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  In an interview with a newspaper reporter years later, Heron even admitted shooting an unarmed man in a Manhattan park during an argument over heroin. He dropped a knife at the fallen man’s side before police arrived. The arriving cops then charged the victim with attempted murder. Eventually Heron—nicknamed Peter Heroin by the cops in the 77th Precinct—was arrested for attempted murder. He defended himself saying the stress he experienced in the precinct had led him to use drugs and had ruined his life. In earlier years, Heron had taken Brian O’Regan and Henry Winter aside and warned them that a routine of mayhem and misery could change one’s perspective on life.

  “Get out of this precinct while you still can,” he advised them.

  “Pete Heroin and I worked together for awhile when I first got there. One night we were over by the Albany projects and a robbery went down. A guy with a gun had just ripped a lady off. The guy took off into a building and Pete and I ran after him. He ran to the roof and we could hear him, he was always like one landing ahead of us. When we got there we couldn’t find him. We’re the only people on the roof. I go to check the other entrance and it’s locked. Where the hell could this guy go? We searched the top of the air shafts. We checked the elevator shaft. Nothing. Finally Pete spotted the guy’s fingers. He was hanging over the side of the building waiting for us to leave, but before we could get there he lost his grip. He had been hanging there for at least five minutes. It’s a standard ghetto trick, but he fell.

  “We both thought the same thing. Fort Apache. The Bronx. We could see the headline: ‘Cops hurl suspect to death from rooftop.’ There’s no witnesses. We’re both going to jail. We ran downstairs and found the guy moaning in the courtyard. He hit a tree on the way down, breaking his fall. A crowd gathered and somebody was already yelling, ‘You cops threw him off the roof. We saw you do it.’ We rushed the guy off to Kings County Hospital. He came to in the emergency room. We didn’t know if he was going to make it. A doctor asked him, ‘What happened up there?’ And the guy said, ‘I lost my grip. I fell.’ Then he blacked out. But we were all right—he had told the truth. Everybody heard him. But imagine if he comes to and makes a dying declaration, something like, ‘The cops pushed me off the roof.’ The funny thing was that we never found the mutt’s gun. I think somebody stole it off him when he hit the ground.

  “Pete and I were on another robbery in the Albany projects. I arrived on the scene as the backup. I saw a guy come running around the corner with Pete chasing him in a patrol car, driving his car like a cowboy with his gun out the window. Pow. Pow. He’s shooting away. Pete dropped the guy with a shot in the ass.

  “I did a lot of strange things in my time. But Pete, he was the weirdest of the weird. Like I wasn’t afraid of anybody. If I had a job to do, I’d do the job. If a guy was six-foot-six and weighed 260 pounds, I would take the diplomatic approach. I knew I couldn’t take him out right away, so I’d bullshit with him a little, bullshit with him a little more, try to get behind him, and then cold-cock the son of a bitch with my jack or nightstick. Pete would go right up to them. He was an ex-Marine. Every situation was Tripoli to him. He would go face-to-face with them. And lose. Get his ass kicked. He’s the type of guy who would say, ‘Give me a ten—eighty-five [backup] with two units and call an ambulance.’ And then he’d walk in on the guy and fight him. Instead of doing it the sneaky way, trying to get behind him, and hit him with the stick or something, Pete would just call in the troops, call in the medics, drop the radio, and go to war.”

  Even a casual visitor to the 77th Precinct could see there was something inherently wrong at the station house. In a neighborhood where cops were literally stepping over dead bodies and running into robbers on the streets, the most that anybody in a position of authority wanted to know was why the number of traffic summonses was down and the precinct’s overtime up. The bigger questions went unresolved.

  “I believe crimes are being committed by Members of the Service in uniform,” wrote Captain Donald T. Bishop, the precinct commander, to his zone commander shortly after taking over the 77th Precinct in February 1982. “There’s a good possibility that late tour personnel are committing larcenies at the scenes of past burglaries.”

  Bishop’s warning, like those of a previous zone commander, went unheeded. Police officers assigned to the precinct sensed that most of their supervisors simply wanted to get their time in and move on before a major scandal broke. The department seemed to care little about the 77th and even less about what cops did in the neighborhood. Henry Winter was about to discover that a cop in the 77th Precinct could pretty much do whatever the hell he or she wanted.

  Henry Winter got in trouble with his superiors shortly after he arrived. Oddly enough, he got “jammed up”—a cop phrase meaning in trouble—after he caught a bad guy who was supposed to be a good guy, driving a stolen car through his sector.

  One night in 1981, Henry was teamed up in a squad car with a rookie, patrolling a section near Eastern Parkway, when he looked over to his right and saw a black man with wild-looking hair and a ragged shirt driving a beat-up Ford. Henry studied the man’s car for a moment and then spotted a portable radio on the dashboard.

  “Hey,” Henry said to his partner, “that looks like a police department radio.”

  Edging up, Henry finally got close enough to read the insignia on the side of the radio—NYPD. Henry was excited. This guy couldn’t be a cop.

  “Look, I bet we got a member of the Black Liberation Army here with a stolen radio,” Henry said. This imaginary scenario wasn’t so wild. Recently, two members of the black supremacist gang had jumped from a van on a quiet Queens street and fired more than twenty shots at two police officers trapped in their radio car. Neither cop had time to get his gun out of his holster—one was killed, the other critically wounded. The surviving cop’s father had a heart attack in the hospital and later died. The shooters, although later captured and convicted of murder, were still at large.

  The light turned green and the driver took off. Henry followed, running the man’s plate over his own portable radio. Within seconds the plate came back as a ten-sixteen (stolen). Henry reported his location over the air, hit the siren, and started to give chase. He felt good, too, figuring he was chasing a fugitive with a stolen police radio in a stolen car. He was going to be praised as one alert cop when this was all over.

  Henry continued chasing the car and finally pulled it over at an intersection. He and the driver got out of their cars at the same time. Henry looked at him and felt sick. They were both wearing standard issue police trousers, shoes, and gun belts. Henry had caught a cop.

  “What are you doing?” the driver yelled. “I’m a cop.”

  “What do you mean you’re a cop?” Henry yelled back. “Show me something.”

  Henry was mortified. Any second now there would be a half-dozen other police cars converging on the scene.

  “What are you doing in a stolen car?”

  “Ah, the car’s not stolen, man.”

  “Don’t bullshit me. I just ran the fucking plate. You’re in a stolen car.”

  Henry looked to his left and saw the radio cars closing in, their lights flashing. He had to make a quick decision, a fateful decision. Should he or shouldn’t he rat on a fellow cop?

  “All right. Get the fuck out of here now.”

  The cop sped off just as the first radio car arrived, carrying a sergeant, no less.

  “What happened?” the sergeant asked. “I thought you had a stolen car.”

  Henry tried a smile. “No. I must have put over the wrong plate because he’s got papers for that car and everything. I just let him go.”

  “All right,” the sergeant said.

  But things were not all right. The sergeant had caught a glimpse of the fleeing car and had written down a plate number just as he arrived. He called the dispatcher to ask what plate number Henry Winter had given over the air. The two numbers matched. Henry was in a lot of trouble.

  They took h
is gun and shield away pending an in-house investigation. But later that night, following a meeting in the precinct captain’s office between two borough commanders and members of the Field Internal Affairs Unit, they were given back. Henry insisted he had made a mistake, that he had put over one number and seen another on the car and registration. Essentially the department decided to look the other way. Henry was given an official reprimand; a yellow sheet was placed in his file.

  The cop whom Henry let get away was assigned to watch prisoners at Kings County Hospital. He had taken an impounded car from the parking lot of his precinct during his break and was on his way to see his girlfriend when Henry pulled him over. As punishment for unauthorized use of the car, the cop was transferred to another precinct and given a foot post.

  There was no reason to transfer Henry Winter anywhere else. He was already assigned to a dumping ground. Only now Henry wasn’t going to get out of the 77th Precinct. Ever.

  Originally, Henry had been dumped in the 77th because the department didn’t know what to do with a cop everybody thought was a rat. Now he was anchored to the Alamo, a yellow flag sitting in his personnel folder, all because he had refused to turn in another cop. Life was strange, Henry Winter concluded.

  “I never really did much in the beginning. Maybe little things. You know, if you go into a burglarized apartment and there’s money left, you put it in your pocket. But then I worked with Gallagher—we called him Junior—one night in 1983 and I got started.

  “At that time, Gallagher was looking for a partner. His partner Artie had left the precinct to join the highway patrol, and Junior was auditioning for his replacement. He was the precinct union rep. He had his ear to the ground. Gallagher always knew what was going on. He asked me to be his partner but I just didn’t want to work steady midnights—I couldn’t take working from midnight to eight in the morning. But Junior told me, ‘Midnights are good. Get any days off you want. Nobody is out here watching you.’

  “We had stopped outside a place on Rogers Avenue—there was a social club upstairs. Junior said he had to go and see this guy Robbie for a minute. I said, ‘All right. I’ll stay down here with the car.’ Junior insisted, ‘Come up.’ So I went up to the club with him.

  “It was a Jamaican club. Junior was talking to a guy off on the side and having a beer. So I ordered a beer just to be sociable. Then after a few minutes, we went back to the car. Gallagher handed me a ten dollar bill as we pulled away. I said, ‘What’s this for, Junior?’ He replied, ‘This is from my friend. Every once in a while he gives me a couple of dollars just to stop up and say hello. I give half to the guy I’m with.’ I said, ‘Oh, all right, thank you.’ I didn’t even think about it. It was like found money. You really weren’t stealing money from anybody. I’m used to working on the back of a garbage truck. Everybody pays a garbage man.

  “Later on that night, we were on patrol up on Fulton Street. We spotted a guy with a paper bag, standing in a vestibule. The guy saw us, did a double take, and dropped the bag. Boom. We got out and grabbed the guy and put him in the car. There was a pound of smoke, marijuana, in the bag. Junior asked the guy for identification, and he handed over his wallet, with a couple of hundred bucks in it. We never even looked at the guy’s identification. He could have been Son of Sam for all we knew. Junior kept looking in the wallet and then back at the guy. Then Junior told him, ‘You know, there’s a lot of smoke here in this bag, pal. You could go to jail.’ Back and forth. I looked at Gallagher and said, ‘Ah, come on, we’ll take him in.’ Gallagher said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute.’ So at the end of the story, what happens is that Gallagher takes money out of the guy’s wallet and then hands it back to him. Then he says, ‘This one is on us.’

  The guy was overappreciative. Super-appreciative, in fact. We even drove him home. We drove him home, let him out of the car, and that was it. I think we split fifty dollars apiece. We left the guy some money. Junior took the smoke. He said, ‘I’ll take care of this.’ I wasn’t hip to what was going on back then with the drugs. Today I know what he did, though. He resold the drugs to a drug dealer in the neighborhood. But back then, Gallagher just held up the bag and said, ‘I’ll get rid of this. Don’t you worry about this, buddy boy.’”

  It can be argued that never in the history of the New York City Police Department has there been a precinct quite like the 77th. Certainly there has never been a more raucous locker room than the one in the bowels of the Utica Avenue building—a large but comfortable room roamed by misfits and supervised by uninterested sergeants.

  The locker room and an adjoining lounge were alternately used by some of the two hundred-odd cops in the precinct as a gambling den, target range, bar, and flop house. It has also been said that on any given day there were more cash transactions made in the 77th Precinct locker room than in any Bedford-Stuyvesant bank.

  The most legendary figure ever to work the room was an aging veteran named Johnny Massar, a man everybody loved and respected as a father figure. A thirty-five-year veteran of the force, Massar was one of a dying breed, a dinosaur who had worked the streets for twenty-five years and now rarely left the precinct grounds. A beer drinker without peer, Massar served as the precinct’s gas attendant, cell attendant, and assistant station house officer until finally leaving the department in 1985 on a medical disability. His principle responsibility was to keep a ready supply of cold beer on hand.

  Throughout the years Massar distinguished himself in a series of astonishing incidents. One day he was given the assignment to fill in for a sergeant’s regular driver. Massar proceeded out to the garage and began warming up the sergeant’s car. Somehow he put the car in reverse and then stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake. The car hit a metal pole and flew through a set of steel doors, stopping in the precinct’s vestibule. Massar is said to have shut off the engine, left the car, and walked calmly into the captain’s office. Then he saluted and said, “I just got into a car accident, sir, and I want you to know I wasn’t even drinking.”

  Young cops were particularly fond of blackening out the white numbers on Massar’s combination lock with a marking pen. As he squinted at his lock, the young cops would yell, “Why don’t you go home and get some new glasses, you old fart?”

  On one occasion he finally decided to end his frustration. He pulled his service revolver and shot the lock off his locker, and then shot the locks off several others as well.

  On another night, Massar took exception to the volume level of a radio in the lounge. He asked the young cops to turn the music down, insulting their taste in rock and roll. A young cop responded by cranking the volume even higher.

  “I’ll show you,” Massar suddenly yelled, pulling his gun. “Take that!”

  He fired a single shot into the heart of the radio, knocking it from a shelf to the floor. To his amazement, the radio continued to play.

  “You can’t kill rock and roll,” the young cops shrieked. “Rock and roll lives!”

  On the nights when he wasn’t conducting gun battles in the lounge, the immensely popular Massar spent most of his tour drinking and cooping—sleeping on duty. When he worked as a cell attendant, he did more drinking than guarding.

  One night, after Massar pounded down several cans of beer, police officers found him asleep in the lounge on a bench borrowed from Prospect Park. Ordinarily, the cops might have seen fit simply to wrap him up from head to foot in toilet paper, as was their custom. But on this particular night, the cops harassed him to the point where he felt compelled to check on his prisoners.

  Massar entered the cell area and walked to the end of the row by himself. Then he walked back out of the room—his face the color of chalk.

  “What’s wrong, Johnny?”

  Massar could not bring himself to speak. “Ahh,” he said, pointing to the cell.

  Henry Winter and two other cops rushed past Massar into the cells, discovering a young Hispanic man hanging from the door by his shirt. The man’s lips were blue and his fac
e contorted. As Massar looked on in silent shock, Henry grabbed hold of the man’s waist and lifted him up while another cop cut the prisoner down.

  Feeling a slight pulse in the man’s wrist, Winter and the other cops worked frantically to revive him. They poured ammonia on his clothes and slapped his face. Finally, after a minute or two, he stirred.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.”

  Henry and the other cops sat back, breathing a sigh of relief.

  “He’s gonna make it, Johnny. Relax.”

  At this point Massar emerged from his nearly catatonic state and rushed towards the prisoner. “I’ll teach you to try and kill yourself on my watch!” he screamed while beating the man. “I’ll kill you. Nobody dies on my watch.”

  “Going to one of our outings was like taking your life into your own hands. I went to two functions in the Seven-Seven and both of them blew up. The first one was the precinct picnic in 1983 at Eisenhower Park. They told us don’t ever come back. We even had to pay damages. The problem was the tug-of-war. One of the guys tied his end of the rope to a water fountain. All of a sudden the water fountain is down, we’ve broken the pipe, and there’s water all over the place. We’re laughing like hell, rolling over. We’re all stewed. Even the wives are looped. Then as we’re leaving, I see one cop coming along with a Harley Davidson and another cop coming right at him with a brand new Mustang. They’re both drunk. Boom. The guy hits the Mustang broadside, the other guy’s gun comes out. One cop is threatening to blow the other cop away. Shots fired in the air. I said, ‘Goodbye.’

  “The other outing was a fishing trip. I’m in my boat, and a cop named Billy is in his boat with another guy named Jimmy. We were fishing for fluke off Riis Park. We were drifting, three boats together. These guys over here are drinking, these guys over there are drinking, I’m not drinking because when I fish, I don’t usually drink. All of a sudden, I pulled a nice fluke up out of the water. Boom. Boom. Boom. They’re shooting. I’m here with my boat, I got a fluke out of the water and there’s this cop trying to shoot the fish off my line. I look at him, ‘What are you, fucking crazy?’ Boom. Boom. Boom. I dropped my rod. Both guys go after my pole. One guy gets his outriggers tangled up with my line, loses his outriggers, his engine floods. It’s pure insanity. I said, ‘So long.’