Buddy Boys Read online

  Having transferred all of the 77th Precinct’s 20-odd supervisors into new commands in October, Police Commissioner Ward made the decision in December 1986 to transfer each of the remaining 205 cops in the 77th Precinct into new station houses throughout Brooklyn. The precinct’s law-abiding officers howled about the transfers, complaining that Ward was making them all look guilty in the public eye. Some cops were ostracized by the police officers in their new commands.

  “You worked with the rats? How do we know you didn’t give somebody up too?”

  Henry and Tony read more and more about their cases in the city’s newspapers, particularly the tabloids. A lot of information had been leaked. They were called in by their supervisors and questioned on the leaks. They were furious when confronted with the accusations.

  “Are you guys crazy?” they asked.

  Henry and Tony returned to their transcripts, marking time until the day in April when they would take to the witness stand and testify as members of the New York City Police Department against their indicted colleagues. They would also be asked to testify in the Police Department’s own trial room against some twenty-five police officers brought up on departmental charges. Once clear of the witness box, they would be asked to turn in their guns and shields. The tapes themselves, the bitter legacy of Police Officers Henry Winter and Tony Magno, would remain with the department, packed away in a cardboard box and marked with the numerals “7” and “7”.

  On May 23, 1987 Sergeant Bernadette Bennett walked into their office carrying a cake with a single lighted candle. Henry was intrigued.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Happy Anniversary. You became part of the team one year ago today. Make a wish.”

  Henry laughed as Tony glared at the sergeant, a curse on his lips.

  “Henry, you make the wish,” Bennett said. “Because if Tony gets his wish I may drop dead in my sleep.”

  “I left work early one day in February. I was supposed to take my daughter to a square dance out in Valley Stream. I was coming down Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights, country music playing on the radio, and I was getting into it. The day started out pretty bad. A lawyer from the special prosecutor’s office called to tell we’d be going to trial on Rathbun pretty soon. They gave me eleven tapes to go over. I kept listening to them over and over again. And you know, no matter how many times you listen to the tapes, you always hope to hear the guy say ‘No thanks, I don’t do that,’ when you offer them the money. But they always take the money. That never changes.

  “So I’m coming down Henry Street and I make the left onto Atlantic and then I hear it. My window is rolled down and I hear it, clear as a bell. ‘Hey Buddy Boy.’ I look to my left and it’s Billy Gallagher. He was driving a step van, a bread truck. The sliding door to the van was open and my window was open. I just snapped my head and looked, because, I mean, nobody uses the word ‘buddy boy’ anymore. And there was Billy, sitting in the bread truck.

  “I was just going to roll up the window and take off. I didn’t know what to do. I was scared at first, my stomach felt queasy. I drove down the street another fifty yards and then pulled over. I had to talk to him. I said to myself, ‘No, I can’t run. I just can’t run. I’m tired of running.’ So I made a U-turn and pulled up behind him. I could see him through the side mirror of the truck, and I’m looking at his face and he’s looking back at me. I’m waiting, like who’s gonna make the first move. He did. He started to get out of the truck. Then I got scared. I didn’t know if he had a gun. I thought maybe he could hurt me, maybe he can kill me. But I really didn’t give a shit at that point. I figured if he’s gonna hurt me, let him do it now. Now, instead of years from now. Whatever he’s gotta do, let him do it now. So he gets out of the truck and he walks towards me. I got out and we met halfway. We stood there for a second or two just looking at each other.

  “Billy had lost a lot of weight since I last saw him. He used to weigh about two-forty. Now he was down to about two-ten. He lost weight but he didn’t dress the part. He still had on his old clothes. Before, Billy filled up his shirts. But everything was big on him now. He needed a shave. He had a cold sore on his lip and his hair was in disarray. Billy didn’t look too good. He wasn’t the Billy I knew. I’m used to seeing Billy and saying, ‘Hey Buddy Bee, what are you doing? Let’s go do this. Let’s go do that.’ And this time it was flat. There was nothing there. I was hoping—being naive, but still hoping—that it could be like that again. I looked in his eyes, he looked in my eyes. We were sizing each other up. And then I made a gesture with my hand, like to say I was sorry or something. He looked at me and said, ‘Don’t give me your shit.’ And then we started to talk.

  “He started out with, ‘We went through a lot together. How could you do this to me?’ and I said, ‘You know, I have a family, Billy. True, I was thinking of myself too. I didn’t want to go to jail. But I was thinking of my family, my kids.’ And he comes back at me, ‘Well sure, you weren’t thinking of my kids, you weren’t thinking of my family.’ And you know it was bad, that part was bad. And then he said something like ‘Sure, you’re up there in IAD. You get to report to work every day. You get your paycheck every two fucking weeks. Meanwhile I’m out here working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, trying to put bread on the table for my family, and it’s hard because I’m going to jail. Every day I come home, I’m hustling out here to make money, and I come home and say, What for? Why? I’m going to jail. They offered me five to fifteen years. I’m going to jail.’ So I said, ‘Bill, don’t say that, you got a lawyer, anything can happen, you got a good lawyer.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, but they got a strong case. I know what case I’m going in on. It’s Tony’s case with the heroin. My lawyer says it’s strong. So I don’t know what I’m going to do. I tell you, I’m not going to jail though.’ I didn’t know what to say. And then he brought up Brian.

  “He said, ‘We were close. We had good times and bad ones too. And after all that shit one guy’s dead.’ Meaning Brian. That really hurt me. I know I didn’t kill Brian, but it’s still inside of me. I didn’t pull the trigger, but it wouldn’t have happened without me. Then Billy says, ‘You know, I don’t mind losing the job, but I don’t want to go to jail. I says, ‘Billy, you’ve got a lawyer, I’ll do anything I can to help. You need money? Take half my paycheck—I’ll give it to you.’ I didn’t know what to tell him. He says, ‘Yeah, you’re full of shit. You know damn well you can’t do that. You got a family just like I do. I know you’re looking out for them. I probably would have done the same thing. And maybe if they give me the chance down the road, I will do the same thing.’ I says, ‘Well, maybe they will give you the chance. Do whatever you have to do. Nobody wants to go to jail. I didn’t. Tony didn’t.’ And then he mentioned to me that he was having marital problems now. He said another indicted cop’s wife had already left him. He says, ‘You guys created hardship with everyone. You and Tony destroyed a lot of families.’ I couldn’t tell him that if it hadn’t been me someone else would have caught him. And then he says to me, ‘You know, you don’t have to testify.’ And I said, ‘Billy, if I don’t testify, what happens?’ And he answers, ‘You go to jail.’ And I said, ‘That’s right, Billy. And I’m not going to jail just like you don’t want to go to jail. It has to be done.’

  “At some point we both cried. I think it was after he mentioned Brian’s name. I turned my head and tried to hold it in. But Billy had broke down when I turned around, so I broke down too. I really wanted to grab him. I wanted to put my arm around him or something. But I couldn’t. You see, I still wanted to be liked. I had been with these guys since 1980. I saw them more than I saw my family. They were my family.

  “The thing that bothered me most about the whole investigation was the fact that the same guys who saved my life were the ones that I was burying. During the investigation Tony and I had an incident down on Buffalo Avenue. We arrived at a building and there’s shots fired. An old guy comes out and shoots a kid in the foot. W
e didn’t know what was going on, so we put out a ten—eighty-five [additional units required] over the air and guys rush to back us up. It’s like, I don’t know how to explain it. Here I am keeping myself out of jail but I need help. I call them and they’re there. And that’s what bothers me today. Here I am about to get my ass kicked or killed and the guy I’m recording, to get evidence on, comes racing in at sixty miles an hour to do battle for me. He’s gonna save me and I’m killing him on the other end with the recorder. That’s the worst part.

  “That’s what I was thinking about when I was talking to Billy on the street. I wanted him to like me. I just wanted to talk to him. And when we broke down, I wanted to put my arm around him and say I was sorry. But I kept quiet. I didn’t reach out for him or anything. You know that feeling you get when you really want to reach something and it’s just beyond your grasp? The frustration? Well, that’s the way I felt then.

  “Then we both got straight. He said, ‘Look. I’m really hustling out here. I got no time to talk to you. If you ever want to talk to me, have your lawyer talk to my lawyer. I don’t hate you guys. I just never want to see your faces again.’ It may sound strange, but when Billy told me that he didn’t hate me, I felt better. It was like a divorce or something.

  ‘He was ready to leave, but just before he turned, I wanted to shake his hand and say, ‘Good luck,’ or something. I guess he sensed it or saw me move, because he just looked down at my hand and said, ‘What are you, fucking kidding me?’ And with that, he turned around, got into his truck, made a left turn, and just drove away. I walked back to my truck and started crying as I pulled away. I drove until I couldn’t see anymore. Then I pulled over and found a pay phone. I had to tell someone about this. So I called my partner. I told Tony what happened, and talking to my partner made me feel better. I don’t know who Billy called.

  “About a month later I read the news. Billy Gallagher cut a deal with the prosecutors. They walked him into court right before St. Patrick’s Day and he pleaded guilty to one felony. They dropped all the other charges. Billy’s deal is three years in exchange for testimony against all the other indicted cops. They may even count the time he’s working on the cases as time served. If the trials go on long enough, Billy may never have to serve jail time. I felt happy for him in a way. Billy did what he had to do. Maybe now he even understands. We did what we had to do.

  “I had the tape recorder in my jacket pocket when I met Billy on the street that day. I thought about turning it on too. But then, it hit me. I don’t have to record cops anymore. There isn’t any more for me to record. That part of my life is over. I threw the recorder out of my truck window on the way home. I felt pretty good after that. I turned on the radio and listened to country music again. It was like, ‘End of story, end of life, end of everything.’”

  Epilogue

  I was watching the Brooklyn street from a Park Slope saloon named Clockworks, waiting to meet Henry Winter for the first time. I had been told to look for blond hair.

  It was mid-October, 1986, three weeks after news of a corruption scandal in the 77th Precinct had exploded across the front pages of the city’s tabloids. The saloon was nearly deserted. I nursed a beer and watched a storm hammer 12th Street, a rivulet of fouled rainwater rushing towards a sewer. A biting wind slapped sheets of rain against the windowpane. I wasn’t sure what to expect.

  In outlining the ground rules for our initial meeting, Winter had made a single request.

  “No tape recorders,” he said. “I don’t do that anymore.”

  As I studied the street, a blond-haired man driving a blue Ford pickup truck pulled up and parked. He sat in the cab smoking a cigarette, the motor still running. For a moment I thought he might drive off again, taking his secrets with him. But after finishing his cigarette, Henry Winter emerged from the truck. He gathered his brown suede jacket against the cold and ran for the bar. He entered wiping the rain from his brow with the back of his left hand.

  “McAlary?” he asked.

  I nodded. Winter smiled and offered me his dry hand. The gesture was rushed and awkward. I guessed he had not shaken hands with anyone for a while. I looked at Henry’s hand and the cop’s face went flush. I rescued him with a handshake.

  The bartender slid two bottles of beer at us and Henry pulled out his wallet. He insisted on paying, explaining it had been some time since he had bought someone a drink. We retired to an empty table in the back of the room and started talking. We’ve been talking ever since.

  Over the next year, as I interviewed Winter and his partner, Tony Magno, for this book, we went through it all. We started out with names, dates, and times of crimes committed. We wound up with talk about fear, betrayal, and loneliness. Henry wanted to be liked, or at least understood. Tony wanted to trust someone again, or at least be trusted himself.

  I guess they trusted me. At some point Henry began to end all our conversations with a chilling send-off. He called me Buddy Boy. “Talk to you later, Buddy Boy,” he would say. I don’t think I ever got used to that. It reminded me of something O’Regan had said before committing suicide. “Buddy Boy is his favorite word. If you want to see thirteen cops turn in their graves just go up to them, tap them on the shoulder, and say, “Hey Buddy Boy.”

  Steadily I came to recognize the paradox in Winter. He could be engaging and confident one moment, reluctant and bewildered the next. Sometimes I saw him cry. At other times, I heard him laugh. Mostly he seemed tortured by his own legacy.

  “You keep calling me a ‘rogue’ in your newspaper stories,” Henry had said that first night. “Do you know what the word “rogue” means? I looked it up in the dictionary last night with my wife. It’s like calling someone a worthless animal. Do you think that’s the way I’ll be remembered?”

  By the time Hynes announced his indictments, I was writing about the investigation every day for New York Newsday. And then one night O’Regan picked up the telephone, reaching me in the newsroom, saying he wanted to meet in a diner to talk about his case.

  There was no choice but to go and meet him. O’Regan had been around long enough to know how it works with newspaper reporters: You call them. They answer the call.

  When they found a copy of my article about O’Regan next to his body in the motel room, it bothered me for a long time. I had hoped the cop would read the explanation of his ruined career and turn himself in. But O’Regan, ever the Marine, had already committed himself to carrying out his final detail. I had become the cop’s unwitting pawn—a writer to set a non-writer’s suicide note to paper.

  At first, no one would reveal the contents of O’Regan’s own rambling notes. Much later I learned that his desperate jotting included the line, “McAlary wrote too much.” There was no further explanation. Like the voices on the 77th Precinct tapes themselves, the meaning of O’Regan’s message was left for the living to decipher.

  The entry unnerved me, and forced me to ask questions about the responsibility for O’Regan’s suicide. Eventually I reached the conclusion that O’Regan was responsible for his own death, just as he was liable for his own misdeeds.

  By dying without giving me a chance to ask him to explain himself further, O’Regan put me in a vulnerable position. In rebuttal, a dead man’s words put the living at a distinct disadvantage. But if I wrote too much, it may have been because he told me too much. I guess I can live with that. Cops still call me. I still answer the phone.

  In the year following his suicide, each of the 77th Precinct’s indicted cops managed to shoulder the same burden that O’Regan collapsed under. They arrived one by one in the mahogany-paneled Brooklyn courtroom of State Supreme Court Justice Felice Shea, sitting at a defense table, listening to the testimony of police officers Henry Winter and Tony Magno. They sat staring at an engraved inscription on the wall behind the judge. It read: “To be perfectly just is an attribute of the divine nature.”

  As the officer facing the most charges in the scandal, Gallagher arrived in Shea’s cour
troom on March 10, 1987 to plead guilty in a plea-bargain arrangement. He was dismissed from the force after pleading guilty to one count of selling cocaine, just one of eighty-seven counts in a series of indictments for burglary, drug sales, and grand larceny. In exchange for cooperation—Gallagher agreed to testify in departmental trials against the other suspended cops—he was given a three-and-a-half- to ten-and-a-half-year prison term. He remains free until his sentencing at the conclusion of the other trials.

  “I think it’s a very sad day for all of us,” Hynes said after Gallagher entered his plea. “Not only has he disgraced himself, but he has dishonored other police officers, most of whom I believe are honest.”

  Gallagher left it to his attorney, Barry Agulnick, to explain his reasons for agreeing to help Hynes prosecute other cops.

  “It’s been the worst moment of his life,” Agulnick told reporters. “His partner received a death sentence for this case. I think that weighed heavily on his mind. He wants to get on with his life.”

  As Gallagher went back to driving a bread truck, Robert Rathbun headed to trial. He used entrapment as a defense in answering a thirty-seven-count indictment. Rathbun’s lawyer, Mark Summers, described his client as a “hero cop who became a tragic figure.” He told the court that when Rathbun first heard his own voice on tape, he said, “I don’t know that person.” Summers added, “He could not identify the person on the tape as being him and the good cop he had been for thirteen years.”

  A jury found Rathbun guilty on all counts on May 14, 1987, after just three hours of deliberation. They gave no credence to the defense claims that Rathbun had placed stolen money in a church poor box and that he had been enticed to steal by Winter.