Buddy Boys (23 page)

By the afternoon of May 28, five days after they were brought in, Henry and Tony were literally rolling. Shortly after turning out, William Gallagher approached Henry and Tony as they sat in the park.

“José Villarini wants to make a withdrawal,” he said.

“What do you mean, make a withdrawal?” Henry asked innocently.

“He wants to hit a place,” Gallagher replied. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

“Okay,” Henry decided. “Meet us later on.”

Tony and Henry left the park and drove directly to a pay phone, calling the ‘hello' number. The cops explained that they were about to make a withdrawal. An hour later, a field operative assigned to Internal Affairs met them in front of the Brooklyn Museum, handing Henry a loaded tape recorder. He squeezed the bulky recorder into his pocket and drove back into his sector. A short time later, Villarini and Gallagher pulled up while Henry and Tony were handling a job.

“So what do you want to do?” said Henry, beginning the first tape of Internal Affairs Investigation No. TF53s84.

“Make a withdrawal,” Gallagher said.

Villarini, who would later be suspended from the force for refusing to take a drug test, and was indicted for conspiracy, grand larceny, and official misconduct once he left the job, explained that he wanted to hit two drug locations, one at 277 Eastern Parkway and another at 409 Lincoln Place. The four cops crashed into several apartments without finding any drugs. The Lincoln Place address was an apartment house with no less than twenty apartments.

“What apartment you wanna hit?” Henry asked.

“I don't know,” Villarini replied.

“What do you mean you don't know? This is your place.”

“Let's hit them all,” Villarini suggested.

The cops groaned. Villarini was not a Buddy Boy. He was an amateur. As they left the building, Villarini grabbed a resident and frisked him, stealing a knife from the startled man's pocket. Henry's tape recorder picked up the cop's frustration.

“Hey,” Villarini said. “If I had to do this for a living, I'd starve to fucking death.”

They were given tape recorders. Tony's was an Olympus microrecorder, serial number 211417. The machine was one half inch thick and approximately four inches long. Henry got a Panasonic microrecorder, serial number 6BBRB09497—a thinner, shorter recorder that fit inside a pack of cigarettes. They also got brief instructions on how to operate the machines.

“This is the ‘on' button, this is the recording button and this is the volume button. You press this button to make it record and this button to make it stop,” an investigator explained. Henry got equally impressive advice on how to conduct an undercover operation. “Just go out and do what you would usually do,” he was told.

The cops were supposed to record all their conversations in the precinct, with Henry's machine as the primary recorder and Tony's operating as the backup system. They would meet investigators on their way home from work, driving to prearranged drops. Tony usually met the plainclothes investigators at an intersection on Ocean Parkway near his home. Henry met his contact at the corner of Foster and Ralph Avenues in East Flatbush.

The cops turned over the ninety-minute tapes they used during their tour and briefed the investigators on the contents of the recordings. The Internal Affairs operatives would then reload the cops' recorders with fresh batteries and new tapes. A brief header—used for voice identification—was then recorded on each tape along with the time and date.

It was soon apparent to investigators that Tony was not cooperating in the probe. Sometimes he went out on patrol and left the recorder in his locker. He often submitted blank tapes, explaining, “Henry got all the conversations.”

“The recorder is too big,” Magno said, his voice filled with paranoia, “I know they can see it bulging from my shirt and pants. It feels like I'm carrying a thousand pounds of bricks.”

“You'll get used to the weight,” the investigators told him.

On another street corner, another set of cops was complaining to Henry.

“Look, you're doing all the taping and your partner isn't doing anything.”

“That's because Tony's recorder is too big,” Henry insisted. “It's too bulky for him.”

“Then switch recorders,” the investigators said.

Henry and Tony switched recorders. Soon both men were turning in tapes full of crisp, clearly incriminating conversations. The investigators were happy. Magno and Winter were miserable.

“The recorder sucked, Tony and I both agreed on that. You could never forget that you had it on you. Not like your gun. Sometimes you forget that you have the gun on. In the beginning I was always shifting the recorder from one pocket to another, trying to find a place that was comfortable. I put it in my shirt pocket. I put it in my pants pocket. I taped it to my crotch. It never felt comfortable. I felt like everybody could see it. Guys would look at me and I'd be sure they were looking at the recorder. But they never saw it. They would have shot me if they found the recorder on me. I would have shot me too. It's an unwritten law with cops. If you catch another cop wearing a wire on you, he's a dead man.

“I went to a Singer sewing machine center and bought a strip of two-inch elastic. Then I sat in my living room one night watching television, and sewed a pocket inside of my bulletproof vest. Right near my heart. I had never sewn anything before in my life. But my life, when you think about it, depended on this. I sewed a secure little pocket. The recorder fit in there nice and snug. I also sewed elastic strips into the sides of my pants. I had a strip on either side. That way I could move the recorder. If I was driving and talking to somebody on my right, I'd put the recorder on my right side. If I was in the passenger seat I'd put the recorder on my left side. I even had a Velcro strap that went over the recorder to make sure it didn't fall out.

“One time it did fall out. I was running up a flight of stairs behind Robert Rathbun and the thing flew out of my sock. It clattered on the stairwell. Rathbun was about five steps ahead of me. I grabbed it and threw it in my pocket. He didn't hear anything. But there were other problems too. When you put the thing on ‘record,' a little red light went on. One night, I was walking past a window and I saw the reflection of a little red glow coming out of my chest. That scared the shit out of me. I had to cover up the light with a piece of black electrical tape.

“This may sound strange—people may consider me a scumbag or something—but after awhile, if I got good conversation on the tape, I actually felt good. I did my job. I believed if you're gonna do something, go all out, do it right. That's the way I am. But after handing in the tape and thinking about what I recorded people saying, I felt like shit. I'd say to myself, ‘Oh fuck. What did I just give these people? What did I just do? I'm sending these guys to jail.”

During the first week of their undercover duty, Henry and Tony put out the word in the precinct that they were willing to fence whatever the other cops could steal. They were interested in everything from stereos and videotape equipment to guns and televisions.

Steadily, they picked up more and more conversation from corrupt cops. The transcripts of their ninety-minute tapes were a catalogue of precinct gossip. William Gallagher insisted another cop on his tour was stealing cars while on duty. Gallagher explained that the cop would park his tow truck in the precinct and then tow cars back to Long Island, breaking down the car overnight and reselling the parts. Brian O'Regan boasted of robbing a grocery store of $8,000 in cash and $3,400 in food stamps. The cops arrived at the store to answer a burglary call and then robbed the store's safe, O'Regan explained. A precinct detective implicated a black patrolman in the contract killing of a man and woman in a parked car in an adjoining precinct. The cop was said to have been paid $1,500 by his relative, a neighborhood drug dealer who ran a bodega on Saratoga Avenue.

Investigators found the early conversations interesting but unappetizing. They needed real evidence of criminal activity, not hearsay gossip, if they were going to bring the 77th Precinct's rogue cops to court.

Roy, the Jamaican cocaine dealer from Lincoln Place, called Henry into his store on June 5, explaining that he felt something was “wrong in the neighborhood.” A few days earlier he had spotted two men with a camera parked in an unmarked car across the street from the store. The men were taking photographs of Roy and his customers. He figured they were cops. His street instincts told him he had been targeted for prosecution in some larger investigation. Henry listened, his tape recorder rolling.

“I know there's somebody out there watching me,” said Roy, a strong believer in voodoo. “I'm in for trouble. Someone is going to give me trouble. And it's someone close. I just can't put my finger on it.”

Roy then used his fingers to count out a cash payment to Henry, bribing the officer to utilize a police department computer to check the license plate number of his mysterious camera-toting guests. The payoff was the first of three that Roy would make to Henry over the next four months—recorded bribes that eventually led to Roy's indictment on three separate counts of bribery in the second degree. On the day of Roy's arraignment, his lawyer told a judge, “My client doesn't remember too much. He has a bullet in his head.”

A few days later Henry and Tony realized that the investigators were using even background conversation from the tapes to gain indictments. Henry was standing outside the station house on June 9, discussing “hits” with William Gallagher, when Zeke Zayas spotted his partner, David Williams, throwing two garbage cans into the back of his car. “What the hell are you doing?” Zayas said, laughing. “Can you believe this guy? He's stealing our garbage cans.” Gallagher and Winter laughed.

“I didn't even know the conversation was on the tape,” Henry said later to an investigator. “You mean you can be arrested for shit like that?”

Williams was later suspended, indicted, and arrested on a charge of petty larceny—to wit, the theft of two garbage cans. Zayas, having failed to report the theft of the cans to his superiors, was later suspended, indicted, and arrested on a charge of official misconduct.

On June 17, the investigators came up with their first hard evidence. The evening started when William Gallagher put out “Buddy Boy, Buddy Bob,” over the radio. Henry answered with a “Hey, two-three-four” and then drove to St. Johns Recreation Center across from Engine Company 234. Henry, Tony, Gallagher, and O'Regan then discussed ways to hit a building they suspected of being a crack house at 143 Albany Avenue. Earlier on that rainy evening Gallagher and O'Regan chased a man whom they suspected of being a drug dealer into a building and kicked down a door, searching the apartment for drugs. They came up empty on the first burglary, and were in the mood to make a major score.

Driving with their lights out, a steady drizzle masking their approach, the two patrol cars descended on the block. Henry and Tony gave their Buddy Boys a four- or five-second head start, then tiptoed past a sleeping sentry who had nodded out in the vestibule of 143 Albany Avenue. Gallagher and O'Regan entered an adjoining building that was abandoned and boarded up. Each pair continued to second-floor apartments. The door to the apartment in Henry's building was locked. Tony knocked and then heard the sound of a metallic click.

“There's a gun in there,” Tony whispered. “I heard a gun.”

“All right, but we gotta go in.”

After throwing the gun across a narrow air shaft into the second-floor apartment in the abandoned building, the man opened the door. Henry and Tony searched the apartment but found nothing. Across the air shaft, O'Regan found a .357 magnum lying on a pile of trash in the second-floor apartment of the abandoned building. Henry and Brian stared at each other across the shaftway and shrugged. Then O'Regan shined his flashlight out the window and down into the open air shaft, spotting a dry bag on top of a pile of soaked garbage.

“Look,” he said. “That's got to be it.”

Tony lowered Henry into the shaft, first dropping a bed-spring out the window to break his partner's fall. Henry retrieved the bag, which was filled with three hundred vials of crack. Moments later Gallagher discovered a potato chip bag stuffed in the window sill of the abandoned apartment. The second bag contained another one hundred vials of crack.

“Ah, we got more stuff here,” Gallagher said.

The cops came away from the apartment with four thousand dollars worth of cocaine, and let the man go free, saying, “You're lucky we didn't find this in your apartment.” They drove directly back to the park.

“Give me the gun,” Henry said. “I can get rid of the gun.”

Gallagher handed it over.

“I can get rid of the drugs too,” Henry said, looking for evidence to go with his tape of the robbery.

“No,” Gallagher said. “We'll get rid of the drugs through Roy.”

On their way home that morning, Henry swung by Foster and Ralph to meet the investigators. He handed over the stolen gun, telling the operatives that he would need two hundred dollars to pay Gallagher and O'Regan for it. Then Henry told the cops about their four thousand dollar score, explaining that Gallagher had taken the drugs to Roy, who would buy them at half price.

“That stuff is going back on the street?” an investigator said. “You guys are supposed to get the drugs back. The drugs are evidence.”

“Sorry, but you never told us that part of the deal.”

After a short meeting, it was decided that Henry and Tony would go into the business of fencing the stolen drugs. The Police Department would simply outbid Roy, offering seventy-five cents on the dollar to Roy's fifty cents. Henry was told to make up a story about an imaginary dealer, as was Tony. Henry invented a black dealer named Bobby, and Tony thought up a Hispanic named José. The mythical dealers put Roy out of business.