Buddy Boys
Page 18
The cops turned over the ninety-minute tapes they used during their tour and briefed the investigators on the contents of the recordings. The Internal Affairs operatives would then reload the cops’ recorders with fresh batteries and new tapes. A brief header—used for voice identification—was then recorded on each tape along with the time and date.
It was soon apparent to investigators that Tony was not cooperating in the probe. Sometimes he went out on patrol and left the recorder in his locker. He often submitted blank tapes, explaining, “Henry got all the conversations.”
“The recorder is too big,” Magno said, his voice filled with paranoia, “I know they can see it bulging from my shirt and pants. It feels like I’m carrying a thousand pounds of bricks.”
“You’ll get used to the weight,” the investigators told him.
On another street corner, another set of cops was complaining to Henry.
“Look, you’re doing all the taping and your partner isn’t doing anything.”
“That’s because Tony’s recorder is too big,” Henry insisted. “It’s too bulky for him.”
“Then switch recorders,” the investigators said.
Henry and Tony switched recorders. Soon both men were turning in tapes full of crisp, clearly incriminating conversations. The investigators were happy. Magno and Winter were miserable.
“The recorder sucked, Tony and I both agreed on that. You could never forget that you had it on you. Not like your gun. Sometimes you forget that you have the gun on. In the beginning I was always shifting the recorder from one pocket to another, trying to find a place that was comfortable. I put it in my shirt pocket. I put it in my pants pocket. I taped it to my crotch. It never felt comfortable. I felt like everybody could see it. Guys would look at me and I’d be sure they were looking at the recorder. But they never saw it. They would have shot me if they found the recorder on me. I would have shot me too. It’s an unwritten law with cops. If you catch another cop wearing a wire on you, he’s a dead man.
“I went to a Singer sewing machine center and bought a strip of two-inch elastic. Then I sat in my living room one night watching television, and sewed a pocket inside of my bulletproof vest. Right near my heart. I had never sewn anything before in my life. But my life, when you think about it, depended on this. I sewed a secure little pocket. The recorder fit in there nice and snug. I also sewed elastic strips into the sides of my pants. I had a strip on either side. That way I could move the recorder. If I was driving and talking to somebody on my right, I’d put the recorder on my right side. If I was in the passenger seat I’d put the recorder on my left side. I even had a Velcro strap that went over the recorder to make sure it didn’t fall out.
“One time it did fall out. I was running up a flight of stairs behind Robert Rathbun and the thing flew out of my sock. It clattered on the stairwell. Rathbun was about five steps ahead of me. I grabbed it and threw it in my pocket. He didn’t hear anything. But there were other problems too. When you put the thing on ‘record,’ a little red light went on. One night, I was walking past a window and I saw the reflection of a little red glow coming out of my chest. That scared the shit out of me. I had to cover up the light with a piece of black electrical tape.
“This may sound strange—people may consider me a scumbag or something—but after awhile, if I got good conversation on the tape, I actually felt good. I did my job. I believed if you’re gonna do something, go all out, do it right. That’s the way I am. But after handing in the tape and thinking about what I recorded people saying, I felt like shit. I’d say to myself, ‘Oh fuck. What did I just give these people? What did I just do? I’m sending these guys to jail.”
During the first week of their undercover duty, Henry and Tony put out the word in the precinct that they were willing to fence whatever the other cops could steal. They were interested in everything from stereos and videotape equipment to guns and televisions.
Steadily, they picked up more and more conversation from corrupt cops. The transcripts of their ninety-minute tapes were a catalogue of precinct gossip. William Gallagher insisted another cop on his tour was stealing cars while on duty. Gallagher explained that the cop would park his tow truck in the precinct and then tow cars back to Long Island, breaking down the car overnight and reselling the parts. Brian O’Regan boasted of robbing a grocery store of $8,000 in cash and $3,400 in food stamps. The cops arrived at the store to answer a burglary call and then robbed the store’s safe, O’Regan explained. A precinct detective implicated a black patrolman in the contract killing of a man and woman in a parked car in an adjoining precinct. The cop was said to have been paid $1,500 by his relative, a neighborhood drug dealer who ran a bodega on Saratoga Avenue.
Investigators found the early conversations interesting but unappetizing. They needed real evidence of criminal activity, not hearsay gossip, if they were going to bring the 77th Precinct’s rogue cops to court.
Roy, the Jamaican cocaine dealer from Lincoln Place, called Henry into his store on June 5, explaining that he felt something was “wrong in the neighborhood.” A few days earlier he had spotted two men with a camera parked in an unmarked car across the street from the store. The men were taking photographs of Roy and his customers. He figured they were cops. His street instincts told him he had been targeted for prosecution in some larger investigation. Henry listened, his tape recorder rolling.
“I know there’s somebody out there watching me,” said Roy, a strong believer in voodoo. “I’m in for trouble. Someone is going to give me trouble. And it’s someone close. I just can’t put my finger on it.”
Roy then used his fingers to count out a cash payment to Henry, bribing the officer to utilize a police department computer to check the license plate number of his mysterious camera-toting guests. The payoff was the first of three that Roy would make to Henry over the next four months—recorded bribes that eventually led to Roy’s indictment on three separate counts of bribery in the second degree. On the day of Roy’s arraignment, his lawyer told a judge, “My client doesn’t remember too much. He has a bullet in his head.”
A few days later Henry and Tony realized that the investigators were using even background conversation from the tapes to gain indictments. Henry was standing outside the station house on June 9, discussing “hits” with William Gallagher, when Zeke Zayas spotted his partner, David Williams, throwing two garbage cans into the back of his car. “What the hell are you doing?” Zayas said, laughing. “Can you believe this guy? He’s stealing our garbage cans.” Gallagher and Winter laughed.
“I didn’t even know the conversation was on the tape,” Henry said later to an investigator. “You mean you can be arrested for shit like that?”
Williams was later suspended, indicted, and arrested on a charge of petty larceny—to wit, the theft of two garbage cans. Zayas, having failed to report the theft of the cans to his superiors, was later suspended, indicted, and arrested on a charge of official misconduct.
On June 17, the investigators came up with their first hard evidence. The evening started when William Gallagher put out “Buddy Boy, Buddy Bob,” over the radio. Henry answered with a “Hey, two-three-four” and then drove to St. Johns Recreation Center across from Engine Company 234. Henry, Tony, Gallagher, and O’Regan then discussed ways to hit a building they suspected of being a crack house at 143 Albany Avenue. Earlier on that rainy evening Gallagher and O’Regan chased a man whom they suspected of being a drug dealer into a building and kicked down a door, searching the apartment for drugs. They came up empty on the first burglary, and were in the mood to make a major score.
Driving with their lights out, a steady drizzle masking their approach, the two patrol cars descended on the block. Henry and Tony gave their Buddy Boys a four- or five-second head start, then tiptoed past a sleeping sentry who had nodded out in the vestibule of 143 Albany Avenue. Gallagher and O’Regan entered an adjoining building that was abandoned and boarded up. Each pair continued to second-floor apar
tments. The door to the apartment in Henry’s building was locked. Tony knocked and then heard the sound of a metallic click.
“There’s a gun in there,” Tony whispered. “I heard a gun.”
“All right, but we gotta go in.”
After throwing the gun across a narrow air shaft into the second-floor apartment in the abandoned building, the man opened the door. Henry and Tony searched the apartment but found nothing. Across the air shaft, O’Regan found a .357 magnum lying on a pile of trash in the second-floor apartment of the abandoned building. Henry and Brian stared at each other across the shaftway and shrugged. Then O’Regan shined his flashlight out the window and down into the open air shaft, spotting a dry bag on top of a pile of soaked garbage.
“Look,” he said. “That’s got to be it.”
Tony lowered Henry into the shaft, first dropping a bed-spring out the window to break his partner’s fall. Henry retrieved the bag, which was filled with three hundred vials of crack. Moments later Gallagher discovered a potato chip bag stuffed in the window sill of the abandoned apartment. The second bag contained another one hundred vials of crack.
“Ah, we got more stuff here,” Gallagher said.
The cops came away from the apartment with four thousand dollars worth of cocaine, and let the man go free, saying, “You’re lucky we didn’t find this in your apartment.” They drove directly back to the park.
“Give me the gun,” Henry said. “I can get rid of the gun.”
Gallagher handed it over.
“I can get rid of the drugs too,” Henry said, looking for evidence to go with his tape of the robbery.
“No,” Gallagher said. “We’ll get rid of the drugs through Roy.”
On their way home that morning, Henry swung by Foster and Ralph to meet the investigators. He handed over the stolen gun, telling the operatives that he would need two hundred dollars to pay Gallagher and O’Regan for it. Then Henry told the cops about their four thousand dollar score, explaining that Gallagher had taken the drugs to Roy, who would buy them at half price.
“That stuff is going back on the street?” an investigator said. “You guys are supposed to get the drugs back. The drugs are evidence.”
“Sorry, but you never told us that part of the deal.”
After a short meeting, it was decided that Henry and Tony would go into the business of fencing the stolen drugs. The Police Department would simply outbid Roy, offering seventy-five cents on the dollar to Roy’s fifty cents. Henry was told to make up a story about an imaginary dealer, as was Tony. Henry invented a black dealer named Bobby, and Tony thought up a Hispanic named José. The mythical dealers put Roy out of business.
“Hey, why are we dealing with Roy?” Henry said to Gallagher the next day. “Roy gives us half price. I got a guy that lives out by me who gives a much better cut. If you give Roy four thousand dollars worth of coke and he gives us two thousand dollars to split four ways, he’s making two thousand on us. For what? We’re taking the chances. I’ll get us three thousand next time.”
“Do you trust him, Buddy Boy?” Gallagher asked.
“Oh yeah. He’s very good. I’ve used him before.”
“We hit another place the next night, June eighteenth. We put out ‘Buddy Boy, Buddy Bob’ over the radio, and met in the park. Gallagher had scouted out Two-sixty-one Buffalo Avenue. ‘It looks good. We should pay them a visit.’ So we did. We followed him down the block and ran into the building. We hit one apartment and found nothing. Then we spotted two guys in the hallway who looked pretty suspicious, like they were hiding from us or something. O’Regan went over to the other side of the building. I was talking to a lady who told me about how three guys upstairs had threatened to shoot her. And as I look out the window, I see a guy shimmying down the ledge. He swings through the window into the apartment on a telephone wire and I grab him. I can hear the cops upstairs, right above me, kicking in the apartment door, so I know I’ve got the guy we’re looking for. He says, ‘Hey, come on, we can work out a deal.’ I said, ‘Fuck you. Come on, you’re coming back up there with me.’ On the way upstairs, he told me where the stash was. ‘Look, the stuff is kept inside, underneath the rug, underneath the floorboards, there’s a trap door.’ I bring him into the apartment and everyone is looking at me. They haven’t found anything. I said, ‘The stuff is underneath the rug.’ The guy wasn’t lying. I pulled the rug up, lifted a floor board, stuck my hand in, and came up with one hundred seven dollars in cash and eight hundred dollars worth of marijuana.
“So as we’re walking out, the guy says, ‘Hey look, you know, can you take care of me? Can you give me a couple of dollars?’ O’Regan said, ‘Yeah, give the kid a couple of dollars,’ and he grabbed twenty dollars from me and handed it to the kid. Then the guy said, ‘Can you give me some smoke too?’ He was wearing army pants. O’Regan lifted up a flap on the kid’s pants and put some herb in his pocket. Then the kid says, ‘You can’t just leave me here. They’ll kick my ass. You gotta walk me out like you’re locking me up. I won’t come back.’ So O’Regan cuffed him. And then he says, ‘Look, you gotta slap me around a little and make it look real.’ So we walked him downstairs and by that time a little crowd had formed. As we walked him outside, Brian yelled, ‘Hey scumbag, get in the back of the car.’ We smacked him in the back of the head a couple of times, threw him in the back, and O’Regan and Gallagher took off.
“Tony and I drove back to the park. Within ten minutes Gallagher and O’Regan pulled up laughing, ‘Oh, he must have got away. We don’t know where he went.’ We split the money up and then Gallagher agreed to give me the marijuana to sell. ‘We’ll give your guy a shot. Let’s see how fast he comes back with the money.’ Later that night I turned the drugs into IAD.”
On June 21, Gallagher paid Henry one thousand dollars for the crack they had seized in the Albany Avenue raid. Henry turned the money into Internal Affairs and passed Gallagher the four hundred dollars he had gotten from IAD for the marijuana they had stolen from Buffalo Avenue. That same day Brian told Henry he had spotted a new drug location on Classon Avenue. The following morning Brian called Henry to tell him they had hit the Classon Avenue address, stealing seventy dollars and fifty-six vials of crack. There was also the matter of having stolen two thousand dollars off a fire escape in another drug dealer’s apartment. Brian asked Henry to deal the crack through his friend. Henry turned in the crack and a tape of his phone conversation with O’Regan to an investigator. A day later, the investigator told him, “That conversation you had with O’Regan on the phone was great. Good work. Keep it up.”
A week or so later, Herbie Woods put out the word on the street that he wanted to see Blondie. Henry arrived at the man’s home on St. Johns Place and got a one thousand dollar bribe to watch over Herbie’s bustling drug business.
“Buy yourself a cup of coffee,” Herbie said.
“Pretty fucking expensive cup of coffee,” Tony answered, the tape still rolling.
A few days later one of the investigators took Tony aside at a meeting and said, “Your remark about the coffee was very unprofessional.”
Shortly before midnight on July 1, O’Regan walked over to Henry’s truck and placed an envelope containing seventy-two vials of crack in the glove compartment.
“You want it in here, Hank?”
“Yeah.”
Gallagher had written the notation “52/10” and “19/5” on the outside of the package. He slid into the truck next to Henry and talked about the upcoming Statue of Liberty celebration, which would culminate with the relighting of the lady’s famous torch on the Fourth of July.
“So what’s here?” Henry asked.
“Fifty-two dimes, and nineteen nickels.”
“What does that come too?”
“Six hundred and fifteen.”
“So figure you’re gonna get four hundred dollars.”
“Okay,” Gallagher said. “If you get four hundred dollars, then one hundred is yours right off the top.”
“Because we’re giving it to you to get rid of it.”
“I’m doing it as a friend. Keep your money.”
Gallagher reached across the seat and gave him a playful slap on the back of the neck.
“Listen scum,” he said. “Just see how you do. It’s a small package. See if he can handle it. He’s your boy, you’re dealing with him. He’s not our man.”
Twenty-five minutes later, Henry sat huddled over his Olympus recorder with Detective James O’Brien and Sergeant Bernadette Bennett, two investigators assigned to the Internal Affairs Division.
“Did you record any conversations during your tour of duty,” O’Brien asked, the tape rolling again.
“Yes I did.”
“And who were those conversations with?”
“I had conversations with Police Officer O’Regan and Police Officer Gallagher.”
“Did you receive anything tonight?”
“Yes I did.”
“What did you receive?”
“I received a quantity of crack from Police Officer O’Regan and a piece of paper stating the quantity was fifty-two dimes and nineteen nickels.”
“Where did this occur?”
“This occurred outside the precinct. I was in my truck leaving to go home and they came up. Police Officer O’Regan put the envelope in my glove compartment.”
“Was Officer O’Regan in uniform at that time?”
“Yes he was.”
“Have you inspected the package?”
“Yes I did.”
“And what do you know it to be?”
“I know it to be crack,” Henry said firmly.
On the morning of July 4, after taking two days off, Henry returned to the 77th Precinct station house, meeting Gallagher as he came into the muster room. Henry clicked his tape recorder on.