Buddy Boys Read online

  “Sometimes it was easy and we didn’t even need to show our guns. We’d just knock on the door, they’d open the door up and we’d walk in. They never stuck around to see what we wanted—they just ran, jumping out windows and climbing down fire escapes. We didn’t care. We weren’t there to arrest anybody. We were there to scoop up their money and drugs and then get the fuck out.

  “But we always tried to make them think they were getting away. If a guy stayed and we came up with shit, we’d act all serious. I’d say, ‘Whose collar is this?’ and Brian would say, ‘I got him.’ Then someone else would say, ‘Take him out in the hallway and put cuffs on him.’ But as soon as Brian got the guy into the hallway, we’d call him back on some excuse and Brian would tell the guy, ‘Now don’t move. You stay right here. You’re going to jail as soon as I get back out here.’ Then Brian would come back into the room and we’d hear the guy scurrying down the hall, making his getaway. We’d laugh and say, ‘Oh, the bad guy just got away.’

  “We had this one idiot one time. Gallagher, Brian, me and Tony were on a job. We actually left the guy in the hallway, went back into the apartment, and shut the door. When we came back out five minutes later, the guy was still there. I look at Brian. He looks at me. We can’t believe this guy. We go back inside, shut the door, and wait another five minutes. The guy is still standing there. So we closed the door and we ran away. We went out the fire escape because the fucking guy just would not leave. We made some noises in the apartment, and then left one by one, going down the fire escape thinking this was the dumbest fucker we’d ever seen. We had to run away from him! Then we got back in our cars and drove to the park to see who got what and divvy up the drugs and cash.”

  The Buddy Boys became more brazen with experience. Henry, having nearly broken his foot when he tried to kick down a metal door with sneakers, bought a pair of steel-tipped boots. Gallagher and O’Regan began carrying a sledge hammer, crowbar, and pinch bar in the trunk of their patrol car. They all packed screwdrivers in their attaché cases along with their paperwork.

  Some of the cops became experts at kicking down doors and crashing through walls. No door could hold them. They split oak doors with one mighty swing of their hammers and used crowbars to pry metal doors off their hinges. If the cops wanted to get into a third-floor apartment, they would climb to the roof, tie a rope around an elevator housing and then rappel down the side of the building, crashing feet first into the apartment window. Some Buddy Boys also carried ash cans—small but powerful fireworks—which they would light and slip through mail slots, literally bombing people out of their apartments.

  If the cops found themselves ill-equipped for a manuever, one of them would rush off to a firehouse to borrow axes and bolt cutters. The firemen, unaware of their role in the burglaries, scratched their heads and asked each other, “What the hell are these guys doing out there?”

  One night the Buddy Boys arrived at a building on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Rogers Avenue, only to discover they had no means of getting to an adjoining roof. They had to place a man on the roof to keep the dealer they were after from escaping out his apartment window with his drugs and money.

  “We need a ladder for this job,” Gallagher decided.

  “I saw a ladder at an excavation site on the way in to work today,” Henry said.

  So Tony and Gallagher sat in the apartment while Brian and Henry tore off in a patrol car, driving to the far end of the precinct where they found a wooden ladder at an excavation site. The cops wedged the ladder between the lights and the roof, ruining the car’s paint job in the process, and then sped back to the scene, laughing as they raced through the city streets with an eight-foot ladder hanging off the top of their patrol car. Then they drove the car up on the sidewalk next to the building and put the ladder on top of the car. Henry and Gallagher climbed up the ladder, entering the dealer’s apartment. Tony and Brian broke through his front door.

  “He was very surprised to see us,” Henry later remembered.

  “Brian started talking about making his own equipment. He wanted to put together a scaffold that would fit into the back of his car. Then he talked about mailing away for things. He was going to get one of those rope ladders that you throw up, it hooks on, then you pull a string, it comes down, and you climb up. He was actually going to send away for this thing so we could rip places off. I told him, ‘Come on. What are we going to do, start a business here? Do you want to get a van, too, and paint “H and B Removal” on the side?’ Holy shit. That’s what it was like. I mean, I’m not glad this happened to me, but it was getting pretty crazy on the midnight tours. Anything and everything went. You could do whatever you wanted to do and nobody could stop you. Getting a van wasn’t out of the question. I think that if this was still going on we’d have a van by now. We would have all chipped in, got a van, and set it up with everything we needed—crowbars, helmets, axes, ropes, ladders, and acetylene torches. We could have parked it somewhere in the precinct before heading into work. Then we could have said on the radio, ‘Buddy Bee, Buddy Bob. Get the Buddy-Boymobile.’

  “There were a lot of times, hairy times, when we went up against big guns. Sometimes I came through the window, and I said to myself, ‘What the fuck am I doing? This is ridiculous.’ You’re coming in through a window, it’s a dark alley, you don’t actually know who or what’s in there. You just got a tip from one of your squealers, and here you are, four cops, going in with little thirty-eights, surrounding a building, kicking in windows off a fire escape. You don’t know what the hell you’re getting into. But we did it. There were a lot of times we went in and I could hear my heart coming through my chest. I was so dry I couldn’t swallow. I was afraid to go in that window. But when the “Buddy Bob” came over the radio, the foot went in, I dove in that window, wound up on the bed next to a guy with a loaded gun, and came out with forty fucking dollars. I could have been killed. I just took ten years off my life. I got three new gray hairs. And for what? For the excitement of it all, that’s what. We were lost in a frenzy.

  “It was like we were insane or something. I mean one time we hit this bar on Schenectady Avenue on a late tour. It was Gallagher, O’Regan, Nicky Scaturico, and me. Brian and I jumped over a fence and came in the back way. Gallagher and Nicky came through the front. The idea was to scare them out the back way. Nicky and Junior banged on the front door, trying to sound like Emergency Services cops. So these guys opened the back door and we were right there. Surprise. All in uniform. We tossed everybody. While me and Nicky were in the back searching through things, a line of customers formed. Brian started selling them coke through a slot in the door. And it was a good thing he did, too, because we came up with a small amount of money and a large amount of coke. So O’Regan made more money for us. He did it for about an hour. There was this one guy who came up to the door and wanted to sell his sweater. It was a nice, a brand-new sweater. But there was a long line so we couldn’t open the door. That would have been bad for business. Brian tried to get the guy to slip the sweater under the door, but it wouldn’t fit. And O’Regan, once he got money, he wouldn’t give back change. One guy slipped Brian a fifty and wanted two twenty-dollar tins of coke and ten dollars change. Brian slipped the guy three twenty-dollar tins back. The guy started screaming, ‘I don’t want this, I want my change.’ Brian slipped him another tin. But the guy was insistent, he kept getting louder and louder. And Brian would not give the guy any change. We were screaming now in our best Jamaican dialects, ‘Geeve the mon his change.’ Brian wouldn’t do it. So we had to skate out the back door because the guy was raising too much of a riot.”

  By mid-1984, the Buddy Boys were in trouble. Not with the cops, but with drugs. They were confiscating hundreds of dollars worth of cocaine and marijuana as well as guns. Originally the cops had been content to flush the drugs down toilets. But being good businessmen, they soon realized that there was a profit to be made in drug dealing. They decided to fence most of their stolen drugs,
guns, and electronic equipment through a middle-aged Jamaican drug dealer named Euston Roy Thomas who ran a grocery store and restaurant on Lincoln Place. Nicknamed “Roy,” the dealer had ingratiated himself with the cops in the 77th years earlier when he stepped into an argument between a cop and a drug dealer, taking a bullet in the face. Roy still carried the bullet in the back of his head, a tiny mustache covering the entrance wound under his nose.

  “Don’t worry about me,” Roy used to tell the cops. “I got a bullet in the head. If someone comes around here asking about my friends, I don’t remember too good. You be amazed at what I remember to forget.”

  William Gallagher, who had been partners with the cop Roy tried to help out, never forgot the drug dealer. When it came time to fence drugs and guns, Roy was only too happy to accommodate his cop friends. He paid them fifty cents on the dollar for their coke and marijuana and a fair price on their guns, all of which he later resold on the street. No fool, Roy also gave the cops a payoff not to raid his own drug locations, explaining that he did not want to be in the business of buying back his own drugs.

  By the winter of 1984, Henry and Roy had developed a certain sympathy. Henry often visited Roy’s grocery store on Troy Avenue, asking how his business was going and talking about wives. Roy’s Jamaican wife, Grace, was always trying to get her husband to hire her cousins from the islands for his business. Roy preferred kids from the neighborhood. Sometimes the couple’s arguments were very loud and violent, and then Henry would arrive at the store and settle the dispute, reminding Grace that it was bad manners to point a loaded gun at one’s own husband. Henry would then leave the building with two or three hundred dollars in his pocket and Roy’s blessing.

  “Buy yourself a cup of coffee,” Roy would say.

  Roy was well known to the precinct’s homicide detectives. A lot of people died on the dealer’s block. Although Roy’s name figured prominently in discussions of drug-related homicides near the intersection of Troy and Lincoln Place, he was never arrested for murder. Henry knew Roy to be a tough guy but he didn’t know him to be a killer. He thought of Roy as a friend, so much of one that when the police officer called his wife to wish her a happy New Year on December 31, 1984, he even put Roy on the phone with Betsy.

  “Oh pretty lady,” Roy said.

  “Goodbye,” Betsy said.

  When Henry got home the next day, Betsy met him at the door.

  “Who was that guy you had on the phone?”

  “Oh, that’s my friend Roy.”

  “You got some friends. I don’t believe what you do in that precinct!”

  Henry could not have known then that some investigators were already thinking the same thing. Homicide investigators assigned to the precinct’s detective unit had arrived at Roy’s store in January 1985 to inquire about a dead man found on the doorstep. A few days later Tony and Henry came in while detectives were questioning Roy, trying to determine whether he had seen or heard anything relating to the murder. The interrogation proved fruitless. “I got a bullet in my head. Sometimes I forget.”

  The detectives asked Henry and Tony for help, and Roy was only too happy to talk to them about the case, the detectives noted. One detective working the case, Steve Niglicki, went back to his supervisor, Lieutenant Burns, and reported the questionable relationship between the cops and the drug dealer. Burns filed a report with the Internal Affairs Division.

  A set of wheels began to turn at One Police Plaza.

  By this time Henry had many street friends in the precinct, and most of them paid through the nose for this relationship. One of them was an elderly black drug dealer named Herbie, who operated a drug business out of an apartment on St. Johns Place. The officers met him while raiding one of his properties, where they found one hundred crack-filled vials in the bottom of a bag in the kitchen. They also found eight hundred dollars on Herbie, which they placed on a counter in the kitchen.

  “You’re going to jail,” Henry announced.

  Obviously having dealt with cops from the 77th Precinct before, Herbie seemed unimpressed.

  “Look,” he said, “We can work out a deal.”

  The cops walked out of the kitchen, leaving Herbie alone with the crack vials. When they returned, he had stashed the drugs and there was a wad of money lying on the table. As the men continued to talk, Herbie suddenly opened a newspaper and flashed four hundred dollars at the cops. Tony and Henry exchanged glances and then grabbed the newspaper.

  “Have a nice day,” Herbie said as the cops left his apartment. “Come back real soon.”

  A few days later, Herbie put out word on the street that he wanted to see the cop called ‘Blondie.’ Henry drove to the apartment and the two men walked down the street, exchanging pleasantries. Then the cop and the drug dealer got down to business. Herbie explained that he was planning to expand his drug operation and wanted Henry’s assurance that certain cops would protect it. He offered Henry two hundred dollars for this assurance, and Henry took the money.

  “Be good,” Herbie said as the cops drove away.

  “We took the money to watch his place but then we got rotated off midnights back to day tours. Herbie got hit three times right after that. Boom. Boom. Boom. And he put out the word that he wanted to see Blondie again. So I went over to see him and he says, ‘Look. I’m getting hit on the midnight tours. You’re supposed to be watching me and telling me when I’m going to get hit. I need to get somebody on the midnight tours.’ So I went back to the station house and told Gallagher about Herbie. I said, ‘Billy, you know this guy on St. Johns, he paid us a couple times for watching him, but we can’t do it anymore and he wants a friend on the midnight tour. If you want to speak to him, go ahead. Tell him Blondie sent you.’ Gallagher went down there and Herbie set him up. At first he got eight hundred a month, but then it went to one thousand and on up to fifteen hundred dollars. Junior and Brian were splitting seventeen hundred a month from Herbie when this whole thing broke.”

  A third man who bribed Henry and Tony to protect his drug operation was a middle-aged black from Pacific Street named Benny Burwell. Originally Henry and Tony had no idea that Benny was dealing drugs. They believed he paid them fifty dollars a week to keep an eye on his brother’s social club. But one day in February 1985, two young cops named Richard Figueroa and Michael Bryan cornered Tony and Henry on the street outside the station house.

  “We know what’s going on at Pacific and Ralph,” Figueroa insisted. “And we want a piece of your pie.”

  Tony gave the young cops the same look that he gave the guy who stepped on his forty dollar shoes.

  “Where the fuck do you guys get off asking for a piece of my pie?” he screamed. “I’m a senior man. I got seventeen years here. You want your action, you go out and get your own piece of pie. Who the hell are you to tell us what you want? This is my contract. You find your own.”

  But the younger cops were adamant about being cut in on the payoffs.

  “Well, we want a piece of your pie,” Figueroa insisted. “And if we don’t get it, we’re going to go harass the guys.”

  “Do whatever the fuck you want to do,” Tony advised them before stalking off.

  A few days later Benny called an emergency meeting with Magno and Winter. The shaken dealer explained that two young cops had come into his store and started pushing his customers around, demanding to be paid off. Benny’s brother Frankie gave Tony and Henry eight hundred dollars cash, telling them, “Split it with those other two cops. I never want to see them again.”

  “Hey, we didn’t have nothing to do with this,” Tony said. “Yeah, okay,” said Frankie. “Just take care of those guys and tell them to stay the hell out of here.”

  Tony went back to the precinct house and split up the money—robbing the cops in the process. He kept six hundred dollars to share with Henry and gave the younger cops two hundred dollars to split. After the initial payoff, Henry returned to Benny’s store every other week. He would go in for cigarettes and c
ome out with a brown paper bag filled with money. Tony became a reluctant paymaster, steadily giving the younger cops raises.

  Four months later, Figueroa approached Magno in the locker room and told him, “Look, we don’t need your Santa Claus no more. We want out. We got enough now.” The brash younger cops offered no explanation for their change of heart. Tony was confused. Why would two dirty cops suddenly stop taking free and easy money? They couldn’t have developed a conscience all of a sudden. Henry and Tony thought the cops must have heard something that scared them straight.

  “Something around here stinks,” Tony decided. “I think we just stepped in shit.”

  “There were investigators tailing us by September 1985. They were easy to lose. We’d spot them and race down one way streets with our lights off. No Manhattan cop could keep up with us when we wanted to lose them. But we knew they were out there. There were too many reports on us by now. They would have been idiots not to be tailing us.

  “One day we were going to a job and we saw the shoofly’s car behind us. We go to another job, the shoofly follows us. He was constantly following us. So we went on one more job, and came out of the street the wrong way and there’s the shoofly, parked on the corner of Park Place and Troy.

  “So Tony said, ‘Fuck this. Let’s call in a man with a gun right on that corner store where he’s parked. Let’s see what he does. Let’s see if he’s gonna back us up or take off like a scared rabbit.’ We went around the corner, getting in a position where we could still watch him, and called in the gun run from a corner pay phone. And then we watched. We were going to bust his chops, run up on him and say, ‘Hey, if you’re on the job and a gun run comes over, you back us up, asshole, no matter who you are.’ But as soon as the gun run came over the radio, the guy took off like a bat out of hell. He didn’t want to get involved in any kind of gun thing. He took off like his pants were on fire. We laughed our asses off over that one.”