Buddy Boys (17 page)

Six months after he arrived at the Seven-Seven, Batman and Robin insisted on giving Tony his first collar. He escorted a drug suspect back to the station house where, under duress, Tony filled out the paper work. He later accompanied his prisoner to court, where the defendant asked to make a brief statement at the close of his arraignment.

“I just want to tell the court that this officer did not arrest me,” the defendant said pointing to Magno. “It was two other officers that got me. This officer only showed up later.”

As the defendant spoke, Magno melted into the bench. The judge asked the arresting officer for an interpretation.

“Not me,” Tony said, committing perjury on the first arrest of his career. “I wouldn't do that.”

“Next case,” said the judge, banging his gavel.

Tony left the courtroom determined never to make another arrest unless it was absolutely necessary. He spent the rest of his career chasing bad guys, cornering suspects, taking their guns away, smacking them around, placing them in handcuffs and then handing them over to some other cops who handled the arrest, the paperwork and the court appearances. Having successfully avoided the one aspect of a policeman's duties that made him feel like a criminal—his day in court—Tony operated as one happy and contented cop.

However, he was not happy, even in the broadest sense, with his assignment to a ghetto precinct. No matter how he tried, he could not get used to poverty. He did not like the acrid smell of the ghetto, the taste that came into his mouth when he stepped into a urine-filled elevator, or the smell of poverty on his clothes. He did not understand this sort of destitution, a squalid existence where people were willing to sit down at the dinner table with roaches and put up with having their kids bitten by rats in the dark. He was a staunch conservative who believed that all of the world's problems came under a single heading he called “that liberalism bullshit.” Tony scorned the very people he was sworn to protect. He escaped them in the precinct locker room.

“I wasn't brought up this way. I tell you I went into buildings in that precinct and I gagged. I had to put my hand over my mouth just to breathe. After a while, they say, you get accustomed to it, but I never did. I wasn't used to certain things about the way those people lived. When you see people living in shit it takes something away from you. It steals something from you. I saw kids in diapers that hadn't been changed for two or three days and it hardened me. I'd walk into apartments with the linoleum half ripped up off the floor, and grease in the kitchen with hundreds of roaches just swarming around. We had to keep moving in those apartments, stamping our feet. We didn't lean on the walls because we didn't want to take the roaches back to the precinct or get them on our uniforms and take them home.

“I remember going on one job where there was a middle-aged woman with rips in her housecoat sitting at a table eating in the middle of this skelly apartment with roaches crawling around on the table. And she was flicking them away from her plate like they were pets, like it was nothing. It makes you cringe. It makes you cry. But what can you do? We had to go into these apartments and breathe in these places.

“One time I went into an apartment and a big woman was lying on the bed, having a baby. She's heavy into labor. She can't wait for the ambulance. The place is disgusting. Her other kids are running around. I wouldn't go into the delivery room if my own wife was having a baby, but I'm here now. And I helped the lady deliver the baby. I wanted to puke but I didn't. I put my hand over my mouth and helped her. There wasn't time for how I was feeling. We just delivered the baby and got the hell out of there. But what did we deliver the baby to? What kind of life is that kid going to have?

“To make matters worse, the people gave us shit. In the old days, when I first got to the precinct, it seemed like more people had respect for you. Even though they looked like shit, if we raised our voices, they knew they couldn't fuck with us. Now, they yell at us as soon as we walk through the door. ‘Who the fuck called you? Who needs you?' Eventually you start asking yourself the same questions. I did. It got so I didn't give a shit what was going on in some places. But I wouldn't leave the precinct either. I was married to the job and the guys. Once I got in the precinct and got comfortable, I never wanted to leave. I loved it there. I loved the guys. It was like a second home to me.”

If it's true that one day can change your life, Tony Magno's life was forever changed by what he saw and did in the 77th Precinct on one humid summer evening when the whole city went dark, Wednesday, July 13, 1977.

Tony, the cop who rarely left the sanctuary of his home, was sitting on his living-room couch after finishing a day tour and dinner when the lights went out at 9:34
P.M
. Like several million other New Yorkers, he figured that he had blown a fuse. But on the way to the basement, he heard people yelling in the streets. No one in Brooklyn had power. The fourth-largest city in the world was plunged into darkness on a humid ninety-five-degree night.

At first, the blackout was just inconvenient. Tony set up his house, lighting candles, loading fresh batteries in radios and flashlights. His neighbors gathered on stoops, quietly swapping ghost stories. The neighborhood kids all agreed that the blackout was a novelty, a reason to stay up late. But as Tony listened to the radio and heard the call for all city police officers to head into their precincts, he became concerned. Thousands of people throughout Black Brooklyn were rioting and looting, gutting shops and burning down buildings.

He decided that he had to go into work and fight the ghetto looters, leaving his own family unguarded. It seemed to be a clear choice. He was a cop and on this night the city needed cops.

“You are not going in to work,” Marianne advised him.

“I have to go in,” he explained. “It's my job.”

Assuring his family that they'd be all right, Tony called Zeke Zayas, another police officer who lived nearby, and the two agreed to accompany each other into work. Neither Zeke nor Tony was prepared for what they would see that night—a night of madness when it seemed that every Bedford-Stuyvesant resident had taken to the street, looting shops of everything from cars and bikes to aspirin and toilet paper.

In the next twenty-four hours police made 3,300 arrests and heard 45,000 phone complaints throughout the city. The fire department received 23,722 alarms and responded to 900 fires, 55 of them serious. One hundred cops were injured while trying to restore order. A dozen people were shot dead by armed shopkeepers, snipers, and frightened police officers. Looters in the Bronx broke down the metal door to an automobile showroom and drove away fifty cars. Roving bands in Harlem carried off stolen television sets and stereo equipment. In Queens, looters rushed away from broken stores carrying couches and beds. Airline pilots flying over Brooklyn reported that the borough was aglow with fire. Mayor Abe Beame later described the blackout as “a night of terror.”

It was an evening perhaps best captured in one headline and one anecdote—both of them from the
Village Voice
, a week after light had been restored. The article, which included a photograph of several looters running down the streets with televisions and furniture on their backs, was entitled, “Here Comes the Neighborhood.” Written by Denis Hamill and Michael Daly, it included the story of one young black man who rushed home to his mother in the middle of the blackout with a stolen air conditioner. Using a flashlight, she plugged the air conditioner into an electrical outlet and pressed the “On” switch. When the machine failed to start after several tries, she was furious and threw the air conditioner out the window. “It don't work,” she screamed. “Go get another one.”

“We got into the precinct without any trouble. As soon as we hit the shitty area—I hate to say it but it was the black area—we saw a lot of people all over the place. The streets were a mess. There was trash and garbage everywhere. The place looked like one big broken window. We got into the station house and went downstairs to get our helmets. I had never worn one before and I felt like an idiot with this stupid pot on my head. I was scared but excited too. I wanted to be out there.

“I remember one of the first calls was a ten-thirteen on Atlantic and Bedford—assist patrolman, shots fired. As soon as we pulled up I heard a shot, then one or two more. I thought, ‘Oh, fuck. What did we get ourselves into here?' All the guys were ducking. Some of us had our helmets on backwards. No one knew where the shots were coming from. There must have been twenty cars there, and we all just got back in them and left. There was utter chaos. We didn't know what to do.

“Then we went out on patrol, if you can call it that, in two cars—one unmarked car followed by a patrol car. The unmarked car would pull up to a store and drive up on the sidewalk, pointing the headlights into the store so we could see what we were doing. The place was a shambles, it didn't even look like a store anymore on the inside. One group of guys would run into the store and start slamming the looters with their sticks. I figured, I ain't going in there and get hit by a stick. I stayed outside and put my deviant mind to work. They could only hit one person at a time inside the store, but I could get six people as they ran out of the store. I stood by the door and waited. And I got every one of them as they came out. Whack, whack, whack. I couldn't hit the women in the face. They'd come out and say, ‘Officer, please don't hit me.' I had my stick raised but I said, ‘All right, I won't hit you.' But as soon as they ran past me, I hit them in the back of the head. I couldn't look them in the face. And it kept going on like that for hours and hours. I was Babe Ruth that night. No one got away from me.

“People fired at us later on that night too. We didn't know where the shots were coming from. It was crazy. The only light on the street was coming from a burning Thom McAn shoe store. People were still inside the burning store stealing shoes. That really got to me. Guys were taking a chance on burning up for a pair of shoes. I really let those looters have it with the stick. I hit this one guy right in the face and he didn't even look like a human anymore.

“One time on Nostrand Avenue we turned around and just starting firing back down the street toward a building. The shooting stopped. They were like rats out there. We'd walk into a store and the place would be crawling with them. They cleaned out the jewelry stores and the grocery stores. I mean everything. And I knew some of the people I was hitting. I was just about to bash this one lady and she yells, ‘Tony, it's me.' I looked and it was the school crossing guard. I couldn't believe it. I told her, ‘Just drop the shit and get the fuck out of here.' Even the people that I liked, my friends in the neighborhood, were out there looting. I lost all respect for the neighborhood after that night. There were some cops taking things too. Guys were loading up their trunks with stuff. I saw a lot of liquor being passed around the precinct that night.”

“I was never so happy to see the sun come up in my life. My arms were falling off. I couldn't swing the nightstick any more. I was exhausted. I couldn't hit another person. But even after daylight people were still out there looting. We got called to a furniture warehouse on Grand Avenue, and people were running down the streets with couches and beds on their backs. They just wouldn't let the stuff go, either. We split their heads with the stick and they'd still hold onto the shit. It was like they already owned it. It scared me to see people like that. It made me think about the neighborhood a lot. Before the blackout, I just figured that we were working with the scum all the time, that there were still good people out there in the community. But after that night, after I saw everybody in the community looting, I just didn't give a shit about what happened on the street any more. I used to just drive through the precinct sometimes and wonder: How far will they go the next time the lights go out?

“It would have made a difference if I could have done something—if I could saved someone's store or something. But when it was all over I felt like a jerk. We went back to the precinct and drank beer. We stayed there and got drunk the whole morning. The cops that came in gave me shit. ‘You gotta be some kind of jackass, Magno. You were home with your family and you came into this cesspool in the middle of the blackout?' And they were right. I should have stayed home. All I really did was crack some heads. We didn't arrest anybody. One of the guys told me, “Magno, you batted .900 out there tonight. I only saw you swing and miss once.' Eventually, a day or two later, I got home. But I didn't tell Marianne much about what happened. What was there to say? That I didn't trust people anymore?”

Over the years, Tony rarely took his job home with him. Although he did bring most of his partners home for early morning card games and beer drinking sessions, they rarely talked about work. It was not unusual, Marianne noted, to wake up at 7
A.M
. in order to send the kids off to school and discover a half dozen of her husband's friends sitting around her dining room table, drinking beer and arguing. Other cops soon decided that Tony had the perfect wife—she could put up with cops.

Actually, there was only one thing that Marianne hated about being a cop's wife. She could put up with her husband's hours and his drinking buddies. She could put up with his frustration and his brooding silence. But she could not put up with being alone in the house—knowing that her husband was out there working in the city's most dangerous precinct—and seeing a police car stopped on her block.

“If someone ever calls up and says I've been shot, don't believe them,” Tony used to tell Marianne. “They don't call you when your husband gets shot. They send a patrol car out to get you. They come to the house.”

So whenever Marianne looked out the window and saw a police car stopped on her block, she would freeze, imagining the worst.