Buddy Boys (10 page)

“That night the late-tour guys said they wanted to talk to me. They caught me in the garage. Gallagher and his partner were there, talking about the situation. Finally, they said, ‘Look, not that we don't trust you, but your brother-in-law was a rat.' And then they tossed me—checked me for a wire. Jesus, I was pissed. We almost got into a fight. I said, ‘You don't have to fucking toss me. If I tell you I'm not wired, I'm not wired. What the fuck is going on here?' Gallagher's partner said, ‘Nothing against you, but I don't talk to anybody unless I toss them first.' I said, ‘Yeah. Okay. No problem.' And from that day on, because they knew I knew something had happened and I didn't open my mouth, I was accepted. I wasn't accepted to the point where they took me in with them—but at least they talked to me. The rest came later.”

4

The Alamo

At the New York City Police Department's headquarters at One Police Plaza in Manhattan—a fourteen-story building dubbed “the Purple Palace” by the city's rank and file cops—the 77th Precinct had acquired a reputation as an “unmanageable” precinct with an acute integrity problem.

Just as a riotous command in the South Bronx had been named Fort Apache, Brooklyn cops referred to the 77th Precinct as the Alamo. A detective's wife who knew a little about silk screens even designed a blue and white T-shirt, with a drawing of the real Alamo and the words “77th Precinct. The Alamo. Under Siege.” The shirts—approximately 150 of them—were snapped up at $7.50 a clip within a week after they went on sale. Most of the cops liked the new nickname. It was much better than that of an adjoining Brooklyn precinct that had been overtaken and trashed by a group of angry Hasidic Jews after a mugging—Fort Surrender.

“We were just thinking of a fort. There were four of us. Me, my partner Al, Larry Bolliack and another cop named Frankie. We were parked side by side in a playground just off Atlantic Avenue. One guy says, ‘We got to name this place and its got to be a fort like Fort Apache.' We were talking about Indians, war and being surrounded. Bolliack wanted to call it Alienated City. Then somebody said it. The Alamo. And the next thing you know it was painted on the wall outside the precinct in orange Day-Glo paint. Alamo. That was the only place it was painted and I did it myself. I pulled up in my car on a midnight tour, and I just went out and wrote in big letters with a spray can: A. L. A. M. O. Alamo. My partner Al kept going, ‘Did you spell it right?' He was nervous about that. He didn't want to be party to a misspelling.

“The next week, something happened at the precinct and the name hit the newspapers. The story said, ‘The Seven-Seven Precinct, sometimes referred to as the Alamo …' But some precinct in the Bronx sent us a teletype message, saying, ‘Hey, we're the Alamo. We're the original Alamo.' One of the guys sent them a message back too—Fuck you.

“About the same time a Communist Party group came in to the precinct, trying to rile the blacks up. They came around and started breaking the windows in the station house. They had us surrounded. And that's when our captain said on the news, ‘We were like a fort under siege.' That did it. They came out with the T-shirts right after that. ‘The Alamo. Under Siege.' Everybody bought the shirts. Didn't Brian have his on when he did what he did in the motel?”

No one liked wearing the new T-shirts better than some of the cops working the precinct's midnight shift. Some of the officers would put the shirts on under their uniforms and then set out to wreak havoc in the precinct—drinking beer, robbing the dead, stealing from the scenes of past burglaries and holding up drug dealers. It seemed to the officers on the midnight tours that almost everyone knew about these extracurricular activities except the people in charge of stopping corruption—an apparatus that included the precinct's Integrity Officer, the Internal Affairs Division, the Field Internal Affairs Unit, the Brooklyn district attorney and the state special prosecutor.

Sergeant William Stinson, who supervised the midnight tour, always asked precinct detectives, “So, what do you hear?” When detective Frank Duffey told him, “I hear you guys on the midnight tour are out there robbing everybody blind,” Stinson replied, “I think I'll retire.” But when he put in his retirement papers, and realized that the department was actually going to let him go, he rethought his position. Stinson went back to work, telling friends, “If they're going to let me retire, that means they don't have nothing on me.”

Peter Heron, another new cop in the 77th Precinct who got transferred there after pulling his gun on the day he graduated from the police academy and shooting a neighbor in the head during a hallway scuffle, was fired from the department after he started snorting heroin on the job. Heron, an active cop if there ever was one, got into no less than four shootouts with drug dealers and robbery suspects during his first six months in the precinct—a remarkable achievement when you consider that most city cops retire without ever having fired their guns in the heat of battle.

In an interview with a newspaper reporter years later, Heron even admitted shooting an unarmed man in a Manhattan park during an argument over heroin. He dropped a knife at the fallen man's side before police arrived. The arriving cops then charged the victim with attempted murder. Eventually Heron—nicknamed Peter Heroin by the cops in the 77th Precinct—was arrested for attempted murder. He defended himself saying the stress he experienced in the precinct had led him to use drugs and had ruined his life. In earlier years, Heron had taken Brian O'Regan and Henry Winter aside and warned them that a routine of mayhem and misery could change one's perspective on life.

“Get out of this precinct while you still can,” he advised them.

“Pete Heroin and I worked together for awhile when I first got there. One night we were over by the Albany projects and a robbery went down. A guy with a gun had just ripped a lady off. The guy took off into a building and Pete and I ran after him. He ran to the roof and we could hear him, he was always like one landing ahead of us. When we got there we couldn't find him. We're the only people on the roof. I go to check the other entrance and it's locked. Where the hell could this guy go? We searched the top of the air shafts. We checked the elevator shaft. Nothing. Finally Pete spotted the guy's fingers. He was hanging over the side of the building waiting for us to leave, but before we could get there he lost his grip. He had been hanging there for at least five minutes. It's a standard ghetto trick, but he fell.

“We both thought the same thing. Fort Apache. The Bronx. We could see the headline: ‘Cops hurl suspect to death from rooftop.' There's no witnesses. We're both going to jail. We ran downstairs and found the guy moaning in the courtyard. He hit a tree on the way down, breaking his fall. A crowd gathered and somebody was already yelling, ‘You cops threw him off the roof. We saw you do it.' We rushed the guy off to Kings County Hospital. He came to in the emergency room. We didn't know if he was going to make it. A doctor asked him, ‘What happened up there?' And the guy said, ‘I lost my grip. I fell.' Then he blacked out. But we were all right—he had told the truth. Everybody heard him. But imagine if he comes to and makes a dying declaration, something like, ‘The cops pushed me off the roof.' The funny thing was that we never found the mutt's gun. I think somebody stole it off him when he hit the ground.

“Pete and I were on another robbery in the Albany projects. I arrived on the scene as the backup. I saw a guy come running around the corner with Pete chasing him in a patrol car, driving his car like a cowboy with his gun out the window. Pow. Pow. He's shooting away. Pete dropped the guy with a shot in the ass.

“I did a lot of strange things in my time. But Pete, he was the weirdest of the weird. Like I wasn't afraid of anybody. If I had a job to do, I'd do the job. If a guy was six-foot-six and weighed 260 pounds, I would take the diplomatic approach. I knew I couldn't take him out right away, so I'd bullshit with him a little, bullshit with him a little more, try to get behind him, and then cold-cock the son of a bitch with my jack or nightstick. Pete would go right up to them. He was an ex-Marine. Every situation was Tripoli to him. He would go face-to-face with them. And lose. Get his ass kicked. He's the type of guy who would say, ‘Give me a ten—eighty-five [backup] with two units and call an ambulance.' And then he'd walk in on the guy and fight him. Instead of doing it the sneaky way, trying to get behind him, and hit him with the stick or something, Pete would just call in the troops, call in the medics, drop the radio, and go to war.”

Even a casual visitor to the 77th Precinct could see there was something inherently wrong at the station house. In a neighborhood where cops were literally stepping over dead bodies and running into robbers on the streets, the most that anybody in a position of authority wanted to know was why the number of traffic summonses was down and the precinct's overtime up. The bigger questions went unresolved.

“I believe crimes are being committed by Members of the Service in uniform,” wrote Captain Donald T. Bishop, the precinct commander, to his zone commander shortly after taking over the 77th Precinct in February 1982. “There's a good possibility that late tour personnel are committing larcenies at the scenes of past burglaries.”

Bishop's warning, like those of a previous zone commander, went unheeded. Police officers assigned to the precinct sensed that most of their supervisors simply wanted to get their time in and move on before a major scandal broke. The department seemed to care little about the 77th and even less about what cops did in the neighborhood. Henry Winter was about to discover that a cop in the 77th Precinct could pretty much do whatever the hell he or she wanted.

Henry Winter got in trouble with his superiors shortly after he arrived. Oddly enough, he got “jammed up”—a cop phrase meaning in trouble—after he caught a bad guy who was supposed to be a good guy, driving a stolen car through his sector.

One night in 1981, Henry was teamed up in a squad car with a rookie, patrolling a section near Eastern Parkway, when he looked over to his right and saw a black man with wild-looking hair and a ragged shirt driving a beat-up Ford. Henry studied the man's car for a moment and then spotted a portable radio on the dashboard.

“Hey,” Henry said to his partner, “that looks like a police department radio.”

Edging up, Henry finally got close enough to read the insignia on the side of the radio—NYPD. Henry was excited. This guy couldn't be a cop.

“Look, I bet we got a member of the Black Liberation Army here with a stolen radio,” Henry said. This imaginary scenario wasn't so wild. Recently, two members of the black supremacist gang had jumped from a van on a quiet Queens street and fired more than twenty shots at two police officers trapped in their radio car. Neither cop had time to get his gun out of his holster—one was killed, the other critically wounded. The surviving cop's father had a heart attack in the hospital and later died. The shooters, although later captured and convicted of murder, were still at large.

The light turned green and the driver took off. Henry followed, running the man's plate over his own portable radio. Within seconds the plate came back as a ten-sixteen (stolen). Henry reported his location over the air, hit the siren, and started to give chase. He felt good, too, figuring he was chasing a fugitive with a stolen police radio in a stolen car. He was going to be praised as one alert cop when this was all over.

Henry continued chasing the car and finally pulled it over at an intersection. He and the driver got out of their cars at the same time. Henry looked at him and felt sick. They were both wearing standard issue police trousers, shoes, and gun belts. Henry had caught a cop.

“What are you doing?” the driver yelled. “I'm a cop.”

“What do you mean you're a cop?” Henry yelled back. “Show me something.”

Henry was mortified. Any second now there would be a half-dozen other police cars converging on the scene.

“What are you doing in a stolen car?”

“Ah, the car's not stolen, man.”

“Don't bullshit me. I just ran the fucking plate. You're in a stolen car.”

Henry looked to his left and saw the radio cars closing in, their lights flashing. He had to make a quick decision, a fateful decision. Should he or shouldn't he rat on a fellow cop?

“All right. Get the fuck out of here now.”

The cop sped off just as the first radio car arrived, carrying a sergeant, no less.

“What happened?” the sergeant asked. “I thought you had a stolen car.”

Henry tried a smile. “No. I must have put over the wrong plate because he's got papers for that car and everything. I just let him go.”

“All right,” the sergeant said.

But things were not all right. The sergeant had caught a glimpse of the fleeing car and had written down a plate number just as he arrived. He called the dispatcher to ask what plate number Henry Winter had given over the air. The two numbers matched. Henry was in a lot of trouble.

They took his gun and shield away pending an in-house investigation. But later that night, following a meeting in the precinct captain's office between two borough commanders and members of the Field Internal Affairs Unit, they were given back. Henry insisted he had made a mistake, that he had put over one number and seen another on the car and registration. Essentially the department decided to look the other way. Henry was given an official reprimand; a yellow sheet was placed in his file.

The cop whom Henry let get away was assigned to watch prisoners at Kings County Hospital. He had taken an impounded car from the parking lot of his precinct during his break and was on his way to see his girlfriend when Henry pulled him over. As punishment for unauthorized use of the car, the cop was transferred to another precinct and given a foot post.