Buddy Boys (29 page)

He continued talking, rubbing the stubble of his beard. He was asked a bigger question: Why had police officers felt compelled to break the very laws they were sworn to uphold and obey?

“My partner keeps saying, ‘We never hurt nobody.' And that's true. No one would have cared. If drugs are stolen in the ghetto does anybody really care? I don't even think the drug dealers cared. It was all done as a way of getting back at the people you couldn't hurt. We never hurt Joe Good Guy. For me, I did it for the glory. It wasn't money. It was like you were finally getting back at the slaps in the face you took.”

Brian was now on his third cup of coffee. It was approaching midnight. He was beyond the point in life where a man worries about sleep. Or can sleep.

“Sometimes I used to get a feeling—a deep, deep feeling of guilt. But then it would go away. I'd get back on patrol and it would go away. I never stole before I got there. And we never stole when we weren't working there in uniform. I just didn't care. I'm dead and I don't even know it.”

The corruption was widespread, Brian insisted. The truth about police officers in New York City would raise the collective hair on the back of the public's neck. Cops weren't just stealing in the Seven-Seven. They were robbing people in each of the city's seventy-five precinct houses.

“We are no different than the politicians.”

It seemed to Brian that everyone in public office was a thief. Koch, the city's mayor—a man who will go down in the history of New York City politics as Mayor Nero—had brought a bunker mentality to City Hall by November, 1986. He had even stopped writing books. Koch sat back and watched a wave of white paper—federal and state indictments—roll over his city. Queens Borough President Donald Manes had committed suicide rather than appear in court on corruption charges. Stanley Friedman, the Bronx Democratic chairman, would be led away in handcuffs. A Brooklyn Democratic leader, a senior Bronx congressman, and the Bronx borough president would all see their names typed on indictments. In this environment of graft, greed, and mayoral disinterest, Brian O'Regan said he saw no reason not to steal.

“Every cop is going to be petrified for two years after this. But then it's going to happen again. This won't stop kids from stealing. Did the Knapp Commission change us? How can you change human nature?”

O'Regan switched the conversation to broken dreams. His coffee cup was empty. He motioned for the waiter.

“All I wanted was a house, a wife, and a child. What was it Crystal Spivey said? That she did this because she wanted a co-op? That's all I wanted. I have a girlfriend. It's all over for her. She's twenty-five. I'm forty-one and going to jail.”

O'Regan's eyes were misty. He looked out the window and spotted a passing patrol car from the 100th Precinct.

“That bothers me—seeing a police car. I want to be in that car. I would go to jail for a hundred years if I could go back in a patrol car when I got out.”

By now it was two o'clock in the morning. Brian stood up, saying he had to get going, that he wanted to see his girlfriend before his arrest. The reporter, who had brought a friend to the meeting, could see that he was still restless. The reporter and his friend offered to stay with him until his arraignment.

“No. I got to see my girl.”

O'Regan dug his hands into his pocket and came up with a roll of tokens. He offered the reporter two tokens to get back over the bridge from Rockaway into Brooklyn. The reporter told Brian he would be better off keeping the tokens, that he would need them to get to court in the morning.

“I have plenty. I'll have no problem getting there.”

The cop and the reporter walked outside, standing in the rain next to Brian's car, a gray 1984 Subaru. Brian wiped his forehead with his sleeve and smiled. It was the smile of a man with a terrible secret.

He walked to the back of his car and opened the trunk, pointing inside to a green plastic bag.

“I got my whole uniform in here. You want any of it?”

“No,” the reporter replied. “You keep it. Who knows? You may still need it.”

O'Regan shrugged and slammed the trunk closed. Then he walked to the front of the car, opened the driver's door and leaned across the seat to pick up a small package wrapped in aluminum foil. “Then take this,” offering the package over the hood of the car. “It's a piece of my girlfriend's birthday cake. She just turned twenty-five.”

The reporter took the cake. Brian came around and offered his hand. It was a small hand, not the kind of hand you imagine a cop having. The reporter shook it. He was looking forward to writing Brian O'Regan's story. He said it was a story he wanted told.

“Thanks for coming out. It meant a lot to me just to be able to get out of the house and talk about this stuff.”

Brian got into his car. The reporter waved and then jogged across the parking lot through the rain to his own car. It was a miserable night, the reporter decided. He closed his eyes as the car warmed up and thought about his conversation with the cop. The reporter had asked a lot of questions, and some of Brian's answers had been frightening. But only one of his statements would haunt the reporter over the next few days and months.

“You tell me why I did this,” Brian had said.

Brian drove directly back to his Rockaway apartment and walked into the bathroom. He became sick, vomiting in the toilet. He washed his face and then went over to the phone, calling his girlfriend in Park Slope.

“I got sick after talking to the reporter. It must have been all that coffee. Bad coffee.”

Brian did not go to see Cathy. Instead, he drove out to his mother's house in Valley Stream. There was so little time, he had decided by now, and so much work to be done.

He slipped into the house quietly, went to his bedroom, and began packing. He filled a cardboard box with a three-page will he had had notarized even before he met the reporter, a pair of spit polished police shoes, an identification card from the Broward County Sheriff's Department, his bank book, several greeting cards from his family, including a ten-year-old card from his grandmother that still had a $10 bill stuffed inside, and photographs of his family at Christmas. Brian neatly sealed the box with tape and wrote the numerals “7” and “7” in Magic Marker on the side.

He had placed a typewritten note in the box.

“I am sorry for the past happening. I love you all. Don't fight. Be happy.”

At 4:30
A.M
. Brian's mother awoke. She had heard movement in the house. She walked into her son's room wearing a flannel nightgown and asked if he wanted to talk.

“I don't have time,” Brian said gently. “I can't. I have to appear.”

Brian continued past his mother down to the basement, retrieving his dead father's electric razor from a box. He stood before a mirror, shaving the stubble from his sallow face. Hours earlier, before going to meet the reporter, he had said on the phone, “I look bad. I don't want you to think I'm a skell.”

After shaving, Brian walked out of his red brick home into the darkness. Dorothy O'Regan followed as far as the back doorstep, and called out to him as he climbed into his car, “Brian, you're very upset. Drive carefully.”

Brian had purposely left the cardboard box behind, laying it at the foot of his bed.

The cop drove down his tree-lined street and through the sleepy hollow of Valley Stream. He continued on until he reached the ramps leading to the Southern State Parkway. A left turn would have put the Subaru in the westbound lanes of traffic, taking him to Brooklyn. Brian pulled the steering wheel to the right and headed east, looking for a motel room.

He drove directly to Lindenhurst, checking into the Pine Motor Lodge on Route 109, approximately thirty-two miles away from Brooklyn where the other twelve indicted cops were getting ready to surrender. Brian had never stayed at the motel before. It was the kind of establishment where guests are treated like customers, and the clerks ask questions like, “Short stay or overnight?” Brian stood next to a Donkey Kong machine as he filled out a registration card with the name Daniel Durke. At 6:20
A.M
. Brian paid thirty-five dollars and was given the key to Room 1. He entered the room and pulled a laminated Honor Legion plaque from a shopping bag, propping it up on a fluorescent light fixture over the bed. He switched on the television and sat down at the desk, beginning to write on a pad of Broward County Sheriff's Department stationery.

“Good morning. I missed my appointment.”

The reporter slept late. He arrived for work in midtown Manhattan at 10
A.M.,
carrying Brian O'Regan's confession in a notebook. The wire service was already reporting that one of the indicted cops had failed to show up for his arraignment.

“Is this your guy?” an editor asked, pointing to the story. “Brian O'Regan?”

The reporter read the wire copy and felt ill. He returned to his desk and called the police, speaking to a detective in Internal Affairs. The reporter told the detective he had spent four hours with O'Regan in a Queens diner the night before and that the cop seemed scared and depressed.

“Don't worry,” the cop said. “From what we understand this guy isn't suicidal.”

“I think you're wrong. I didn't think so last night, but now I think Brian could kill himself. If he was a mailman or a mechanic it would be different. Those guys just run. But cops in trouble don't run. Cops have consciences. I don't think Brian can cope with being a criminal.”

“Give us the Rockaway address,” the cop decided. “We'll send someone out there right away.”

The reporter called the police several times throughout the day, remembering different things Brian had said. He went to church a lot. Check the churches. He had friends in Florida. Check Florida.

By the end of the day everyone felt a little better. The police hadn't found a body.

Brian did not like his room at the Pine Motor Lodge. People in the lobby could see right into Room 1. There was too much traffic in the motel. Brian knew there would be an all points bulletin put out on his car. He didn't want to be discovered. Not yet, anyway.

Shortly before noon, a Suffolk County police officer cruised through the parking lot, looking for three men who had just robbed a cash machine. Brian waited until he saw the car clear the lot and then packed up his garbage bag. He left the motel, leaving his Honor Legion plaque behind.

“We figured he'd be back,” said John Drake, a desk clerk who discovered the plaque. “A cop would want to keep it. It would be important to a cop.”

By 12:30 Brian was back on the highway, heading further east. He drove until he ran out of highway, winding up in Southampton, on the eastern tip of Long Island. He pulled into a deserted motel parking lot.

“Are you open?” he asked, knocking on the door to the Southampton Motel.

“Yes we are,” said Camille Gosiewski, the motel's sixty-three-year-old owner. “Come right in.”

He registered as Daniel Grant, paying $37.65 in cash for his room. The motel's only guest was given Room 2. Brian asked Gosiewski for directions to a McDonald's and then headed back into town. He returned later, entering the room with his note pads and his uniform in a green plastic garbage can. He also carried a pint of Seagram's Seven Crown and a bottle of 7-Up. Brian liked the symbolism—Seven and Seven was the perfect drink for a cop from the 77th Precinct.

He sat at a desk and began writing again.

“I can't swim in a cesspool, can you?”

The cop spent the rest of the evening writing a one hundred page note, a rambling explanation of his life and times in the 77th Precinct. Brian watched television and saw that he had been indicted for crimes involving some eighty felonies and misdemeanors. He watched news footage of his friends being led to Central Booking in handcuffs. He fell asleep after watching the eleven o'clock news.

Brian woke at 5
A.M
. on Thursday, November 7. It was still raining. He left the motel shortly before six and drove into town, buying two newspapers from coin-operated machines. He returned to his motel room and read the reporter's newspaper, studying the front page account of his own interview. Then he began writing and sipping from the paper cup filled with Seven and Seven again.

“I am guilty, but not as guilty as you understand.”

As he sat at a dresser across from the bed, Brian occasionally looked up, studying his face in the mirror. He wrote that his stomach felt nauseous and that he did not like the face he saw in the mirror anymore.

“I look bad.”

He was still writing at 9:20
A.M
. He had changed into his blue “Alamo” T-shirt and turned on the television. He watched the Phil Donahue show as he wrote of his love for Cathy and of his fear of being caught by members of the Emergency Services Unit.

“Only have about $4. What a choice. Death or jail. Got no place to go. Do you think God wants me? Does it hurt to die?”

Brian's older brother Greg discovered a letter in the family's mailbox at about the same time. He found a handwritten note from his missing brother, postmarked November 6, the day Brian disappeared.

“I've always considered myself to be an honest upstanding citizen,” Brian wrote. “I was firmly convinced that nobody cared in the ghetto from the people that lived there to the police and the city. In short terms, they put us in a cesspool and expected us to swim. I'm sorry it had to happen this way but it did. I wish you only health and happiness in the future. Try your best to take care of mom.”

Greg showed the letter to his younger brother Kevin and his mother.

“It was the type of letter you get from somebody you don't expect to see anymore,” Kevin later explained.

Brian probably stopped writing shortly before 10
A.M
. He placed the garbage bag containing his uniform near the bed and propped up his birth certificate and union identification on a nightstand. He noted that the motel's check out time, 12:30
P.M.,
was nearing. He wrote one last line before putting his pen down.