Buddy Boys

by Mike McAlary

  By September, Tony had gained incriminating evidence against a group of younger cops, and Henry had made new friends in the anticrime detail. The special prosecutor had enough evidence to seek criminal indictments against at least fifteen cops in the 77th Precinct. Another twenty-five would have to face departmental trials as a result of what they told Henry and Tony.

  At this point, the investigators decided to expand their operation. They planned to use Henry’s relationship with Roy to set up a sting against the cops assigned to guard airports. They even mapped out an operation that involved sending Henry to Jamaica with Roy on a drug-running sting. The drugs would be brought back into the country through Kennedy Airport with Henry paying off cops along the way. There was talk of involving federal agents as well.

  “If you went down there, you’d have to go without a gun,” the investigators told Henry. “Do you trust Roy that much?”

  “Sure, and Roy trusts me that much. He’s been trying to get me down to the islands for years.”

  The investigators put the idea on hold, refocusing their attention on Crystal Spivey, twenty-nine, a black female cop in the precinct who had lost her gun on two occasions. They had information that Spivey, the daughter of a highly respected sergeant, was dating a known drug dealer and they were certain she was using cocaine herself. Hynes was intent on cracking the precinct’s race barrier and getting black cops to incriminate themselves in his investigation. Spivey could become the bridge between Henry and the precinct’s black cops, everyone agreed. She seemed to color all cops in the same light—blue.

  “Crystal approached me in July. She was going out with a guy named Understanding, who lived on St. Johns and worked as one of Roy’s coke dealers. She told me that’s where she got her drugs. She said Understanding wanted her to protect his operation. I couldn’t understand why she came to me, a white guy. There were plenty of black guys in the precinct who were into this shit. But apparently Understanding had talked to Roy and he said, ‘Talk to Blondie.’ So Crystal came to me and asked, ‘How should I do it? What should I ask for? Do I ask for five hundred dollars a week?’ I laughed, ‘Benny was giving us fifty dollars a week and you want five-hundred.’

  “I went over to her house to talk to her about it, and I was wired. She told me Understanding was her man and he was giving her an eighth of a gram of coke each week. We went through the whole thing. That’s how I got started with Crystal. I told her what to ask for and what she would have to do. But I knew the guy was bullshitting her. He worked for Roy. He couldn’t come up with that kind of money.”

  “All Crystal talked about was making money. First she wanted to get off the job and go into the record business with her boyfriend. Then she wanted to buy a card shop. Then she wanted to buy a condo. Finally the SPO [special prosecutor’s office] decided to set up a sting. They said, ‘She wants money. Let’s see if she’ll transport drugs.’ I told her, ‘Listen, I have a drug operation. A guy I used to work with back in the Twenty-fifth Precinct, I still deal with him. We run drugs from one location to another. You don’t have to get out of the car. All you have to do is rent your gun and shield for the day. I would do it myself, but it looks strange with a black and a white guy in the car. I generally like to use black women to do it.’ And she said, ‘All right. I’ll let you know.’ A couple of days go by, and then she came back and went for the bait.

  “We set it up for the morning of September fourth, my day off. I called Crystal at home and woke her up. I was wired with two recorders. They also wired my truck and fixed the radio so it couldn’t be turned up. They gave me one of the big recorders this time—they call them Nagras. They’re reel-to-reel jobs, a two-and-a-half-pound unit. And once you turn them on, you can’t shut them off. The night before I went out and bought a loose-fitting sweatshirt. I drove out to the Canarsie Pier, they put me in a van and wired me up, taping the unit to my back. I used my small recorder as a backup unit. Then I went to pick Crystal up.

  “We drove to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where we picked up my man “Moe”—an undercover cop named Eugene Poulson. He was also wired. Crystal thought he was a drug dealer. We were followed by guys in nondescript IAD cars just in case anything happened. Crystal tells the guy, ‘Nice to meet you.’ Moe asks, ‘Did Blondie tell you what’s going on?’ ‘Yeah.’ But Moe takes her through the whole thing anyway just to get it on tape again. ‘We’re going to pick some coke up. Then we’re going to drive it to the Canarsie Pier and meet a guy. We give him the coke and our deal ends. You’ll be paid five hundred dollars then.’ Crystal gets in Moe’s car and drives over to Park Slope to meet the guy with the drugs—another black undercover cop posing as a dealer. Moe and Crystal took the coke—five ounces—to the Canarsie Pier where they met another black undercover cop. We had two vans parked on the pier and videotaped the whole transaction. Moe takes Crystal back to the car and she says, ‘That wasn’t bad. We just got rid of the coke. Would you like to do it again?’ ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes!’ Then Moe gives her the money. The camera picked it up beautiful. Crystal says, ‘Thank you,’ and gets out of the car. Then she comes over to my car and Moe takes off. She gets in and I said, ‘Well, how do you like him?’ She says, ‘Oh, he’s all right.’ So I just drove her home. I went back to the pier and they took the wires off me. It was easy. They had her dead to rights on an A-two felony. Major weight. Major time. We opened a new door with Crystal. You could almost hear the whole precinct crashing down as we replayed those tapes.”

  11

  “If I was a rat, do you think this precinct would still be here?”

  A few days after Crystal Spivey agreed to rent out her gun and shield for five hundred dollars, riding shotgun on a shipment of cocaine through Brooklyn, Henry Winter arrived for work in the 77th Precinct and found the word “Rat” scrawled across the face of his locker in black Magic Marker. He ignored the crude memorandum. A day later someone added a new entry: “You’re gonna die.”

  A new wave of rumors washed over the station house. By the second week of September, the precinct was flooded with innuendo and finger pointing. It seemed that everybody believed Henry was wearing a wire and cooperating in some sort of corruption probe. Cops working with him in the Anticrime detail suddenly stopped talking to him. They walked out of the locker room as soon as he entered. No one wanted to ride with him in a car anymore. Steadily, his work in the investigation began to suffer. Where he once had turned over tapes glutted with tales of police corruption, he now turned in bland conversations.

  Although no one could prove he was a rat, everyone knew something was up. Cops began to close ranks, whispering among themselves, avoiding each other. A mood of paranoia and edgy suspicion reigned in the 77th Precinct locker room.

  “I don’t believe it,” Brian O’Regan told another cop, who told him Henry was probably wearing a wire. “Not Hank.”

  A few days earlier, another cop pulled William Gallagher aside and gave him a friendly word of advice, “Cops on the midnight tour are going to jail.” Gallagher acted insulted. “Anybody who steals out there is crazy,” he said.

  For months investigators had tried unsuccessfully to plug leaks. But Officer Tracy’s cousin insisted that there was a blonde cop cooperating with prosecutors in a search for crooked cops. Special Prosecutor Charles Hynes compounded his problems with a mistake in judgement. He asked a former New York City detective working as a city marshal to help him out in a corruption probe of Brooklyn’s 77th Precinct. The city marshal turned down the job offer, then warned a friend in the precinct, David Williams, that Hynes was planning to lock up dozens of cops. Williams passed the information on to Tony Magno, who recorded the embarrassing conversation.

  Even the Police Commissioner himself, Benjamin Ward, a man with a propensity for making public blunders, helped leak news of an investigation. Ward was an unpopular administrator who was nicknamed “Bubba” by the department’s rank and file cops. When he was a deputy commissioner in 1972, he apologized to a group of Muslims after a cop wa
s shot to death in a Harlem mosque. In 1984, Ward’s first year as police commissioner, he faced charges of indulging in a tryst at Rikers Island prison with a woman who wasn’t his wife. Ward was also accused of getting drunk at a police union convention and urinating from his helicopter, a craft without a toilet, on the way home. Ward admitted the extramarital affair and apologized for his public drunkenness at a press conference. The new police commissioner had also disappeared during the so-called Palm Sunday Massacre, reportedly drinking his way through the weekend as the city’s best detectives tried to solve the mystery of ten murdered bodies found in a Brooklyn apartment, the city’s worst single-day slaughter. Somehow, the city’s first black police commissioner managed to keep his job.

  “The guy is always talking about accountability,” Brian O’Regan later said. “When is the police commissioner going to hold himself accountable for his own actions?”

  On July 23, Ward tipped union officials to the investigation when he at first refused to sit on the dais at a press conference with Frank Piro, a police officer assigned to the 77th Precinct who had survived a shooting. Realizing that Piro was a target of Hynes’s investigation, he told union officials, “Get him out of here. I don’t want to be seen with him.”

  The startled union officials began asking Piro questions. “Are you in some kind of trouble out there in your precinct?” “Not that I know of,” Piro replied. After he threatened to leave the building, Ward was advised by a deputy commissioner that his actions were being monitored closely and that to leave now would be a grave mistake, tantamount to screaming on a bullhorn, “We’re going after cops in the Seven-Seven.” Ward finally sat down with Piro, one of the two cops who were shot in their patrol car by a handcuffed prisoner on May 27, the second day of the investigation.

  “We all started asking ourselves questions,” said Jimmy Higgins, a police union delegate who attended the press conference. “Why doesn’t the police commissioner want his picture taken with a hero cop? It didn’t take much to put one and one together and come up with an investigation.”

  And so it was that rumors and leaks forced a premature end to the most widespread police corruption probe in years. The end, when it came, arrived swiftly.

  On Monday September 15, a black police officer named Michael Titus walked through a set of metal doors leading into the 77th Precinct and continued directly down into the locker room. The younger brother of a detective assigned to the precinct’s homicide squad, Titus had left the 77th Precinct earlier in the year to take an undercover assignment with a Queens narcotics detail.

  Titus was scared. He knew he had good information. Devastating information. He knew the names of more than a dozen cops targeted in the probe and that Henry Winter was wearing a wire. Titus also knew the name of the agency conducting the investigation and that Winter had turned after being confronted with videotaped evidence of bribe-taking.

  Fearing that someone in the precinct might implicate him in a conversation with either Henry or Tony, Titus returned to the Seven-Seven to warn other cops of the investigation and to find out if he was involved in the inquiry. He immediately sought out Crystal Spivey, telling her all he knew about the investigation.

  “Not Hank,” Crystal said.

  Details of their conversation spread through the station house over night, burning from one locker to the next like a gasoline fire. Luckily, Henry had the day off. On Tuesday night, Tony arrived at the precinct to begin a midnight tour. He had just put his tape recorder in his pocket when Bill Hock approached him.

  “Hey,” Hock began, his voice unsteady. “Titus was in here talking to Spivey the other day, and he heard there’s going to be a couple of guys arrested. He said some guys were wearing wires.”

  Tony acted interested.

  “Yeah, who?”

  “Your partner.”

  Tony slammed his locker shut and turned to face the younger man.

  “Anybody else?”

  Hock stammered, his eyes focused on the floor. “I don’t want to say,” he mumbled.

  “Anybody else?”

  “Yeah,” Hock said. “You.”

  Tony let out a deep breath. “It ain’t me,” he said angrily, walking away. “I got nothing to do with nothing.”

  Tony left the locker room and headed out in his car to Sector Ida-John. He sensed that the investigation was nearing an unnatural conclusion. A lot of cops had always been suspicious of Henry, but no one had ever before dared to accuse him, one of the precinct’s most popular cops, of being a rat. Tony got in touch with Henry.

  “Crystal knows what’s going on. I think they all know. She’s gonna want to talk to you when you get in here. Just play it smart when you talk to her.”

  Shortly before six o’clock on Wednesday, September 17, Henry drove his blue Ford truck into the precinct parking lot. He found Crystal’s car and parked in front of it. If she wanted to go home when she got off duty at midnight, she’d have to ask him to move his truck. Henry went out to work for five hours and returned to his truck shortly before midnight, lying in wait, an Olympus microrecorder strapped to his crotch. He turned on the machine, which was loaded with new tape and fresh batteries, when he saw Crystal approach his truck at 11:54 P.M.

  “The thing we’re supposed to do with Moe tomorrow is off,” he began, referring to a second bogus drug run he had set up with Spivey.

  “You’re getting chicken, man,” Crystal said as she climbed into the truck’s cab.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “What are you talking about? I didn’t change the plan when I heard this shit about you.”

  “Moe is not available.”

  “What’s going on?” Crystal demanded.

  “You tell me.”

  “The word is that the precinct is fucking going up in smoke. I heard that you, your ex-partner, and several other people are going down. A lot of people. A lot of names.”

  “I’m always under investigation. IAD is always looking at me.”

  “I hear it’s coming from higher up than that, babe. We’re talking about the district attorney’s office and probably the special prosecutor. They got you on film for something. Film. They have you on video doing something. Did you know anything about that, Hank?”

  “They got me on video?”

  “Doing some shit in the precinct. Yeah, babe. Yeah. Taking money on a video? How could that be a rumor? What I’m telling you is on the grapevine. How? I don’t know. But it’s beyond IAD. That’s what the word is. And also that you’re a rat. And stay away.”

  “Oh really?” Henry said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “That again, huh?”

  “Yep. And that you, you know, are looking to give motherfuckers up.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “I thought, well, let me talk to Hank. I wouldn’t just dismiss this.”

  Crystal reached across the seat and ran her hand over Henry’s chest, searching him for a wire. She patted his back with the palm of her hand and ran her fingers along the side of his pants. She did not check Henry’s crotch.

  “You want me to strip down?” he said, laughing. “I am no rat. You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Well, this is what the word is.”

  Henry was anxious. He wanted Crystal out of the truck. He wanted to get out of the precinct immediately.

  “All right,” he said. “Let me check this out. Who did you hear this from? Titus?”

  “Yeah. He seems to think the only reason they haven’t moved on you and Magno is because they’re going after a lot of guys. A lot of the midnight motherfuckers. And that’s a lot of people. And I have ridden with all of them.”

  “Is Titus getting it from a reliable source?”

  “Yeah. He came here to tell the boys this is coming and to keep his name out of it.”

  “He said they had me on film?”

  “That was the most clear thing. That and that you are a rat. A bona fide rat. I said, ‘That doesn’t seem like
Hank, but …’”

  The investigation was over. Henry could sense it. This would be his last tape recording in the 77th Precinct.

  “You don’t have to worry about Hank,” Henry said. “I mean anybody that wants to toss me for a wire, can toss me. They can do anything they want. I don’t wear a wire.”

  “Maybe they turned somebody on the street to get you. That’s the fucking thing I wanted to talk to you about. Could some street dog have set you up, Hank? Cause that’s the word. They got you and Tony on videotape. They caught you red-handed. And because of that, now you’re turning around. Now is that true?”

  “No. That’s not true.”

  “Well check it out, Hank. The word is that you’re a rat. I wouldn’t expect that of you, Hank. I wouldn’t expect you to dog me like that.”

  “No,” Henry insisted, hesitating to catch his breath. “I mean if I was a rat, do you think this precinct would still be here?”

  Henry paused again, pretending to be hurt.

  “Why Blondie? Why me?”

  “I heard this in June and I still talked to you about other shit. I had a certain level of trust. I hope that my trust isn’t betrayed.”

  “It’s there, don’t worry about it.”

  “I wouldn’t give anybody up,” Crystal said, her voice bubbling with indignation. “I wouldn’t do it. I go to hell with what the fuck I know about people. I don’t play that shit at all. And Titus told me, ‘The word is, Crystal, that you’re really cool. That you wouldn’t give anybody up.’ Titus doesn’t want to get jammed up. He said, ‘That’s why I’m here now. This is fucking real and it’s going to be happening soon.’”