Buddy Boys (11 page)

There was no reason to transfer Henry Winter anywhere else. He was already assigned to a dumping ground. Only now Henry wasn't going to get out of the 77th Precinct. Ever.

Originally, Henry had been dumped in the 77th because the department didn't know what to do with a cop everybody thought was a rat. Now he was anchored to the Alamo, a yellow flag sitting in his personnel folder, all because he had refused to turn in another cop. Life was strange, Henry Winter concluded.

“I never really did much in the beginning. Maybe little things. You know, if you go into a burglarized apartment and there's money left, you put it in your pocket. But then I worked with Gallagher—we called him Junior—one night in 1983 and I got started.

“At that time, Gallagher was looking for a partner. His partner Artie had left the precinct to join the highway patrol, and Junior was auditioning for his replacement. He was the precinct union rep. He had his ear to the ground. Gallagher always knew what was going on. He asked me to be his partner but I just didn't want to work steady midnights—I couldn't take working from midnight to eight in the morning. But Junior told me, ‘Midnights are good. Get any days off you want. Nobody is out here watching you.'

“We had stopped outside a place on Rogers Avenue—there was a social club upstairs. Junior said he had to go and see this guy Robbie for a minute. I said, ‘All right. I'll stay down here with the car.' Junior insisted, ‘Come up.' So I went up to the club with him.

“It was a Jamaican club. Junior was talking to a guy off on the side and having a beer. So I ordered a beer just to be sociable. Then after a few minutes, we went back to the car. Gallagher handed me a ten dollar bill as we pulled away. I said, ‘What's this for, Junior?' He replied, ‘This is from my friend. Every once in a while he gives me a couple of dollars just to stop up and say hello. I give half to the guy I'm with.' I said, ‘Oh, all right, thank you.' I didn't even think about it. It was like found money. You really weren't stealing money from anybody. I'm used to working on the back of a garbage truck. Everybody pays a garbage man.

“Later on that night, we were on patrol up on Fulton Street. We spotted a guy with a paper bag, standing in a vestibule. The guy saw us, did a double take, and dropped the bag. Boom. We got out and grabbed the guy and put him in the car. There was a pound of smoke, marijuana, in the bag. Junior asked the guy for identification, and he handed over his wallet, with a couple of hundred bucks in it. We never even looked at the guy's identification. He could have been Son of Sam for all we knew. Junior kept looking in the wallet and then back at the guy. Then Junior told him, ‘You know, there's a lot of smoke here in this bag, pal. You could go to jail.' Back and forth. I looked at Gallagher and said, ‘Ah, come on, we'll take him in.' Gallagher said, ‘Wait a minute. Wait a minute.' So at the end of the story, what happens is that Gallagher takes money out of the guy's wallet and then hands it back to him. Then he says, ‘This one is on us.'

The guy was overappreciative. Super-appreciative, in fact. We even drove him home. We drove him home, let him out of the car, and that was it. I think we split fifty dollars apiece. We left the guy some money. Junior took the smoke. He said, ‘I'll take care of this.' I wasn't hip to what was going on back then with the drugs. Today I know what he did, though. He resold the drugs to a drug dealer in the neighborhood. But back then, Gallagher just held up the bag and said, ‘I'll get rid of this. Don't you worry about this, buddy boy.'”

It can be argued that never in the history of the New York City Police Department has there been a precinct quite like the 77th. Certainly there has never been a more raucous locker room than the one in the bowels of the Utica Avenue building—a large but comfortable room roamed by misfits and supervised by uninterested sergeants.

The locker room and an adjoining lounge were alternately used by some of the two hundred-odd cops in the precinct as a gambling den, target range, bar, and flop house. It has also been said that on any given day there were more cash transactions made in the 77th Precinct locker room than in any Bedford-Stuyvesant bank.

The most legendary figure ever to work the room was an aging veteran named Johnny Massar, a man everybody loved and respected as a father figure. A thirty-five-year veteran of the force, Massar was one of a dying breed, a dinosaur who had worked the streets for twenty-five years and now rarely left the precinct grounds. A beer drinker without peer, Massar served as the precinct's gas attendant, cell attendant, and assistant station house officer until finally leaving the department in 1985 on a medical disability. His principle responsibility was to keep a ready supply of cold beer on hand.

Throughout the years Massar distinguished himself in a series of astonishing incidents. One day he was given the assignment to fill in for a sergeant's regular driver. Massar proceeded out to the garage and began warming up the sergeant's car. Somehow he put the car in reverse and then stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake. The car hit a metal pole and flew through a set of steel doors, stopping in the precinct's vestibule. Massar is said to have shut off the engine, left the car, and walked calmly into the captain's office. Then he saluted and said, “I just got into a car accident, sir, and I want you to know I wasn't even drinking.”

Young cops were particularly fond of blackening out the white numbers on Massar's combination lock with a marking pen. As he squinted at his lock, the young cops would yell, “Why don't you go home and get some new glasses, you old fart?”

On one occasion he finally decided to end his frustration. He pulled his service revolver and shot the lock off his locker, and then shot the locks off several others as well.

On another night, Massar took exception to the volume level of a radio in the lounge. He asked the young cops to turn the music down, insulting their taste in rock and roll. A young cop responded by cranking the volume even higher.

“I'll show you,” Massar suddenly yelled, pulling his gun. “Take that!”

He fired a single shot into the heart of the radio, knocking it from a shelf to the floor. To his amazement, the radio continued to play.

“You can't kill rock and roll,” the young cops shrieked. “Rock and roll lives!”

On the nights when he wasn't conducting gun battles in the lounge, the immensely popular Massar spent most of his tour drinking and cooping—sleeping on duty. When he worked as a cell attendant, he did more drinking than guarding.

One night, after Massar pounded down several cans of beer, police officers found him asleep in the lounge on a bench borrowed from Prospect Park. Ordinarily, the cops might have seen fit simply to wrap him up from head to foot in toilet paper, as was their custom. But on this particular night, the cops harassed him to the point where he felt compelled to check on his prisoners.

Massar entered the cell area and walked to the end of the row by himself. Then he walked back out of the room—his face the color of chalk.

“What's wrong, Johnny?”

Massar could not bring himself to speak. “Ahh,” he said, pointing to the cell.

Henry Winter and two other cops rushed past Massar into the cells, discovering a young Hispanic man hanging from the door by his shirt. The man's lips were blue and his face contorted. As Massar looked on in silent shock, Henry grabbed hold of the man's waist and lifted him up while another cop cut the prisoner down.

Feeling a slight pulse in the man's wrist, Winter and the other cops worked frantically to revive him. They poured ammonia on his clothes and slapped his face. Finally, after a minute or two, he stirred.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I'm okay.”

Henry and the other cops sat back, breathing a sigh of relief.

“He's gonna make it, Johnny. Relax.”

At this point Massar emerged from his nearly catatonic state and rushed towards the prisoner. “I'll teach you to try and kill yourself on my watch!” he screamed while beating the man. “I'll kill you. Nobody dies on my watch.”

“Going to one of our outings was like taking your life into your own hands. I went to two functions in the Seven-Seven and both of them blew up. The first one was the precinct picnic in 1983 at Eisenhower Park. They told us don't ever come back. We even had to pay damages. The problem was the tug-of-war. One of the guys tied his end of the rope to a water fountain. All of a sudden the water fountain is down, we've broken the pipe, and there's water all over the place. We're laughing like hell, rolling over. We're all stewed. Even the wives are looped. Then as we're leaving, I see one cop coming along with a Harley Davidson and another cop coming right at him with a brand new Mustang. They're both drunk. Boom. The guy hits the Mustang broadside, the other guy's gun comes out. One cop is threatening to blow the other cop away. Shots fired in the air. I said, ‘Goodbye.'

“The other outing was a fishing trip. I'm in my boat, and a cop named Billy is in his boat with another guy named Jimmy. We were fishing for fluke off Riis Park. We were drifting, three boats together. These guys over here are drinking, these guys over there are drinking, I'm not drinking because when I fish, I don't usually drink. All of a sudden, I pulled a nice fluke up out of the water. Boom. Boom. Boom. They're shooting. I'm here with my boat, I got a fluke out of the water and there's this cop trying to shoot the fish off my line. I look at him, ‘What are you, fucking crazy?' Boom. Boom. Boom. I dropped my rod. Both guys go after my pole. One guy gets his outriggers tangled up with my line, loses his outriggers, his engine floods. It's pure insanity. I said, ‘So long.'

“But, then again, sometimes I liked the madness. I remember one time I had a black powder gun in the locker room. A rifle—a .45-caliber monster. A guy wants to see how it's shot. Okay. So I go to the locker room and load the sucker up. I didn't put the ball in, I just loaded up a charge. Then I go back to the lounge and yell, ‘Ah, you motherfucker.” Boom. The whole lounge. Ka-boom. Then I went into the bathroom after a few guys went into the stalls, cocked the hammer back and let it go again. Ka-boom. It was like an ash can went off. The room filled with smoke. The guys are screaming. It was beautiful. Then I went upstairs and the lieutenant says, ‘Heard a little tremor downstairs men. What was it?' We said, ‘Nothing, Nothing, don't worry about it.'

“That was good but not as good as when Gallagher got the whole roll call to wet their pants. We made believe we were having an argument. Gallagher took his real gun out of the holster and replaced it with a starter's pistol—you know, blanks. So the sergeant is in the middle of the roll call and Junior suddenly stands up. ‘I've had it with your fucking shit, Henry.' And I'm in the back. ‘Fuck you, Junior. Your wife says this—' He screams, ‘Oh yeah, your wife and your brother-in-law—' ‘Yeah, well, you son of a bitch.' He pulled the gun from the holster and then: Boom. Boom. Everybody in roll call hit the ground. And after he shot, I went, ‘Aaaaggghh,' and bent over, like I've been hit. One sergeant, a young one, he turned white. Sergeant Jervas was there too. His nickname was Nervous Jervas. He was beyond white. He was absolutely bloodless.

“It really didn't go over too well, though. It was funny later when everybody sat down and laughed. But Jervas, he was pissed. He said, ‘You could have been blown away. These guys, they don't know you. They could have shot you.' He got over it though. Eventually, no matter what you did in the Seven-Seven, the supervisors got over it.”

During the summer of 1982, a sergeant named Jerome Schnupp was transferred into the 77th and made it known that he had every intention of straightening out the misguided troops. Schnupp worked around the clock getting to know all of the precinct's cops by face and putting a hit list together. Within weeks of his arrival, the cops had a nickname for their new supervisor that epitomized their feelings for the do-good leader. They called him Sergeant Schmuck.

In January 1983 Schnupp went to the precinct captain, Donald Bishop, and reported what everyone else had known for months. A lot of cops were robbing bad guys instead of arresting them. Schnupp filled out a report that was later delivered to Internal Affairs in which he named cops on the late tours whom he suspected of committing larcenies, cooping, and visiting girlfriends while on duty. A police officer with friends in Internal Affairs got hold of a copy of the report and circulated it in the precinct locker room. A few days later, Schnupp walked into the muster room to oversee roll call only to discover a dead rat pinned to the blackboard. The rat wore a name tag too—Sgt. Schmuck.

Schnupp left the room and ran to see the captain, complaining that the men were, well, using rodents to challenge his authority. By the time Schnupp returned with the captain, the rat had disappeared.

“What's the problem here, men?” the captain wanted to know.

“No problem, sir.”

“Was there just a rat in here?”

“A rat in here? There aren't any rats in the Seven-Seven, Captain. Everybody knows that, sir.”

Within two years, the misfits drove Sergeant Schnupp out of the precinct, if not his mind. He spent a lot of his time out in the parking lot after work, changing flat tires on his car.

“I must have went over that pothole too hard,” he once told Henry.

“Yeah,” Winter replied, pointing to three fresh puncture wounds in the tire. “And there must have been a pitchfork in the pothole.”

5

“You killed that guy for ten dollars?”

New York City Police Department regulations specify that any officer suspected of taking drugs must submit to a test called a Dole Urinalysis within twenty-four hours of being so ordered. If an officer tests positive for drugs, he's immediately suspended and ordered to face a departmental trial where he's usually fired. If a policeman is suspected of taking drugs and refuses to submit to a test, he's also usually fired.