Buddy Boys

by Mike McAlary

  “Hello, Officer Gallagher. How are you?”

  “What have you got for me?”

  Henry pulled out a roll of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket. He snapped four bills off the roll, counting out loud as he laid the money into Gallagher’s outstretched hand.

  “One. Two. Three. Four. Four hundred dollars, Buddy Boy.”

  Gallagher handed Henry back one of the bills.

  “No, I don’t want it.”

  “Take it, take it,” Gallagher demanded, stuffing the money into Henry’s shirt pocket.

  “You work, you stick your neck out, you get paid,” O’Regan added.

  Then Gallagher handed Henry another package, explaining that they had hit a drug location at 1224 Lincoln Place—a crack den run by their old friend Roy.

  “You take this,” Gallagher said. “We can’t take it to Roy. Someone may have recognized us.”

  Later that night Henry met Gallagher outside a United Parcel Service warehouse in Queens, where he was moonlighting as a security guard. Gallagher had just spent an eight-hour tour strolling the Brooklyn docks, watching the largest fireworks display in the city’s history. He complained that his feet were blistered.

  “Waste of time,” he remarked.

  Henry opened the package of drugs Gallagher and O’Regan had given him earlier in the night.

  “I haven’t seen coke like this around in a long time,” he said, his recorder rolling. The men counted out dozens of tins of cocaine and at least seventy-one vials of crack, approximately fourteen hundred dollars worth of stolen drugs.

  “Figure on getting about nine hundred dollars.”

  “I trust you,” Gallagher said, walking away.

  “You trust me?” Henry Winter said. “I love you.”

  The prosecutors assigned to handle the 77th Precinct indictments were pleased. By mid-July, they figured they had enough evidence on Gallagher and O’Regan to send them off to jail for years, if not for life. But there were problems with the investigation. Special Prosecutor Charles J. Hynes and his chief aides told Henry and Tony that they wanted to catch some of the precinct’s black cops as well as other crooked cops working elite details. It was decided that the investigators would split the cops up, moving Henry upstairs into the Anticrime detail and keeping Magno on patrol.

  There were problems with Tony, the investigators had decided. He had a bad attitude. He seemed uninterested in their corruption probe. He still regularly turned in blank tapes. Compared to Henry, Magno wasn’t pulling his own weight.

  “I went on vacation for two weeks and came back at the end of July. Henry was in Anticrime, doing his thing. I guess he was doing pretty well. We used to have these meetings at Creedmoor Hospital—the nut house. It was crazy. We had to come in on our days off and meet secretly in the basement there. I didn’t mind it at first when they split us up. It had become, well, like a job. But when they separated us, all of a sudden the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. Henry and I had to set up hand signals. If I looked at him and he was twirling his fingers, that meant he was rolling tape on the guy he was talking to. I stayed away when I saw that. We didn’t want to trip over our own words somewhere down the line.

  “Originally they wanted me to go into Anticrime with Henry. But I told them that the guys know I’ve always turned down Anticrime before and couldn’t take it now. It wouldn’t look right. So I stayed on patrol. I come back from vacation and I’m refreshed. I said, ‘Fuck, if anything comes along, I’ll tape it.’ I was worried about entrapment. But nothing came along. I wasn’t getting any incriminating conversations. I was going onto steady midnights in August and I knew the shit would fly then because I’d be back with Gallagher and O’Regan. The midnights were always wild. I put out feelers, telling the guys I would be going on steady midnights, and all of sudden there’s an emergency. I get a phone call at home. They want to see me at Creedmoor. Right away.

  “So I walk in and there’s the captain, along with Marty Hershey, the top lawyer from Hynes’s office. I sat down and they gave me donuts and coffee. All of a sudden, Marty Hershey yells, ‘All right. Let’s stop the bullshit.’ The calm in the room was gone. Hershey yells, ‘Tony, we’re fed up with your act.’ Now I’m shitting. I don’t know what they’re talking about. I thought I was doing exactly what they wanted me to do. And then Hershey starts ripping into me, ‘You’re full of shit. You ain’t doing nothing.’ I said, ‘What do you mean I ain’t doing nothing? Look at all the things me and Henry did.’ They said, ‘Never mind what you and Henry did. We can use Henry’s testimony without you.’ I was really scared, ‘What do you mean? It was me and him working together.’ Hershey says, ‘Yeah, but Henry held the recorder.’

  “Then they got really serious. ‘You’re out. I’ve got a sealed indictment on you and I’m going to open it up this week.’ I started to plead with him. I’m shaking. I’m scared. Hershey said, ‘We’re going to lock you up. We’re going to prosecute you to the full letter of the law.’ I didn’t know what to say, nobody there backed me up. I don’t know if they did it to light a spark plug in my ass or what, but he made a mistake because Hershey turned me the wrong fucking way.

  “They gave me a week to straighten out. I was pissed. I went home and started to punch the walls. And I was sick. I went to the bathroom three and four times a night. As soon as I walked in the precinct now I had to head for the toilet. I couldn’t take the pressure. I got stuff on the tapes. I was giving them their property. And all I could think of was what that fucking Marty Hershey had said. ‘We’re going to lock you up.’ I didn’t know where to turn. I didn’t know who to talk to anymore. I used to meet the IAD guys after a tour crying like a fucking baby at times. I used to punch the back seats of the cars and curse them. I drove them crazy. ‘You fucking motherfuckers,’ I cursed. ‘Lock me up right now. Nobody gives a fuck about me. Take me to Central Booking right now. Fuck you, fuck them, fuck everybody.’ I even talked to the bosses like that. I didn’t care who I was talking to. And then one day they sent Lieutenant Andy Panico out to see me. I told him, ‘Listen, don’t give me no fucking bullshit, Andy. I’ll take you outside this car and I’ll beat your fucking brains in right here in the fucking street.’ I went crazy. He says, ‘Don’t talk like that. Look, you gotta still think of your wife.’ ‘Don’t give me that bullshit about my wife. I don’t want to hear that anymore. That Jew motherfucker was going to lock me up.’ I got racial and everything. I said whatever I could think of. This went on for about two weeks. I was going loony. I just couldn’t get it out of my head. Nobody came on my side when Hershey came after me. Nobody.”

  Henry continued to shine in his undercover role throughout July and August. There were still rumors about him, but Robert Rathbun, the portly cop working with him, felt reasonably certain that his new partner wasn’t wired. He sat in a park one day eating hot dogs with Henry, bragging about his greatest rip-off.

  “We stole sixty-seven pounds of marijuana once. The whole car stunk of pot. We had to unload it fast. We sold it for forty-five hundred dollars.”

  “You got beat,” Henry said.

  Having been dumped in the 77th after screwing up on a narcotics detail, Rathbun began robbing drug locations with Henry. On July 11, he and Henry went on patrol in an unmarked car. Rathbun explained he was taking his kids on a camping trip in the morning and wanted to get some “sneaker money.”

  “How are those Reeboks you got on?” he asked.

  A few minutes later, Rathbun and Winter pulled up to an apartment building at 1260 Pacific Street. The officers had no intention of hitting the place until the building’s landlord told them, “There’s guys dealing marijuana upstairs. Why don’t you throw them out?” The cops proceeded directly upstairs to a second-floor apartment and Henry knocked on the door.

  “Yeah, who is it?”

  “It’s me,” Henry said, disguising his voice to sound like a Jamaican. “Open up.”

  A man opened the door and the cops, wearing plain
clothes, rushed into the room, their guns drawn. Henry and Rathbun had just located a marijuana stash when they heard a knock at the door. Henry looked out the peephole and saw that a line of customers had formed in the hallway.

  “Give me a nice tray,” said a man pushing five dollars through the door’s gutted out peephole. Henry sold two or three bags of pot before Rathbun relieved him. Pulling up a chair, the chubby cop collected money and dispensed parcels of marijuana through the door until he ran out of customers.

  “Hey, I ain’t got no money,” said a young female customer. “How about doing the right thing?”

  “Not today, honey,” Rathbun replied. “Try back tomorrow.”

  While searching the apartment for more drugs, Rathbun discovered an old arrest warrant hidden in some trash. He held it up and said, “Hey, there’s a warrant out for you guys. If we lock you up now, you’re going to jail and you ain’t coming out.” He opened a window and walked out of the room. The dealers scrambled out the window to freedom.

  Rathbun had sold about thirty bags of marijuana and he decided that he had enough money to go away on vacation. Henry drove his partner to the Kings Plaza shopping mall. Moments later he emerged from a shoe store wearing a brand new pair of black Reeboks.

  “A nice fucking shoe,” he commented.

  Later that night Henry turned over his tapes and the remaining bags of stolen marijuana to investigators. He also explained how the cops had opened up the apartment for business, selling drugs to customers through a peephole. The investigators laughed. “You’re kidding.”

  “No, we really did it. We opened the place up for business.”

  Soon all the men were standing on the corner laughing.

  A few days later, Gallagher and O’Regan tried to reopen the apartment for business, but they were wearing uniforms and parked in front of the building, scaring off potential customers. They left after making only a few dollars.

  On July 30, Henry’s recorder picked up another illegal raid. Henry joined O’Regan, Rathbun, and a young police officer named James Day on a break-in at the Soul Food Restaurant. O’Regan uncovered a .25-caliber automatic in the trash, turning it over to Henry to sell. The cops also discovered a bag of drugs in a velvet Crown Royal bag. The cops left the restaurant and drove back to the park to count their score.

  “Okay, who’s got the bag?” Henry asked.

  “Not me,” O’Regan answered.

  “Not me,” said Rathbun, “I never touched the bag.”

  “I thought you had them,” Day added.

  Finally, the cops realized that the drugs had been left back at the restaurant.

  “What are we?” Henry said, his recorder rolling. “A bunch of Keystone Cops?”

  Tony Magno had become the model undercover cop. He showed up night after night, turning in miles of tape with dozens of incriminating conversations and thousands of dollars in stolen money, drugs, and guns. Gallagher and O’Regan had handed over packets of stolen heroin on August 10 and were hitting a new drug location every night they worked together. They regularly bragged about their scores to Tony.

  “I found a new place on Bedford Avenue I wanted to do,” O’Regan told him. “I said to Junior, ‘I wanna do this place, but we’re gonna need the hammer.’ So I went back to the precinct and got the sledgehammer. I dropped Junior off in the back yard. I broke the fence down for him and he walked right through. I went back to the car and waited for him to get in position. So Junior goes over the air, ‘Radio Check, Central,’ giving me the signal he’s ready. So I pull in front of the place, go upstairs with the fucking hammer and start rapping on the door. I hit it twice and it popped open.”

  “Surprise, surprise,” Gallagher said.

  “Boom. Boom. Hello,” from O’Regan.

  “Shocked the shit out of him,” Gallagher continued.

  “The guy and his girl both jumped out the window,” O’Regan added.

  “So what do you have for me?” Tony asked, holding a package of drugs in his hands.

  “Roughly, the whole package is worth about two grand,” Gallagher said.

  “Two grand?”

  “Yeah, it comes to about seven hundred in crack and about twelve, thirteen hundred in that other stuff.”

  “Smoke?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” Tony said. “Let me see what my guy will give us for it.”

  “We trust you,” Gallagher replied.

  On August 23, Tony paid Gallagher $1800 for the drugs, and he handed back $600 as a commission for handling the package.

  “Why six hundred?”

  “We were going to give you five hundred,” Gallagher explained. “But I told Brian, ‘If we give him five that leaves us thirteen.’ He gets real superstitious on me. He says, ‘Oh no. You know I don’t want thirteen.’”

  The Panasonic recorder picked up both cops laughing.

  On August 25, Tony Magno got in more trouble. Investigators listening to the recording he had made the previous night were shocked to hear him insulting them at the end of the tape.

  “It’s five twenty-two and I don’t know what else to fucking do. You read me, motherfuckers? I don’t know what else you want me to do. I’m getting fucked up and you won’t leave me alone.”

  A few moments later Magno returned to his tape recorder, continuing with his brazen outburst.

  “Time is now five thirty, August twenty-fourth. End of past conversation. First part of conversation was Police Officer William Murphy who gave me information about Officer Monroe. Second part was with Officer Al Cortez who I dropped off at some broad’s house on Schenectady Avenue. Now going to shut the fucking tape off. If my meet is there, I’ll be there. If not, fuck you.”

  Tony continued to cruise along a block on Ocean Parkway looking for his drop. He returned to his tape recorder a few minutes later.

  “Time is now five fifty. I’ve just made five passes at Avenue C and Ocean Parkway in the service road and I can not find my meet. I’m going to call my wife. And if there is a problem at home, I’m going the fuck home whether you like it or fucking not. If I have to bust my balls to get information, somebody should be here to fucking meet me. This is fucking bullshit.”

  A few minutes later Tony spotted Detective Patricia Perkins of the Internal Affairs Division in an unmarked car near his drop point. He handed over the tape and drove home, waiting for the explosion he knew was sure to follow.

  “One day I was supposed to meet this detective out on Ocean Parkway and Avenue C. She went to Coney Island Avenue instead. I had been drinking some beers back at the station house, so I’m driving around in circles, looking for her, getting madder and madder. Then I started talking into the tape recorder. I put a lot of stuff on it. Finally I met her and gave her the tape. I was ranting and raving. They apologized and I left.

  “Then they heard the tape. They called another emergency meeting at Creedmoor. This time they called Henry in too, even though he was on vacation. He met me on the street and said, ‘What the fuck did you say? They want to call off the investigation.’ I got scared for Henry. I didn’t want him to go to jail because of what I was doing. They led me into the room and Captain Joseph DeMartini was there. I knew right away what he wanted. He said, ‘I want you to hear something.’ I didn’t want him to play the tape in front of everybody, so I said, ‘Look Captain, can I talk to you outside?’ ‘Sit down and listen.’ They played the tape. Hershey was there too. I had said something about him on the tape too. He looked at me and says, ‘Tony, I didn’t know you were like that.’ And DeMartini, in the middle of the tape says, ‘Who’s talking now? Who’s the real Tony Magno? Is it the person talking to us here now or is it the person on the fucking tape? You got to remember something. My people are supervisors. They don’t need your aggravation. They’re not thrilled doing this stuff.’ I says, ‘Look Captain, it won’t happen again, I apologize.’ He was pissed. They all hated my attitude. But I didn’t want to fuck Henry up, and I was worried. I said, ‘Look,
it will never happen again.’ It never did happen again either. When I tell somebody something, I usually keep my word.

  “I still couldn’t believe what I was doing though. Sometimes in the locker room we talked about cops who wore wires. I always said, ‘I’d kill any motherfucker that ever wore a wire on me.’ I was never one for talking about Serpico or reading Prince of the City. I didn’t even watch the movies. It just wasn’t me. I couldn’t believe I had become like that. Call me a hypocrite or whatever, but sometimes even after I dropped off those tapes I would go back and meet the guys at a bar. Here I had just sank them and now I’m drinking with them in Gallagher’s bar. Then I felt like a cop. The only time I didn’t feel like a cop was when I put that recorder on. I wasn’t a cop at that point. I was shit. I was a cop for them. But once I switched that recorder off, I was back to myself again. It was Jekyll and Hyde. I’d be fucking around, goofing off with the guys. But if Gallagher and O’Regan came over in the middle of a conversation, I’d look around to make sure nobody was looking and click, click, start rolling tape on them. Then I’d turn the tape in and drive back to meet Gallagher at his father’s bar for free beers. I’d be throwing darts and drinking beer with the same guys I was helping to get indicted. It didn’t faze me one way or the other. I never even thought about it then. I felt great. I was a cop.”

  Henry rarely had any problems with the investigators. Some of them even brought him hot coffee and buttered rolls while they debriefed him on the previous day’s escapades.

  “I only had one problem with an IAD guy. And it was more embarrassing than anything else. A lot of the guys who are in Internal Affairs are God-Squad types—born-again Christians. I guess if you talk to God a lot, you really don’t feel that bad about having a job where all you do is screw other cops for a living. So one night they send this guy out to see me—Thomas Bellino. We were going through the stuff and all of a sudden he asks me, ‘Henry, do you ever think about God?’ And I said, ‘Sure, we all do.’ The guy’s eyes light up. He hands me a Bible and some literature that says I’m a sinner. Then he asks, ‘Do you want to pray with me?’ I couldn’t believe it. The guy got down on his knees and started praying on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. I looked around, you know, because I thought someone was going to think we were some kind of nuts. This is the middle of Brooklyn we’re talking about here. Finally I said, ‘Ah, Tom, could you get up off your knees please? I don’t really think I want to do that right now.’ I called the ‘hello’ number later and said, ‘Do me a favor, guys. Don’t send me Bellino anymore.’