Buddy Boys

by Mike McAlary

  The two cops sat silent for a moment. Crystal had Henry dead to rights, he knew that. He wondered how far she would push him on the issue. But suddenly Spivey changed the subject.

  “Well, this investigation is just for precinct stuff,” Crystal said, shocking Henry with her boldness. “Moe isn’t from the precinct, right? So as far as our business outside the precinct, we can probably continue. I mean, whatever shit you have to do, I hope this doesn’t have nothing to do with our thing. I’m hoping you aren’t setting me up for no bullshit.”

  “No,” Henry assured her. “This has nothing to do with Moe. What I do with Moe has nothing to do with the precinct. We don’t even come into this precinct. That’s all off-duty stuff.”

  Crystal yawned.

  “You have to be an adult,” she advised Henry. “I can separate what’s going on here between the precinct and what we’re doing off duty. If you feel the water is too fucking hot, then we’ll chill. We can still do our thing. I have no fear about that. But you can handle your program a little slicker than that, Hank.”

  “All right,” Henry decided. “Let me let you go.” I thank you very much for the information.”

  “So call me in the morning, please. Let’s set something up with Moe.”

  “You got it.”

  “I need some fucking money, Hank. I’ve got some goals, babe.”

  “What are your goals, Crystal?”

  “I want to buy a co-op,” said the police sergeant’s daughter. “I need five grand in a few months, that’s what’s happening.”

  “Why don’t you talk to Moe?”

  “The motherfucker didn’t talk to me yet. The vibes I got from him was that he was real cool. Is the guy that ridiculous or what? He can’t be this fucking devious. God wouldn’t let me be involved with this motherfucker if he was that fucking devious.”

  “Moe is good people,” Henry concluded, starting up the truck.

  “Where you going?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Henry said, his hands shaking on the steering wheel. “I forgot I was still working. I was going home.”

  The last noise investigators would hear from Henry Winter’s Olympus tape recorder would be the sound of two cops laughing.

  Henry went into the precinct and called the ‘hello’ number, his index finger fumbling over the buttons as he dialed. Detective James O’Brien answered the phone call in Internal Affairs headquarters.

  “Crystal knows everything,” Henry said, the words gushing out. “She knows I’m on film. She knows we were caught. She knows I’m wired.”

  “Calm down. Calm down. Relax. It will be all right. Is she still working?”

  “No, she went home,” Henry said.

  “All right. That’s good she went home. How are you?”

  “I’m all right. But she knows everything. I mean what the fuck is going on here? Somebody leaked it. Somebody leaked it out.”

  The detective told Henry to finish out his tour, and that he would meet him later in the morning to retrieve the tape. Henry got off the phone and stared at the clock. When he looked up a moment or two later, he saw Roy Thomas standing in the middle of the station house.

  “Roy is not the type of guy who comes walking into a police precinct unless he’s in handcuffs. Cops go to Roy—Roy doesn’t go to cops. He came right over and said that he heard something on the street, that the next two cops to hit Twelve twenty-six Lincoln Place were going to be killed. The address was a known drug location. They sold drugs out of the basement of the building. All of us had hit the place a lot. Gallagher and O’Regan had just hit it. I knew this was a legit threat. For Roy to risk everything and let people see him come into the precinct, people in the street, other drug dealers—well, I knew this was serious. The Jamaicans on the street decided that we’d gone too far. We’re going to have some dead cops out there.

  “So I went upstairs to the detectives. I told them Roy was downstairs and that he had information that some cops were going to be hit. They just looked at me and they couldn’t believe that Roy came in. All I told them was that Roy was downstairs and that he had information. I went over and said, ‘Roy, talk to these guys. Tell them everything you got.’ He didn’t tell them shit. He started in with his act, ‘I got a bullet in my head, I don’t remember too good.’

  “I went back upstairs and hung out until the end of my tour—two in the morning. My head was spinning. I got Crystal telling me she knows everything, but still wants to run coke. I got Roy telling me two cops are going to be killed. Is it me and Tony that are going to be killed? Crystal knows. Titus knows. All the black guys know. Roy’s black. What’s going on? Am I dead today or what?”

  Henry met Detective O’Brien later that night across the street from Prospect Park, in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

  “They know the whole story,” Henry began. “It’s over.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Here,” he said, pushing his tape recorder toward the detective. “Listen to the tape.”

  Henry and the detective sat huddled over the recorder, dissecting Spivey’s words. The investigators had never played any of Henry’s tapes in front of him before.

  “Holy shit,” O’Brien decided. “We’ll let you know what’s going on tomorrow.”

  Henry slept fitfully. He heard tape recorded conversations in his sleep again. In the morning, he drove back to the station to start an early tour. At about ten o’clock his belt beeper sounded and he called the ‘hello’ number. An investigator told Henry to call Crystal Spivey and tell her they were going on another drug run. Immediately.

  “We’re going to take her,” the investigators said. “Drive to the corner of Utica and Winthrop. There’s a diner there. Get out of the car and we’ll take her.”

  Henry woke Spivey out of bed and told her that he had set up another run with Moe. Then he picked her up at her home in Crown Heights and they continued on to the diner.

  “You want something to eat?” Henry asked.

  “Yeah, get me a hamburger.”

  Henry went into the diner and watched as a gang of undercover cops descended on his truck and Spivey. After they drove her away, he returned to his car and drove back to Internal Affairs headquarters on Poplar Street in Brooklyn Heights. He never again set foot in the 77th Precinct.

  “Anybody want a hamburger?” Henry asked.

  Crystal Spivey was rushed back to the special prosecutor’s office and confronted with the videotape of her taking five hundred dollars from an undercover cop named Moe. Shaken by what she saw, Crystal initially agreed to cooperate in the investigation. She left the office with a microrecorder of her own.

  Later in the day, an Internal Affairs investigator returned Henry’s portable police radio to the 77th Precinct. Using bolt cutters to crack open his locker, he emptied Henry’s belongings into a paper bag, leaving behind only a single brass collar pin with the number 77. On the way out, the investigator stopped by the front desk to make a notation in the precinct log book next to the names Henry Winter and Tony Magno.

  “Transferred to IAD,” the cop wrote.

  Even as one investigator was returning Winter’s portable radio to the station house—rather like throwing a lighted stick of dynamite into a crowded room—another investigator called Tony at home, telling him to report for work at IAD headquarters on Friday. Tony, ever the cop’s cop, didn’t want to believe he could never return to the station house he loved so much.

  “I don’t wanna come to IAD,” he said, sobbing into the phone. “I don’t wanna work there. I wanna stay on patrol with the guys. Just take the recorder away.”

  “No, that’s it. Come on in.”

  Tony hung up. For the first time in the investigation, he felt like an informer.

  “I was trying to keep reality away,” he remembered about the phone call. “I knew it was going to come someday, but I always figured I would have another month, another year with the guys. And then the guys were gone.”

  Brian O’Rega
n drove to Winter’s white frame home in Valley Stream on Saturday, September 20. He didn’t see Henry’s car in the driveway so he continued on to a flea market, studying a set of eyelet-edged sheets for extra holes. He called his girlfriend Cathy and asked if ten dollars was a fair price for the sheets. She told Brian it was a good deal. He hurried back to the sale but the sheets had already been sold.

  “I never had any kind of luck in life,” he said later.

  O’Regan swung by Henry’s house again and spotted Betsy Winter, a woman he recognized from photographs hanging in Henry’s locker, entering the house.

  “She looked like she had been through a war,” he remembered. “I said, ‘I’m Brian.’ She said, ‘He’s not here and I gotta go.’” As Brian started to leave, Henry pulled up in the truck with his father-in-law. Both men were getting ready to go to a wedding reception. “I said ‘Hank, how are you doing?’ He said, ‘Hey, buddy boy.’ He has a big smile on his face and he says, ‘I’ll see you later.’ He said he’d call me but I knew he didn’t have the number.”

  Later that night, Brian drove to Gallagher’s house near Marine Park. He walked into the house and found Gallagher sitting in his living room, sobbing. He had never seen his partner cry before.

  “He was always concrete,” Brian recalled. “Now he looked almost broken.”

  “I told my wife everything,” Gallagher said.

  “Everything?”

  “Yeah. We could be in big trouble.”

  On Monday morning, Crystal Spivey walked into the Office of the Special State Prosecutor with a lawyer, who explained that his client would cooperate in retracing the leaks in exchange for probation. Hynes insisted that Spivey serve some jail time. The cop and her lawyer left, Spivey still carrying her tape recorder.

  The following day, Hynes and John Guido went to lunch, taking an investigation folder along with them. The men agreed that they could not risk the chance that Spivey would tell all the other officers about the investigation. They returned to the office and sat around the oblong desk in the big room where Henry and Tony had first identified their fellow cops as thieves, robbers, and drug users. The investigators had nicknamed the office on the twenty-third floor the “War Room.” There were dozens of photographs tacked to a bulletin board—mug shots of cops. Henry was there on that Tuesday morning. He watched while Guido pulled thirteen names from his investigation folder.

  After thirty years, Guido was retiring from his position as Chief of Inspectional Services on October 15. This was the last major case for a cop who liked to say he came to Internal Affairs in 1972, A.S.: After Serpico.

  “Take them,” Chief Guido said. “Take them.”

  Henry was asked to leave the room. Moments later, cops and lawyers buzzed around Hynes’s office, running to phones and making copies of documents.

  “It’s going down now,” Captain Joseph DeMartini told Henry.

  “What’s going down?” he said, his hands shaking as he chain-smoked another cigarette. “Talk to me.”

  “Come on. Let’s go back to IAD.”

  As the cops headed out of Manhattan, they heard the first news flash on the radio. Thirteen cops from the 77th Precinct were suspended for conduct unbecoming an officer. Hynes hadn’t even had time to present the cases to a grand jury. The names of the suspended cops followed the initial headline. DeMartini and Winter stared at each other in disbelief.

  “How the fuck did the names get released so fast?” Henry wondered.

  Captain DeMartini asked the car’s driver to pull the car over to a pay phone at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “Call your wife and tell her to get out of the house,” he said.

  “What?” Henry’s voice shook.

  “Just to be safe.”

  The cops surrounded Henry while he stood at the corner pay phone. He called his wife and told her to wait for him at her mother’s house. But Betsy Winter did not leave her home. She greeted Henry with a snarl when he came in an hour later.

  “I’m not running,” she said. “Nobody is making me run from my own home. We’re not going to get hurt because they’ll get hurt first.”

  Shortly before sundown Henry took his two little girls, Meghan, six, and Elizabeth, ten, for a walk around the block. He explained to them that he would probably be in the newspapers soon.

  “I was bad as a police officer and now I’m trying to make things better for us as a family,” he explained. “I was taking money and drugs and selling it back to the department to catch other police officers. I ratted on them.”

  Meghan’s eyes grew wide with bewilderment. Her daddy had broken one of the family’s cardinal rules.

  “Daddy, you told me never to rat on my sister,” she said. “You always say, ‘Don’t be a rat on your sister. She gets in enough trouble on her own.’ But you are ratting.”

  Henry tried to explain why he had ratted. He only had to mention the word “jail” once before Elizabeth hugged him.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Are you still a cop?”

  “Yeah. I’m still a cop.”

  “Well, you’ll always be a good cop,” she decided. “I love you very much.”

  Henry walked home crying. He felt destroyed as a cop, but he was very proud of his daughters. The entire Winter family slept in one bed that night, hugging their father’s tears away.

  The Police Department never made official notifications of the suspensions. Brian O’Regan was sitting in his apartment when a friend phoned and told him to turn on the television. He watched his name flash across the screen. Gallagher heard the news on the radio. Rathbun was standing with a prisoner in Central Booking when he called his wife and learned he had been suspended. Another cop was just being seated with his girlfriend in a restaurant when he saw his name roll up the television screen at the bar. Brian called his sergeant, Robert Jervas, to break the news.

  “I had to tell him five times. He wouldn’t believe it.”

  One by one, the suspended cops came in to the 77th Precinct that night, turning in their guns and shields. Brian entered through a side door, avoiding the glare of television lights. He was escorted down to his locker by a cop assigned to Internal Affairs, who rummaged through his belongings, taking his police identification, gas card, and daily memo book.

  “I guess they were afraid we were going to blow our brains out,” O’Regan said. “I asked the guy, ‘What kind of job do you have?’ And he says, ‘It’s just a detail.’”

  As his locker was emptied, Brian paused to write the word “Suspended” next to the date, September 23, in his memo book. Then he walked out of the precinct, driving back to a Catholic church in Rockaway. Despite the time of night—it was well after 8 P.M. by now—Brian coaxed a priest into hearing his confession. He then cleansed his soul of all the sins he had committed while working as a uniformed officer in the 77th Precinct.

  “I thought the priest was going to fall over and take a heart attack. But he didn’t even bat an eye. He just said, ‘I’ve heard worse. Get a good lawyer and be prepared for what might happen.’”

  In the morning, Brian and several of the other suspended officers drove to their union headquarters, where they discussed the suspensions with lawyers. Gallagher, the once-brazen union delegate who had taught both Henry and Brian how to steal, cried six times during the meeting. Brian was amazed by the change in him.

  “I couldn’t believe it. He was always cement. I was a follower. He was infallible.”

  On the street outside the union office, Brian found Robert Rathbun sitting in his car weeping. Brian tried to console him. “Maybe they ain’t got us that bad. Shit, Bobby, at least you got family.”

  Rathbun pulled a snapshot from his wallet. Brian saw the face of a smiling boy looking back at him.

  “See this?” Rathbun said. “How can I ever tell him about this?”

  By the time he reached his girlfriend Cathy’s apartment in Park Slope later that day, Brian still hadn’t cried. But then he met Cathy at the door and saw
the redness in her eyes. “Have you been crying, Cathy?” She nodded. He walked past her and continued upstairs into the bedroom. He closed the door and sat on the bed crying.

  Later Brian returned to his own Rockaway apartment, meeting his landlord outside the building. “That was me on the news, you know,” Brian said. The landlord nodded.

  “If you want, I’ll move.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Over the next few weeks, as a special grand jury prepared a first round of indictments against thirteen police officers, Brian avoided his family. He missed a dinner date at his older brother Greg’s Long Island home and only returned to his mother’s Valley Stream home at night, the darkness covering his identity. He also started attending church regularly, taking communion.

  “I know when I die I’m going to heaven,” he later said.

  After one of his visits to church, Brian felt in such a state of grace that he even dared to call Henry Winter at home, leaving a short message on his old friend’s tape recorder.

  “Hey Hank,” Brian said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “This is Brian. I don’t hold any animosity toward you at all. What is done, is done. If you want to talk, let’s meet and talk. Believe me, that’s all it is. We won’t even talk about anything that’s going on. We’ll just talk.”

  Henry came home and played the message over and over again. Then he began to cry. He could not chance a meeting with any of the Buddy Boys.

  A few days later, William Gallagher called Henry’s home, leaving a message of his own on the recorder. Speaking in a voice that shimmied like a car with a bad transmission, Gallagher said, “Hank, this is Billy. Billy Gallagher. You know my number. Call me and let me know what’s going on.”

  Henry only noticed one thing about the message when he played it back later. Junior Gallagher was scared. Henry erased the message, choosing to remember Gallagher as the precinct tough guy.