by Mike McAlary
And for a while, Dennis Caufield even felt like a hero. Some detectives actually talked to him. But then, a year or so later, rumors about Caufield began to circulate in the 17th Precinct where he now worked.
“Caufield saved his own ass,” the cops and detectives whispered. “He was just as dirty as the rest of them out in the Seven-Five. Only they caught him first and he agreed to turn.”
Dennis Caufield became a pariah. He spent more time in the Valley Stream volunteer fire house, where he had recently been named chief, and less time in the police station. He couldn’t fight rumors—even false ones. He got tired of telling people that he had only turned on the other cops because he had seen wrong and wanted to right it. Considered to be a man of conscience, Caufield’s conscience began to bother him. Although he never left Valley Stream, Dennis changed his residence several times.
He didn’t seem comfortable anywhere, anymore. It seemed that everyone was watching him. In the sanctuary of his home, Dennis screamed and punched walls. Sometimes Henry’s sister Millie came home and found her husband sitting in a darkened room, sobbing. Dennis began to have loud arguments with his wife and kids.
Finally, in 1984 he turned in his gold shield and gun. Dennis Caufield, hero cop, couldn’t stand the agony of being a policeman anymore. Right or wrong, other cops believed that he had done a terrible thing. He had turned in other cops and they had gone to jail. One day those cops would all be out of jail, but Dennis wasn’t sure if he’d ever be free again. He took a better-paying job with the village of Valley Stream.
Still on loan from the 69th Precinct, Henry Winter was finished as a cop in the 75th. All of his fellow officers in East New York were in total agreement: If Henry’s brother-in-law is a rat, then Henry must be a rat too.
Within days of Caufield’s press conference, Henry was threatened by other cops. They put cheese in his locker and made rodentlike sounds whenever Henry walked into a room. Supervisors were getting scared. The roll-call sergeant told the desk lieutenant that something bad could happen to Henry Winter if he was allowed to remain on a foot post in the 75th. At One Police Plaza, the decision was made to take him out of the precinct.
Henry got new orders. He was put on a foot post at the Canarsie Pier, back in the 69th. Henry hated his new beat. He couldn’t hide in buildings on a pier. He couldn’t use binoculars to spy on drug deals, kick down doors, or make undercover arrests in uniform anymore. He was with white people again. He was dealing with lawyers again. And he was bored.
But then on April 5, 1980, after a four-month stint on the isolated Canarsie Pier watching waves lap at his feet and young lovers smooch in parked cars, Henry got new orders again. He was going back to a crime front, back to a neighborhood where lawyers rarely ventured and where, if you arrested people, they stayed arrested. Henry was going to the Police Department’s dumping ground. He was going to Bedford-Stuyvesant, a neighborhood where young thugs like to brag upon being arrested, “I’m from Bed-Stuy. Do or Die.”
Henry had been transferred to the 77th Precinct.
“The funny thing about it was that my nickname was Seven-Seven. I always drank Seagram’s Seven Crown and Seven-Up back then. In the Six-Nine we used to go over to the VFW Post on Conklin Avenue after work and I would drink Seven and Seven. When the orders came down, I was out on my post. So this cop I used to drink with who knows my nickname gets a copy of the orders and calls me on the radio.
“‘Seven-Seven. Know where you’re being transferred to?’
“‘No.’
“‘Seven-Seven.’
“I waited a moment and then asked him again. ‘Where am I going?’ He gets back on the radio and says, ‘Seven-Seven, I just told you. Seven-Seven.’ I came back to him again. ‘Okay, quit fucking around. Where am I going?’ He comes back, ‘Seven-Seven, Seven-Seven.’ It went on like that for about ten minutes before I realized that I was going to the Seventy-seventh Precinct. It was like that old Abbott and Costello routine, ‘Who’s on first?’”
The morning of Monday, April 8th, 1980 was gray and rainy. Henry left Valley Stream with his gear packed in a blue duffel bag lying on the car seat beside him. He had his uniform draped over a hanger in the back. Henry was headed for his first day of work in the 77th Precinct. The big news blasting from the radio that morning focused on a week-old strike of 33,000 New York City bus and subway workers. The traffic on the Belt Parkway was bumper-to-bumper. Thousands of people were walking to work in Manhattan from Brooklyn, strolling across the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges. Mayor Koch was out there somewhere, asking the stragglers, “How am I doing?” A few commuters even told the mayor how he was doing. The embarrassed mayor trudged back to City Hall surrounded by bodyguards on at least one occasion.
Elsewhere in the city, drivers were picking up hitchhikers in three-piece suits throughout Queens and the Bronx to join them on the slow commute into midtown Manhattan. Some of the strangers would develop life-long friendships. Other people made their way to work on roller skates, bicycles, and fishing boats. In a time of crisis, the city of New York seemed to be getting along for once.
Driving the back streets through Queens and Brooklyn to avoid traffic, Henry reached the southwest perimeter of the 77th Precinct an hour after leaving his home. He drove west on Eastern Parkway, a six-lane street with a tree-lined mall separating the traffic, heading towards the 77th Precinct station house.
Once Eastern Parkway had been one of the great Brooklyn addresses—a polite Jewish neighborhood of nineteenth-century brownstones and elegant limestone townhouses. Doormen in white gloves and maroon caps stood sentry at expensive apartment houses. Howard Cosell and thousands of other little kids had grown up here. They attended local synagogues, studied in the Brooklyn Public Library, stood in awe of the Egyptian exhibits in the Brooklyn Museum, took romantic walks through the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and watched parades under the dramatic arch in Grand Army Plaza near Prospect Park.
But in the late ’50s and early ’60s something that urban sociologists labelled “white flight” hit Eastern Parkway and the surrounding neighborhoods of Crown Heights and East Flatbush. Poor blacks from Brownsville, East New York, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, seeking to escape the ghettos, moved into these neighborhoods. Rents and real estate prices plummeted as blockbusters went to work integrating them. Jewish merchants began to close their shops on Nostrand Avenue and flee to suburban Queens and Long Island, abandoning their Eastern Parkway temples and yeshivas.
Soon the brownstones stood scarred, abandoned, and gutted, sheets of steel bolted to windows and doorways. Black Baptist ministers transformed the temples into churches, hanging wooden crosses outside stained glass windows shaped like the Star of David. Other ministers opened storefront churches in old dress shops on Nostrand Avenue. Liquor stores replaced Jewish delicatessens on Utica Avenue. Dry cleaners closed up, making way for little Spanish grocery stores called bodegas on St. Johns Place and Troy Avenue.
Bedford-Stuyvesant, like Eastern Parkway, had once been a predominantly white area filled with doctors, lawyers, and merchants. As one of the first neighborhoods to gain subway service to Manhattan in the late nineteenth century, the enclaves of Bedford and Stuyvesant had become prototypes for the modern suburb. Rich people who wanted to get away from the rat race lived there, and commuted to work in the city.
The neighborhood underwent a dramatic change during World War II when the Brooklyn Navy Yard hired black workers from the South who had never been welcomed in a white area before. They soon integrated the neighborhoods of Bedford and Stuyvesant, shortened to Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1944. The war ended and many of the blacks stayed, unable to get jobs, and eventually joined the city’s burgeoning welfare rolls. By 1960, 51 percent of the residents living in Bed-Stuy were black. And as city services declined and new low-income housing developments went up, the crime rate soared. Another mass exodus of whites occurred after a series of race riots in the late ’60s. By 1970, 84 percent of Bedford-Stuyvesant’s reside
nts were black. It had become to Brooklyn what Harlem was to Manhattan—a raging ghetto.
The neighborhood’s remaining whites left following the blackout on a sweltering July night in 1977, when the streets teemed with rioters and looters. By then the area was known as Black Brooklyn. The only white people who walked the Eastern Parkway mall were cops from the 77th Precinct, and a good portion of them drove in to work from their Long Island homes. The neighborhood served by the police officers of the 77th Precinct was now the home of pimps, muggers, robbers, rapists, and drug dealers.
The station house itself, located at 127 Utica Avenue was a two-story, red brick structure surrounded by an eight-foot brick wall. The complex included the station house, a parking area, and a private filling station, and was a block wide and half a block deep. An American flag waved high above the building on a flagpole dwarfed by a sixty-foot radio-communications antenna. As he drove up the block that first day, Henry Winter decided that his new command station looked like a fort.
And, in truth, there was a war being fought in the streets surrounding the 77th Precinct. Henry was now stationed at a sort of domestic Vietnam where each year some 230 cops logged as many as 80 murders, 100 rapes, 400 shootings and more than 2000 robberies. For their part, the 77th Precinct cops kept the Civilian Complaint Review Board bogged down with almost 100 reported cases of police brutality, abuse, discourtesy, and ethnic slurs each year.
The 77th Precinct’s detective squad came to be known as some of the sharpest homicide minds in the city. They caught and cleared more murders in one year than some other squads dealt with in a decade. In 1979, the year before Henry arrived, eighty-two people were murdered in the 77th—more murders than in the entire city of Boston for the same period, or in all of England. And all this carnage took place in an area about half the size of Henry Winter’s hometown of Valley Stream.
To make a bad situation worse, the Police Department had a secret policy of fighting Black Brooklyn’s crime war with what amounted to a “black sheep squadron.” Although there were certainly good, decent, law-abiding cops in the 77th, the house had been dubbed a police dumping ground years ago. Henry’s new command included a locker room full of drunks, duty shirkers, wife beaters, drug addicts, rule benders, and discipline problems who were not quite bad enough to fire. An officer would screw up somehow in a cushy command, only to find himself dressing at the 77th on the following day.
“What are you in for, kid,” the veterans would ask new arrivals. “Murder, rape, or robbery?”
On the day he arrived Henry had only one mark against him, but it was the mark of Cain. His brother-in-law was a rat who had helped send other cops to jail. Henry Winter had to be a rat too. And so from the day he stepped through the precinct’s metal doors and walked up a flight of steps to introduce himself to the duty captain, Henry was someone whom other cops ignored, distrusted, and avoided.
“My name got there before I did. The word had come down that I was Dennis’s brother-in-law and that I was a rat. Nobody would talk to me. There was one guy, a cop named Larry Bolliack. Larry was a little wacky. He wore an earring with a little number 77 on it. I guess he really liked the precinct. He said his girlfriend had given him the earring. I had been working with Larry for a little while and he came up to me one day and said, ‘Look, I just got to find out what the hell is going on here with you. I hear you’re a rat. I know your brother-in-law is a rat. He worked for IAD. I want to know if you’re working for IAD. That’s why the guys aren’t talking to you here.’ I said, ‘Look, Larry I’m not working for IAD. What my brother-in-law did was what he did. We’re two different people.’ Larry told me, ‘Well Henry, that’s why guys aren’t talking to you.’
“All the guys on the midnight tour shied away from me. Some of them were into serious shit before I ever got to the precinct. The first time I got involved with it was with the sergeant, Gallagher, and Gallagher’s partner. There happened to be money missing on a job they went on, and the guy who lost the money came into the precinct bitching. It was a set-up job. It wasn’t a real radio run. They had dropped a dime on the guy. They had called 911 themselves and then responded to the bogus call to get inside the building. The owners were selling drugs out of an apartment in the front and running a dice game in the back. So the cops went in to hit the place, I happened to swing by. It was on Schenectady Avenue.
“Later the guy who got ripped off came into the station house bitching that money was missing. The sergeant met the guy outside. In the meantime, I had to go out on a car accident with a DOA. When I got back, Gallagher came up to me and said, ‘There’s a guy in the precinct bitching about money being taken.’ I said, ‘What do I give a fuck? I didn’t take any money from him. Let the guy bitch all he wants.’ At that time, it was 1981, I was a year in the precinct. I didn’t take money then. I didn’t know these guys on the late tour were grabbing money left and right. Anyway, apparently they gave the guy some money back. But later the guy came around and started bitching again about money being taken. I don’t know if they gave him money the second time or just took him for a ride. He was gonzo alonzo [gone] after that.
“That night the late-tour guys said they wanted to talk to me. They caught me in the garage. Gallagher and his partner were there, talking about the situation. Finally, they said, ‘Look, not that we don’t trust you, but your brother-in-law was a rat.’ And then they tossed me—checked me for a wire. Jesus, I was pissed. We almost got into a fight. I said, ‘You don’t have to fucking toss me. If I tell you I’m not wired, I’m not wired. What the fuck is going on here?’ Gallagher’s partner said, ‘Nothing against you, but I don’t talk to anybody unless I toss them first.’ I said, ‘Yeah. Okay. No problem.’ And from that day on, because they knew I knew something had happened and I didn’t open my mouth, I was accepted. I wasn’t accepted to the point where they took me in with them—but at least they talked to me. The rest came later.”
4
The Alamo
At the New York City Police Department’s headquarters at One Police Plaza in Manhattan—a fourteen-story building dubbed “the Purple Palace” by the city’s rank and file cops—the 77th Precinct had acquired a reputation as an “unmanageable” precinct with an acute integrity problem.
Just as a riotous command in the South Bronx had been named Fort Apache, Brooklyn cops referred to the 77th Precinct as the Alamo. A detective’s wife who knew a little about silk screens even designed a blue and white T-shirt, with a drawing of the real Alamo and the words “77th Precinct. The Alamo. Under Siege.” The shirts—approximately 150 of them—were snapped up at $7.50 a clip within a week after they went on sale. Most of the cops liked the new nickname. It was much better than that of an adjoining Brooklyn precinct that had been overtaken and trashed by a group of angry Hasidic Jews after a mugging—Fort Surrender.
“We were just thinking of a fort. There were four of us. Me, my partner Al, Larry Bolliack and another cop named Frankie. We were parked side by side in a playground just off Atlantic Avenue. One guy says, ‘We got to name this place and its got to be a fort like Fort Apache.’ We were talking about Indians, war and being surrounded. Bolliack wanted to call it Alienated City. Then somebody said it. The Alamo. And the next thing you know it was painted on the wall outside the precinct in orange Day-Glo paint. Alamo. That was the only place it was painted and I did it myself. I pulled up in my car on a midnight tour, and I just went out and wrote in big letters with a spray can: A. L. A. M. O. Alamo. My partner Al kept going, ‘Did you spell it right?’ He was nervous about that. He didn’t want to be party to a misspelling.
“The next week, something happened at the precinct and the name hit the newspapers. The story said, ‘The Seven-Seven Precinct, sometimes referred to as the Alamo …’ But some precinct in the Bronx sent us a teletype message, saying, ‘Hey, we’re the Alamo. We’re the original Alamo.’ One of the guys sent them a message back too—Fuck you.
“About the same time a Communist Party group c
ame in to the precinct, trying to rile the blacks up. They came around and started breaking the windows in the station house. They had us surrounded. And that’s when our captain said on the news, ‘We were like a fort under siege.’ That did it. They came out with the T-shirts right after that. ‘The Alamo. Under Siege.’ Everybody bought the shirts. Didn’t Brian have his on when he did what he did in the motel?”
No one liked wearing the new T-shirts better than some of the cops working the precinct’s midnight shift. Some of the officers would put the shirts on under their uniforms and then set out to wreak havoc in the precinct—drinking beer, robbing the dead, stealing from the scenes of past burglaries and holding up drug dealers. It seemed to the officers on the midnight tours that almost everyone knew about these extracurricular activities except the people in charge of stopping corruption—an apparatus that included the precinct’s Integrity Officer, the Internal Affairs Division, the Field Internal Affairs Unit, the Brooklyn district attorney and the state special prosecutor.
Sergeant William Stinson, who supervised the midnight tour, always asked precinct detectives, “So, what do you hear?” When detective Frank Duffey told him, “I hear you guys on the midnight tour are out there robbing everybody blind,” Stinson replied, “I think I’ll retire.” But when he put in his retirement papers, and realized that the department was actually going to let him go, he rethought his position. Stinson went back to work, telling friends, “If they’re going to let me retire, that means they don’t have nothing on me.”
Peter Heron, another new cop in the 77th Precinct who got transferred there after pulling his gun on the day he graduated from the police academy and shooting a neighbor in the head during a hallway scuffle, was fired from the department after he started snorting heroin on the job. Heron, an active cop if there ever was one, got into no less than four shootouts with drug dealers and robbery suspects during his first six months in the precinct—a remarkable achievement when you consider that most city cops retire without ever having fired their guns in the heat of battle.