Buddy Boys (24 page)

“Hey, why are we dealing with Roy?” Henry said to Gallagher the next day. “Roy gives us half price. I got a guy that lives out by me who gives a much better cut. If you give Roy four thousand dollars worth of coke and he gives us two thousand dollars to split four ways, he's making two thousand on us. For what? We're taking the chances. I'll get us three thousand next time.”

“Do you trust him, Buddy Boy?” Gallagher asked.

“Oh yeah. He's very good. I've used him before.”

“We hit another place the next night, June eighteenth. We put out ‘Buddy Boy, Buddy Bob' over the radio, and met in the park. Gallagher had scouted out Two-sixty-one Buffalo Avenue. ‘It looks good. We should pay them a visit.' So we did. We followed him down the block and ran into the building. We hit one apartment and found nothing. Then we spotted two guys in the hallway who looked pretty suspicious, like they were hiding from us or something. O'Regan went over to the other side of the building. I was talking to a lady who told me about how three guys upstairs had threatened to shoot her. And as I look out the window, I see a guy shimmying down the ledge. He swings through the window into the apartment on a telephone wire and I grab him. I can hear the cops upstairs, right above me, kicking in the apartment door, so I know I've got the guy we're looking for. He says, ‘Hey, come on, we can work out a deal.' I said, ‘Fuck you. Come on, you're coming back up there with me.' On the way upstairs, he told me where the stash was. ‘Look, the stuff is kept inside, underneath the rug, underneath the floorboards, there's a trap door.' I bring him into the apartment and everyone is looking at me. They haven't found anything. I said, ‘The stuff is underneath the rug.' The guy wasn't lying. I pulled the rug up, lifted a floor board, stuck my hand in, and came up with one hundred seven dollars in cash and eight hundred dollars worth of marijuana.

“So as we're walking out, the guy says, ‘Hey look, you know, can you take care of me? Can you give me a couple of dollars?' O'Regan said, ‘Yeah, give the kid a couple of dollars,' and he grabbed twenty dollars from me and handed it to the kid. Then the guy said, ‘Can you give me some smoke too?' He was wearing army pants. O'Regan lifted up a flap on the kid's pants and put some herb in his pocket. Then the kid says, ‘You can't just leave me here. They'll kick my ass. You gotta walk me out like you're locking me up. I won't come back.' So O'Regan cuffed him. And then he says, ‘Look, you gotta slap me around a little and make it look real.' So we walked him downstairs and by that time a little crowd had formed. As we walked him outside, Brian yelled, ‘Hey scumbag, get in the back of the car.' We smacked him in the back of the head a couple of times, threw him in the back, and O'Regan and Gallagher took off.

“Tony and I drove back to the park. Within ten minutes Gallagher and O'Regan pulled up laughing, ‘Oh, he must have got away. We don't know where he went.' We split the money up and then Gallagher agreed to give me the marijuana to sell. ‘We'll give your guy a shot. Let's see how fast he comes back with the money.' Later that night I turned the drugs into IAD.”

On June 21, Gallagher paid Henry one thousand dollars for the crack they had seized in the Albany Avenue raid. Henry turned the money into Internal Affairs and passed Gallagher the four hundred dollars he had gotten from IAD for the marijuana they had stolen from Buffalo Avenue. That same day Brian told Henry he had spotted a new drug location on Classon Avenue. The following morning Brian called Henry to tell him they had hit the Classon Avenue address, stealing seventy dollars and fifty-six vials of crack. There was also the matter of having stolen two thousand dollars off a fire escape in another drug dealer's apartment. Brian asked Henry to deal the crack through his friend. Henry turned in the crack and a tape of his phone conversation with O'Regan to an investigator. A day later, the investigator told him, “That conversation you had with O'Regan on the phone was great. Good work. Keep it up.”

A week or so later, Herbie Woods put out the word on the street that he wanted to see Blondie. Henry arrived at the man's home on St. Johns Place and got a one thousand dollar bribe to watch over Herbie's bustling drug business.

“Buy yourself a cup of coffee,” Herbie said.

“Pretty fucking expensive cup of coffee,” Tony answered, the tape still rolling.

A few days later one of the investigators took Tony aside at a meeting and said, “Your remark about the coffee was very unprofessional.”

Shortly before midnight on July 1, O'Regan walked over to Henry's truck and placed an envelope containing seventy-two vials of crack in the glove compartment.

“You want it in here, Hank?”

“Yeah.”

Gallagher had written the notation “52/10” and “19/5” on the outside of the package. He slid into the truck next to Henry and talked about the upcoming Statue of Liberty celebration, which would culminate with the relighting of the lady's famous torch on the Fourth of July.

“So what's here?” Henry asked.

“Fifty-two dimes, and nineteen nickels.”

“What does that come too?”

“Six hundred and fifteen.”

“So figure you're gonna get four hundred dollars.”

“Okay,” Gallagher said. “If you get four hundred dollars, then one hundred is yours right off the top.”

“Why would you give me one hundred dollars when you can take it to Roy and get three hundred?”

“Because we're giving it to you to get rid of it.”

“I'm doing it as a friend. Keep your money.”

Gallagher reached across the seat and gave him a playful slap on the back of the neck.

“Listen scum,” he said. “Just see how you do. It's a small package. See if he can handle it. He's your boy, you're dealing with him. He's not our man.”

Twenty-five minutes later, Henry sat huddled over his Olympus recorder with Detective James O'Brien and Sergeant Bernadette Bennett, two investigators assigned to the Internal Affairs Division.

“Did you record any conversations during your tour of duty,” O'Brien asked, the tape rolling again.

“Yes I did.”

“And who were those conversations with?”

“I had conversations with Police Officer O'Regan and Police Officer Gallagher.”

“Did you receive anything tonight?”

“Yes I did.”

“What did you receive?”

“I received a quantity of crack from Police Officer O'Regan and a piece of paper stating the quantity was fifty-two dimes and nineteen nickels.”

“Where did this occur?”

“This occurred outside the precinct. I was in my truck leaving to go home and they came up. Police Officer O'Regan put the envelope in my glove compartment.”

“Was Officer O'Regan in uniform at that time?”

“Yes he was.”

“Have you inspected the package?”

“Yes I did.”

“And what do you know it to be?”

“I know it to be crack,” Henry said firmly.

On the morning of July 4, after taking two days off, Henry returned to the 77th Precinct station house, meeting Gallagher as he came into the muster room. Henry clicked his tape recorder on.

“Hello, Officer Gallagher. How are you?”

“What have you got for me?”

Henry pulled out a roll of hundred-dollar bills from his pocket. He snapped four bills off the roll, counting out loud as he laid the money into Gallagher's outstretched hand.

“One. Two. Three. Four. Four hundred dollars, Buddy Boy.”

Gallagher handed Henry back one of the bills.

“No, I don't want it.”

“Take it, take it,” Gallagher demanded, stuffing the money into Henry's shirt pocket.

“You work, you stick your neck out, you get paid,” O'Regan added.

Then Gallagher handed Henry another package, explaining that they had hit a drug location at 1224 Lincoln Place—a crack den run by their old friend Roy.

“You take this,” Gallagher said. “We can't take it to Roy. Someone may have recognized us.”

Later that night Henry met Gallagher outside a United Parcel Service warehouse in Queens, where he was moonlighting as a security guard. Gallagher had just spent an eight-hour tour strolling the Brooklyn docks, watching the largest fireworks display in the city's history. He complained that his feet were blistered.

“Waste of time,” he remarked.

Henry opened the package of drugs Gallagher and O'Regan had given him earlier in the night.

“I haven't seen coke like this around in a long time,” he said, his recorder rolling. The men counted out dozens of tins of cocaine and at least seventy-one vials of crack, approximately fourteen hundred dollars worth of stolen drugs.

“Figure on getting about nine hundred dollars.”

“I trust you,” Gallagher said, walking away.

“You trust me?” Henry Winter said. “I love you.”

The prosecutors assigned to handle the 77th Precinct indictments were pleased. By mid-July, they figured they had enough evidence on Gallagher and O'Regan to send them off to jail for years, if not for life. But there were problems with the investigation. Special Prosecutor Charles J. Hynes and his chief aides told Henry and Tony that they wanted to catch some of the precinct's black cops as well as other crooked cops working elite details. It was decided that the investigators would split the cops up, moving Henry upstairs into the Anticrime detail and keeping Magno on patrol.

There were problems with Tony, the investigators had decided. He had a bad attitude. He seemed uninterested in their corruption probe. He still regularly turned in blank tapes. Compared to Henry, Magno wasn't pulling his own weight.

“I went on vacation for two weeks and came back at the end of July. Henry was in Anticrime, doing his thing. I guess he was doing pretty well. We used to have these meetings at Creedmoor Hospital—the nut house. It was crazy. We had to come in on our days off and meet secretly in the basement there. I didn't mind it at first when they split us up. It had become, well, like a job. But when they separated us, all of a sudden the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. Henry and I had to set up hand signals. If I looked at him and he was twirling his fingers, that meant he was rolling tape on the guy he was talking to. I stayed away when I saw that. We didn't want to trip over our own words somewhere down the line.

“Originally they wanted me to go into Anticrime with Henry. But I told them that the guys know I've always turned down Anticrime before and couldn't take it now. It wouldn't look right. So I stayed on patrol. I come back from vacation and I'm refreshed. I said, ‘Fuck, if anything comes along, I'll tape it.' I was worried about entrapment. But nothing came along. I wasn't getting any incriminating conversations. I was going onto steady midnights in August and I knew the shit would fly then because I'd be back with Gallagher and O'Regan. The midnights were always wild. I put out feelers, telling the guys I would be going on steady midnights, and all of sudden there's an emergency. I get a phone call at home. They want to see me at Creedmoor. Right away.

“So I walk in and there's the captain, along with Marty Hershey, the top lawyer from Hynes's office. I sat down and they gave me donuts and coffee. All of a sudden, Marty Hershey yells, ‘All right. Let's stop the bullshit.' The calm in the room was gone. Hershey yells, ‘Tony, we're fed up with your act.' Now I'm shitting. I don't know what they're talking about. I thought I was doing exactly what they wanted me to do. And then Hershey starts ripping into me, ‘You're full of shit. You ain't doing nothing.' I said, ‘What do you mean I ain't doing nothing? Look at all the things me and Henry did.' They said, ‘Never mind what you and Henry did. We can use Henry's testimony without you.' I was really scared, ‘What do you mean? It was me and him working together.' Hershey says, ‘Yeah, but Henry held the recorder.'

“Then they got really serious. ‘You're out. I've got a sealed indictment on you and I'm going to open it up this week.' I started to plead with him. I'm shaking. I'm scared. Hershey said, ‘We're going to lock you up. We're going to prosecute you to the full letter of the law.' I didn't know what to say, nobody there backed me up. I don't know if they did it to light a spark plug in my ass or what, but he made a mistake because Hershey turned me the wrong fucking way.

“They gave me a week to straighten out. I was pissed. I went home and started to punch the walls. And I was sick. I went to the bathroom three and four times a night. As soon as I walked in the precinct now I had to head for the toilet. I couldn't take the pressure. I got stuff on the tapes. I was giving them their property. And all I could think of was what that fucking Marty Hershey had said. ‘We're going to lock you up.' I didn't know where to turn. I didn't know who to talk to anymore. I used to meet the IAD guys after a tour crying like a fucking baby at times. I used to punch the back seats of the cars and curse them. I drove them crazy. ‘You fucking motherfuckers,' I cursed. ‘Lock me up right now. Nobody gives a fuck about me. Take me to Central Booking right now. Fuck you, fuck them, fuck everybody.' I even talked to the bosses like that. I didn't care who I was talking to. And then one day they sent Lieutenant Andy Panico out to see me. I told him, ‘Listen, don't give me no fucking bullshit, Andy. I'll take you outside this car and I'll beat your fucking brains in right here in the fucking street.' I went crazy. He says, ‘Don't talk like that. Look, you gotta still think of your wife.' ‘Don't give me that bullshit about my wife. I don't want to hear that anymore. That Jew motherfucker was going to lock me up.' I got racial and everything. I said whatever I could think of. This went on for about two weeks. I was going loony. I just couldn't get it out of my head. Nobody came on my side when Hershey came after me. Nobody.”