Buddy Boys

by Mike McAlary

  Brian did not like his room at the Pine Motor Lodge. People in the lobby could see right into Room 1. There was too much traffic in the motel. Brian knew there would be an all points bulletin put out on his car. He didn’t want to be discovered. Not yet, anyway.

  Shortly before noon, a Suffolk County police officer cruised through the parking lot, looking for three men who had just robbed a cash machine. Brian waited until he saw the car clear the lot and then packed up his garbage bag. He left the motel, leaving his Honor Legion plaque behind.

  “We figured he’d be back,” said John Drake, a desk clerk who discovered the plaque. “A cop would want to keep it. It would be important to a cop.”

  By 12:30 Brian was back on the highway, heading further east. He drove until he ran out of highway, winding up in Southampton, on the eastern tip of Long Island. He pulled into a deserted motel parking lot.

  “Are you open?” he asked, knocking on the door to the Southampton Motel.

  “Yes we are,” said Camille Gosiewski, the motel’s sixty-three-year-old owner. “Come right in.”

  He registered as Daniel Grant, paying $37.65 in cash for his room. The motel’s only guest was given Room 2. Brian asked Gosiewski for directions to a McDonald’s and then headed back into town. He returned later, entering the room with his note pads and his uniform in a green plastic garbage can. He also carried a pint of Seagram’s Seven Crown and a bottle of 7-Up. Brian liked the symbolism—Seven and Seven was the perfect drink for a cop from the 77th Precinct.

  He sat at a desk and began writing again.

  “I can’t swim in a cesspool, can you?”

  The cop spent the rest of the evening writing a one hundred page note, a rambling explanation of his life and times in the 77th Precinct. Brian watched television and saw that he had been indicted for crimes involving some eighty felonies and misdemeanors. He watched news footage of his friends being led to Central Booking in handcuffs. He fell asleep after watching the eleven o’clock news.

  Brian woke at 5 A.M. on Thursday, November 7. It was still raining. He left the motel shortly before six and drove into town, buying two newspapers from coin-operated machines. He returned to his motel room and read the reporter’s newspaper, studying the front page account of his own interview. Then he began writing and sipping from the paper cup filled with Seven and Seven again.

  “I am guilty, but not as guilty as you understand.”

  As he sat at a dresser across from the bed, Brian occasionally looked up, studying his face in the mirror. He wrote that his stomach felt nauseous and that he did not like the face he saw in the mirror anymore.

  “I look bad.”

  He was still writing at 9:20 A.M. He had changed into his blue “Alamo” T-shirt and turned on the television. He watched the Phil Donahue show as he wrote of his love for Cathy and of his fear of being caught by members of the Emergency Services Unit.

  “Only have about $4. What a choice. Death or jail. Got no place to go. Do you think God wants me? Does it hurt to die?”

  Brian’s older brother Greg discovered a letter in the family’s mailbox at about the same time. He found a handwritten note from his missing brother, postmarked November 6, the day Brian disappeared.

  “I’ve always considered myself to be an honest upstanding citizen,” Brian wrote. “I was firmly convinced that nobody cared in the ghetto from the people that lived there to the police and the city. In short terms, they put us in a cesspool and expected us to swim. I’m sorry it had to happen this way but it did. I wish you only health and happiness in the future. Try your best to take care of mom.”

  Greg showed the letter to his younger brother Kevin and his mother.

  “It was the type of letter you get from somebody you don’t expect to see anymore,” Kevin later explained.

  Brian probably stopped writing shortly before 10 A.M. He placed the garbage bag containing his uniform near the bed and propped up his birth certificate and union identification on a nightstand. He noted that the motel’s check out time, 12:30 P.M., was nearing. He wrote one last line before putting his pen down.

  “Bye. This will be hard to do.”

  Brian turned out the lights, drew the shades, and lay down on the bed, the television still blaring. He raised a .25-caliber Titan automatic pistol with his right hand and pressed the chrome barrel to his right temple. Then Brian Francis O’Regan fired.

  Camille Gosiewski discovered the body shortly before two o’clock. She knocked on the door several times first, yelling, “Mr. Grant? Are you in there, Mr. Grant?” She pushed open the door and saw a figure lying on the bed in the darkness. “Are you all right, Mr. Grant?” She stepped closer to get a better look and saw that there was a gun in the man’s hand and a dark stain on the pillow. Oddly, she didn’t scream. The scene seemed too serene to be disturbed. Gosiewski simply backed out of the room and closed the door. Then she called her son.

  “There’s a dead man in Room Two,” she said.

  The reporter learned of the cop’s suicide shortly after three o’clock. He cried in the newsroom. Moments later, a clerk yelled across the copy desk, “Mr. O’Regan is on the phone. He wants to speak to you.” The reporter thought someone was playing a sick joke on him. The caller was Greg O’Regan. He was calling from a pay phone in Huntington, Long Island. He had been out searching neighborhood churches for his brother.

  “We were just wondering. Is Brian with you? We got a letter from him this morning, that, well, really disturbed us.”

  “No,” the reporter replied. “But I wish he was.”

  The reporter told O’Regan to drive home. He told a white lie, saying he would come out and help search for their brother. Then he called the police. He knew they would be looking for Brian O’Regan’s family now. He spoke to Frank Corcillo, the Deputy Chief of Internal Affairs.

  Corcillo was upset.

  “We can’t get anybody out there in time,” he said. “The media already has the story. I’ve never done this before like this, but I’m going to have to tell them about it on the phone.”

  The reporter hung up. He tried to picture Brian O’Regan’s smile. He tried to recall his last words to him.

  “See you around,” Brian had said.

  13

  “Hey, Buddy Boy.”

  There was a wake and a funeral. That Sunday night, Brian was laid out in the same oblong room of the Moore Funeral Home where he had sat sentry over his father’s body seven years earlier. Dorothy O’Regan sat in a folding chair near the front of the room, watching over the mahogany coffin. She would not leave her son alone.

  The lid on the coffin was open. Brian would spend eternity dressed in blue. He wore a blue suit and a white shirt, a blue tie knotted firmly at the collar. The undertaker had wrapped a set of black rosary beads in the policeman’s hands. Brian’s brothers had taped pictures to the casket hood of him laughing with his family. Brian went to his grave looking innocent, his face suggesting the first hint of a smile.

  Kevin O’Regan invited the reporter to the wake. He arrived in the early evening, walking past a group of cops from the 77th Precinct who were milling around outside, dragging hard on cigarettes. Having purposefully left his notebook at home, the reporter continued past an assembly of working newsmen. Kevin met him inside the front door. The dead cop’s brother and the reporter shook hands. The reporter, a man who worked with words, simply shrugged. He had no words left.

  “We wouldn’t have been able to get through this if Brian had just left without telling us how he felt,” Kevin said. “He never told us how he felt about that precinct. He never sat down with any of us for four hours to talk. He must have trusted you. We all feel that Brian was lucky to have met you. Someone else, well, they might have written the story differently.”

  The dead patrolman’s brother smiled and reached out to embrace the reporter.

  “I have my whole life to cry,” Kevin said.

  Brian’s girlfriend Cathy sat in the third row, a police officer at he
r right side. She wore black and her blue eyes looked vibrant and clear. She handed her unused handkerchief to a woman weeping quietly on her left. One of Brian’s relatives told Cathy that she looked strong.

  “There’s nothing else to be,” she answered.

  Most of the suspended cops attended the wake. They filed past the casket. Later, there was angry talk in the back of the room when someone mentioned the names Henry Winter and Tony Magno.

  “The wrong guy shot himself,” one cop said. Another nodded.

  Accompanied by his wife, Robert Rathbun suddenly approached Brian’s mother. There were tears in the ruined police officer’s eyes. He spoke in a whisper.

  “I worked with your son,” Rathbun muttered in a voice so low that he had to repeat himself to be heard. The cop and his wife sat down. “If I didn’t have a wife and kids …” Rathbun continued, his voice dying out in mid-sentence. The patrolman’s wife, a slight but fiery woman, spit out a name. “Henry Winter,” she said, trying to place blame for her husband’s misdeeds on an absent cop. “He better move out of town. I don’t know how he can stay here.” Dorothy O’Regan nodded. Rathbun got up and left the room, moving on legs that wobbled as he walked. It was hard to imagine that he had ever worn new sneakers.

  In a hunting cabin outside a small town in the Adirondacks, Henry Winter sat dazed before a fireplace. The investigators had taken away his service revolver on the day they found O’Regan’s body. Henry had escaped to the woods with his friend Jimmy Leavy. They spent most of their day sitting on a stump talking, loaded rifles at their feet. A doe wandered by but neither man could find the strength to shoulder his gun. Later Henry drove into town and wired flowers to the Moore Funeral Home. He signed the card, “A friend.”

  Henry had spent one day searching for Brian in churches throughout Rockaway and Valley Stream. News of his death confused Henry. No one at Internal Affairs headquarters would talk to him about it. Searching for answers, he went to the reporter’s home on the morning after O’Regan committed suicide. The men walked down a block near Prospect Park, reviewing what Brian had said and done. As he listened, Henry had wiped tears and rain from his face.

  “They left him out there alone too long,” he decided. “You can’t let a cop sit in a room for six weeks wondering about jail. The prosecutors don’t care about any of us as people. We’re just cases. Now they have one less case to try.”

  Henry and Tony had already come to terms with their guilt. They didn’t blame themselves for Brian’s death. They hadn’t entrapped O’Regan or forced him to commit crimes.

  “If this was what Brian was set on doing then it didn’t matter if we caught him or someone else caught him. I just wish I had called him.”

  William Gallagher did not attend the wake. After the viewing on Sunday, Greg O’Regan spoke briefly over the phone with Gallagher’s wife. Eventually she handed the phone to her husband.

  “I’m sorry,” William Gallagher said. “I’m so sorry.” He could be heard weeping into the receiver before handing it back to his wife.

  Later Greg said of the conversation. “Billy feels it’s his fault. I can’t say that. That’s not for me to say.”

  Charles J. Hynes told The New York Times that he would not take the blame for the policeman’s death. He had been through this type of thing before. Brian O’Regan was the third defendant in one of Hynes’s cases to take his own life. Hynes found no solace in numbers.

  “It’s very troubling,” he said. “I feel very sad. But I don’t feel guilty. Investigating cops is the saddest job I’ve ever had. It destroys lives. If you enjoy it, you’re sick. But if it gets to the point where you have trouble sleeping at night, you ought to be out of it. It’s something that has to be done. And done professionally.”

  Hynes would not second guess his tactics in the case either. The cases could not have been made, the corruption carved out of the body of the 77th Precinct, without the cooperation of Henry Winter and Tony Magno.

  “The only way to catch a thief is to turn a thief,” the prosecutor insisted.

  Police commissioner Benjamin Ward attended a prayer breakfast on the morning of the wake and led a moment of silence for a cop who had “strayed.” He described O’Regan as a lost member of the police family. “I’m not going to judge him. No court will judge him. A higher authority will judge him …”

  Ward did not mention that he was already in enough trouble. On the day of the indictments, the commissioner had announced a foolhardy anticorruption plan, demanding that 20 percent of the department’s work force of twenty-seven thousand cops be rotated into new precincts every year. He apparently believed that the best way to fight corruption was to make strangers out of cops. Ward eventually dropped the plan, but not before the union president demanded his resignation and city cops exerted a one-week job action where they simply refused to write tickets or make arrests. By the time the O’Regan family buried Brian on Wednesday, November 12, morale in the New York City Police Department had hit an all-time low. The cops called their affliction “the Blue Flu.”

  “The kids are yelling at us in the street now,” said Lieutenant George Duke, the commander of the 77th Precinct’s detective squad, the only unit in the station house untouched by the scandal. “They’re saying, ‘Hey officer, can you sell us some crack?’”

  A polished silver hearse carrying Brian O’Regan’s body was escorted by a police color guard from the funeral home to the Holy Name of Mary Church in Valley Stream. Officers from the 77th Precinct, all of whom would be either transferred, suspended, or indicted in the months ahead, stood at attention, their hands covered with white gloves. The cops saluted as the ex-Marine’s flag-draped coffin was carried into the church.

  Greg O’Regan left his seat during the middle of the service, walking down the right side of the church during the Sign of Peace to shake hands with one cop after another. With the glaring exception of Henry Winter and Tony Magno, all of the Buddy Boys were in attendance. Rathbun languished in a wooden pew next to his wife, moaning quietly. Having embraced his dead partner’s oldest brother, Gallagher stood in the back of the church, a white-knuckled grip on the pew in front of him, his eyes leaking tears.

  Once returned to the hearse, Brian O’Regan trailed a cluster of leather-jacketed police officers on motorcycles to his grave. Family members laid single red carnations at the foot of his grave and the ghetto cop was finally laid to rest in suburban earth.

  Henry and Tony were assigned to Internal Affairs headquarters in Brooklyn Heights, Complaint Investigation Unit No. 3. They carried guns and badges to work but did not feel like cops anymore. Real cops drove patrol cars, and hung out in locker rooms. Their new cop world was devoid of laughter.

  Henry tried to make new friends among the cops he worked with. At first he brought them coffee and told them jokes. The gestures of friendship didn’t do much good. The officers sipped their own coffee and told each other their own jokes. Henry complained to his wife that there was no warmth or camaraderie in his new command and Betsy sent her husband off to work with even more love notes hidden away in his clothing.

  “Just let us go out on patrol,” Henry and Tony pleaded with their supervisors. “You can trust us. We won’t do anything. Let us feel like cops again.”

  Henry tried to crack the icy wall during the Halloween party. He painted whiskers on his face and walked around handing out cheese.

  “What are you supposed to be?” a cop asked.

  “A rat,” Henry replied, laughing.

  They were originally invited to the office Christmas party, but later told that they had been “uninvited.”

  “Nothing personal guys,” a cop explained. “It just wouldn’t be right.”

  “I wonder,” Henry said to Tony later. “Is being uninvited anything like being unarrested?”

  Tony befriended no one. He seemed to like the wall of silence. He had been forced to take an assignment with Internal Affairs, but the other cops there had volunteered to police other polic
e officers. Tony decided he had no use for cops who liked sending other cops to jail.

  “I’m finished as a person,” Tony told Marianne later. “What’s going to happen with me in life? All I know is how to be a cop. All my friends are cops. And now they don’t call. What’s going to become of me when I’m done testifying and they let me go? At least Henry has friends off the job. I respect him for that. But all I got now is my partner. Henry is all I got left.”

  The cops began to spend more and more time at home. Literary agents called Henry Winter, offering to buy the rights to his story. Former New York City police detective Robert Leuci, another cop who had walked among corrupt cops with a tape recorder, called Henry. Having already told his own story of police betrayal to author Robert Daley in the brilliant yet disturbing bestseller Prince of the City, Leuci now offered to help write Henry’s book.

  “I know what you’re going through,” he said. “You’ll be all right. Things will pass.”

  Henry turned down the offer, but was later seen sitting with his feet up on Bob Leuci’s old desk in Internal Affairs, thumbing through a copy of Prince of the City. Some of the cops he worked with began asking, “Will I be in your book? Are you thinking about a movie too? If you are, you gotta get Paul Newman to play me.”

  Nineteen-eighty-seven broke with Henry and Tony continuing to sift through miles of tape. They reported to work at 7:30 A.M. and studied transcripts until signing out of their new office at 4 P.M. An investigative grand jury had been empaneled in December and continued to winnow through the secret testimony of no less than twenty-five police officers working in the 77th Precinct. Nearly all of the cops were talking now. Some rushed to put their retirement papers in, hoping to get out before they were incriminated in the scandal.

  Prosecutors plucked cops out of the precinct one by one. A cop facing indictment was arrested after he walked into a smoke shop with his daughter and bought marijuana. Another was suspended after refusing to take a drug test. Figueroa was disciplined after he wrote down an attractive woman’s license plate number and called her at home. The woman set up a meeting with him, but Figueroa was beaten by the woman’s husband who explained to police that he suspected the cop of making obscene phone calls to his wife. It was later determined to be a case of mistaken identity.