Buddy Boys (19 page)

Henry was interested. “What do you mean you think he got everything?”

“Well I keep a lot of money in the closet, but I didn't dare open it. The money is in a tin box. Could you go in and check to see if it's still there?”

Henry and Tony entered the apartment, leaving the woman in the hallway with a neighbor. Tony guarded the door while Henry removed two hundred dollars from the tin box. Henry stuffed the money into his pocket and the cops returned to the hallway, filling out a burglary complaint report.

“Yep,” Henry announced. “They got it all, lady.”

Later they split up the cash in the patrol car. Henry felt bad about what he had just done. His conscience bothered him. This wasn't some street dealer or numbers runner they had just ripped off, this was a frightened woman who trusted them. The partners discussed the possibility of returning the money, but Tony didn't want to compound the mistake with a lie.

“Forget it,” he decided. “What's done is done. We'll never do it again.”

Feeling disgraced, they decided they wouldn't rob anybody but really bad guys. They had to have some code of ethics, they agreed. They were not, Henry and Tony assured each other, complete degenerates. They were businessmen, and even the cruelest businessman had to operate by a set of principles.

But soon they had another problem. They were running out of bad guys. A lot of smoke shops in their sector had closed because the drug merchants had moved to neighborhoods where the cops weren't quite so active and so greedy. Several numbers parlors also shifted their bases of operation, relocating in sectors beyond the reach of Winter and Magno. Apparently shut out, Tony and Henry refocused their attention on the ghetto's burgeoning drug trade.

“We'll become like Robin Hoods,” Tony announced one day. “We'll steal from the rich and keep it.”

While on patrol one day in late 1984, Henry and Tony rounded a corner on Schenectady Avenue and spotted a man carrying a shoulder bag. He looked at the cops, did a double take, and then sprinted down the street. He entered a storefront that the police listed as “a known drug location” in their intelligence reports.

The cops got out of their car and chased the man into the building. Henry grabbed him in the back of the otherwise empty store and asked, “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing. Just hanging out.”

“What are you hanging out here for? There's nobody here.”

Then Henry noticed that the man no longer had his shoulder bag and he ordered, “Get out of here. Now.”

The man obliged and, once he'd left, Tony found the bag hidden behind a large commercial refrigerator. He opened it and called Henry over.

“What is it?”

“Fucking money. A lot of money.”

They returned to their car with the bag. As Henry drove away, Tony counted out more than $5,500. The cops took $2,500 apiece and returned to the station house where they vouchered the bag and remaining $500 as found property. The man they robbed confronted them in the precinct parking lot.

“Please give me the money back. They're gonna kill me when I tell them what happened. They won't believe me.”

“We're vouchering the bag and the money,” the officers answered. “Tell your boss to come down and prove the money is his. It'll be right here. See the desk officer and tell him where you got the money.”

When they turned the bag in, the sergeant discovered an additional $1,500 in a compartment the officers overlooked. Henry and Tony looked at each other and said, “We blew it. How stupid can we be?”

The bag's owner realized he would have to answer some hard questions about the drug trade if he tried to reclaim his cash and he never bothered to set foot in the 77th Precinct.

Henry and Tony were ecstatic. The incident brought a renewed sense of purpose to their work as members of the New York City Police Department. No drug dealer was safe from them. They broke down doors and climbed fire escapes into fortified apartments, getting the drop on surprised dealers.

Within a year after first teaming up, Henry and Tony were hooked on the excitement they felt whenever they harassed drug dealers.

“We always tried to leave the bad guys with a little something. If you go into a place and take everything, they're gonna bitch. They may even come down to the precinct and file a complaint against you. Of course a lot of guys did file complaints against us. They always identified us as ‘Blondie and his partner.' Tony used to go crazy when he heard that. He'd scream, ‘Keep your hat on when we're out in the streets. Being out here with you is like being with Fay Wray.'

“But if you catch guys and let them go with a little money and drugs they're not going to bitch. They're as happy as a pig in shit. They're thinking, ‘I'm not going to jail. So I lost a little money. I'll make it up next week.' Plus they didn't know we were actually keeping the drugs and reselling them. They thought we vouchered the drugs after we let them go. That was easier for them to take than if we walked over to a toilet and flushed one thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars worth of cocaine away. They got pissed when we did that and said, ‘You should have locked me up.'

“Did I feel guilty about what we were doing? Yeah. At that particular minute. When someone handed me money, I felt guilty. I think anybody would feel guilty then. But then all of a sudden we'd get a ten-thirty [shots fired] or something on the radio. And we'd go answer the job and forget about what we'd just done. Once I got through the day, I lived with my guilt. There were times I thought, ‘What's going to happen? Holy shit, what am I doing? Taking a lousy couple of dollars. It's not worth it.' But it just seemed like, ‘So what?' Who actually is going to come out here and look at us?

“Even though I was a bad guy, I had the feeling, ‘Hey I'm bad on one side, but on this side I'm making up for it.' If people really needed us, we were there. We weren't taking anything from honest workers. I know it doesn't matter whether its an honest worker or a skell, it's still wrong. I know that. But we were taking money that was illegal to begin with. Drug money. It's weird but I never thought I was robbing those people. I was robbing a lowlife. A drug dealer. Someone who shouldn't be there to begin with. The law couldn't touch these guys. If we caught them they just went down and paid the fine. They could afford the fines. Hell, they were making money hand over foot. I know it sounds like a rationalization. But what we did worked. We ripped these guys off and they moved out. They should legalize that. Go in and rip all these guys off and they'll all disappear.

“At first Tony didn't like playing with drugs. He had no problems with money, none whatsoever. He just didn't want to have anything to do with dealing drugs. But after we started selling the drugs back on the street and getting more money, Tony just didn't even think about it anymore. He just did it.

“See, he was set in his ways. He had been on the job for fifteen years by the time I hooked up with him in 1983. He didn't give a shit what the bosses said. If we were going on our meal hour and they wanted to give us a job, we'd try to eat on the job. We'd say, ‘Yeah Central, we'll take that job.' But we wouldn't go to it. We'd park somewhere, have our dinner, and after we ate, we'd go to the job.

“If we were goofing off, we'd sit on any job except an emergency call. If the call was a cardiac, we'd go. If we had a young kid suffering an asthma attack, we'd answer it right away. If there was a gun battle in the street, say at Plaza Street East and Underhill, we'd say, ‘Maybe we better take a ride down there because maybe good people are involved.' But if we heard Lincoln and Franklin, a shit area, we'd just sit back and have our dinner. Let them shoot everybody the fuck up. Who the hell cares? We'll just go and pick up the bodies. Everybody else is gone. If two guys are having a gun fight, who do you take? You take the loser. He's sitting there with a bullet in him, so you get to lock him up.

“But really, it all depended on what mood we were in. If we were working a four-to-twelve shift, and Tony came in really early, like maybe around one o'clock in the afternoon, and he partied with the guys downstairs until I came in, then he'd be in a happy mood. He wouldn't care if the precinct turned upside down. We'd handle our jobs. But we wouldn't go crazy to back up another unit or take a job in someone else's sector. We'd do a job and shoot back to Macho's Bodega on Buffalo and St. Johns for a beer.

“We sat in the back on milk boxes, drinking bottles of beer and playing with the roaches, betting on the fastest ones. There were times that we'd have eight or nine cops in the back of the store, hooting and hollering, arguing about who was going to go out to the refrigerator to get the next round of beers. Anthony, a guy who hung out in the store, was an old-type numbers man who wrote everything down on a piece of paper. Everybody played their number with him and so did we. Tony and I hit a lot. He was good. We'd see Anthony on the way into work and he'd wave to us, ‘I know, you hit today.' We got everything we ever needed from the bodega—cigarettes, batteries, sandwiches, and beer. All for free. The store owner and Anthony the numbers man both loved us. We were the right type of cops.”

In a precinct that seemed to have gone mad, Henry and Tony were regarded as two of the most outrageous characters. Given the right set of circumstances—which was almost any circumstances at all—they could be counted on to commit the most unimaginable offenses. No one in the precinct could match their flair for handling a simple dispute.

One day early in 1984, Tony and Henry responded to a call about a husband-wife dispute in a tiny Park Place apartment. Tony arrived to quell the ruckus wearing shiny new shoes, which he had purchased earlier in the day. The husband, a wife beater, refused to leave the apartment. As Tony shoved the man out of the apartment, he stepped on Tony's new left shoe, landing on it in such a manner that he cut a tiny sliver of leather off the toe. Tony screamed, pointing at his shoe. The dispute stopped.

“I just paid forty fucking dollars for these shoes,” Tony yelled, throwing the man around the apartment.

The shaken man pulled out twenty dollars and handed it to the cop. Tony's eyes went wide with a deranged look Henry had never seen before. He pocketed the money and then rifled the man's pockets for more.

“Is this all you got? Twenty dollars? Twenty dollars when I just paid forty dollars for these shoes? You're buying me a new pair of shoes.” Tony said.

“Yes sir. But twenty dollars is all I got.”

Magno turned on the heel of his good shoe and stormed out of the apartment, rushing back to the patrol car. Winter followed, amazed by his partner's anger. Henry waited until they had driven away from the scene before finally daring to speak.

“You know you just fucking robbed that guy?”

“Fuck him,” Tony replied, his face still red with rage. “We're going back next week to get another twenty for the other shoe.”

Henry rarely lost his cool. He did, however, once floor a fellow officer who refused to escort a teenaged shooting victim from the site of a gun battle to the hospital. The cop wanted to go visit his girlfriend instead, and Henry sent him off to see his girl with a shiner under his left eye. So on rare occasions Henry, to use a cop expression, “wigged out.”

A few months after Tony cut his shoe, Henry entered an apartment to settle a dispute between a Jamaican woman and her landlord. Seeing a uniformed officer at her door, the woman made peace with her landlord, and aimed her sights at Henry, calling him a “blood clot” and suggesting that he engage in a sexual relationship with a goat. Henry took exception to this and raised his flashlight over her head, preparing to strike her. She stepped back into her apartment, grabbed her infant child off the floor, and returned to the fray.

“You blood clot cop. You can't hit me, I'm holding a baby.”

Henry stepped forward and whacked the woman on the top of her skull with his flash light, rendering her unconscious immediately. He caught the baby as the woman crumbled, and then placed the child in its crib.

This time it was Tony who looked on mouth agape and stupefied.

“You crazy ass, you've got to be kidding me.”

“I couldn't take her no more,” Henry explained as they reached the street. “Come on. Let's get out of here.”

A week later Tony and Henry returned to the same apartment building to settle another dispute between yet another tenant and the landlord. Henry spotted the Jamaican woman sitting on the stoop holding her baby as they pulled up in their patrol car.

“Hellooo, Officer Winter,” she called. “How are you?”

“All right, and yourself? How's the baby?”

“Oh good, good.”

Of course, there were members of the community who thrived on testing a police officer's mettle, particularly a cop like Henry Winter who wanted to get along with everyone, cop or thief. On a summer day in 1984, Henry entered an apartment building on Lincoln Place to handle a dispute on the second floor. As he entered the building, Henry met a Jamaican marijuana dealer named Panama Mike, who was selling drugs in the building's vestibule.

“You be gone by the time I come down stairs,” Henry said.

He returned a few minutes later only to discover Panama Mike still selling nickel bags of marijuana through a mail slot in the door.

“Have some respect. What did I fucking tell you? I don't care what you do, but when I tell you to be gone, you get the hell out of here.”

Panama Mike smiled and said, “Fuck you, Blondie. I'm going to kick your ass the next time you come around here.”

“All right, you kick my ass next time I come around here.”

Henry continued toward the door, heading for a metal garbage can near the entrance.

“Come on Blondie, me and you, right now.”

As they reached the door, Henry grabbed the garbage can and swung it, splitting Panama Mike's nose open. He fell to the floor, and Henry picked him up and put him in the garbage can. Then he left the building.