by Mike McAlary
“The same thing happens today with the cheese the government gives out. In a ghetto area like the Seventy-seventh Precinct, you can go into any bodega and you’ll see packages of cheese, honey, and butter stamped ‘U.S. Government, not to be sold.’ But in every bodega they’ve got them for sale. I guess once you slice cheese and put it on a piece of bread, it doesn’t say ‘Not for sale’ anymore.
“The cops were just as bad as the skells, though. A sergeant in the Seven-Seven and two other guys went down to a Catholic Charities cheese giveaway. They pulled up and said, all somberlike, ‘There are some disabled people on the far side of the precinct who can’t get over here to get the free cheese. If you can give us some, we’ll gladly distribute it amongst the poor and handicapped.’ A priest gave the cops the cheese, said ‘God bless you, officers,’ and sent them off with a trunk-load of free cheese. The cops drove right back to the precinct and split up the cheese among themselves.”
On March 10, 1975, as rumors persisted that there would soon be massive police layoffs because the city was facing a fiscal crisis, perhaps even bankruptcy, Henry arrived for work in the 25th Precinct only to learn that he had been transferred from Spanish Harlem to the 100th Precinct in Rockaway, Queens. He was surprised by the move—he had only spent five months in his first command—but he was happy because his commute to work would be cut from an hour to just under fifteen minutes. But soon Henry learned that there was no rush to get to work anyway—there was no work to be done. Throughout the city, young police officers facing July 1975 layoffs had simply stopped arresting people.
“They told us not to make arrests, because we’d have to go to court and if I’m laid off why should I go to court? The word was: Don’t give out summonses, don’t make arrests, don’t do anything. Just be in Limbo. I went about three months without making an arrest. Nobody was.
“It got so that we’d just go out, drive around, and if we saw somebody committing a crime, we’d just pick up the radio and say, ‘Anybody catching collars tonight?’ If nobody answered, we let it go. Just drove away.
“I remember one time I was up on One Hundred and Sixteenth Street in the One Hundredth Precinct and I see two mutts pull up in a green Comet. I said to myself, ‘They don’t belong in that car.’ So I put the plate number over the radio to see if it had been reported stolen. My partner was an oldtimer. He was in the bank, cashing his check when I spotted the car. He came out and got in the car just as the central dispatcher came over the air and said, ‘One hundred [sector] David, that’s a ten-sixteen [stolen car], wanted by Yonkers.’ My partner just looked at me. So I said, ‘Hey, we got a stolen car here with two guys in it.’ He just looked at me and said, ‘Kid, you think that I’m going to make the arrest?’ And I said, ‘Well, I ain’t making the arrest either. I’m getting laid off.’ He said, ‘And I’m too old to make arrests.’ I picked up the radio and said, ‘Wrong plate, Central.’ We let them go. We just let them drive away, go to the beach and do whatever they wanted to do. I didn’t give a shit.”
Betsy and Henry were married on May 30, 1975 in Valley Stream’s Blessed Sacrament Church. But even as the couple sat on the dais, toasting the future, Henry was worried about losing his job. Mayor Abe Beame was already preparing police union officials for the biggest layoff in the history of the New York City Police Department. The wedding guests, some of them cops, pushed envelopes containing checks and money into Henry’s hands.
“Sorry about the job, kid,” people said, offering condolences on what should have been the happiest day of his life.
Three weeks later, Henry came home from his honeymoon to the bad news that he didn’t have a job. He walked into the precinct house in late June only to be handed a teletyped message by a desk sergeant. The message listed all those police officers in the department being laid off on July 1, 1975. Henry found his name, tax registry number, shield number, and command listed with the W’s near the bottom of the sheet. It was official. Henry Winter had become an ex-cop three-quarters of the way through his rookie year on the job.
“That was it. The words were there. We weren’t supposed to work, we didn’t work. Actually, they wanted our guns as of July third, but everybody had it up to here. We said, ‘Fuck you, take my guns, take my shield, take my patrol guide, take everything now,’ and that’s what we did. We went to the desk and turned everything in. Why should I work? I was getting laid off in three days. I wasn’t going to go out and get shot up on the day before I got laid off.”
“Being laid off was like a kick in the pants, because I made good collars. I didn’t cause anybody headaches. If they told me to do something, I did it. I was the type of cop who, if I thought you were dirty and you were in my sector, I would fuck around with you or get you to come after me until I could get you. There were times when, if I saw a stolen car parked on my foot post, I wouldn’t budge. I’d hide, wait for somebody to get in the car, and then pounce just to make a collar. But now, why should I do stuff like that? I’m getting laid off. My benefits were going. When I was in the Two-Five, there was a cop who just got out of the academy, but he was getting laid off. He went to answer a call on One Hundred and Tenth Street with a day or two to go on the job, and a bomb went off. He lost an eye and his job. The department didn’t do anything for him until the story hit the newspapers.
“Anyway, we all went up to Dingy Dan’s on One Hundred and Eighth Street and Beach Channel Drive and had a party and a half. It was a good place, a cop’s place, and he put out a spread with pitchers of beer. It was all for free. Officially, we still had three days left as cops. We weren’t civilians yet. Dingy Dan knew that. He didn’t make us pay for anything.”
Disappointed, Henry headed back permanently to his apartment in Valley Stream. Soon he was collecting unemployment and working part-time making deliveries for Gus’s Pizza Shop on West Merrick Road. He continued to look for police-type work, applying for jobs with a variety of security firms that guarded warehouses at night and accompanied armored car deliveries of cash. Ordinarily, an ex-cop like Winter—one with no criminal record and two commendations—would have been snapped up by a security firm. But the timing was all wrong. There were literally hundreds of laid-off New York City police officers vying for security jobs. Henry’s application got lost in a flooded job market.
Within a year of his firing, however, Henry was already developing a reputation in the New York City and Long Island newspapers as something of a heroic figure. He was delivering a pizza for Gus shortly after 10 P.M. on March 7, 1976 when he noticed a car with six black men in it parked in front of a Merrick Avenue bar, the Club 600. The car was running, but the lights were off.
Henry parked his delivery van about sixty feet behind the suspicious car, a beat-up Chevy Impala. He watched one man get out and enter the bar, spotting a gun butt sticking out of the man’s waistband.
His cop instincts working, Henry jotted down the car’s license number and headed off to a nearby corner where he knew he would find a Nassau County Police call box. Instead, he met a uniformed Nassau County patrolman and neighborhood acquaintance, Vincent Joaquin, sitting in his patrol car.
“Follow me,” Henry said. “There’s six black guys holding up the Six Hundred bar.”
Joaquin, recognizing Henry as the ex-cop turned pizza delivery man, asked, “OK, but have you got your gun?”
“Nah. I left it home.”
The men reached the scene just in time to see the suspect jump into the car and speed off, heading west into the city.
“I just got a call on the radio,” Joaquin screamed to Henry. “They robbed the bar.”
Winter jumped into the delivery van and Joaquin sped off in the patrol car, chasing the robbers across the city line into Queens. Henry raced into oncoming traffic, cut off the Impala and jumped from the van. He ran to the passenger’s side of the Impala, pretending to reach behind his back for a gun.
“Freeze, motherfuckers!” he yelled.
No one dared move.
“No
w shut the car off and put your hands on the dashboard.”
One pair of hands, the one closest to Henry, placed a gun on the dashboard. He reached into the car, grabbed it and held it on the suspects until Joaquin arrived with his backups. “Is that your gun?” asked one of the arriving officers, Larry Robinson, another Nassau County cop, who recognized Henry as the ex-cop from the pizza parlor.
“No, this is their gun. My gun is at home.”
“You mean you took these guys without a gun?”
Henry laughed. One of the suspects began to curse.
“I told you we should have wasted the dude. He’s a pizza man. We got nabbed by a pizza man.”
The Long Island cops scratched their heads.
“All yours, officers,” Henry said. “I got a pizza to deliver.”
Two days later, the New York Daily News carried an account of the arrest on page seven. The article, headlined, “With a Hunch and a Bluff, Laid-off Cop Corrals Six,” ran at the top of the page and explained Winter’s exploits in detail. The lead to the story included a curious error, however.
“A young ex-cop, a casualty of New York City’s fiscal woes, ventured from his Valley Stream home in quest of a pizza pie to share with his wife and wound up helping to bag a carload of robbery suspects by bluffing that he had a gun, Nassau County police said yesterday.
“Police said Henry Winter, 23, laid off from the city Police Department last July, spotted five men and a juvenile in a car near the Club 600 bar at 600 Merrick Road, Valley Stream at about 10 P.M. Sunday while he was driving to a pizza parlor.”
Years later, Henry recalled: “All I knew was that these guys robbed a bar and they had to be caught. That’s all I cared about. But when the Daily News reporter called me, I realized that I had to tell him I was driving to the pizza parlor rather than delivering pizzas. I couldn’t have it printed that I was working for a pizza parlor, because at that time, hell, I was still collecting unemployment checks from the city.”
In April, Henry made the city newspapers again.
This episode began shortly before 1 A.M. as Gus Sakellarios, Henry and a teenaged waitress named Jan Tragner prepared to close up Gus’s Pizza Shop. Henry was at the front counter, counting his tips, when a black man entered the store. The man walked to the back of the shop and then returned to the front counter.
“Where’s the bathroom, man?” he asked.
“Out of order,” Gus replied.
The man then left, but Henry, wearing a small revolver in an ankle holster, felt the hair on his arms stand up.
“Gus, we’re going to be robbed.”
“Henry, won’t you ever stop being a cop?”
“I’m telling you, Gus, it’s going down.”
Two minutes later, the man returned to the parlor with a friend.
“Two slices,” he said.
As Gus put the slices on the counter, the man pulled a nine-millimeter automatic from his waistband and pointed it at the owner’s head. The other man grabbed Jan, holding her in a choke hold.
“Open the register,” they shouted at Henry. “Move!”
Henry hit the ‘No sale’ button and the register drawer popped open. One of the men dug his hand in, stuffing dollar bills into his pocket.
The gunmen then pushed all three workers into a back room and closed the door. For a split second, Henry thought about pulling his gun. Then he thought again. Jan was still in his line of fire. He heard the men run back to the front of the parlor, a bell jingling as they opened the door to the street.
“Don’t follow or else.”
As the door closed, Henry ran out of the shop and into the street. He caught a glimpse of the license plate on the red Oldsmobile getaway car as it pulled away from the curb. He raced fifty feet to the corner, where his brother-in-law, Douglas Caufield, a Hempstead cop, was waiting in his car to drive Henry home from work.
Douglas and Henry took off after the robbers, chasing them at high speed across the city line. They lost track of the car in Queens, but stopped to give a description of its occupants and the license plate number to a patrolling team of city cops. They put out a radio call, alerting Nassau County officers, who later caught up with the fleeing robbers near the Nassau Expressway in North Lawrence. The cops recovered an automatic and fifty dollars, arresting two robbers and a driver.
Two days later, Newsday and the New York Daily News carried reports on Henry Winter, the cop without a police department. The News was really impressed this time, headlining the article, “Laid-off City Cop Helps Nab 3 in Store Robbery.”
The lead to the story read: “Stickup men who ply their trade in Valley Stream are on notice to watch out for Henry Winter. The 23-year-old laid-off New York City cop played a hero’s role for the second time yesterday in the arrest of three Far Rockaway, Queens men who allegedly held up a store where Winter has a part-time job.”
Henry recalled, “I was gonna drop the guy with the gun. I wanted to shoot him dead. But I couldn’t take a chance. The other guy was holding Jan. He could have been armed. Gus was still very happy, though. I was the best delivery boy he ever had. After that, I could eat anything I wanted in the store. Veal cutlets. Meatballs. Shrimp. Finally, I even said to Gus, ‘Hey, did you ever think of putting lobster on the menu? I really like lobster.’ Gus just shook his head. He figured if I didn’t get a job with a police department soon, I was going to eat him out of business.”
Henry Winter’s big decision:
“I sent résumés out to various police departments in different parts of the country. The union told us that other police departments were looking to hire laid-off New York City cops. So I sent a résumé out to Arapahoe County, Colorado, about twelve miles east of Denver. They called and asked me to come out and take a lie detector test. I flew out at the end of June in 1976, just about a year after I got laid off. I met this sergeant in personnel, Reynolds. He gave me the lie detector test.
“It consisted of three questions: Did I ever steal anything? Did I ever cover up a felony? Did I ever have sex while I was on the payroll as a New York City police officer? Did I ever steal anything? Yeah, everybody steals. You take a little money out of your mother’s pocketbook when you’re a kid and you steal money from other kids when you’re in school. Did I ever cover up a felony? The answer to that was no. I had never covered up a felony. Did I ever have sex as a member of the New York City Police Department? I answered yes to that one too. They didn’t specify on duty or off duty. The sergeant says, ‘All right. We’ll be in touch.’ I figured, that’s it—I flunked the damn thing.
“The following Wednesday I get a phone call. This guy said, ‘Henry Winter? This is Sergeant Reynolds, from the Arapahoe County Police Department in Colorado. We went over your application and we’d like you to work for us.’ So I said, ‘Oh, fine. I’m interested. But it will take me about a month or so to get squared away here. I have a wife and child. When do you want me to start?’ He said, ‘Monday.’ I said, ‘I have no place to live. I can’t just drop everything.’ He said, ‘They’re going to waive everything, all the learning and the academy.’ They were going to set me up in the police barracks until I could find a place. I’d have to learn the new gun laws and things like that. He said I could look for my own place and eventually move out of the barracks. I talked it over with Betsy and she said, ‘Yeah, go out and try it.’
“So I loaded up our 1971 Volkswagen bug, and took off. I drove all the way out to Arapahoe County in three days. I went in, met the guys, everything was fine. They said, ‘Here’s your hat, here’s your shirt, here’s your pants, here’s your boots, here’s your gloves, here’s your jacket, here’s your leather goods, here’s the keys to your car.’ The keys to my car? Turns out the car was mine twenty-four hours a day. We got to take the car home at night. That was nice. I didn’t even need my Volkswagen out there.
“So there I was. Deputy Sheriff. Deputy Dawg. They called us ‘Pepsi cans’. Our cars were red, white and blue with red, white and blue lights o
n the top. You had a bluish pair of pants, highlighted with a red stripe down the sides and a white shirt. We even had Smokey the Bear hats. The town was beautiful. It was the great outdoors. Every other store was a sporting goods store. Everybody carried guns. They were legal as long as you didn’t conceal them. I called up Betsy that night and told her it was really nice, clean.
“Eventually they found me an apartment in the nice section of town. It was four and one-half rooms, fully furnished, for one hundred forty-five dollars a month and five dollars more a month in the summer for air conditioning. An indoor/outdoor swimming pool. Tennis. I mean, really nice. It was excellent. I would ride up to Jefferson County, stand by the side of the road and see a deer crossing the field.
“After two months, I called Betsy up and told her, ‘I like it here. It’s really nice country. Come on out and tell me what you think of it.’ She said, ‘No, Henry.’ I said, ‘What do you mean, No?’ ‘I thought about it and I don’t want to leave Valley Stream. I don’t want to leave my family.’ I told her, ‘Betsy, I’m your family. We’re married now. Come on. I think this is going to be good out here.’ But Betsy wouldn’t budge. She told me, ‘No, it’s too big a move. Come home.’ So she put it, not in these exact words, but something like, ‘Make up your mind. Do you want to stay in Colorado or do you want me?’ I said, ‘Okay, I’ll be home.’
“I didn’t even think about the decision. I just loaded up their cruiser, went into work, and handed everything back in. I even apologized to Sergeant Reynolds. I told him that I liked it there but I couldn’t stay. He said that he understood. I wasn’t the first New York City cop to do this to them. I got into the Volkswagen and drove nonstop back home. From Arapahoe County to Valley Stream in thirty-seven hours.