Buddy Boys

by Mike McAlary

  “If you don’t cooperate with us, I will personally prosecute you to the full letter of the law. I’ll make the terms run consecutively. You’ll be doing nine years.”

  Tony’s hands and knees shook. An investigator handed him a filtered cigarette. Tony snapped off the filter and lit the remainder of the sawed-off cigarette, puffing madly as he smoked.

  “Can I talk to my partner?”

  “Yeah, you can talk to your partner,” a lawyer said. “We want you both to make the same decision. And whichever way you go, that’s the way things will go.”

  The investigators led Tony to an adjoining room where he was joined by his partner. Hynes had already told Henry that he might not have to go to jail if he agreed to cooperate.

  “We’re going to leave you two alone to talk things over,” an investigator said.

  The two men sat across a table from each other, smoking cigarettes, trying to make a decision that would determine their own fate and ultimately the fates of nearly twenty-five other New York City cops.

  “Henry, what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know. It’s up to you. You’re senior man.”

  “Look Henry, I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Well I don’t want to go to jail either.”

  “Do we cooperate with them, Henry?”

  “I don’t know. Do we?”

  And that’s the way it went—Tony asking questions and Henry repeating them.

  “I want to go home tonight, Henry. Do you want to go home tonight?”

  “Yeah, I want to go home too.”

  “Then I guess we have no choice, Henry. I guess we’ll cooperate.”

  “Whatever you want to do. You want to cooperate, Tony, we’ll cooperate.”

  “We got to do this together all the way, Henry. Not that bullshit where they stick you in one room and me in another room and pretty soon we’re going at each other.”

  “No,” Henry agreed. “We got to stay together through the whole thing.”

  “Okay. Then we’ll do it that way. As long as we’re together, then I don’t give a fuck.”

  Henry and Tony returned to the conference room and sat down at the table. There wasn’t an available seat in the room. Hynes sat on the opposite side of the table, his shirt open and his tie askew. Henry remembered that the prosecutor’s hands were folded. Tony would recall that Hynes looked priestly.

  “We agree to cooperate with you,” Henry said.

  “We’ll do whatever you want,” Tony added.

  Hynes stood up.

  “Okay,” he said firmly. “Now I want names.”

  Henry and Tony were startled. They were being asked to give up other cops, to identify other cops as criminals, right now. Tonight.

  At that point, Tony spotted two piles of photographs stacked on the table across from him. An investigator started thumbing through a smaller pile of pictures.

  “William Gallagher.” He held up the cop’s picture for everyone to see. “What does he do?”

  “He would take things,” Tony began.

  “Brian O’Regan. What would he do?”

  “He will steal things,” Henry volunteered.

  “Robert Rathbun. What would he do?”

  “He’ll steal drugs.” Henry and Tony both agreed.

  “Crystal Spivey. What does she do?”

  “I think she does drugs,” Henry said.

  And so it went, with the prosecutors producing photographs and asking questions and the frightened cops giving up information. They worked through the smaller pile and then into the bigger pile. Winter and Magno identified approximately twenty-five of their fellow officers as men and women who would rob drug dealers, break into apartments, take money from dead bodies and use drugs. They spent the better part of an hour identifying their fellow police officers as robbers, drug users and car thieves.

  At one point a lawyer left the room to get an even larger stack of photographs. One by one, the police officers offered information—either good or bad—on every cop in their precinct, roughly two hundred people.

  After Henry and Tony had finished identifying the suspected criminals in the 77th Precinct, the investigators filed out of the room taking their photographs with them. Oddly, neither man felt shamed by what he had just done. The words had come from their lips freely.

  “Do you realize what we just did?” Tony asked.

  “What else could we do?” Henry said. “I ain’t going to jail.”

  “Me neither. Let’s just tell them what they want and get the hell out of here.”

  A moment later Hynes reentered the room with his aides. He offered his hand to Henry and Tony. The three men shook hands.

  “We have a deal,” Hynes said, smiling.

  Henry and Tony remained expressionless. They were going home. Later Hynes explained that the men had been “unarrested.” He told them they would have to wear recording devices during the investigation and meet secretly with Internal Affairs operatives in the middle of the night. They were given a special telephone number to call day or night, something called a “hello number.” An investigator manned the phone twenty-four hours a day during the investigation, answering incoming calls with a simple, “Hello.” If discovered, the telephone number could not be traced.

  “You can’t tell anybody about this investigation,” an aide said. “That means friends, family, and other cops. You can’t even tell your wife about this unless you can trust her. If word gets out, all bets are off. You go to jail.”

  Henry and Tony were advised that they would have to testify in court against the cops they caught stealing, probably some of their friends. Later, they would be asked to catalogue every crime they had ever committed. They would be given full immunity for all past crimes but murder.

  In exchange for their cooperation, Henry Winter and Tony Magno were given a simple deal.

  “No jail,” Hynes promised. “No jail time whatsoever.”

  An investigator slid Henry’s gun and shield to him across the table. The officers were still on the job. They were told to report to work in the 77th Precinct on Monday morning.

  They left the building shortly after 11 P.M. Henry was driven back to his truck, which was parked at a motel near John F. Kennedy Airport. All of his fishing gear had been taken off the boat and packed into the truck. The only things missing were the three bluefish. Someone had stolen the day’s catch.

  Still shaking, his body drained of emotion, Henry started to drive home. He pulled off to the side of the Belt Parkway and cried. Then he took out his gun. He stared into the barrel for a moment, pondering what he had just done and what he would have to do in order to stay out of jail.

  But Henry Winter could not shoot himself. He wasn’t strong—or weak—enough for that. He was just dazed, an unfeeling hollow man. He would never again be the same cop who had left his house nearly sixteen hours earlier in hopes of catching some fish and sun.

  The fisherman went home and made up a story. He didn’t want his wife to know her husband was a rat, at least not yet. So he fabricated a tale about a broken propeller and being marooned at sea for eight hours. Betsy believed him.

  Henry Winter was already starting to live a lie.

  A police officer assigned to the Internal Affairs Division, Al Pignataro, drove Tony Magno back to Midwood.

  “There are guys that have been in worse positions than you,” Pignataro said. “You’ll be okay.”

  But Tony wasn’t even thinking about what he had just done. He was thinking about what he was going to tell his wife.

  He knew he was in trouble the minute he walked in the door. Marianne was standing by the kitchen with a drink in her hand. And Marianne is not a drinker.

  “You no good son-of-a-bitch,” she said, figuring that her husband had been out partying somewhere with his partner for the last six hours.

  “Please,” Tony whispered. “Wait until the kids go to bed.”

  “If you want to be with Henry Winter so much, w
hy don’t you just leave us and move in with him?” Marianne yelled.

  “Look, I’m in trouble.”

  Marianne hesitated, pausing in midcurse.

  “Marianne, I’m in a lot of trouble. Wait until the kids go to sleep.”

  He walked to the refrigerator and grabbed a beer.

  “Come on, honey,” Tony said. “Help me hang another piece of wallpaper.”

  Later that night the couple sat on their bed. Suddenly it seemed huge. Marianne sat on one corner waiting to listen, and Tony sat on the other corner waiting to talk. He didn’t know how to explain without making himself sound like a crook. He did not want to lose his wife now.

  “Look,” he began. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I was arrested.”

  “What?”

  “Technically I was arrested. But not really arrested.”

  In time, Tony revealed everything, explaining how he had accepted bribes, broken into apartments, and robbed drug dealers. He just sat on the corner of his bed, telling his wife that the cop she had married was really a thief. Marianne sat smoking a cigarette, pretending that her heart wasn’t really broken. But the tears gave her away.

  “Didn’t you think of me and the kids?”

  “It may sound crazy, but I was thinking of you and the kids.”

  Marianne looked at her husband like he was crazy.

  “How can you say that?” she said, her voice cracking. “You were thinking of me and the kids when you were taking money from a drug dealer?”

  “Yeah. Remember the money squabbles we used to have all the time? You were always running short of cash? You were reaching into the house money?”

  “So what? Did I ask you for extra money? Did I need extra money? I didn’t care about money. We were happier when we had nothing. I should have realized that something was going on in the last couple of years. You changed. There was something different about you. I don’t know what it was. But I knew it had something to do with him.”

  “I’m not gonna blame Henry. It’s not his fault. He didn’t put a gun to my head. But now there are a couple of things I can do. I can go to jail or I can cooperate. If I cooperate some guys could go to jail. Guys you know. What do you want me to do?”

  Marianne looked at her husband like he had six heads—all of them empty.

  “What do you mean, what do I want you to do? I’m not going to tell you to go against your friends. But I don’t want you to go to jail. I don’t want you to do anything. This is something you got to live with. These are your friends. You’ve got to live with this the rest of your life.”

  “I’m not making any decision until you tell me what you want me to do.”

  Marianne finished the discussion at 4 A.M. “All I’m telling you is that I don’t want you to go to jail.”

  Tony Magno knew exactly what he would have to do. The most trusted and popular cop in the 77th Precinct would have to help send his friends to jail. He would remain Henry Winter’s partner. And they would become the first partners in the history of the New York City Police Department to turn against an entire precinct.

  2

  “Some of you will be arrested.”

  When Henry F. Winter was born on July 29, 1952, a group of nurses in a Queens hospital gathered near the infant’s bassinet. With his turquoise-colored eyes and curly wisp of amber hair, little Henry was the talk of the maternity ward.

  “Get a load of Blondie,” one nurse was heard to say. “He’s the most perfect baby in here.”

  The child’s father, Henry H. Winter, felt his chest inflate when he heard these words. Earlier that year, Winter, a floor supervisor with a Schlitz beer distributorship in Brooklyn, had moved his wife and two children out of a tiny New York City apartment and into a suburban world of polished cars, manicured lawns, and commuter trains. For $8,500 he bought a two-story, wooden frame home with a finished basement and one-car garage in the Long Island village of Valley Stream, turning his back on the big city and its problems.

  There was a comfortable world awaiting little Henry Winter. And at that moment, no one could have imagined what the name Henry Winter or the nickname Blondie would mean to drug dealers and crooked police officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn’s black ghetto.

  Mildred Winter doesn’t remember the first time her son Henry uttered the word “cop.” But she can recall his fascination with guns and badges, and the many times he imagined himself a miniature Eliot Ness or a pint-sized Joe Friday. There was even a day when ten-year-old Henry sat his mother down at the kitchen table and interrogated her with a plastic gun.

  “Just the facts, mom,” he insisted.

  As a kid Henry liked three things—cops, guns, and hunting. He grew up catching things, using a pole to pull carp out of a pond behind Central High School and tracking down rabbits with a bow and arrow in a field near his house. Henry liked to imagine the scurrying animals as fleeing felons. There was no place to hide from a fledgling twelve-year-old New York City police officer named Henry Winter.

  In the mid-1960s when other kids gathered to play catch on neighborhood baseball diamonds and talk about their idols Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, Henry retired to his father’s basement den. He would stand before a mirror and push live .38-caliber shells into his father’s handgun.

  “Freeze!” he’d yell, assuming the classic combat position and pointing the gun at his own image. “Police officer!”

  Certainly Henry knew right from wrong at an early age, having attended a Catholic grammar school, Blessed Sacrament, from first through sixth grades. He also learned about trust in school. His best friend was Jimmy Hoffman, a neighbor and classmate. Regarded as the class hellions by the nuns, Hoffman and Winter spent a good portion of each school day sitting outside the principal’s office, begging forgiveness.

  One day the nuns caught Jimmy Hoffman painting a mustache on a hallway statue of the Virgin Mary. Statues of Jesus and Saint Joseph had been similarly defaced. Hoffman had signed the art work with the letters “J” and “H.” Suspecting that Hoffman had an accomplice, the nuns called in Henry Winter for questioning. Henry feigned innocence, insisting that the letters “J” and “H” stood for Jimmy Hoffman. In another room, the nuns were threatening Jimmy with a priest. The word “Hell” was mentioned several times during the interrogation. Fearing eternal damnation, Jimmy Hoffman finally told all—confessing that the letters “J” and “H” really stood for Jimmy and Henry.

  “The nuns never even offered Jimmy a deal,” Henry remembered years later.

  When they were thirteen, Jimmy and Henry were picked up by a team of Nassau County detectives as they walked along a pipeline in a wooded section of Valley Stream, taking potshots at squirrels with a BB gun. The cops, responding to a “man with a gun” call on the radio, surrounded the youths as they emerged from the woods at dusk, pulling their own weapons and yelling, “Freeze!”

  Hoffman and Winter literally wet their pants. The equally shaken cops drove the kids home, warning them to be more careful.

  At fourteen, Henry was in trouble again. He was driving to school one morning when he turned the corner and struck a fifteen-year-old boy riding a bicycle. The boy flew over Henry’s car, breaking his leg. Cops led Henry away.

  Although the charges against Henry were later dropped because of his age, Millie Winter’s insurance company had to pay a sizable claim. Henry neglected to tell the cops investigating the accident that the car was actually his, or that his mother had registered and insured it for him.

  The first time Henry Winter got near a cash register, when he was fifteen, he shortchanged it. Working in the sporting goods section of a Times Square department store near his home, he started running his own sales. Winter’s buddies got an automatic 50 percent cash discount on everything from baseball gloves to fishing poles. Usually, anybody shopping in Henry’s department got a bargain.

  He watched intently one day as a black child tugged on his mother’s arm, begging her to buy him a Giants helmet and shoulde
r pad set carrying a twenty-five dollar price tag.

  “How much do you have,” he finally asked the woman.

  “Ten dollars.”

  “Sold. Bring it over here.”

  A store detective spying on the transaction later led Henry into a back room, where it was determined that he was both underage and working under an assumed name—Bruce Winter.

  “I’m really only fifteen,” Henry said confidently. “That makes me a youthful offender.” The manager threw up his hands and fired the underage thief.

  Henry graduated from Valley Stream Central High School in 1969. A card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association, he boycotted his graduation ceremony rather than join in a student demonstration.

  “Everyone was supposed to refuse to stand during the national anthem. It was being done in high schools all across the country. But I argued about it because I thought we should stand. It’s our country.” Henry went fishing on graduation day.

  As the first kid in his class with a car, Henry was very popular. He drove a 1956 Chevy Bel Air that his older sister Millie had painted over with large red roses and white daisies. A huge smiling face with two eyes stared out from the front grill. With his shoulder-length blonde hair and an interest in marijuana cigarettes, Henry was known on the streets of Valley Stream as Flower Power Hank.

  In high school he had the rare ability to get along with both jocks and hippies. There was an incongruity in his lifestyle. Henry seemed as comfortable smoking a line drive single to center on the baseball diamond as he did partying after the games. Henry batted cleanup on the baseball team and played shortstop. He hit close to .600 in his junior year and spent a lot of time listening to Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young records as a senior. He especially liked a protest song entitled “Chicago”—a song that commemorated the 1968 riots involving young people and Chicago police in a park outside the Democratic National Convention.

  “We can chaaange the world,” Henry would sing, an eight-track tape blasting in his car. “Chi—ca—go. If you bee—lieeve in justice. Chi—ca—go. If you bee—lieeve in free—dom. Chi—ca—go. It’s start—ing …”