Buddy Boys Page 15

  “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.

  “How did it go in there?” Tony asked.

  “Good. I just left Oscar the Grouch sitting back there in a garbage can.”

  “Tony and I got medals for handling one dispute back in the summer of 1984. There was this new kid in the precinct, a guy we called Scoop Mahoney. He was walking a foot post one day and called in a ten–eighty-five—officer needs assistance. Scoop was yelling, ‘Man with a knife, man with a machete.’ So Tony and I decided to go see what Scoop wanted. There’s Scoop on the corner with a guy with a big machete, swinging it like crazy. And every time Mahoney went near him, the guy took a swing at him. The guy was acting really flippy. Other people went after him and he’d swing at them too. Tony and I arrive on the scene and there’s all these cops with guns drawn. I said, ‘What’s he calling in an eighty-five on this for? The guy’s got a machete, he’s swinging it at you, just drop him. Shoot him.’ We’re sitting in the car looking and looking, and finally Tony looks at me and I say ‘All right.’

  “So we get out of the car and now the place is loaded with cops. I don’t have a night stick on me. I never liked carrying a stick. I figure if you really have to hit somebody, I mean hit them in the head with all your might, you’re gonna kill them anyway, so why not use a gun? Mahoney comes running over to me and says, ‘What do I do? I can’t get the machete away from him.’ I said, ‘All right. Give me your stick.’ So Tony starts talking to the guy, ‘Hey, put down the knife. I’ll fucking jack you up.’ I tell Mahoney, ‘Just get his attention for a second.’ Mahoney does it and I walk behind the guy and pow. He goes out cold. I get the machete, I give the machete and the stick to Mahoney, then me and Tony get back in the car and pull away.

  “It was Mahoney’s collar. We met him back at the station house and he tells us, ‘Look, I’m putting in for a medal and I’m putting you guys in for one too.’ I says, ‘No. No. You handle it.’ He says, ‘No, I’ll put down that I did everything, but you were there, so I’m putting you in too.’ And that’s the way it went. We got some dipshit medals and Scoop later made detective.”

  On February 17, 1984, Henry and Tony made the city’s daily newspapers for the first time as a team. Henry had narrowly escaped serious injury the night before, when a robbery suspect turned and fired a .357 magnum at him during a chase. The New York Post ran an account of the shootout at the top of page four under the headline, “‘I was lucky,’ says cop who ducked bullet.” The article was illustrated with a large photograph of Henry leading a bloodied suspect away in handcuffs. It was a nice photograph, a graphic picture, the very same photograph that the Post later ran on page one to illustrate an even bigger story about Police Officers Henry Winter and Tony Magno.

  “It was about one thirty in the morning. Tony and I were out on patrol, driving down Park Place when we reached the corner of Bedford Avenue. Two guys waved us over and said, ‘We just got robbed,’ and pointed to five or six guys across the street—like a wolf pack. I said, ‘Anybody got guns?’ and one kid says, ‘Yeah. Two guns.’ We drove up to the pack and they took off. I jumped out of the car—I was driving—and took after two guys. This fucked Tony up because now he had to come all the way around the car from the passenger’s side to get into the driver’s seat. I used to do this to him all the time, it drove him crazy. He used to scream, ‘If you’re driving, you stay with the car. I run when you drive.’ But I always forgot. Sometimes I even forgot to put the car in park. I’d just jump out and start running with the car rolling down the block after me. I’d be chasing the bad guy and Tony would be chasing the car.

  “So Tony is running circles around the car and I’m chasing this guy down the block. He got to the corner first and made a right turn down Park Place. I came around the corner and there he is standing in the combat position behind a car pointing the magnum at me. And the fuck fired the gun. The bullet hit the wall behind me and I dove behind it. I stayed there for a minute and then stuck my head out again in time to see the guy rounding the corner with a silver gun in his hand. I ran past the spot he fired at me from and found the magnum. He had two guns. We chased him to a building and then other cops responded to the scene. They found him hiding in the closet of an abandoned building and brought him up to the roof.

  “I felt like beating the shit out of him. We tried to take care of him but there were too many people around. I smacked him around a few times but then the guys pulled me off. Everybody was uptight. Some parolee had just shot three cops in the South Bronx the night before, killing one of them. They had to call me off. I was going to kill him. I was going to throw him off the roof. He would have been gone.

  “When he heard the shot, Tony broke off his chase and started looking for me. We were both scared. I caught up with him just before they found the guy. He says, ‘You okay, shithead?’ And then I remembered, we had just ordered chicken wings with hot sauce before all this shit broke, so I said, ‘You know we just ordered our food.’ So while all this shit’s going on, Tony runs down to Nostrand Avenue and picks up our chicken wings with hot sauce. As they’re transporting this guy to the station house, we’re just sitting there eating our chicken wings and hot sauce in the car, trying to pretend that someone didn’t just try and kill me.”

  9

  “Buddy Boy, Buddy Bob.”

  In the beginning no one in the 77th Precinct was sure who could be trusted to steal.

  Henry and Tony had worked together for six months before they learned that there were other bluefish cops out there, particularly on the midnight tours, running in schools, robbing almost each and every drug dealer they came in contact with.

  Throughout most of their careers Tony and Henry worked around the clock. They would work a week on the 8 A.M.-to-4 P.M. tour, then spend another week on the 4 P.M.-to-12 A.M. shift, before finishing out the cycle with a tour on the midnight-to-8 A.M. detail. In the beginning, they stole only when the right moment presented itself, in broad daylight and the dark of night. They used their uniforms for camouflage and their badges as passkeys. Their guns provided security.

  But the precinct’s most prolific robbers were found on the midnight tour. Police Officers William Gallagher and Brian O’Regan and another half dozen cops lived for the night, when the darkness hid their misdeeds from prying eyes. By late 1984, with their daylight escapades already well known to the men on the midnight tour, Henry and Tony had been welcomed into the After Midnight gang—a group formerly known as Sergeant Stinson’s Raiders. They were deemed fit company by Gallagher, a swaggering presence who used his ties to the police union to warn the cops of investigations.

  Soon Henry and Gallagher were standing off to the side after roll call, plotting a series of moves that would ultimately land them in reinforced apartments where they were free to terrorize dealers at gunpoint, stealing drugs, money and guns. The cops made up nicknames for each other and talked on the radio in coded messages. Henry became Buddy Boy, Gallagher became Buddy Bee. Brian O’Regan was known as Space Man and the rest of the thieves fell under a single title: The Buddy Boys.

  “‘Buddy Boy’ was a word that we used among ourselves. ‘Buddy Boy’ was me. ‘Buddy Bee’ was Junior Gallagher. ‘Buddy Bob’ was the code word for what we did. It meant, ‘Are we doing anything tonight? You agree to make a little money tonight?’ We used the codes over the radio. If Junior was calling our car, he’d say, ‘Buddy Boy, Buddy Bob.’ That meant, ‘Hey Henry, are we doing anything tonight?’ If I called Junior it would be, ‘Buddy Bee, Buddy Bob.’ Pretty simple stuff. But no one listening to the radio could have figured out what the fuck we were talking about.

  “Now, if we wanted to hit a place, we’d answer with a ‘Hey, two-three-four,’ ‘Two-three-four’ was the code name for a park on Bergen Street between Troy and Schenectady, be
hind the St. Johns Recreation Center across from a fire house, old Engine Company Two-Three-Four. That’s where we got the name. We’d drive into the park and position our cars next to each other between two ball fields and a handball court. If there was anybody hanging out in the park, they’d take off as soon as we drove in. We could see out in all directions, so if the shoofly—some supervisor trying to check up on us—came into the park looking for us, we could see him coming. But nobody ever came. We could talk about whatever we wanted once we got to two-three-four.

  “So we’d drive in there and discuss what we wanted to do. I’d say to Junior, ‘What place you got in mind?’ And he’d answer, ‘Two-sixty-one Buffalo. I came in that way before work and scouted it out. I didn’t see too many lookouts in front of the place.’ And then we’d talk about how we were going to do it. Who’s going in the front? Who’s going to go in the back? Who went in the back last time? Who got dirty last time? Things like that. Then we’d say, ‘All right. Let’s do it.’

  “We’d drive down the streets with our lights off. We’d give the lead car about a four- or five-second head start to get around the corner first. They’d go in the front or back way and we’d go in the other way. Sometimes we’d even park down the block and walk in, just to get the jump on the lookouts. If it was a heavy drug area, with a lot of lookouts, the scouts would start whistling back and forth as soon as they spotted us, yelling their own code words. We’d sneak up on places through backyards and alleys. It was almost like stalking a deer. Tracking through brush and making sure no one saw you doing anything. It was exciting. We created our own thrills.