by Mike McAlary
“You want to play, you got to pay,” the police union rep said before freeing his victim.
Later Brian watched his partner count the stolen money out and split it into two equal piles. Then Gallagher held out $150 to his new partner. Brian froze. Gallagher kept his hand out. Brian didn’t want to embarrass a cop he idolized. He didn’t want a confrontation with a hero. So finally, he just squeezed his hand around the money and shoved it into his pocket.
Much later Brian said, “I felt like I was one of the boys.”
Within days after accepting the money, Brian was lost to the New York City Police Department. He brought a new single-mindedness to his work. Like Henry Winter, Brian had become the law. Guys like Mitch from Lincoln Place were no longer a problem. If Brian caught Mitch with drugs now, he would just steal them and walk away. And unlike other cops in the precinct, Brian wasn’t simply robbing people to get their money. He was using the act of robbery as a vehicle for punishment.
“I did it for the glory,” he said later. “It was all done as a way of getting back at the people you couldn’t hurt. No one becomes a cop to steal.”
By mid-1984, Brian and Henry had adjoining lockers. And sometimes Brian would see Henry counting out large sums of money after a tour. The word on the street was that Henry was crashing through windows into drug locations and stealing money. Brian was conducting similar raids on his own tours.
“I used to see him standing there counting hundreds of dollars,” O’Regan said. “Henry would turn to me and say, ‘Not a bad night.’”
Shortly after hooking up with Gallagher, Brian met a twenty-one-year-old rookie policewoman in the 77th Precinct named Cathy. In Brian’s eyes, she made a police uniform come to life. A petite Polish girl with wavy hair, soft blue eyes, and a high forehead, Cathy was equally impressed with Brian. They met on an arrest, during which Brian subdued a prisoner without benefit of a nightstick.
“I like the way you handled yourself out there,” the rookie said later.
“Really?” said Brian, blushing.
Soon they were dating. And then they were doing more than dating. Brian was talking about his dreams, filling the night air on walks through Park Slope with talk of children and a home. To his surprise, Cathy listened.
But he had some advice for her too. The veteran told the rookie, “Get out of this precinct as soon as you can. Get out of this precinct before it changes you.”
She took his advice, and transferred out, getting a job in a Manhattan command. The relationship continued to flourish even as Brian continued to rob people. Soon he was showing up for work in a tattered, stained uniform. He grew fat and unhappy, his mind and body taking on the consistency of jelly.
“I had no pride,” Brian said of his deteriorating personal appearance.
Over the months and years, Brian O’Regan lost more and more of his resolve. The same cop who dreamed of joining the Emergency Services Unit now drove around with a sledgehammer in his trunk. He bought special steel-tipped shoes so he could kick down doors more easily. He even thought about sending away for a portable rope ladder. “I wanted excitement. Some kind of adventure.”
Soon Brian put his military training to work, surprising fellow thieves with his knowledge of tactical maneuvers and theories of attack. He became known as a tactician, spending hours scouting out fortified positions for weaknesses, taking an inventory of lookouts, bodyguards, and potential gunmen. Henry Winter, among others, was in awe of O’Regan’s organizational ability.
“Other cops robbed people,” Henry said. “Brian conducted operations. He missed his calling.”
Brian later agreed. “I would have done great in narcotics.”
No robbery was beneath Brian, who had a reputation for spending both sides of a dollar. Tony Magno, who rarely got his hands dirty while conducting illegal drug raids, was amazed at O’Regan’s staying power. Although he was nervous on the streets when discussing an upcoming burglary, saying things like, “No bullshit, guys. This time just in and out. Please.” Brian was always the last one to leave a drug raid. He would get down on his hands and knees to search floorboards for secret compartments. He stood on chairs to poke holes in ceilings and punched his fists through false walls. It was not beneath O’Regan to lay on the floor and search behind broken toilets. “See,” he once yelled, pulling a bag of drugs from underneath a feces-filled bathtub in an abandoned apartment, “I told you the shit was here.” By the end of a tour, Brian’s hair was often littered with Sheetrock dust and his uniform covered with grime and filth. He never seemed to notice.
“You just couldn’t stop what was happening,” Brian said. “It was like we had a fever or something.”
But by this point even Brian knew he had more than a simple illness. He knew he had psychological problems, perhaps triggered by some physical ailment. He went to see a physician on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, only to be told there was nothing physically wrong with him. The doctor suggested that Brian see a psychiatrist. Soon.
Instead, he began taking antidepressant pills. One night Brian mentioned in confidence to Gallagher that he was thinking of getting some help. The next day, cops were pointing at Brian with one hand and twirling a finger near their heads. “Woo, woo,” they said. Brian had a new nickname in the precinct—the other cops called him Spaceman. Officer Spaceman stopped looking for help. “If you tell someone you have psychological problems, they think you’re crazy.”
“Brian kept saying that he wanted to get off the job, that he wanted to get out on a medical disability. We used to talk about it. He’d say, ‘Henry, I got to get out while I still can.’ So I said, ‘No problem. I’ll just shoot you.’ We decided to stage an accidental shooting. Brian loved the idea. Guys in the Marines did stuff like that to get out of Vietnam. He kept asking, ‘When are we going to do it? When are we going to do it? And so one night we decided to do it.
“We drove down to a building on Portal Street, on the borderline between the Seven-One and the Seven-Seven. We were working together on a late tour. So he says, ‘What do you think? Should we do it?’ I didn’t want to, but Brian said, ‘Aw, come on.’ He was carrying a .22-caliber pistol that looked like some kind of cowboy gun. A big gun with a long barrel. He kept saying, ‘Aw, come on, let’s do it.’ And I kept telling him, ‘Nah. We can’t do this.’ But Brian was persistent. I finally agreed to shoot him.
“At first he wanted to be shot in the leg. But I told him, “No, no. You can’t do it in the leg, Brian. You got arteries all over the place there. You could bleed to death. Do it someplace else. Just take a finger off. Shoot the trigger finger off and you’ll never be able to qualify with the other hand. They’ll have to give you a medical disability.’ Brian thought about it for a minute and said, ‘No, I don’t want to lose a finger.’ Then we started passing the gun back and forth on the street, saying, ‘You do it,’ ‘No, you do it.’ We went on like that for awhile. Then I just said, ‘Brian, I can’t fucking shoot you.’ He said, ‘Come on. Will you just shoot me? We’ll set it up like we chased some skell into the building and shots were fired.’ I said, ‘No, no, here, you take the gun, you shoot yourself.’
“Brian took the gun in his right hand and aimed it at his left. I stopped him and said, ‘No. Do it the other way around. Take the gun in your left hand and shoot yourself in the right hand. Who gives a shit about your left hand? You shoot right-handed. Shoot the right hand.” Brian looked at me and said, ‘Okay. I just wasn’t thinking there for a moment.’
“So now Brian’s got the gun in his left hand and he’s pointing it at the palm of his right hand. And I said, ‘No, don’t do it like that. The bullet will just go right through your hand and you won’t do any damage that way. Close your hand, make a fist and then shoot into the fist.’ I was trying to psych Brian out. Nobody would shoot through a closed fist. But I said, ‘Go ahead, if you shoot into your fist you’ll take your finger, your knuckle, and everything.’ He goes, ‘You think so? You think this is the way?’ ‘Believe m
e.’ He held the hand open again. ‘Not like that?’ I tell him, ‘Not like that Brian. It goes right through if you do it like that. How many times have you seen guys shot in the hand like that, it goes through and nothing?’ He says, ‘Yeah, yeah, you’re right about that.’ Finally I said, ‘Make a fist and shoot yourself through the fist.’
“He stood there for a second pointing the cowboy gun at the fist but he couldn’t do it. ‘No way Hank. I ain’t doing that.’ I said, ‘That’s right. You shoot yourself in the fist and there goes the whole fucking hand.’ Brian put his gun away and we drove back to the precinct. Brian couldn’t shoot himself.
“Later Brian and I used to sit in the car in the Seventy-seventh Precinct asking each other, ‘What the fuck are we doing here?’ He should have been in Broward County in Florida and I should have been in Colorado. Now we were both sitting in the middle of a slum with a banged-up patrol car and frayed uniforms. We felt like two idiots. But really, that’s it with life, isn’t it? You make a choice somewhere along the way and then you live and die with it. There’s no turning back.”
7
“I was exhausted. I couldn’t hit another person.”
Tony Magno grew up in an Italian section of Brooklyn and as a kid he loved two blue uniforms. One uniform belonged to the New York City Police Department, the other to the Brooklyn Dodgers.
At first Tony dreamed of wearing Dodger Blue. He played sewer-to-sewer stick ball on 71st Street between 19th and 20th Avenues, pretending to be his favorite Dodger, Carl Furillo. He idolized Furillo as a baseball player because he was Italian and his middle name was Anthony. But Tony liked all the Dodgers, even Jackie Robinson, and he told his Italian friends that anybody who played for the Dodgers was socially acceptable, even if he was black.
“Jackie Robinson isn’t black anymore,” he said. “He’s blue. It’s the same with the cops. Once a guy puts on the uniform, he’s a cop just like Jackie Robinson is just a Dodger.”
He hung out with a small, loosely-defined, relatively harmless group of Italian kids from the neighborhood who laughingly referred to themselves as “The Seventy-first Street Faggoteers.” They rarely got into fights and carried metal combs and a ready supply of Vitalis instead of weapons, but they did wear motorcycle jackets, garrison belts, white Keds sneakers, tight jeans, and white T-shirts. Mostly the Faggoteers played baseball, but in time they gave up the game for girls.
When Raymond Giamanco bought a 1958 Chevy convertible, the gang expanded its horizons, traveling into the nearby neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Bath Beach to meet new girls in new Italian neighborhoods. Tony nicknamed the car the “pushmobile.”
“Half the time when we took the car out we wound up pushing it back home,” Magno later remembered. “We were always running out of gas and having breakdowns.”
By the early 1960s, Tony had set aside his stickball bat for a pair of wooden drumsticks. He sat in his living room, beating on a pair of telephone books, keeping time to Benny Goodman and other Big Band sounds on his father’s stereo. After wearing out the yellow pages, he started on the furniture. His father rescued the family sofa when his son turned fourteen, buying him a set of Gretsch black diamond pearl drums which he set up in the basement. Soon all the neighborhood rock and rollers were hanging out in Tony’s cellar, dreaming about playing in nightclubs and deposing the Beatles.
Unable to read music and unwilling to read textbooks, Tony was regarded as a mediocre musician and an uninterested high school student. He had to attend night school for a full year after his senior year in order to qualify for a high school diploma. When he eventually graduated, in 1965, Tony took a job as a stock boy at May’s department store on 14th Street in Manhattan, where he was known as a soft touch who would sometimes switch the price tags on clothes.
At this stage in his life, Tony had little understanding of geography or history. He knew, for example, that there were run-down black neighborhoods in Brooklyn but he had never really seen a slum. And the one time he tried to make a killing through thievery—stealing a yellow parchment from the basement of his drum teacher’s home—he embarrassed himself.
“I thought I really had something big—the original copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. When I tried to sell it, they laughed me off the block.”
In early 1966, when he was seventeen, Tony decided to join the Army, asking his father to co-sign his enlistment papers. Ernest Magno, a World War II veteran who saw action in North Africa and Italy, refused, telling his son, “I ain’t signing your death certificate. I did enough fighting for both of us.” Tony dropped the idea of becoming a war hero.
In July of that year a guitar-playing friend invited Tony on a boat ride with two girls, one of them a shy blonde from the neighborhood named Marianne. The foursome headed out into Jamaica Bay, listening to the radio for hours while basking in the sun. Midway through the trip, Marianne decided that she was extremely impressed with Tony the drummer. She liked the way he looked in tight black chinos, and the way his starched white and yellow shirt hung off his string-bean frame. He seemed to be a cross between Fabian and Elvis. So when the boat docked, Marianne sprinted away with Tony Magno’s ID bracelet.
“I was pretty sure he’d call me anyway,” she explained. “But I wanted to make sure.”
Within weeks the couple was dating seriously and by early 1967 they were talking about getting married. But there was one small problem. Tony couldn’t offer Marianne any long-term security, and she wasn’t the type to marry a department store clerk, even if he was fairly adept at switching price tags and looked like Fabian.
Tony knew that he wasn’t going to make it as a rock-and-roll star either. His band—they called themselves the Paragons—had flopped at its one nightclub audition, stumbling through versions of “Hang on Sloopy,” “In the Midnight Hour” and “House of the Rising Sun.” To make matters worse, several customers came to the club hoping to see the real Paragons.
“They claimed false advertising,” Tony said. “They came in to see the Paragons and saw what amounted to the Slobs instead. We never got to play another club after that.”
A week or so later, Marianne told her boyfriend that he couldn’t marry her until he got some sort of normal job.
She suggested that he study for an upcoming civil service exam and follow up on his dream to join the police force, now that the Dodgers had moved west. The couple got copies of old tests and studied for long hours in the evenings, sitting on the girl’s couch and whispering sweet nothings like “perpetrators,” and “homicides,” into each other’s ears.
Nineteen-year-old Tony Magno was contacted by the Police Department in mid-1967 and offered a job as a police trainee, a job that carried a military exemption. He was ecstatic—he was going to be a cop once he turned twenty-one. Marianne couldn’t have been happier that she was going to be a cop’s bride. They were married on January 5, 1969, ten days before Tony was sworn in as a police officer. Because he was still in the academy, he was only given two days off. They honeymooned in Manhattan, taking a room at the Sheraton Motor Inn for the weekend.
“It was a nice way to start a marriage,” Marianne thought. “We worked and struggled together, and we got somewhere. So we appreciated the little that we had. We were very happy with very little.”
Tony was appointed to the New York City Police Department on January 15, 1969. They took away his police trainee uniform and gave him a silver shield and a .38-caliber service revolver. He joined a group of recruits on a trip to Smith-Gray Uniform Tailors in Manhattan where he plunked down $200 for two uniforms. After working for a week during a snow emergency in the 17th Precinct, Tony Magno was assigned to his first command, the 77th Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.
“The first corruption I ever did, I was a police trainee. I was too young to actually come on the job but they had started this new unit. Police trainees. We had a stupid little uniform. Gray pants and a gray shirt with a little blue tie. We had a hat too, but we didn’t have to wear i
t. It was one of those fold-over World War II hats. They sent us out into a borough command office and we either did paperwork or answered phones. I got sent to the old Eight-Oh, which is now part of the Seven-Seven. One night I’m on the switchboard with a fill-in lieutenant from the old Thirteenth Division. Somebody needed a tow truck, so I called one. But after the job was completed, the driver came into the station house, handed me fifty dollars and said, ‘Thanks.’ I just stood there with my mouth open. I was making one hundred and twenty-nine dollars every two weeks at that point, and I didn’t know what to do with the fifty dollars. I was scared shitless.
“So I told the fill-in lieutenant, ‘The tow truck driver came in and walked out leaving me money. Do you get half? I don’t know what to do.’ He looked at me and said, ‘Kid, this was your contract. You got the money. You keep the money.’ I didn’t know what to do so I put the money in my pocket and that was that. I didn’t even think about corruption. I didn’t even know what the word ‘corruption’ meant.
“The only other thing that I knew was wrong was guys sleeping on the job. Even guys that were radio dispatchers used to sleep. They set up beach chairs behind the radio receiver boxes, and guys that worked right in the radio room would go in there and sleep. At three o’clock in the morning one guy could handle the job, so they took turns. I remember when the sergeants came off patrol, if things were quiet, they’d go upstairs to the dormitory too. Everybody slept. The lieutenant on the desk slept. There were times I was the only guy alive in the station house on a twelve-to-eight shift. There were no lights on except the desk light and the switchboard light. The only way a person could tell it was a station was the two little green lights out in front that said ‘Police.’
“Before we graduated, I had told everybody in the academy that I knew where I was going. I had a hook. I was going to the Six-Two out in Bensonhurst, my old neighborhood. It was all arranged. My uncle, who worked in a bakery, knew some inspector in Brooklyn South. The inspector used to come in for coffee and free pastries in the morning and one day my uncle tells him, ‘Look, my nephew is in the academy. Do you think we can get him out here?’ The inspector said, ‘No problem. I’ll just make a phone call.’ So it was set. I was going to the Six-Two. My uncle said, ‘This guy is a Scotch drinker. When this is all over, you might have to buy him a case of Scotch.’ No problem. My father would have bought the Scotch. All the other guys were worried about where they were being sent. Not me.