Buddy Boys

by Mike McAlary

  Henry and Tony spent most of October reviewing tapes, correcting transcripts, and testifying before a special grand jury. Hynes told Henry to go out and buy new clothes to wear to court, explaining that he couldn’t testify against cops in dungarees and flannel shirts. So one night in early October Henry and Betsy went shopping, buying tapered shirts, silk ties, tailored pants, and fine sports jackets for a cop who had only one suit hanging in his closet—the one he had worn on the day he married Betsy Bassett. Henry tried to pretend that he was having fun, but she saw through his mask. They paid for the clothes and headed home.

  The next day Henry was sitting on the witness stand when he reached into his pocket and found a note that read, ‘Have a nice day, Love B.’ He smiled. His wife had never written him a love note before. An hour later, after telling a particularly harrowing story, Henry saw a look of disgust on several faces in the grand jury box. He reached into his jacket pocket and found another note. This one read, ‘Don’t worry about it. I love you. B.’

  Over the next few weeks, Henry found dozens of love notes hidden in his new clothes. It seemed to him that every time he began to doubt his own life, asking why he had agreed to testify against other cops, he found the answer hidden in his jacket pocket.

  “I did this for my family,” Henry later said. “I had no choice.”

  On November 4, Brian O’Regan called a friend to say he and twelve other cops had been told to surrender for arrest and arraignment on November 6. The first set of indictments had come down in what the newspapers were calling “The Shame of the 77th Precinct.” O’Regan and the other cops were told to report to Internal Affairs headquarters at 7:30 in the morning along with their lawyers. They would be arrested, given the Miranda warning, pose for mug shots, and have their fingerprints taken. Brian said he planned to wear dark sunglasses, a hooded sweatshirt, and a baseball cap. For the first time in his life, he was scared to go to Central Booking.

  “It’s funny how you can be good your whole life, for so long, and then …,” he said later.

  Henry arrived at Internal Affairs headquarters on the morning of November 6 shortly after dawn, walking into the brick building through a steady drizzle. He sat at a desk near Tony, sipping coffee and eating a doughnut. He chatted nervously. Tony sat in silence. Words were no help to Tony. This had been an investigation of words. He was sick of listening to them on tape and reading them in transcripts. On this day—especially this day—Tony wanted to hide behind a wall of silence.

  “They’re bringing them out now,” someone said at 8:30 A.M.

  Henry got up out of his chair and walked over to the third-floor window. He looked down into the street and saw the cops he once worked with manacled, their hands behind their backs in handcuffs. With the exception of William Gallagher, almost all of the defendants wore jackets and ties. Crystal Spivey had tied her hair back with a pink ribbon. Robert Rathbun hid his tears behind sunglasses. They all cursed the newspaper photographers and television cameramen.

  Henry walked back over to Tony, who was pacing near his desk. The cops could hear the metallic clicks of the cuffs that bound the hands of their friends.

  “They’re in handcuffs, Tony,” Henry said gently.

  Tony began to swear. He reached for a cigarette and said, “There’s no need for that. The motherfuckers. They told us they wouldn’t do that to them.”

  Henry and Tony stood at the window watching the cops head off to Central Booking in separate cars. Henry stood in the window for several minutes, watching silently, tears running down his face. A sergeant walked up behind him and put a hand on his shoulder.

  “What are you doing this for? Come on. Get out of here.”

  Henry left the window and returned to a seat near his partner. He sat there several moments, trying to remember what the cops had looked like.

  “You know, I didn’t see Brian out there,” he said, standing up, his voice filled with worry. “Where’s Brian?”

  12

  “Good morning. I missed my appointment.”

  On the evening of Wednesday, November 5, Brian O’Regan walked into the Ram’s Horn Diner in Rockaway. He wore the night rain in his hair and a four-day growth of beard on his face. His delicate blue eyes were framed with dark circles. He searched out the restaurant, as only a cop can, with a single look.

  Brian slid into a back booth, smelling of perspiration. He had called a newspaper reporter earlier in the evening, setting up the meeting. He said he wanted to talk. Brian O’Regan sounded scared. It was raining out and it seemed an especially terrible night to be scared and alone. So the reporter agreed to meet O’Regan at 10 P.M. in a diner near the cop’s apartment in the Rockaways.

  “Just come out,” O’Regan said. “Just come out and we’ll talk.”

  Originally the reporter balked at meeting the cop. His wife was pregnant, expecting their second child any day. The reporter mentioned that Brian had to be up early in the morning anyway. He had a date with an arrest.

  “I won’t sleep tonight,” Brian said on the phone.

  Although Brian should have been concerned with time—in nine hours he was scheduled to be arrested for his role in the 77th Precinct corruption scandal—he wore no watch. He looked out the window, rain spattering against the pane. A waiter came over and the cop ordered coffee, the first of six cups he would consume over the next four hours. Brian watched the waiter walk away before turning to the reporter.

  “How many years do you think I’ll get?” he whispered, the words hissing out of his mouth like steam from a boiling kettle.

  There was no answer.

  “Why didn’t somebody come down and just say, ‘Knock it off’? Why didn’t the guys from Internal Affairs come down and say, ‘If you do that again you’re fired.’ Why not transfer us? Why jail?”

  Brian looked like a soldier suffering from combat fatigue. He jumped when a waiter dropped a spoon. He wore a brown United Parcel Service jacket over a blue T-shirt which read: “77th Precinct. The Alamo. Under Siege.” The white words were printed over a drawing of the real Alamo.

  “Now I’m under siege.”

  O’Regan said he had been sitting home the last few weeks worrying about jail. He had not been back to the precinct since turning in his gun and shield on September 23. “I don’t want to see the precinct anymore. The precinct is hell. Why would you want to go to hell? I know when I die, I’m going to heaven.”

  There was music in the background. Someone in the kitchen turned the volume up on a radio. Glenn Frey sang a song that was used in an episode of Miami Vice. “You be-long to the cit-ee. You be-long to the night.”

  Brian noticed the song and shrugged, ordering his second cup of coffee. “And the city goes round and round,” he said. He tapped his right index finger on the table and looked up, eyeing the room suspiciously. “I look at people in the street now and get scared. I’m afraid someone is going to say, ‘There’s the guy. He’s the one.’”

  He tried to shift the tenor of the conversation, telling a story about giving a summons to a beautiful girl and how he was frightened of her beauty, unable to even look her in the face as he wrote the ticket.

  “The sarge came up to me and asked, ‘Why are you giving her a ticket?’ I said, ‘Sarge, I don’t even dare look at her.’”

  Brian tried to laugh. But the humor was lost somewhere between the thought and the sound. “I told my lawyer everything. He told me to take a plea, and I might get two or three years. He wanted $15,000 up front. I don’t think he trusted me. How am I gonna do on the stand? I can’t lie. I can’t lie. I don’t know how this will all end.”

  But he knew how it all started.

  There was a burglary in a dress shop on Nostrand Avenue. Another cop dipped his hand into the cash register and pulled out a fistful of dollars. O’Regan sipped his coffee and ran a hand over his lips. “I will never forget that,” he said.

  Brian went back to his coffee and then glanced out the window. Rain pounded the streets.

/>   “There were days I didn’t care. I didn’t care about nothing. I went to three doctors and they said I needed psychiatric help. They gave me antidepressant pills. But I never faced the facts. I had problems and I never faced the facts. Does a man talk about his weaknesses?”

  He continued talking, rubbing the stubble of his beard. He was asked a bigger question: Why had police officers felt compelled to break the very laws they were sworn to uphold and obey?

  “My partner keeps saying, ‘We never hurt nobody.’ And that’s true. No one would have cared. If drugs are stolen in the ghetto does anybody really care? I don’t even think the drug dealers cared. It was all done as a way of getting back at the people you couldn’t hurt. We never hurt Joe Good Guy. For me, I did it for the glory. It wasn’t money. It was like you were finally getting back at the slaps in the face you took.”

  Brian was now on his third cup of coffee. It was approaching midnight. He was beyond the point in life where a man worries about sleep. Or can sleep.

  “Sometimes I used to get a feeling—a deep, deep feeling of guilt. But then it would go away. I’d get back on patrol and it would go away. I never stole before I got there. And we never stole when we weren’t working there in uniform. I just didn’t care. I’m dead and I don’t even know it.”

  The corruption was widespread, Brian insisted. The truth about police officers in New York City would raise the collective hair on the back of the public’s neck. Cops weren’t just stealing in the Seven-Seven. They were robbing people in each of the city’s seventy-five precinct houses.

  “We are no different than the politicians.”

  It seemed to Brian that everyone in public office was a thief. Koch, the city’s mayor—a man who will go down in the history of New York City politics as Mayor Nero—had brought a bunker mentality to City Hall by November, 1986. He had even stopped writing books. Koch sat back and watched a wave of white paper—federal and state indictments—roll over his city. Queens Borough President Donald Manes had committed suicide rather than appear in court on corruption charges. Stanley Friedman, the Bronx Democratic chairman, would be led away in handcuffs. A Brooklyn Democratic leader, a senior Bronx congressman, and the Bronx borough president would all see their names typed on indictments. In this environment of graft, greed, and mayoral disinterest, Brian O’Regan said he saw no reason not to steal.

  “Every cop is going to be petrified for two years after this. But then it’s going to happen again. This won’t stop kids from stealing. Did the Knapp Commission change us? How can you change human nature?”

  O’Regan switched the conversation to broken dreams. His coffee cup was empty. He motioned for the waiter.

  “All I wanted was a house, a wife, and a child. What was it Crystal Spivey said? That she did this because she wanted a co-op? That’s all I wanted. I have a girlfriend. It’s all over for her. She’s twenty-five. I’m forty-one and going to jail.”

  O’Regan’s eyes were misty. He looked out the window and spotted a passing patrol car from the 100th Precinct.

  “That bothers me—seeing a police car. I want to be in that car. I would go to jail for a hundred years if I could go back in a patrol car when I got out.”

  By now it was two o’clock in the morning. Brian stood up, saying he had to get going, that he wanted to see his girlfriend before his arrest. The reporter, who had brought a friend to the meeting, could see that he was still restless. The reporter and his friend offered to stay with him until his arraignment.

  “No. I got to see my girl.”

  O’Regan dug his hands into his pocket and came up with a roll of tokens. He offered the reporter two tokens to get back over the bridge from Rockaway into Brooklyn. The reporter told Brian he would be better off keeping the tokens, that he would need them to get to court in the morning.

  “I have plenty. I’ll have no problem getting there.”

  The cop and the reporter walked outside, standing in the rain next to Brian’s car, a gray 1984 Subaru. Brian wiped his forehead with his sleeve and smiled. It was the smile of a man with a terrible secret.

  He walked to the back of his car and opened the trunk, pointing inside to a green plastic bag.

  “I got my whole uniform in here. You want any of it?”

  “No,” the reporter replied. “You keep it. Who knows? You may still need it.”

  O’Regan shrugged and slammed the trunk closed. Then he walked to the front of the car, opened the driver’s door and leaned across the seat to pick up a small package wrapped in aluminum foil. “Then take this,” offering the package over the hood of the car. “It’s a piece of my girlfriend’s birthday cake. She just turned twenty-five.”

  The reporter took the cake. Brian came around and offered his hand. It was a small hand, not the kind of hand you imagine a cop having. The reporter shook it. He was looking forward to writing Brian O’Regan’s story. He said it was a story he wanted told.

  “Thanks for coming out. It meant a lot to me just to be able to get out of the house and talk about this stuff.”

  Brian got into his car. The reporter waved and then jogged across the parking lot through the rain to his own car. It was a miserable night, the reporter decided. He closed his eyes as the car warmed up and thought about his conversation with the cop. The reporter had asked a lot of questions, and some of Brian’s answers had been frightening. But only one of his statements would haunt the reporter over the next few days and months.

  “You tell me why I did this,” Brian had said.

  Brian drove directly back to his Rockaway apartment and walked into the bathroom. He became sick, vomiting in the toilet. He washed his face and then went over to the phone, calling his girlfriend in Park Slope.

  “I got sick after talking to the reporter. It must have been all that coffee. Bad coffee.”

  Brian did not go to see Cathy. Instead, he drove out to his mother’s house in Valley Stream. There was so little time, he had decided by now, and so much work to be done.

  He slipped into the house quietly, went to his bedroom, and began packing. He filled a cardboard box with a three-page will he had had notarized even before he met the reporter, a pair of spit polished police shoes, an identification card from the Broward County Sheriff’s Department, his bank book, several greeting cards from his family, including a ten-year-old card from his grandmother that still had a $10 bill stuffed inside, and photographs of his family at Christmas. Brian neatly sealed the box with tape and wrote the numerals “7” and “7” in Magic Marker on the side.

  He had placed a typewritten note in the box.

  “I am sorry for the past happening. I love you all. Don’t fight. Be happy.”

  At 4:30 A.M. Brian’s mother awoke. She had heard movement in the house. She walked into her son’s room wearing a flannel nightgown and asked if he wanted to talk.

  “I don’t have time,” Brian said gently. “I can’t. I have to appear.”

  Brian continued past his mother down to the basement, retrieving his dead father’s electric razor from a box. He stood before a mirror, shaving the stubble from his sallow face. Hours earlier, before going to meet the reporter, he had said on the phone, “I look bad. I don’t want you to think I’m a skell.”

  After shaving, Brian walked out of his red brick home into the darkness. Dorothy O’Regan followed as far as the back doorstep, and called out to him as he climbed into his car, “Brian, you’re very upset. Drive carefully.”

  Brian had purposely left the cardboard box behind, laying it at the foot of his bed.

  The cop drove down his tree-lined street and through the sleepy hollow of Valley Stream. He continued on until he reached the ramps leading to the Southern State Parkway. A left turn would have put the Subaru in the westbound lanes of traffic, taking him to Brooklyn. Brian pulled the steering wheel to the right and headed east, looking for a motel room.

  He drove directly to Lindenhurst, checking into the Pine Motor Lodge on Route 109, approximately thirty-two mile
s away from Brooklyn where the other twelve indicted cops were getting ready to surrender. Brian had never stayed at the motel before. It was the kind of establishment where guests are treated like customers, and the clerks ask questions like, “Short stay or overnight?” Brian stood next to a Donkey Kong machine as he filled out a registration card with the name Daniel Durke. At 6:20 A.M. Brian paid thirty-five dollars and was given the key to Room 1. He entered the room and pulled a laminated Honor Legion plaque from a shopping bag, propping it up on a fluorescent light fixture over the bed. He switched on the television and sat down at the desk, beginning to write on a pad of Broward County Sheriff’s Department stationery.

  “Good morning. I missed my appointment.”

  The reporter slept late. He arrived for work in midtown Manhattan at 10 A.M., carrying Brian O’Regan’s confession in a notebook. The wire service was already reporting that one of the indicted cops had failed to show up for his arraignment.

  “Is this your guy?” an editor asked, pointing to the story. “Brian O’Regan?”

  The reporter read the wire copy and felt ill. He returned to his desk and called the police, speaking to a detective in Internal Affairs. The reporter told the detective he had spent four hours with O’Regan in a Queens diner the night before and that the cop seemed scared and depressed.

  “Don’t worry,” the cop said. “From what we understand this guy isn’t suicidal.”

  “I think you’re wrong. I didn’t think so last night, but now I think Brian could kill himself. If he was a mailman or a mechanic it would be different. Those guys just run. But cops in trouble don’t run. Cops have consciences. I don’t think Brian can cope with being a criminal.”

  “Give us the Rockaway address,” the cop decided. “We’ll send someone out there right away.”

  The reporter called the police several times throughout the day, remembering different things Brian had said. He went to church a lot. Check the churches. He had friends in Florida. Check Florida.

  By the end of the day everyone felt a little better. The police hadn’t found a body.