by Mike McAlary
Tony was given a medal and honored by the precinct’s community council with a plaque. And for once, he didn’t even mind going to court.
Firmly entrenched as a prince of the locker room by 1982, Tony started thinking about semi-retirement—getting off the streets and taking a cushy inside job at the 77th Precinct. Young cops already referred to him as “the next Johnny Massar,” and he wasn’t insulted by the comparison to the precinct’s hard-drinking veteran.
When his partner of six years, Johnny Miller, transferred out of the ghetto to a Staten Island command near his home, Tony took the breakup like a death in the family. On the night they got word of the transfers, Magno and Miller drove through their sector with tears in their eyes, at a loss for words to explain how they felt about each other. At one point during their final tour, the cops were called to a street disturbance. In the heat of their last action, the partners snapped. They struck out at several ill-fated residents who made the mistake of looking at them cross-eyed. Giving someone a beating made both cops feel better.
After Johnny left, Tony started to drop hints around the station house that he’d be willing to work inside all the time, but eventually he got over it and decided to put a few more years in on patrol. As a senior man, Tony was given his choice of new partners. Tony decided that his new partner would have to be an active cop, a veteran who knew the streets and was willing to make arrests and go to court. Tony wanted someone he could trust to back him up in the hairiest of situations and who wouldn’t mind him having a beer in their squad car. Finally, he made his choice. He hooked up with a blonde, blue-eyed cop who had a reputation for being a loner and a prankster.
Tony Magno chose Henry Winter.
“First time I saw him he was just like another cop. But I had heard of Henry Winter. The rumor back then, in 1980, was, ‘Watch this guy. Did you hear about him? He came over here with a cloud over his head.’ I asked the guys, ‘What do you mean?’ And they said, ‘We don’t know about this guy. He don’t fuck around with the guys. He don’t drink. He came over here after his brother-in-law did his thing in the Seven-Five. He’s bounced around a few precincts. We’re not sure about him. We got a feeling he might have something to do with Internal Affairs.’
“Henry was in another squad then and I didn’t work with him. But then stuff started coming back on him. Everybody knew that Henry had a clear head on the streets but was a bit of a flaky-type guy, and he started saying and doing things that were off the wall—jumping on desks with his pants down, burning a drug dealer’s money. I don’t know how it got around, but everybody knew Henry was doing something weird out there even though he was working with a super-straight guy. He was sneaky about it, doing whatever it was on the side. Eventually he had a falling-out with his partner. The guy just turned around one day and said, ‘We ain’t partners no more.’
“Then Henry came into my squad and started driving the sergeant, Bill Dougherty, for awhile. They got along good. The sergeant still liked to get involved in making arrests, and Henry liked to make collars, so they gelled. But Sergeant Dougherty was on the lieutenant’s list, so of course he made lieutenant and left Henry hanging loose. My partner had left to train rookies. So now I had nobody, Henry had nobody.
“Henry knew I had time on the job and I knew he was all right, real flaky and shit. So I thought, ‘What the fuck? Let’s hook up.’ I asked Henry one day in the latter part of 1983, ‘What are you going to do, want to work together or what?’ So we did. A couple guys approached me and said, ‘Aw, don’t hook up with him.’ I heard shit like that for no good reason. They just said, ‘He’s not like you.’
“At this point, I was involved in minor stuff, the type of corruption that was standard operating procedure. No drugs. I’d drink beer in the car. Maybe I’d take some money hanging around in the open at a burglary. I might take a can of tuna fish out of a store along with batteries for my flashlight and cigarettes. But that was it. Everybody was doing that shit. I never came out of an apartment with a million fucking dollars.
“I just had to dance with somebody, and I decided to dance with Henry Winter.”
8
“Yep. They got it all, lady.”
Henry Winter and Tony Magno became partners in crime midway through their first tour together. The cops drove past the corner of Lincoln Place and Franklin Avenue, an area in the precinct with a reputation for being a drug flea market. Tony spotted a black teenager talking with a group of older men near a stoop. He recognized them as neighborhood cocaine dealers, and saw one of the men slip what looked like a tinfoil package into the teenager’s hand.
Smiling, the man turned around to face the street and saw the radio car with the police officers staring at him. The man acted very suspiciously, Henry and Tony later agreed. He ran down the block.
Sitting in the “runner’s position”—the front seat on the passenger’s side—Henry kicked open his door and bolted after the man. Tony drove ahead of his partner, shutting off the suspect’s escape route. As Henry chased him down an alley, the suspect began dropping one-dollar bills. Henry kept chasing the dealer until the money jumped from one-dollar bills to twenty dollar bills. Then he stopped and picked the money up off the sidewalk.
The suspect ran straight into Tony’s arms at the end of the alley. Tony threw his prisoner up against the car and frisked him for money and drugs, waiting for his partner to arrive on the scene. A crowd gathered as Tony finished the scavenger hunt, cheering the action.
“Let him go,” Henry said, his pockets already stuffed with money. “He’s got nothing on him. We can’t hold him.”
Tony let him go, saying, “We’re doing you a favor. We’re going to let you go this time.”
The cops returned to their car and drove off. They parked a short distance away and Henry pulled out the money—just over four hundred dollars.
“How did you get it?” Tony asked.
“I’m running after the guy,” Henry explained with a coy smile “and he starts dropping it. I backtracked and picked it all up.”
Tony made a face and restarted the car. He was afraid the drop was some kind of integrity test. Pondering the situation, he drove around for a few minutes before finally pulling over again.
“Well?” Henry asked. “What do you want to do?”
“Let me count it,” said Tony, assuming the role of mathematician.
He counted the cash out into two piles and then looked up.
“Well?” Henry repeated. “What do you want to do?”
Tony held out his hands, weighing both the dollar amount and his decision.
“Ah, fuck it,” he said, shoving his cut into his pants with one hand and passing Henry his share of the rip-off with the other. “We’re partners, ain’t we?”
Most of the cops in the station house believed that the 77th Precinct’s newest partners were an ill-fitting couple. In theory, Henry and Tony were in total disagreement on everything from dress and music to politics and sports.
Tony was a dry cleaner’s dream. Ever the sharp city dresser, he wore thin black Bally shoes, a sleek black leather coat, finely creased slacks and starched cotton shirts. Henry, the suburban outdoorsman, picked his clothes out of an L. L. Bean catalogue. He wore brightly colored Reebok sneakers, corduroy jackets, dungarees, and flannel shirts.
A check of the AM radio in their squad car confirmed that they were men of different tastes, if not worlds. Tony kept one button preset to an oldies station, while Henry kept another set for a station playing country and western music. On day tours, the partners listened to oldies, with Tony eventually teaching his partner the finer points of doowop. On midnight tours they listened to country music, with Henry helping Willie Nelson explain why Tony shouldn’t let his babies grow up to be cowboys.
Sporting events presented another problem in Sector Ida-John. Tony lived for the Mets and Giants. Henry died with the Yankees and the Jets. Election nights usually brought more disagreements. Tony would hoist a can of Budweiser
to salute victorious Republican candidates, but Henry honked the horn in deference to Democratic winners.
And so it was that Henry Winter and Tony Magno spent much of their time together. They argued, honked horns, sang doo-wops, mimicked Dolly Parton, and laughed. They began to enjoy the time of their police careers. They became the perfect partners. You might even say that they loved each other.
“Tony and I were completely opposite, so whatever he talked about was interesting to me, and whatever I talked about was interesting to him. I could put an experience on Tony, and he could put one on me. It just worked out perfect.
“Tony stayed with the guys after the tour to drink beer and bullshit, but I was on my way home five minutes before our tour ended. Tony didn’t make collars, I did. We had nothing in common whatsoever. I talked about hunting and fishing; he talked about other guys on the job and what was happening in the precinct. We always talked.
“It’s funny. If you have something in common with someone, you usually become competitive. You can really get on each other’s nerves. But we were like magnets. Our differences drew us closer together.
“One thing we agreed on was the car. Tony and I really took pride in it. We started with an old car and then got a new one. We kept it cleaned and waxed. If something went wrong, even if a bulb went out, we’d spend the money ourselves to fix it. Once we were out on a three-day swing and came back to find the car’s whole front end demolished. It was destroyed. We didn’t get it back for six weeks. Meanwhile we were driving around a shitbox car that was falling apart. Finally we got our car back. We saw them pull it in just as we finished an eight-to-four tour one afternoon. We went over, looked at it and said, ‘All right. It’s in good shape.’ Then we went home. We came in the next day and the car was totaled out again. The guy driving it was some tall Jewish cop—a rookie no less. We called him everything underneath the sun. Tony was really pissed. He screamed at the guy, ‘Hey, you can’t even drive. You’re not a cop, you’re a fucking little whore.’
“We were in total agreement on the car. And there was another thing we agreed on too. After a while, neither one of us saw anything wrong with ripping off drug dealers while we were in uniform.”
As with most criminals, Henry and Tony started out small. Shortly after they teamed up, they were sitting on a corner in their sector watching a group of suspicious-looking men parade into a smoke shop on Brooklyn Avenue. They decided to get a closer look at what was going on inside. Tony drove to a corner pay phone and Henry dialed 911—the police emergency number. Disguising his voice to sound like a Jamaican black, Henry reported seeing a man with a gun in the smoke shop.
“The mon inside, he have a gun. For sure the mon shoot someone.”
He then returned to the car to wait for the call. “Ida-John, Central,” Henry said. “We’ll handle that job.”
With guns drawn, Henry and Tony rushed into the building. Several men fled out through an unguarded rear exit. Inside, Tony found a marijuana-filled cigar box. The cops were disappointed—they wanted money, not drugs. So they led the counter man into the bathroom and forced him to flush the drugs down the toilet.
Within months of that first operation, Henry and Tony were conducting similar raids on numbers parlors in their sector. They would rush into buildings, screaming, their guns drawn, chasing gamblers out into the street through rear exits. Once everyone had left, Henry and Tony would scoop up any money left behind, and leave.
In addition to hitting numbers parlors, they took money whenever they had the opportunity. They once stepped over a dead man’s body, discovered in his apartment on the last day of the month, to seek out and steal his rent money.
The cops hit their collective low as thieves on a winter day in 1984. Responding to a radio call of a burglary in progress, they arrived at a Park Place apartment to find a woman standing in the hallway, shaking. She had come home to find her door ajar and jewelry missing from her bedroom bureau.
“I ran out of the apartment,” she said. “I was scared the burglar might still be in there. I think he got everything, but I’m not sure.”
Henry was interested. “What do you mean you think he got everything?”
“Well I keep a lot of money in the closet, but I didn’t dare open it. The money is in a tin box. Could you go in and check to see if it’s still there?”
Henry and Tony entered the apartment, leaving the woman in the hallway with a neighbor. Tony guarded the door while Henry removed two hundred dollars from the tin box. Henry stuffed the money into his pocket and the cops returned to the hallway, filling out a burglary complaint report.
“Yep,” Henry announced. “They got it all, lady.”
Later they split up the cash in the patrol car. Henry felt bad about what he had just done. His conscience bothered him. This wasn’t some street dealer or numbers runner they had just ripped off, this was a frightened woman who trusted them. The partners discussed the possibility of returning the money, but Tony didn’t want to compound the mistake with a lie.
“Forget it,” he decided. “What’s done is done. We’ll never do it again.”
Feeling disgraced, they decided they wouldn’t rob anybody but really bad guys. They had to have some code of ethics, they agreed. They were not, Henry and Tony assured each other, complete degenerates. They were businessmen, and even the cruelest businessman had to operate by a set of principles.
But soon they had another problem. They were running out of bad guys. A lot of smoke shops in their sector had closed because the drug merchants had moved to neighborhoods where the cops weren’t quite so active and so greedy. Several numbers parlors also shifted their bases of operation, relocating in sectors beyond the reach of Winter and Magno. Apparently shut out, Tony and Henry refocused their attention on the ghetto’s burgeoning drug trade.
“We’ll become like Robin Hoods,” Tony announced one day. “We’ll steal from the rich and keep it.”
While on patrol one day in late 1984, Henry and Tony rounded a corner on Schenectady Avenue and spotted a man carrying a shoulder bag. He looked at the cops, did a double take, and then sprinted down the street. He entered a storefront that the police listed as “a known drug location” in their intelligence reports.
The cops got out of their car and chased the man into the building. Henry grabbed him in the back of the otherwise empty store and asked, “What are you doing here?”
“Nothing. Just hanging out.”
“What are you hanging out here for? There’s nobody here.”
Then Henry noticed that the man no longer had his shoulder bag and he ordered, “Get out of here. Now.”
The man obliged and, once he’d left, Tony found the bag hidden behind a large commercial refrigerator. He opened it and called Henry over.
“What is it?”
“Fucking money. A lot of money.”
They returned to their car with the bag. As Henry drove away, Tony counted out more than $5,500. The cops took $2,500 apiece and returned to the station house where they vouchered the bag and remaining $500 as found property. The man they robbed confronted them in the precinct parking lot.
“Please give me the money back. They’re gonna kill me when I tell them what happened. They won’t believe me.”
“We’re vouchering the bag and the money,” the officers answered. “Tell your boss to come down and prove the money is his. It’ll be right here. See the desk officer and tell him where you got the money.”
When they turned the bag in, the sergeant discovered an additional $1,500 in a compartment the officers overlooked. Henry and Tony looked at each other and said, “We blew it. How stupid can we be?”
The bag’s owner realized he would have to answer some hard questions about the drug trade if he tried to reclaim his cash and he never bothered to set foot in the 77th Precinct.
Henry and Tony were ecstatic. The incident brought a renewed sense of purpose to their work as members of the New York City Police Department. No drug dealer
was safe from them. They broke down doors and climbed fire escapes into fortified apartments, getting the drop on surprised dealers.
Within a year after first teaming up, Henry and Tony were hooked on the excitement they felt whenever they harassed drug dealers.
“We always tried to leave the bad guys with a little something. If you go into a place and take everything, they’re gonna bitch. They may even come down to the precinct and file a complaint against you. Of course a lot of guys did file complaints against us. They always identified us as ‘Blondie and his partner.’ Tony used to go crazy when he heard that. He’d scream, ‘Keep your hat on when we’re out in the streets. Being out here with you is like being with Fay Wray.’
“But if you catch guys and let them go with a little money and drugs they’re not going to bitch. They’re as happy as a pig in shit. They’re thinking, ‘I’m not going to jail. So I lost a little money. I’ll make it up next week.’ Plus they didn’t know we were actually keeping the drugs and reselling them. They thought we vouchered the drugs after we let them go. That was easier for them to take than if we walked over to a toilet and flushed one thousand, fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars worth of cocaine away. They got pissed when we did that and said, ‘You should have locked me up.’
“Did I feel guilty about what we were doing? Yeah. At that particular minute. When someone handed me money, I felt guilty. I think anybody would feel guilty then. But then all of a sudden we’d get a ten-thirty [shots fired] or something on the radio. And we’d go answer the job and forget about what we’d just done. Once I got through the day, I lived with my guilt. There were times I thought, ‘What’s going to happen? Holy shit, what am I doing? Taking a lousy couple of dollars. It’s not worth it.’ But it just seemed like, ‘So what?’ Who actually is going to come out here and look at us?