Buddy Boys

by Mike McAlary

  “Now I don’t even think about what it would have been like if Betsy had come out to Colorado. I don’t bring it up too often. I don’t bring it up too often because that was me then, Colorado was Henry Winter. It was a hunting town where I could work as a cop. Arapahoe County was me and I left it.

  Henry returned home in late August 1976, taking a job at a 7-Up plant in Mineola, Long Island. He drove a truck dispensing cases of soda pop on a route that included Queens, Brooklyn, and eastern Long Island, including some of the same streets his father had driven twenty-five years earlier while distributing beer. Henry’s boss turned out to be a gun freak who liked cops. He wanted to hear all of Henry’s stories, and Henry was only too happy to embellish. He and his boss started taking off from work early to drive to the Nassau County Police range, where they fired guns and listened to more cop stories. When the company started to lay off workers in the winter of 1977, the boss made Henry management, giving them even more time to fire guns and tell cop stories.

  Henry didn’t allow himself to think about Arapahoe County much. Mostly he just worked and waited. The city had started hiring back some of the laid-off cops. And then finally, in November 1978, Henry got a letter from the New York City Police Department asking him to report to the Police Academy for a two-week retraining session.

  Blondie was getting his service revolver and silver shield back.

  3

  “I’m from Bed-Stuy. Do or die.”

  “First I went to the academy for two weeks. Then they put me in something called the Neighborhood Stabilization Unit. We were housed in the Six-Nine Precinct on Foster Avenue in Canarsie, Brooklyn. The NSU was a new thing for rookies that was formed while we were laid off. Now they made rookie cops spend six months in NSU before assigning them to a precinct. None of the guys coming back from the layoff wanted to be in NSU. We were already cops. We knew what the game was. NSU was an insult. We all felt the same way. We came out of the academy with a class of rookies, but we weren’t rookies. There were guys in my unit with three and four years on the job. So I couldn’t take the Six-Nine. I was there for about a month, walking a beat on Avenue L, and I just couldn’t deal with this precinct. It was a white precinct and I couldn’t deal with white people. I had worked in Harlem and East Rockaway. If you arrested somebody in Harlem, they stayed arrested. If you took somebody off the street in the Six-Nine, the bad guy’s lawyer would beat you back to the station house. Then the phone calls would start. Some political guy would call your captain or a lieutenant from another precinct would get you on the phone and say, ‘That’s my cousin Sal you got there. What can you do for him?’ I used to wonder what the hell was going on. I wanted out.

  “I had a dynamite boss there named Frank Bunting. He came from the Seven-Five out in East New York—my brother-in-law Dennis Caufield’s precinct. One day Bunting told us, ‘Look, we got a foot post open in the Seven-Five on Pitkin Avenue. It’s a badass place. Does anybody want it steady?’ I jumped for it. I took care of Pitkin Avenue from Crescent and Pine to Euclid, that whole section of East New York. And I loved it there, because now I was back with the skells, the guys who, when you collared them, they stayed collared.”

  For most of the next year and a half, Henry Winter walked a beat on Pitkin Avenue, swinging his nightstick, grabbing crooks and developing a reputation as an active cop. He made good collars, harassed drug dealers, and just generally broke the bad guys’ chops. When other cops hesitated to chase an armed robber into an abandoned building, Henry charged past them. It never dawned on him to be actually afraid of something in the street. After all, he had a gun and a badge.

  Steadily, Henry became more streetwise. Unlike other white cops in the precinct, he actually seemed to like the people on his beat. Hispanic kids on the block taught him Spanish words and the black kids gave him lessons in cool. It was not uncommon, supervisors noted, to find Police Officer Henry Winter dancing in the streets with kids. He was given an excellent rating in their reports.

  Back in the precinct house, where Henry’s brother-in-law was still working a plainclothes assignment with an anticrime detail, cops were beginning to take notice of his arrests.

  “That kid brother-in-law of yours is pretty active out there,” cops told Caufield. “What’s he trying to do, arrest the whole city?”

  If nothing else, Henry had an active imagination when it came to making arrests. One day he noticed several men lining up outside a building on the corner of Pitkin Avenue and Pine Street. Sitting on a step across the street, Henry watched the men ring an apartment doorbell and then slip dollar bills into a mail slot. A second or two later, the slot reopened and a hand passed out a small white envelope. Henry ambled across the street, rang the doorbell himself and pressed his face close to the peephole, so the people inside couldn’t see his uniform. When the mail slot opened, Henry took five dollars from his wallet and pushed it into the opening. A hand passed back a nickel bag of marijuana.

  “Bingo,” Henry thought.

  He waited a half hour until a backup unit arrived before kicking down the front door of the apartment. Rushing in with his gun drawn, he arrested two men and found a large supply of cash and fifty nickel bags of marijuana.

  Henry then returned to the precinct with his two suspects and the confiscated cash and drugs. He told his sergeant how he had just made an undercover drug buy while in uniform and the sergeant, who years later would wind up working with him in the Internal Affairs office, shook his head. “Winter, you’re going to become a legend in your own time if you keep this up.”

  Henry vouchered all the confiscated drugs and money with the exception of his own five dollars, which he casually reclaimed once the sergeant left the room.

  Soon he was doing his own stakeouts. Finding it virtually impossible to make any more undercover drug buys in uniform, Henry started bringing binoculars to work. He hid in abandoned homes across from buildings he suspected of being drug spots and waited for something to happen. When he spotted a drug deal, he’d rush to the street and make an arrest. Neighborhood dealers soon referred to the new blonde cop on the beat as ‘the Invisible Man.’”

  Not everyone appreciated Henry’s tactics however. One night as Henry walked his beat on a midnight shift, a green car suddenly leaped the curb and tried to run him down. Henry jumped out of the way at the last moment, escaping injury. As the car passed, he swung his nightstick, shattering the rear window. Henry reported the license number and threat on his life to his superiors.

  Three months later, an alert team of patrolling cops spotted the car and gave chase, running it off the road. The suspect, having tried to murder a cop with a car, took one look at the officers surrounding him and realized his own life was probably in danger. By the time Henry arrived on the scene to identify his attacker, the suspect had defecated in his pants.

  “You want to lock him up or take care of him yourself?” a supervisor asked Henry.

  “Ah, just lock him up. I don’t want a piece of him. He’s in enough trouble.”

  Six months later, the man who tried to kill Henry Winter with a car agreed to a plea-bargain arrangement with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. The arrangement called for the man to pay a fifty dollar fine.

  The foot patrolman tells his secrets:

  “I must have made eight or nine good robbery and drug collars in the Seven-Five using the binocular trick. If you sit in a room and stake something out, it’s easy to see what’s going on. Nobody sees you.

  “There was this one family named Garcia up on Pitkin Avenue. They were heavily into drugs, especially the woman, who had blonde hair. And I loved breaking their chops. I just missed getting her good one day too. I had just come on duty when one of the kids ran up to me and yelled, ‘Henry. Henry. Henry.’ I liked it better when they called me ‘Henry.’ It was a little easier to deal with people when they said my name rather than ‘officer’. So the kids yelled ‘Henry, Henry, Henry. You just missed something. The blonde lady just came out and go
t in a fight with one of the girls. Then she pulled out a little .25 automatic.’ So I stayed there and watched because I wanted her so bad. But she was good. I couldn’t get her. I got her husband, but I never got her.

  “One day she even invited me and my partner, Al Haymen, up for coffee. She knew I was giving her business a beating. So she says, ‘Well, we’d like to buy you a new hat.’ I’m thinking, I got a hat, what does she want to buy me a new hat for? Then the light went off. Bribe. So I went back and told Frank Bunting about it. He told Internal Affairs. That night the IAD guys came down and wired me up, put a tape recorder on me. Then I went out and tried to make contact with her, but she was too slick. She must have gotten word back, somehow. She wouldn’t even stand on the same side of the street with me.

  “That was the first time I wore the wire. I wore it just that one night on her. And it was the only time I ever wore a wire where I didn’t get some type of conversation.”

  Traditionally, city cops pay little heed to rumors about pending investigations, particularly investigations of cops by other cops in high crime areas. Like bad guys without badges, crooked cops tend to see themselves as somehow beyond the reach of the law. It’s always the other guy that gets caught.

  In the 75th Precinct, a group of four crooked cops in an elite detail called the Anticrime Unit were positive that they could continue to burglarize apartments, rob drug dealers, and steal money off dead bodies whenever they wanted to. They would assure each other: If we can’t catch the robbery and burglary suspects out here in this jungle, how are other cops—spit and polish Manhattan cops, who don’t know the area—ever going to catch us dirty. You’d have to be one of us to catch us.

  These officers who had been at the top of the precinct’s overtime list, suddenly quit working extra tours and making arrests. One began wearing a lot of gold jewelry. Another drove a brand new Cadillac to work. Two others bought expensive new homes. Lumped together, these signs had the effect of raising a giant red flag over the 75th Precinct.

  In 1979 rumors flew through the locker room of the station house on Sutter Avenue. Cops began whispering to each other that there was a big investigation of guys in Anticrime going on. It was even said that cops were going to jail.

  Police Officer Henry Winter heard the rumors too. But he couldn’t have imagined how the truth would effect his own career. All he knew was that he wasn’t dirty. Sure, he bent the rules a little to make a good collar here and there, but he never stole anything. He wasn’t what Internal Affairs would call “a player.”

  Then on a humid night in August something happened that threw a fright into Henry Winter. A team of four cops assigned to the Anticrime detail were driving an unmarked car through the precinct when they noticed another car following them. Curious, the driver of the Anticrime car suddenly threw his car into reverse, getting behind the suspects. This maneuver, called double tracking, enabled the Anticrime cops to get the drop on the people tailing them, and they surrounded the chase car with guns drawn.

  “Get out of the car,” the cops yelled.

  “We’re on the job,” the men answered.

  “What job?”

  “None of your fucking business what job.”

  The cops escorted their suspects back to the precinct house and searched their car.

  “Hey look at this.” One of the cops held up a stack of photographs he had recovered from the front seat. “These guys have got a picture of every guy from Anticrime here.”

  During questioning it became apparent that the men trailing the Anticrime officers were investigators assigned to the office of the special state prosecutor for the New York City criminal justice system. Their investigation had been blown. It was like a twenty-megaton bomb had gone off in the 75th Precinct.

  Henry Winter was in shock too. But he was also in for an even bigger surprise. Not only was there a state investigation into corruption in the 75th Precinct, but his own brother-in-law, Dennis Caufield, an eleven-year veteran of the force, had been wearing a wire for the last eighteen months, secretly recording conversations with the corrupt cops he worked alongside.

  Henry Winter’s own brother-in-law was a bona fide rat.

  “I would call Dennis’s house and my sister would say, ‘Oh, hold on.’ or ‘I’ll call you right back.’ I didn’t know it then, but their phone calls were recorded. So she would shut the recorder off and then call back. I found out that Dennis was wired when I went over there one day and there was a police department radio and recorder right on top of the television in the living room. I knew then that Dennis had to be working undercover. And that was it. I never brought it up with him until after the arrests came down in the precinct.

  “The day after they grabbed the guys from Anticrime I went into the Seven-Five and a couple of guys came up to me. They asked, ‘What’s the story with your brother-in-law? What’s the matter with him? How come they picked up Dennis and his partner last night and only Dennis’s partner is locked up.’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything.’ I couldn’t say anything because I knew they’d kill Dennis. So I just kept my mouth shut. But later I called Dennis and asked him what the story was. He told me he was working undercover for Internal Affairs and the special prosecutor’s office. He and his partners were hitting drug locations, robbing the dealers and then splitting up the money and the drugs. Dennis was turning the drugs back in. That was his job. He was undercover. I said, ‘Okay.’ and hung up the phone. But things weren’t okay. I felt about him the same way people feel about me. Cops don’t turn in other cops. Rats turn in cops.

  “The cops in the Seven-Five were thieves. They were doing the same thing that was going on in the Seven-Seven. Hit the place, take the money, take the drugs, sell the drugs, sell the guns. Same exact thing. I should have known, really, what was going on. They would go in and hit a place and all the bad guys would run out the back door. I always thought it was kind of stupid that with four guys in an Anticrime car they never sent two of them to cover the back. All four went in the front door, and I’d be standing there watching these dealers flying out the back and escaping over a back fence or something. Sometimes I’d even chase them and come back and say, ‘I tried to catch that guy.’ And the cops were probably saying, ‘Whew, glad he didn’t catch him.’ Guys would just look at me. ‘Okay, all right. Nice job, Henry.’ In the meantime, Dennis was standing there wired, rolling tape on me. I didn’t know.

  “I still called Dennis but I wasn’t as friendly as before. If he had just told me from the beginning, I would have felt a lot better. But he didn’t and I talked to him at times when he was wired. That made me think. What would have happened if I had done something wrong? I would have been screwed too.

  “I know this only too well, now. If you do something and it makes the tape, you’re fucked. The guys listening to the tapes don’t care about family or friends. They care about indictments. They think, ‘He’s a cop. He said and did something illegal. Take him. He’s gone.’

  “If I had come up dirty on those tapes, Dennis would have had to help send me to jail. It doesn’t matter who you are. If the tape gets you, you go. And if you don’t believe me, ask Richard Nixon about that.”

  Dennis Caufield was made a hero. The Police Department called two press conferences on November 30, 1979, the day after a special state prosecutor for corruption, Roderick Lankler, announced the indictment of four cops from the 75th Precinct’s Anticrime detail. The first press gathering focused on the undercover investigation. Police Commissioner Robert J. McGuire pointed out that cops who stole were being caught, that safeguards implemented by his department in the wake of the Knapp Commission investigation into police corruption were working. The so-called Blue Wall of Silence was cracked, he insisted. Cops were turning in other cops. Cops were getting other cops arrested.

  “The system is working,” the Police Commissioner said as the television cameras focused on a set of indictments in his hands.

  Charged in nine overlapping indictments involving th
irty-seven counts of bribe taking, attempted extortion, and burglary were officers Frank L. Beltrani, 32, Daniel Buckley, 31, Joseph Fina, 30 and William Roberts, 30. The indicted cop’s supervisor, Sgt. Anthony Canilleri, was suspended. The four men, all of whom had between nine and eleven years on the job, lived in suburban Long Island towns. They had come to the city to rob people in the ghetto.

  All four either pleaded guilty or were found guilty at a jury trial. They had accepted bribes, resold stolen guns and burglarized apartments. On one occasion an officer had even called 911, the police emergency number, disguising his voice. He reported that there was a man with a gun inside a Brooklyn building. This practice—called “dropping your own dime”—enabled the Anticrime officers to report on a bogus gun run when they really entered the apartment to search it for narcotics and money.

  Later in the day, the police brass gathered to pay homage to Dennis Caufield during a promotion ceremony. The Commissioner handed Caufield a gold shield and announced that the department’s newest detective was being transferred out of East New York and reassigned to a Manhattan command on the swank East Side. McGuire didn’t say that this was being done to protect Caufield from angry cops in the 75th Precinct.

  John Guido, chief of the department’s Inspectional Services, stood at the podium and said, “Detective Caufield represents the new breed of New York City police officer,” and cited the detective for his extraordinary courage. Newspapermen rushed to their computer terminals, proclaiming Caufield the second coming of Frank Serpico.

  “There were times when I thought my cover had been blown,” Caufield told the reporters. “But as to the danger—I didn’t want to think about it.”

  Like Serpico—the legendary cop who reported criminal activities of fellow cops in the Knapp Commission investigations—Caufield had broken the Blue Wall of Silence.

  “I think anytime a police officer sees a crime or crimes like those that occurred in the Seventy-fifth, he should come forward. I feel sorry for the position these guys put themselves in, but they think they are smarter than the police department.”