Buddy Boys Page 4

But the thing that Henry Winter loved most about high school was love itself. As a fourteen-year-old sophomore, he met a seventeen-year-old senior named Betsy Bassett at a New Year’s Eve party in his parent’s basement. Henry’s older brother, Bruce, on leave from the Air Force, had invited Betsy and one of her girlfriends to the party. Henry and Betsy milled around a polished pine bar in the basement, chatting quietly over beers while Bruce got drunk with Betsy’s girlfriend upstairs.

  When the party ended, Henry offered to walk Betsy home. But he ran out of sidewalk—she only lived three blocks away—and conversation.

  “I was interested,” Henry recalled. “But she was three years older. She seemed bored by the whole idea of me.”

  Three weeks later Betsy invited Henry to a high school sorority dance. Sometime during the night, she suggested that Henry join a fraternity. At first he balked at the idea—he didn’t see much sense in hanging out with other guys when he could be dating girls—but he later joined a frat in order to pacify his new girlfriend.

  Winter, who even years later rarely hung out with other cops while off-duty, came to be regarded by the brothers of Alpha Omega Theta as one of their sorriest pledges. He refused to be hit with a paddle, never shined anyone’s shoes, and rarely brought seniors their coffee and bagels in the morning. One time the brothers succeeded in holding Winter down and paddling him for refusing to get a haircut. A week later, when the brothers threatened to paddle their long-haired pledge again, Winter quit the fraternity.

  “It was either my ass or my hair,” he recalled. “I decided to keep both.”

  In the process, Henry lost Betsy Bassett. She graduated that summer, leaving Flower Power Hank to patrol the high school parking lot by himself.

  With Vietnam pounding in the distance, seventeen-year-old Henry Winter decided in 1968 that he would join the Army along with several high school buddies who had been drafted. The family threw a going-away party for him, bestowing on him a knapsack-load of address books, razors, and shaving cream. At 7 A.M. the next morning, Henry’s mother dropped him off at the Army recruiting station in Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. Henry was met by fourteen other scared-looking inductees and a muscle-bound sergeant with a square jaw.

  “We are your mothers now, and anyone who doesn’t want to stay here can leave,” the sergeant roared, pointing towards the door.

  Henry turned and made eye contact with a black recruit standing next to him.

  “I don’t want to be here,” the black teenager said.

  “I’ve got to stay,” Henry whispered. “They had a party for me and everything.”

  The two teenagers smiled, then walked out the front door, taking their address books, razors, and shaving cream home, missing the Vietnam War. Henry hitchhiked back to Valley Stream and threw himself a welcome-home party.

  An Army recruiter continued to call his home for the next few days, but neither Henry nor his parents, who needed to sign a permission slip, would budge. Most of his buddies went off to war. Some of them even made it back home.

  Henry spent most of his summers upstate and became an avid hunter. He especially liked deer hunting. And like the character played by Robert De Niro in the film The Deer Hunter, Henry abided by a single commandment in the woods. One deer. One shot.

  He hunted with a single-shot 7 x 57 Ruger rifle. If he missed hitting the deer with his first shot, the animal was free to escape. He never reloaded. Amateurs reloaded. Henry also had another odd habit. Sometimes he would just chase a doe through the woods, screaming crazily, until he lost sight of the animal.

  The hunting ritual caused a rift between the Winter brothers and their father. Henry’s father would have liked to take both of them hunting, but Bruce preferred the ski lounges and the fireplaces.

  The Winters soon noticed that their sons didn’t seem to like each other much. Although they shared the same friends, the boys rarely shared each other’s company. They did occasionally meet by accident on the streets, where their disputes quickly became neighborhood legend.

  Living in a house with a one-car garage and three cars, the Winter brothers often raced each other home in order to get the only parking spot off the street. One day Henry, driving an Opel, arrived at one end of Washington Avenue just as Bruce, driving a Capri, rounded the corner at the opposite end of the block. The brothers zoomed down the block, each determined to reach the parking spot first. As neighbors watched, the cars smashed into each other head on, metal and glass flying. Henry and Bruce jumped from their steaming wrecks and proceeded to pummel each other in full view of their horrified parents.

  “My father stuck up for the hunter,” Henry remembered. “My mother stuck up for the designer clothes.”

  Eventually the brothers decided that neither the house nor garage was big enough for both of them. After graduation, Henry began to spend more and more time in a small upstate New York town called Cochecton Center, staring across a table at a girl named Kathy Costello. A part-time waitress and maid in a boarding house where Henry worked chopping wood and clearing brush, Kathy served him heaping piles of pancakes in the morning and hearty stew at night. She changed his sheets and vacuumed his room. The couple took moonlight walks on country roads and attended her senior prom.

  Kathy was everything Henry ever wanted in a girl. Her family owned half a mountain. He began to dream about living in a world where a man could roll out of bed in the morning and hunt from dawn to dusk without ever stepping off his own property. The couple became engaged.

  “My father was in favor of marriage,” Henry said. “He couldn’t imagine a more qualified bride. He sat there and said, ‘Tell me about the land again.’”

  Late in December 1969, Henry invited Kathy and her mother down to Valley Stream to do some weekend Christmas shopping in Manhattan. On the night they arrived, Henry was lounging in the remodeled basement watching television when the telephone suddenly rang.

  “Hello, Henry Winter?” said a woman with a vaguely familiar voice. “This is the Dime Savings Bank in Valley Stream. We just wanted to notify you that your checking account is overdrawn.”

  “Good try,” Henry said, recognizing the caller as Betsy Bassett. “But I don’t even have a checking account at the Dime Savings Bank.”

  They spent the next half hour reminiscing. Betsy had left the sorority and taken a job as a bank teller. Henry was working on the back of a village garbage truck and thinking about taking the entrance examination for the New York City Police Department.

  “I hear something about you getting married,” Betsy said.

  “You hear wrong.”

  The couple made a date to meet later that night on a deserted neighborhood corner.

  “I’ll wear a pink coat,” Betsy said. “You wear a white carnation, so I’ll be able to recognize you.”

  Henry hung up the phone and went upstairs to find Kathy Costello sitting on the couch. Mildred Winter and Kathy’s mother were sipping tea in the kitchen.

  “Let me see that ring I gave you,” Henry said nonchalantly.

  Kathy pulled the ring from her finger and handed it to him. He closed one hand on the ring, grabbed his coat with the other, and headed for the front door.

  “I don’t want to get married,” Henry was heard to say.

  Henry returned home two days later. Kathy Costello and her mother were long gone, having returned to their side of the mountain.

  Henry and Betsy spent their evening in her Corvair station wagon parked on a road alongside the village garbage dump. After three years, there was a lot to talk about. They laughed long into the evening, agreeing that Betsy had phoned Henry at precisely the right moment in his life.

  The couple talked about buying land together and one day possibly even opening a joint checking account at the Dime Savings Bank. Finally, Henry held up the ring and said, “I got this.”

  Earlier in the year Henry had taken the first job of his adult life, joining the Valley Stream Sanitation Department as the tail man on a garbage truck. He got the jo
b through a hunting buddy named Jimmy Leavy who wound up working on the same truck. By coincidence, they had been assigned a route that included both their homes. Henry was thoroughly unprepared for the physical strain of lifting twenty-five hundred garbage cans into the back of a truck. An hour into the job it seemed to him that a lot of people were throwing away cement with their trash. And at 10 A.M. when the truck stopped in front of his home, he tore off his uniform and ran into the house.

  “I quit!” he yelled.

  Winter refused to come out of the house until Jimmy promised to let him ride in the truck while he finished off the rest of the route. It took a week before Henry was able to work an entire shift without threatening to quit. By that time he and Jimmy were moonlighting as junk dealers. Sifting through their neighbors’ garbage for something they called “mongo,” the garbage collectors came up with copper, other metals, and wood, which they later sold. Eventually, they graduated to a route in an even nicer neighborhood, finding toasters, stereos, and an occasional working television set in the morning trash.

  Although they had their problems, Henry and Betsy continued to date over the next four years. Henry worked on the garbage truck but he really wanted to be a New York City cop. And on an August night in 1973, his brother-in-law, Dennis Caufield, a city cop working with an undercover anticrime detail in Brooklyn’s 75th Precinct, invited Henry to join him on a midnight tour.

  Henry drove into the city and met Caufield on a corner, sitting in a yellow cab with his partner.

  “What’s this?” Henry asked.

  “Our cover,” Caufield explained.

  As he accompanied the cops on their tour of a bleak neighborhood named East New York, he gazed at rows of gutted tenements and tilting brick buildings. He saw wooden planks nailed over windows and sheets of steel bolted over apartment house entrances. Henry watched intently when a group of blacks scattered from a Pennsylvania Avenue storefront as the Checker cab—with three white men inside—drove past.

  “They seem to recognize you guys,” Henry noted.

  “Cockroaches,” Caufield replied.

  “Skells,” the partner added, using the catchall nickname used by cops when referring to ghetto pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, robbers, muggers, junkies, and other lowlifes. Henry remembered thinking, “Why would anyone from the suburbs want to come and work in a ghetto?”

  By the middle of the midnight tour, as the undercover cops raced from robbery to burglary, answering radio calls of “shots fired,” and “ten-thirteen—officer needs assistance,” Henry had changed his mind. He wanted to work here. He watched in amazement as Caufield and his partner rushed into a building after hearing gunshots, kicked down a door, and finally emerged from an apartment with a black man in handcuffs.

  “Is it always like this?” Henry asked, staring at a loaded .357 magnum the officers had taken off the gunman.

  “No,” Caufield said. “Most of the time it’s busy.”

  Henry settled back into the deep Checker cab seat and smiled.

  “Fuck the garbage truck,” he thought.

  Having passed an entrance examination for the department in 1970, Henry Winter was finally told to report to the New York City Police Academy for a physical in June 1974.

  Along with half a million other suburban commuters, he rode the Long Island Railroad to work, pushing and shoving his way onto the train each morning for the ride into Penn Station, then boarding a bus for the ride to the Police Academy, nestled between Second and Third Avenues on East 20th Street. He was happy and nervous. Soon the same Henry Winter who had pretended to be Joe Friday as a kid would be pulling his very own .38 and telling real bad guys to freeze. He would be a New York City cop—a member of a department known throughout the world as the Finest. He could hardly contain his excitement. His father, the same Henry H. Winter who left the city for the suburbs twenty-two years earlier, was already telling the fathers of Nassau County cops he drank with in a local bar, “Your sons aren’t real cops. Not like my son Henry, anyway. He’s a city cop.”

  In July, Henry invited Betsy out for dinner at the Lincoln Inn in Rockville Centre, Long Island. It was the first restaurant he had ever been to where someone parked your car. Betsy was similarly impressed. She ordered chicken cordon bleu. Henry got the veal. Over appetizers, he popped the question: Would she be interested in becoming a cop’s wife? By the time a waiter rolled the dessert cart over to the table, the couple had agreed on a May 1975 wedding.

  From the start, Henry liked the military atmosphere and the feeling of confederacy at the academy. But it wasn’t too long before he spotted a way to circumvent certain rules and regulations. All recruits, he noted, were given three yellow “gig cards.” They were to be carried at all times in a uniform shirt pocket. If a recruit with dull shoes or a stained uniform was spotted by a supervisor, he had to surrender a gig card. If he lost all three cards, he got a reprimand from the captain. Repeat offenders faced expulsion.

  Although Henry Winter lost twelve gig cards during his four-month stay in the academy, he was never disciplined. He and the other recruits always seemed to have enough gig cards, even though they often weren’t in the right names.

  In October, Henry graduated from the Police Academy. There was no official ceremony, just a party at an East Side Italian restaurant. He was assigned to the 25th Precinct, a Spanish Harlem command housed on East 119th Street. The day before leaving, the class watched a training film that included a message from a member of the department’s Internal Affairs Division, the unit which polices the police.

  “Don’t ever forget that we’re out there watching,” said an IAD investigator.

  As the film ended and the lights came on in the auditorium, a sergeant stood at the podium, scanning the faces of recruits.

  “There are a few of you out there who won’t make it as cops,” he said, holding up a pair of handcuffs. “Some of you will wind up being arrested.”

  The words meant nothing to Henry. He had the gun and he had the silver badge. He was the good guy and had a blue uniform to prove it. That night, he went home and had one of the most powerful dreams of his life. Henry dreamed he was standing before hundreds of bad guys with his gun drawn and his badge sparkling.

  “You’re all under arrest,” the patrolman said in his dream. Before awakening, Henry Winter dreamed he had every bad guy in the city wearing handcuffs.

  The voice of Henry Winter:

  “My first day on the job and I’m standing on the corner of Lexington Avenue and East One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street with my thumb up my ass on a foot post when I suddenly get a call on the radio. It’s a ten-two. I didn’t even know the police radio codes yet, so I just ignored the call. A few minutes later a sergeant pulled up to my foot post in a car. He said, ‘Hey, Winter. Didn’t you just get a ten-two?’ I said, ‘Yeah sarge. Should I call the station house or something?’ The sergeant looked at me for a second and then said, ‘You dumb rookie hump. You don’t call the station house on a ten-two. When you get a ten-two, you return to the station house, pronto.’

  “So I ran back to the station house and reported to the front desk. The sergeant there is smiling and holding up my license plate. I said, ‘Oh, did it fall off the car or something?’ The sergeant said, ‘No. And don’t get excited now, Winter, but, ah … this is all that’s left of your car.’ I was stunned. The sergeant had to put a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing.

  “It turned out a drunk cab driver had smashed into my car on One Hundred and Nineteenth and Park, pushing it up against a pole. The car looked like an accordion when I got there. It was a beautiful car too—a 1972 Grand Torino with white leather interior and a midnight blue paint job. The car had a 351 Cleveland, a four-barrel engine. I couldn’t believe it. My first day on the job and some drunk turned my car into an accordion. I cried.

  “I made my first collar in October on a burglary. It was a radio run—we responded to a call over the radio. We came up the street with our lights off and arriv
ed at a warehouse on the corner of East One Hundred and Eleventh Street and Second Avenue. When we got there a sixteen-year-old kid was swinging down off the roof on a rope with a knapsack full of radios. He looked like Batman. He hit the ground and we arrested him. He was real surprised to see us.

  “Later I took him to the old Central Booking at One Hundred Centre Street. In those days you stayed with the suspect right up until his arraignment. The whole process could take thirty hours. Anyway, in the hallways, there were all these empty lounge chairs. Some had little pieces of cardboard tacked to them with names on them. I thought they were police department property, so I fell asleep in one. Finally I wake up and there is this oldtimer kicking at my feet, yelling, ‘Get the fuck out of my chair.’ By the next week I had my own lounge chair. I used to keep it in my car and then grab it out of the trunk whenever I made a collar. I did a lot of sleeping on the job back then.

  “I didn’t see much corruption in the beginning. The biggest thing was that we’d go into a store and get a free sandwich. I didn’t think that was wrong. Probably the worst thing I saw was two days before Thanksgiving in 1974—my second month on the job. The city pulled a tractorload of turkeys into the precinct one night and parked it on the corner of Park Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. They were going to give the turkeys away to the poor in the morning. I got the foot post guarding the turkeys, to make sure nobody broke in and stole them. But throughout the night I got sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and borough commanders driving up to the truck and demanding free turkeys. I’m just out of the academy. The Supervisors are yelling, ‘Hey kid, let me have a turkey.’ What am I supposed to do? Say, ‘Excuse me, Captain, but you can’t have a turkey?’ No, I give him the turkey. If I don’t give him a turkey, my ass is grass.

  “But that was a good job too, because the next day when we started giving out the turkeys, a line formed. It was good. Blacks, Hispanics, whites, all the poor people from the neighborhood were coming out to get a free turkey. One of us was supposed to hand a person a bag of potatoes while the other guy handed him a turkey. But it got crazy. People started grabbing us and pulling us off the truck, just to get another turkey. And then they’d sell them. On the next corner there were guys selling frozen turkeys for five dollars apiece. So we threw them out at the people, yelling ‘Here’s a turkey for a turkey, here’s a turkey for another turkey.’