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Buddy Boys

When Good Cops Turn Bad

Mike McAlary

For my wife Alice, New York's finest

Prologue

Henry Winter lay in bed, dreaming. He was sleeping late, again.

In spite of all the recent developments in the New York City police officer's life—a period of betrayal, deception and fear—Henry Winter had amazed even his own wife with his ability to fall asleep during this time of unrest. He didn't tell his wife that the only time he felt unburdened now was when he slept. He didn't have to record his dreams. Henry found sanctuary in slumber.

Crooked Brooklyn street cops were free from harm in Henry Winter's dreams. They could speak freely without fear of punishment. No one played Henry's dreams back on a little tape recorder, listening to them on a headset. No one plugged them into a videotape recorder either, watching them on a television. No one dissected the ghetto cop's dreams, pulling out names and addresses, marking down dates and times of crimes committed by other members of the New York City Police Department.

Much later, Henry Winter's dreams would turn to nightmares. Sometimes he would awaken in a cold sweat, his bedclothes sodden, his body twitching uncontrollably. Betsy Winter would be holding her husband, trying to shake him free of some unseen torment.

“It's happening again,” she would say. “Isn't it?”

Henry Winter would grab a cigarette from the pack of Newports on his nightstand and strike a match to it. Mentholated smoke would fill the couple's tiny Valley Stream, Long Island bedroom. Then Henry would run his fingers through his blonde hair.

Yes, it was happening again, Henry would realize. And then the conversations—the headings on the tapes he was recording on a small machine he carried hidden in a pocket of his bulletproof vest—would come back to him. The conversations always began with the same introduction.

On some darkened and desolate Brooklyn street, Henry Winter and a faceless investigator from the Police Department's Internal Affairs Division would meet in an unmarked car, huddled over a tiny metal machine.

And it would begin again.

“At this time I am testing an Olympus microrecorder, model number L200, serial number 211417. This recorder is to be used to record conversations by Police Officer Henry Winter during a tour of duty on this date in the Seventy-seventh Precinct. Officer, do you realize that once this recorder is activated it will record any conversations by you or directed towards you?”

“Yes,” Henry would reply in a dead, colorless voice.

“Officer, are you willing to record all conversations of your own free will?”

“Yes.”

“Have you been instructed on the proper use of this recorder?”

“Yes I have.”

“This is the primary recorder to be used during your tour of duty. I ask that you have nothing in your pockets that would interfere with that recording. Is that understood?”

“Yes.”

“End of this portion of the tape.”

On the morning of June 22, 1986, Henry woke to the sound of a telephone ringing at his bedside. The phone sounded like an alarm. At first Henry was confused; a shaft of midmorning summer light shone in his eyes. He grappled with the phone, lifting the receiver with one hand and pressing a small button on a recording machine with the other. It was a practiced maneuver.

Brian O'Regan, forty-one, another police officer from Henry's Bedford-Stuyvesant command—the 77th Precinct—was calling. O'Regan wanted to talk about the job. He had just finished working a midnight tour, and he was excited.

Brian O'Regan was about to engage in the single most important conversation of his life. It would be replayed before a special grand jury hearing evidence in the most widespread case of police corruption in New York City since the days of the Knapp Commission. One morning phone call to Henry Winter's bedroom would ultimately lead a corrupt cop to the most desperate of acts.

“We had a very good night last night,” Brian said.

“Ver-ry goo-ood,” Henry replied. Now he needed to get more information. His role as an undercover cop demanded specific dates and times.

“What happened, Brian?”

“Oh, we got a job, Twelve-sixty Pacific Street, man with a gun, we had a complainant and all.”

“Twelve-sixty?”

“Yeah. Above the Chinese restaurant, Pacific and Nostrand. Last night we had a gun run there. And we met a complainant who's the superintendent of the building. You would have loved this one—a Rastafarian man with all the dreadlocks, but he don't want anybody in the building with no guns. And he says, real quiet like to me, ‘They're dealing cannabis in the second floor right apartment.' So Junior bangs on the door and they let him and the other guys into the apartment. Billy Gallagher's there. Sammy Bell. Billy Rivera. They're looking all over the place. Looking and looking. Don't find anything.

“I'm outside, just standing there in front of the building, finger up my ass as usual, thinking, ‘What the hell's the story? What are they doing in there?' I look up at the fire escape. And ho-ly shit, there's a fucking wad of money sitting on the fire escape.”

“On the fire escape?”

“I hauled ass upstairs. ‘Junior! Junior!' I grabbed him. ‘Go to the front. The fire escape near the left window. All the way in the corner. Look, and get out there as fast as you can, some of the money is blowing away.'

“He goes out there. He calls me out in the hallway. He says, ‘Come here.' He says, ‘What the fuck are we going to do with all of this?' There's a big wad of ones, tens, twenties. I says, ‘Oh, shit. We're gonna have to voucher some of this.' They had one hundred and seven nickel bags of marijuana. So I bring the money inside another room. I tell Junior, ‘Gimme the shit.' And then I started shoving some money in my pocket, shoving it in my socks and everywhere else.”

“Beautiful,” Henry said.

“I grabbed Sammy and said, ‘Look, I found it.' He says, ‘Oh man, there's a lot there.' So I vouchered one hundred and eighty dollars. One-eight-oh.”

“One eighty?”

“One-eight-oh,” Brian said. “We did nine-six-oh. Apiece.”

Henry was stunned. The cops had hit a jackpot.

“Nine … You did nine hundred and sixty dollars apiece?”

“Yep.”

“Nine-sixty for you, nine-sixty for Junior?”

“Yep.”

Henry needed to know about the other cops now. Had they been given a share of the stolen money?

“And did you throw Sammy or Billy anything?” he asked.

“We couldn't.”

“Oh yeah, because you don't know how good they are.” Henry sounded disappointed.

“That's it. I mean, hey, naturally we would, but I'm afraid, you know. I don't know anything about these guys. What am I gonna do, Henry? If you don't know who you're with, you can't just go, ‘Here's yours.'”

“No, Brian, you can't.”

After a pause, Brian began again.

“Yeah. Then we did Classon Avenue.”

“Classon and where?” Henry wanted to know.

“Between Dean and Bergen.”

“Yeah, how did you do there?”

“Very bad. Seventy dollars and some of that funny stuff.”

Henry would have to be careful here. He would have to know how much drugs had been stolen and what kind. He would offer to fence the stolen drugs for O'Regan. Then he could turn them over to a prosecutor.

“What's funny stuff?” Henry asked, already realizing that Brian had stolen crack, a mutant form of cocaine that is smoked in a pipe.

“The funny stuff in the capsules.”

“Oh, the crack.”

“Yeah.”

“And I got fifty-eight for you, Henry.”

“Fifty-eight what?”

“Funny things in capsules,” Brian said. “You want them?”

“Yeah, Brian. You want me to get rid of them for you? I can ask my guy and see if he wants them.”

Brian sounded nervous. “Is he safe?”

“He's good. Don't worry about him, Brian. He's excellent. Figure on getting about four hundred dollars.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“No. He generally takes a third, so I give you two-thirds. I'll give him a call tonight.”

“All right. Anything on stereos, televisions, VCRs?”

The prosecutors were up to their ears in electronic equipment. They wanted stolen drugs and guns. There are more headlines in New York City cops stealing drugs and guns, Henry had heard them say.

“No, that's dead,” he said.

“So we shouldn't even worry about taking that stuff no more?”

Henry hesitated. He didn't want to be in the position of asking cops not to steal.

“Let me try and call this guy Tuesday and see what's happening,” he said.

“Okay. So we only came out of Dean and Classon with seventy dollars. Plus we got eight no-responses.”

In other words, the dispatcher had tried to reach O'Regan and his partner on eight separate occasions at twenty-minute intervals. O'Regan and Gallagher had spent close to a third of their tour robbing people, Henry calculated.

“That sucks,” Henry commiserated.

“Yeah. But I told them we were on a job at Bergen and Nostrand. We covered there. That was no problem.”

“Hey, tell them to scratch,” Henry said.

“That was that. But while we were at Classon I was talking to a guy upstairs. And I told him we're coming down on this crack. And he told me, ‘Why don't you go down to Pacific and Classon. The all-night candy store. They're dealing heavy there.”

“Oh, very good.”

“It might be a place you guys could do. He says he thinks it's crack and reefer.”

“Pacific and Classon. Oh yeah, I think I know the place. It's got the game machines in front?”