Buddy Boys (3 page)

A former city fire commissioner who had made his name as an investigator during a statewide nursing home scandal, Hynes had carefully orchestrated this entire production. He seemed to be reading Henry Winter's mind.

“Now look up,” Hynes said in his most dispassionate voice. “On the television screen.”

An investigator reached past Henry to push a VHS tape into the recorder. Henry's image, wearing his blue uniform, appeared on the screen alongside Benny, who was holding up a brown paper bag full of money. Benny handed the bag to Henry.

“Thanks,” Henry heard himself say.

The investigators produced two other tapes of Henry and Benny. Each contained the same critical scene, the one where the cop accepts the payoff from a man he knows to be a drug dealer. Henry watched, but he did not see. He knew they had him. But every once in a while someone would ask him, “Had enough, Henry? See enough yet?”

Finally Henry took off his headphones.

“I saw enough.”

“Don't say anything,” an investigator said. “We don't want to know anything. Just think of your family.”

He was led to a room and left alone again. He asked to make a phone call.

“I got to call my wife. She's going to be looking for me.”

“No phone calls,” he was told again. “You can't call anyone.”

By now it was close to five o'clock. Henry's wife was getting ready to contact the Coast Guard. His brother-in-law was already out looking for him. The people Henry loved were concerned about him. But he was beginning to worry about someone else.

“Where's my partner?” he thought. “How could they grab me and not Tony?”

While he waited, a lieutenant from the Internal Affairs Division suddenly entered the room.

“We have a problem,” the cop began. “We've been sitting outside your partner's house since seven o'clock this morning.”

“So?”

“Well, we got to get him out of the house. He's been in there all day and only came out once to walk the dog. It's up to you to get him out.”

“Up to me?”

“Yeah.”

He was told that he had to come up with a plan to get Tony out of his house. “We don't want anybody to know we're grabbing him, we don't even want his wife and kids to know we're taking him.”

“Let me go get him. You drive me out there, park, let me out at the corner, I'll call and tell him my truck broke down. He'll come out. But promise me first that you'll give me a second to talk to him before you grab him.”

The investigators, lawyers, and prosecutors all agreed to go along with Winter's plan for taking his partner into custody. They piled into four cars and headed back through the Battery Tunnel into Brooklyn. The Borough of Churches. And confessions.

Tony Magno was cursing, again. Standing on the toilet bowl, he was trying to hang silver and white foil wallpaper on his bathroom wall. The paper slipped and crinkled under his hands.

“Goddamn it,” Tony yelled. “Hanging this shit is like trying to nail fucking Jell-O to a wall.”

A seventeen-year veteran of the force who had spent his entire career in the 77th Precinct, Magno rarely left the sanctuary of his home on his days off. During the work week it was different. Tony drank beer with his buddies in the backs of grocery stores—called bodegas in the ghetto whether they were owned by Hispanics or not—and held court in the precinct locker room. He was liked by younger cops and veterans and was considered to be a leader who knew the ins and outs of the job.

Some cops even idolized Tony Magno. He knew when to slap on the handcuffs and when to let someone go. He could handle a domestic dispute one minute, calming down an irate husband who started a fight with his wife after finding hot dogs on the dinner table instead of meat loaf, and the next minute grab a loaded gun out of a robber's hand. He was considered to be a cop's cop—had assisted on thousands of arrests, grabbed bad guys, and delivered babies. Just a cop. Just another Constable on Patrol in the city of New York.

But Magno also had a bad temper. And his tendency toward violence had led other cops to nickname him Tony the Jack years earlier. He always liked to say that when he swung his nightstick it was a pure act, a movement untainted by either prejudice or favoritism. Other cops took this statement to mean that Tony the Jack would strike any prisoner anywhere, anytime the spirit moved him.

A stately six-foot-two, 190-pound Italian, Tony had dark brown hair that he combed straight back. He was the picture of good grooming, given to wearing starched shirts and creased slacks. A neat black mustache accentuated an even neater set of teeth. And whenever Tony Magno smiled, the whole 77th Precinct seemed to light up.

But he wasn't smiling now, and he wasn't dressed very well. He had gobs of plaster in his hair and wet streaks of wallpaper paste on his old black chinos and white T-shirt. He had spent his entire day in the bathroom, a cold can of Budweiser at the ready, wondering why he had ever agreed to spend the first day of his three-day swing hanging foil wallpaper.

Keeping a careful distance from her frustrated husband, Marianne Magno had just put dinner on the stove when the telephone rang shortly after 5
P.M
. Henry Winter was calling. And Henry Winter rarely called Tony Magno at home.

Marianne was no fan of her husband's partner. She had heard a lot of rumors about him. Frankly, she didn't trust him, and she didn't trust her husband when he was with Henry. So now, Marianne rolled her eyes and handed her husband the telephone.

“It's him,” she said. “Your partner.”

“Tony, I got to talk to you,” Henry began.

The cop's voice was low and filled with concern.

“Are we in trouble?” Tony asked immediately.

“Yeah, in a way. I got to meet you.”

“Jesus, I'm in the middle of hanging wallpaper in the bathroom.”

“I got to meet you.”

“Is it that important, Henry?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, when do you want to meet?”

“Right now,” Henry said.

“Well, where are you?”

“Right here. Right in the pizzeria on your corner.”

“Ooooh shit,” Tony said.

“Yeah, it's important. I got to talk to you.”

“Okay, I'll be right down.”

Tony hung up the phone and turned to face his wife.

“What's the matter?” Marianne asked, her voice already boiling with suspicion.

“I have to meet Henry. He's right on the corner. I'll only be a few minutes. He's just got to tell me something. I'll be right back for dinner.”

“All right,” she said. “But don't forget I'm cooking.”

Magno walked out his front door wearing dirty chinos, a blue rag hanging out of his back pocket. He hadn't bothered to take his wallet or a pack of Pall Mall cigarettes off his bedroom bureau.

Tony walked a block over to the corner of McDonald and Avenue N where he spotted Henry sitting inside Vinnie's Pizzeria, gobbling down a slice of cheese pizza and finishing off a Coke.

“What is it, Henry?”

“They got us.”

“What do you mean they got us?” Tony asked, gesturing wildly with his hands.

“Internal Affairs got me. I'm under arrest, Tony.”

“Ho-ly shit.”

Tony paused for a second, afraid even to mouth the words of his next question.

“What about me?”

“I guess you too.”

“Oh, God.”

Tony's hands shook. He scanned the room, wide-eyed, searching the booths and counter seats for undercover cops.

“Tony. Now don't do nothing. Don't say nothing. Don't try to run. Don't do anything. But they're all around us.”

“Where?”

“Right outside, Tony. Calm down.”

“Okay Henry. All right. All right.”

As the partners walked out of the store, a half-dozen police officers in plain clothes descended upon them, leading them off to separate unmarked cars.

“Have you got your gun, Tony?” Lieutenant Panico asked.

“I got nothing. I don't even have a penny in my pocket.”

Tony was placed in a car along with two lieutenants and a police officer from Internal Affairs.

“We want you to come with us,” Panico said. “We want you to see something. The special prosecutor wants to talk to you.”

“Just let me call my wife and I'll go anywhere you guys want me to go.”

“No. No phone calls.”

Magno pleaded with the investigators to let him call his wife. He asked to go home and change his clothes, to be able to tell his wife where he was going.

“Am I under arrest?”

“Technically,” Panico said.

“You can't do this. This is illegal.”

“Believe me,” Lieutenant Panico replied evenly. “We can do it. The guy sitting next to you, Lieutenant Frohme, is a lawyer. You can't ask for a lawyer. You can't ask for union representation. Think of your wife and kids on this.”

Tony was frightened and confused. In all of his days of arresting people he had never heard of anyone being “technically” under arrest. Either you were under arrest, or you weren't. Finally, as they sat in the parked car debating the law, Tony spotted his thirteen-year-old son, Anthony, Jr., rounding the corner. The boy was searching the neighborhood for his dad, who was already twenty minutes late for supper. Tony watched his son shrug his shoulders after checking the avenue stores and then head back home. He wanted desperately to be out there with his son again. His eyes filled with tears.

“That's my son. He's looking for me. Please, let me go home.”

“You can't,” Panico said. “You got to trust me. You gotta do it this way. They just want to talk to you. See what they have to say.”

“Okay, let's go,” Tony decided, finally.

During the ride to the special prosecutor's office in Manhattan, Tony began to relax. The cops explained that he was not being arrested just yet and that he might even be able to call his wife soon. One of them mentioned that they had been sitting on Magno's house all day, waiting for him to come out.

“The least you guys could have done was come up and help me finish hanging the wallpaper,” Tony Magno replied.

He was led into the building and then up to the twenty-third floor, past a smaller room where Henry Winter sat. Tony walked into the big conference room where the men in ties sat around the large table and television. The headphones and transcripts came out again.

“All we want you to do is listen and read,” an investigator said. “Listen, read, and watch.”

Tony also recognized Benny's voice right away. Henry had told him they were in trouble, and Benny's voice confirmed it. He heard himself accept a payoff from Benny. On the screen, he saw his lips moving.

“Gee, Benny. We missed you for Easter.”

On another tape, Magno watched Henry take a bag of money from Benny.

“Yeah, if anybody gives you any trouble, just let us know,” Henry said. “We'll take care of it.”

A third tape focused on an incriminating conversation between Tony and Benny at the door of the squad car.

“Any of the guys giving you a hard time, Benny?” Tony heard himself say.

He only noticed two things about the incriminating evidence: The television picture was clear and the voice on the tapes was unmistakably his own.

“Oh yeah,” Tony thought to himself. “I remember these scenes like yesterday.”

As the last tape concluded, Hynes suddenly stood up, introducing himself as a special prosecutor for the state of New York and a deputy attorney general. Still playing the bad cop role to his assistant's good cop act, Hynes stated, “You saw yourself. That's you on that tape there. We know what's going on in the Seventy-seventh Precinct. We've been after that precinct for a long time. And now we have you. We want your cooperation. If you have anything for us that we could use in this investigation, it could benefit you.”

Hynes paused a moment, like an auctioneer preparing to drop the hammer.

“If you don't cooperate with us, I will personally prosecute you to the full letter of the law. I'll make the terms run consecutively. You'll be doing nine years.”

Tony's hands and knees shook. An investigator handed him a filtered cigarette. Tony snapped off the filter and lit the remainder of the sawed-off cigarette, puffing madly as he smoked.

“Can I talk to my partner?”

“Yeah, you can talk to your partner,” a lawyer said. “We want you both to make the same decision. And whichever way you go, that's the way things will go.”

The investigators led Tony to an adjoining room where he was joined by his partner. Hynes had already told Henry that he might not have to go to jail if he agreed to cooperate.

“We're going to leave you two alone to talk things over,” an investigator said.

The two men sat across a table from each other, smoking cigarettes, trying to make a decision that would determine their own fate and ultimately the fates of nearly twenty-five other New York City cops.

“Henry, what are we going to do?”

“I don't know. It's up to you. You're senior man.”

“Look Henry, I don't want to go to jail.”

“Well I don't want to go to jail either.”

“Do we cooperate with them, Henry?”

“I don't know. Do we?”

And that's the way it went—Tony asking questions and Henry repeating them.

“I want to go home tonight, Henry. Do you want to go home tonight?”

“Yeah, I want to go home too.”

“Then I guess we have no choice, Henry. I guess we'll cooperate.”

“Whatever you want to do. You want to cooperate, Tony, we'll cooperate.”

“We got to do this together all the way, Henry. Not that bullshit where they stick you in one room and me in another room and pretty soon we're going at each other.”

“No,” Henry agreed. “We got to stay together through the whole thing.”