Buddy Boys (27 page)

The investigation was over. Henry could sense it. This would be his last tape recording in the 77th Precinct.

“You don't have to worry about Hank,” Henry said. “I mean anybody that wants to toss me for a wire, can toss me. They can do anything they want. I don't wear a wire.”

“Maybe they turned somebody on the street to get you. That's the fucking thing I wanted to talk to you about. Could some street dog have set you up, Hank? Cause that's the word. They got you and Tony on videotape. They caught you red-handed. And because of that, now you're turning around. Now is that true?”

“No. That's not true.”

“Well check it out, Hank. The word is that you're a rat. I wouldn't expect that of you, Hank. I wouldn't expect you to dog me like that.”

“No,” Henry insisted, hesitating to catch his breath. “I mean if I was a rat, do you think this precinct would still be here?”

Henry paused again, pretending to be hurt.

“Why Blondie? Why me?”

“I heard this in June and I still talked to you about other shit. I had a certain level of trust. I hope that my trust isn't betrayed.”

“It's there, don't worry about it.”

“I wouldn't give anybody up,” Crystal said, her voice bubbling with indignation. “I wouldn't do it. I go to hell with what the fuck I know about people. I don't play that shit at all. And Titus told me, ‘The word is, Crystal, that you're really cool. That you wouldn't give anybody up.' Titus doesn't want to get jammed up. He said, ‘That's why I'm here now. This is fucking real and it's going to be happening soon.'”

The two cops sat silent for a moment. Crystal had Henry dead to rights, he knew that. He wondered how far she would push him on the issue. But suddenly Spivey changed the subject.

“Well, this investigation is just for precinct stuff,” Crystal said, shocking Henry with her boldness. “Moe isn't from the precinct, right? So as far as our business outside the precinct, we can probably continue. I mean, whatever shit you have to do, I hope this doesn't have nothing to do with our thing. I'm hoping you aren't setting me up for no bullshit.”

“No,” Henry assured her. “This has nothing to do with Moe. What I do with Moe has nothing to do with the precinct. We don't even come into this precinct. That's all off-duty stuff.”

Crystal yawned.

“You have to be an adult,” she advised Henry. “I can separate what's going on here between the precinct and what we're doing off duty. If you feel the water is too fucking hot, then we'll chill. We can still do our thing. I have no fear about that. But you can handle your program a little slicker than that, Hank.”

“All right,” Henry decided. “Let me let you go.” I thank you very much for the information.”

“So call me in the morning, please. Let's set something up with Moe.”

“You got it.”

“I need some fucking money, Hank. I've got some goals, babe.”

“What are your goals, Crystal?”

“I want to buy a co-op,” said the police sergeant's daughter. “I need five grand in a few months, that's what's happening.”

“Why don't you talk to Moe?”

“The motherfucker didn't talk to me yet. The vibes I got from him was that he was real cool. Is the guy that ridiculous or what? He can't be this fucking devious. God wouldn't let me be involved with this motherfucker if he was that fucking devious.”

“Moe is good people,” Henry concluded, starting up the truck.

“Where you going?”

“Oh, Jesus,” Henry said, his hands shaking on the steering wheel. “I forgot I was still working. I was going home.”

The last noise investigators would hear from Henry Winter's Olympus tape recorder would be the sound of two cops laughing.

Henry went into the precinct and called the ‘hello' number, his index finger fumbling over the buttons as he dialed. Detective James O'Brien answered the phone call in Internal Affairs headquarters.

“Crystal knows everything,” Henry said, the words gushing out. “She knows I'm on film. She knows we were caught. She knows I'm wired.”

“Calm down. Calm down. Relax. It will be all right. Is she still working?”

“No, she went home,” Henry said.

“All right. That's good she went home. How are you?”

“I'm all right. But she knows everything. I mean what the fuck is going on here? Somebody leaked it. Somebody leaked it out.”

The detective told Henry to finish out his tour, and that he would meet him later in the morning to retrieve the tape. Henry got off the phone and stared at the clock. When he looked up a moment or two later, he saw Roy Thomas standing in the middle of the station house.

“Roy is not the type of guy who comes walking into a police precinct unless he's in handcuffs. Cops go to Roy—Roy doesn't go to cops. He came right over and said that he heard something on the street, that the next two cops to hit Twelve twenty-six Lincoln Place were going to be killed. The address was a known drug location. They sold drugs out of the basement of the building. All of us had hit the place a lot. Gallagher and O'Regan had just hit it. I knew this was a legit threat. For Roy to risk everything and let people see him come into the precinct, people in the street, other drug dealers—well, I knew this was serious. The Jamaicans on the street decided that we'd gone too far. We're going to have some dead cops out there.

“So I went upstairs to the detectives. I told them Roy was downstairs and that he had information that some cops were going to be hit. They just looked at me and they couldn't believe that Roy came in. All I told them was that Roy was downstairs and that he had information. I went over and said, ‘Roy, talk to these guys. Tell them everything you got.' He didn't tell them shit. He started in with his act, ‘I got a bullet in my head, I don't remember too good.'

“I went back upstairs and hung out until the end of my tour—two in the morning. My head was spinning. I got Crystal telling me she knows everything, but still wants to run coke. I got Roy telling me two cops are going to be killed. Is it me and Tony that are going to be killed? Crystal knows. Titus knows. All the black guys know. Roy's black. What's going on? Am I dead today or what?”

Henry met Detective O'Brien later that night across the street from Prospect Park, in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.

“They know the whole story,” Henry began. “It's over.”

“How do you know?”

“Here,” he said, pushing his tape recorder toward the detective. “Listen to the tape.”

Henry and the detective sat huddled over the recorder, dissecting Spivey's words. The investigators had never played any of Henry's tapes in front of him before.

“Holy shit,” O'Brien decided. “We'll let you know what's going on tomorrow.”

Henry slept fitfully. He heard tape recorded conversations in his sleep again. In the morning, he drove back to the station to start an early tour. At about ten o'clock his belt beeper sounded and he called the ‘hello' number. An investigator told Henry to call Crystal Spivey and tell her they were going on another drug run. Immediately.

“We're going to take her,” the investigators said. “Drive to the corner of Utica and Winthrop. There's a diner there. Get out of the car and we'll take her.”

Henry woke Spivey out of bed and told her that he had set up another run with Moe. Then he picked her up at her home in Crown Heights and they continued on to the diner.

“You want something to eat?” Henry asked.

“Yeah, get me a hamburger.”

Henry went into the diner and watched as a gang of undercover cops descended on his truck and Spivey. After they drove her away, he returned to his car and drove back to Internal Affairs headquarters on Poplar Street in Brooklyn Heights. He never again set foot in the 77th Precinct.

“Anybody want a hamburger?” Henry asked.

Crystal Spivey was rushed back to the special prosecutor's office and confronted with the videotape of her taking five hundred dollars from an undercover cop named Moe. Shaken by what she saw, Crystal initially agreed to cooperate in the investigation. She left the office with a microrecorder of her own.

Later in the day, an Internal Affairs investigator returned Henry's portable police radio to the 77th Precinct. Using bolt cutters to crack open his locker, he emptied Henry's belongings into a paper bag, leaving behind only a single brass collar pin with the number 77. On the way out, the investigator stopped by the front desk to make a notation in the precinct log book next to the names Henry Winter and Tony Magno.

“Transferred to IAD,” the cop wrote.

Even as one investigator was returning Winter's portable radio to the station house—rather like throwing a lighted stick of dynamite into a crowded room—another investigator called Tony at home, telling him to report for work at IAD headquarters on Friday. Tony, ever the cop's cop, didn't want to believe he could never return to the station house he loved so much.

“I don't wanna come to IAD,” he said, sobbing into the phone. “I don't wanna work there. I wanna stay on patrol with the guys. Just take the recorder away.”

“No, that's it. Come on in.”

Tony hung up. For the first time in the investigation, he felt like an informer.

“I was trying to keep reality away,” he remembered about the phone call. “I knew it was going to come someday, but I always figured I would have another month, another year with the guys. And then the guys were gone.”

Brian O'Regan drove to Winter's white frame home in Valley Stream on Saturday, September 20. He didn't see Henry's car in the driveway so he continued on to a flea market, studying a set of eyelet-edged sheets for extra holes. He called his girlfriend Cathy and asked if ten dollars was a fair price for the sheets. She told Brian it was a good deal. He hurried back to the sale but the sheets had already been sold.

“I never had any kind of luck in life,” he said later.

O'Regan swung by Henry's house again and spotted Betsy Winter, a woman he recognized from photographs hanging in Henry's locker, entering the house.

“She looked like she had been through a war,” he remembered. “I said, ‘I'm Brian.' She said, ‘He's not here and I gotta go.'” As Brian started to leave, Henry pulled up in the truck with his father-in-law. Both men were getting ready to go to a wedding reception. “I said ‘Hank, how are you doing?' He said, ‘Hey, buddy boy.' He has a big smile on his face and he says, ‘I'll see you later.' He said he'd call me but I knew he didn't have the number.”

Later that night, Brian drove to Gallagher's house near Marine Park. He walked into the house and found Gallagher sitting in his living room, sobbing. He had never seen his partner cry before.

“He was always concrete,” Brian recalled. “Now he looked almost broken.”

“I told my wife everything,” Gallagher said.

“Everything?”

“Yeah. We could be in big trouble.”

On Monday morning, Crystal Spivey walked into the Office of the Special State Prosecutor with a lawyer, who explained that his client would cooperate in retracing the leaks in exchange for probation. Hynes insisted that Spivey serve some jail time. The cop and her lawyer left, Spivey still carrying her tape recorder.

The following day, Hynes and John Guido went to lunch, taking an investigation folder along with them. The men agreed that they could not risk the chance that Spivey would tell all the other officers about the investigation. They returned to the office and sat around the oblong desk in the big room where Henry and Tony had first identified their fellow cops as thieves, robbers, and drug users. The investigators had nicknamed the office on the twenty-third floor the “War Room.” There were dozens of photographs tacked to a bulletin board—mug shots of cops. Henry was there on that Tuesday morning. He watched while Guido pulled thirteen names from his investigation folder.

After thirty years, Guido was retiring from his position as Chief of Inspectional Services on October 15. This was the last major case for a cop who liked to say he came to Internal Affairs in 1972, A.S.: After Serpico.

“Take them,” Chief Guido said. “Take them.”

Henry was asked to leave the room. Moments later, cops and lawyers buzzed around Hynes's office, running to phones and making copies of documents.

“It's going down now,” Captain Joseph DeMartini told Henry.

“What's going down?” he said, his hands shaking as he chain-smoked another cigarette. “Talk to me.”

“Come on. Let's go back to IAD.”

As the cops headed out of Manhattan, they heard the first news flash on the radio. Thirteen cops from the 77th Precinct were suspended for conduct unbecoming an officer. Hynes hadn't even had time to present the cases to a grand jury. The names of the suspended cops followed the initial headline. DeMartini and Winter stared at each other in disbelief.

“How the fuck did the names get released so fast?” Henry wondered.

Captain DeMartini asked the car's driver to pull the car over to a pay phone at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Call your wife and tell her to get out of the house,” he said.

“What?” Henry's voice shook.

“Just to be safe.”

The cops surrounded Henry while he stood at the corner pay phone. He called his wife and told her to wait for him at her mother's house. But Betsy Winter did not leave her home. She greeted Henry with a snarl when he came in an hour later.

“I'm not running,” she said. “Nobody is making me run from my own home. We're not going to get hurt because they'll get hurt first.”

Shortly before sundown Henry took his two little girls, Meghan, six, and Elizabeth, ten, for a walk around the block. He explained to them that he would probably be in the newspapers soon.