Buddy Boys (14 page)

“No thanks. But Merry Christmas anyway.”

Six months later, Henry spotted Toya playing outside her home. The child was wearing one of the dresses he had given her, but the gift was now dirty, tattered and torn. He talked to the girl briefly, long enough to hear Toya say that her mother had sold her Cabbage Patch doll after she got out of the hospital and spent Henry's twenty dollars on drugs. Henry went to look for the mother, but never found her. That was a good thing, Henry decided, because if he had caught up with Toya's mother, the precinct's homicide list would probably have grown by one.

In time Henry forgot about Toya and her mother, but a little piece of him died with the memory.

One day Henry responded to a robbery in a brownstone on Virginia Place. An elderly couple had been beaten and robbed of their gold and antique jewelry by their grandson, a mildly retarded twenty-five-year-old man named Charlie Isaacson. The couple gave the police officer a picture of their grandson and Henry set out to find the robber.

Henry spotted Charlie on a nearby street corner and placed him in his car. But after questioning the man for five minutes Henry could see that the robber was a little slow. Charlie confessed that he had taken the jewelry (valued at close to eight thousand dollars) to a local pawn shop.

“I got this much back,” Charlie said, handing over twenty-five dollars.

Henry was furious—not with the retarded robber but with the pawnbroker. Accompanied by Charlie, he burst into the pawn shop a few minutes later.

“Did you just take some jewelry from this guy?” he demanded.

The pawnbroker answered, “No.”

Henry kicked down a partition and found the jewelry on a table. The pawnbroker was frightened and handed over the jewelry, never even bothering to ask for his own twenty-five dollars back. Henry returned the jewelry to Charlie's grandparents along with twenty-five dollars interest. Rather than take Charlie to jail, he accompanied him to Kings County Hospital, where he was admitted and treated for six months in the psychiatric ward.

Over the years Henry and Charlie became great friends. Henry gave Charlie his home phone number, and even brought him home for dinner. He taught Charlie how to talk to girls, advising him not to tell them he had money right away. And whenever Charlie smoked marijuana, he called Henry's house. “Mrs. Winter, could you please tell Mr. Winter that I'm high?”

Charlie still stole from his grandparents from time to time, but whenever Henry heard the call on the radio “Virginia Place,” he would handle the job.

“Okay Charlie, what did we get for the jewels this time?”

Charlie became Henry's project. Here was one person in the ghetto of Bedford-Stuyvesant that he could really help.

During his stay in the 77th Precinct, Henry met thousands of people and made hundreds of friends. But to this day only one Bedford-Stuyvesant resident still calls him at home. He calls regularly and always asks the policeman's wife the same thing.

“Mrs. Winter, is Mr. Winter still in town? Is he allowed to talk yet? I saw what happened on the television, you know. Is my friend Mr. Winter all right? Can I do anything for him?”

The caller is a retarded man named Charlie, who still occasionally clips a dollar bill or two off his grandmother's dresser.

6

“Will you just shoot me?”

Brian Francis O'Regan was living the American Dream in reverse.

Like another Valley Stream cop, Henry Winter, O'Regan left his suburban home each day to go to work in a slum. But unlike Henry Winter, Brian never came to grips with this great conflict in his life.

Brian was seven years older than Henry, and he also had graduated from Valley Stream Central High School. Unlike Henry, he hadn't avoided the temptation of the military and Vietnam. He felt an obligation. Brian joined the Marines after high school.

He got as close to the Far East as the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, but that was close enough. Brian spent part of his six-year enlistment keeping inventory of dead soldiers. He carried a clipboard and a mechanical pen, and he watched life flow past him in little black bags with zippers. One. Two. One hundred. Two hundred. One thousand. Two thousand …

Later, Brian was assigned another job, keeping living Marines squared away while he worked as a military policeman. They were both jobs, and Brian could handle them. He had been instilled with esprit de corps. But in 1973, as the guns in Vietnam became a distant echo lost in the clamor of the escalating troop withdrawal, Brian O'Regan came home to Valley Stream, moving back into his parent's house on East Dover Street.

Brian came from the working class. His mother Dorothy arrived in the suburbs from Flushing, by way of St. Albans, Queens. As a child she had often worked alongside her father, a truck farmer, unloading crates of fruit and vegetables onto the docks. Brian's father fixed oil burners for a living and tinkered with engines as a hobby. Mr. O'Regan had created a stir on his block once when he built a Ford with two front ends, a vehicle which surely brought panic to the neighborhood's one-way streets. Another time, Brian's father turned heads on Merrick Road when he rode down the middle of the street standing on a motorcycle.

Essentially, the O'Regans were sensible people. When St. Albans got too crowded they moved further east, winding up in Valley Stream. If you wanted to enjoy life, the O'Regans agreed, you had to have a good job and be willing to work hard. So when Brian came home from the war and told his father he wanted to become a New York City cop, Brian's father deemed his twenty-eight-year-old son's career choice a wise one, worthy of an O'Regan.

“One thing about the Police Department,” Brian's father used to tell him. “They never lay anybody off.”

Originally Brian dreamed of joining an outfit called the Emergency Services Unit—a division of gung-ho officers who are widely regarded as the department's cops of last resort. Emergency Services cops ride in trucks and wear flak jackets. They carry shotguns, battering rams, and, when the situation demands them, machine guns. In a sense, ESU cops are to the New York City Police Department what marines are to the armed forces. Whenever either group arrives at an incident, there is likely to be some sort of ass kicking.

ESU cops earn their paychecks storming into buildings, kicking down doors, and rescuing hostages. They surround bank robbers, focus infrared gunsights on snipers during riots, pull people from burning buildings, climb bridges to talk would-be suicide victims out of jumping, dig city workers out of street cave-ins, and use steel saws to cut accident victims out of cars. An Emergency Services cop was the kind of hero Brian O'Regan wanted to be.

He graduated from the police academy on May 29, 1973, raring to go, ready to arrest the whole city, as cops like to say. But without a friend in high places, sometimes called a “hook,” to guide his career, Brian had to settle for the luck of the draw. Fate led him to a locker in the 77th Precinct.

Other rookies groaned when Brian told them of his assignment. “Oh boy, you got a ghetto job.” Brian shrugged off the warnings. He had a gun and shield. The shield read: City of New York. To Brian that meant you went where the bosses sent you.

“Pride and glory,” he would later say. “That's what I liked.”

Although assigned as a lowly patrolman in a ghetto precinct, Brian soon started acting like a member of the Emergency Services Unit. By day he leaped from one roof to another in a single bound. He dodged bullets on the street and twisted steel doors off their hinges. At night he returned to the suburbs, his body scraped and his mind raw from what he had seen. Family members suggested that Brian get himself transferred to a better environment.

“Your precinct has more murders than any other precinct in the city,” his older brother Greg once noted. “Don't you worry about that?”

“No,” Brian answered, truthfully.

Still, his father offered to call an inspector he knew and work something out. But Brian would have none of it. He figured a cop had to work his way up into the Emergency Services Unit.

“I'm new,” Brian told his family. “I need some more time there.”

In July 1975, when the city started laying off cops, Brian O'Regan joined another 2,863 officers who were ordered to turn in their guns and shields. He left the department on the same day as another policeman working in Rockaway, Queens—Henry Winter. Like Henry, Brian started sending out résumés. A bachelor, O'Regan had no anchor to Valley Stream other than his parents, and they were still young enough to look after each other.

One day he got a letter from the Broward County Sheriff's Department in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. They were hiring. Brian packed up his belongings and drove south, joining the Broward County Sheriff's Department as a deputy sheriff.

He was amazed by what he found in Florida. For openers, there was his patrol car—Broward County deputies took their cars home at night. There was also the uniform—a combination of brown pants and a short-sleeved white shirt trimmed with green and gold. The latest in south Florida cop wear included a Smokey the Bear hat, complete with a little gold braid. Where once Brian had worn a dull, oblong silver shield over his heart, he now wore a brilliant gold star. Relatives visiting Brian in Florida discovered a cop in starched white shirt and creased pants driving a car with a steam-cleaned engine. The car shone so brightly that Brian's nieces joked about borrowing their uncle's wire-rimmed sunglasses just to look at it.

“He always had a smile on his face,” said his niece Kathleen. “He'd say, ‘How do I look? How do I look in my uniform?'”

Brian had a reputation as a model deputy who never lost his head. And when a Miami ghetto erupted in a race riot one summer night in 1979, local police enlisted the help of Brian O'Regan, a Broward County deputy with experience in Black Brooklyn, to help quell the disturbance.

“They wanted me in Miami for one reason,” he later said. “You can't push me. I don't explode.”

In late 1980, he was still working hard in Florida, collecting thank-you letters from citizens he had aided and hearing talk from supervisors about a promotion to detective, when he got bad news from home. His father had died of a heart attack.

Brian flew back to New York, and took a cab straight from the airport to the Moore Funeral Home in Valley Stream. Looking tanned and refreshed, Brian created a mild scene as soon as he entered the sitting room. All his relatives were in the back of the funeral parlor, sitting on folding chairs and chatting. Brian was incensed. No one was sitting near his father's casket.

“Why are you all back here?” Brian said, an edge to his voice. “You've left him all alone up there. You should all be up front with him.”

Brian stormed to the front of the room, and spent several minutes kneeling over his father's casket. Then he plunked himself down in a folding chair near the body, and sat sentry over his dead father for the remainder of the wake.

After the funeral, Brian announced to the family that he was moving back home so he could look after his widowed mother. The New York City Police Department was hiring back the officers it had laid off in 1975, he explained. His family urged him to stay in Florida, insisting that they could look after Dorothy O'Regan.

Apparently disturbed by the way the family cared for his father's body, Brian decided to stay. He turned his back on the Florida sunshine and refocused his attention on the gray decay of the city.

“I never saw anybody take anything in Florida,” Brian said years later. “No one even tried to hand us money when we stopped them. We were beyond that sort of thing. It just wasn't done. I still have a letter from Florida, saying I could come back there and work anytime I wanted. The letter isn't worth shit now. It might as well be written on toilet paper.”

On January 13, 1981, following a two week stay at the police academy, Brian O'Regan got his old badge back—NYPD shield number 1145—to go along with his old assignment—the 77th Precinct. He put on a frayed blue uniform and climbed into a dirty squad car and reacquainted himself with the squalor of the ghetto. Polished brass buttons, steam cleaned engines, and Florida sunshine were part of another lifetime.

At some point during his first tour, Brian drove onto the Atlantic Avenue viaduct, getting his first overview of Black Brooklyn in more than six years. A gloomy cloud of depression filled Brian's radio car. As far as he could see, there were tenements, housing projects, and abandoned buildings.

“What the fuck am I doing back here?” he thought. “I got to be crazy.”

Brian wasn't crazy. But he was pretty sure that another patrolman in his precinct, Henry Winter, was certifiably nuts. The two cops met soon after Brian arrived in the precinct, and at first, Brian wanted nothing to do with Winter, who lived across the street from his uncle back in Valley Stream. Like everyone else in the station house, Brian had heard that Henry was a rat.

Henry had a way of grating on other cops, Brian decided. At first he made other cops, including Brian, nervous. No one who worked with Henry was ever sure what he was going to do next. Among other things, he liked to take his pants off and jump on tables. But Henry did know how to talk to girls. And that was a talent that a bachelor like Brian envied.

“Henry Winter has personality,” Brian later said. “Did you ever know a guy that you really hated, and everyday he comes up to you and pats you on the back and says, ‘How you doing, buddy boy?' Pretty soon you don't hate the guy anymore. You may even like him. That was Henry Winter. I liked Henry. In a way, I still do. ‘Buddy boy' was his favorite word. If you want to see Seventy-seventh Precinct cops jump out of their graves just go up to them now and say, ‘Hey, buddy boy.'”

Brian soon realized there were strange things going on between the cops and the robbers out on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant. A lot of the cops Brian worked with were bad guys. Shortly after returning to the precinct, he arrived at a smoke shop, a grocery store that sells marijuana over the counter, in answer to a radio report of three men with guns. He got to the scene in time to see a team of other cops smash through a storefront window in hot pursuit of three completely imaginary suspects. Once inside, they rummaged through the shelves and floorboards looking for drugs and money.