Buddy Boys (12 page)

Certainly the 77th Precinct had a drug problem. Some officers smoked marijuana in their patrol cars on the late tour and snorted cocaine in the locker room lounge. Many more used drugs off duty, snorting cocaine with girlfriends they had met in the precinct while working. It was not at all unusual for a cop in the 77th Precinct to leave his wife and kids in the suburbs for a prostitute in the slum.

One June day in 1983, a black woman and her husband walked into the precinct and demanded to see a lieutenant. The husband had apparently come home unexpectedly the night before and discovered his wife smoking marijuana with Thomas Texiera, a veteran cop from the 77th with a reputation for a quick trigger finger and an insatiable appetite for women. The husband insisted that Texiera be tested for drugs. Immediately.

A black cop who was preparing to retire soon, Texiera was given to combing his hair straight back and wearing a lot of gold jewelry. “Tex” was widely feared on the street and was said to have dropped four armed suspects during shootouts. Shortly before his current problem, Texiera was sitting in a friend's apartment when he heard a noise on the fire escape. A burglar broke through the apartment window; Tex shot him dead. The incident went into the books, as the cops like to say, as a good shooting.

After hearing the husband's complaint, which was corroborated by his wife, the officer's girlfriend, the desk lieutenant notified Internal Affairs. A cop who overheard the conversation rushed to warn Texiera, who was watching a chess tournament in the lounge.

“Who wants to go across the street for me?” Texiera suddenly asked.

“What do you need?” asked Henry.

“Do me a favor. Here's two dollars. Get me a bottle of vinegar from the store across the street.”

Henry returned with a bottle of cooking vinegar minutes later. Believing falsely that the acidic vinegar would somehow help him pass the drug test, Texiera guzzled down the bottle in front of his friends. He then walked out of the lounge to be met by investigators and members of the Health Services Department, who administered the drug test. Tex tested positively and was dismissed from the force, never to set foot in the 77th Precinct, or the woman's apartment, again.

“I used to smoke some marijuana. Not every day, religiously, but if I went to a party, and all of my friends were there smoking reefer, I'd join them. They'd say, ‘Aw, you're a cop? What are you going to do—lock up your best friends?' We grew up with drugs. 1969. Woodstock. Everybody does it. So I do a joint over here with close friends, that's it. I never touched coke until I got to the precinct. And I just wanted to see what the hell it was. I wasn't an addict or anything. It's like—say you're doing an eight-to-four tour, you wind up going through the four-to-twelve to the midnight-to-eight, then you come back, you work and do another eight-to-four. You're tired. You do some coke. It was a nice feeling. Kept you up, kept you aware, kept you awake.

“Much later, if we hit a place and got drugs, I might have dipped into the package. I can look back and say I was stupid because you don't know what the hell you're getting from these people. But if we got a lot of coke, I'd open up one package in the car, taste it, snort maybe a little bit, and say, ‘Yeah, this is good stuff, we'll get good money for this.' Then I'd be ripped the whole rest of the night. I'd say, ‘Yeah, let's go do this job. Let's go do that job.'

Elsewhere in the precinct, cops were getting suspended or demoted by department brass after committing perjury on the stand or overextending their police powers in the streets. Some were so busy ripping off drug dealers and breaking into apartments that they were no longer interested in making arrests or working overtime. Essentially they were moonlighting as thieves while working in uniform.

Steadily, a small circle of 77th Precinct cops began giving more and more of their arrests away to other cops. Odd radio chatter filled the 77th Precinct airwaves.

“Who's catching tonight?”

“I am.”

“Who's looking tonight?”

“I am.”

“All right, Nostrand and Park.”

One set of cops in a patrol car would then rush to the corner of Nostrand Avenue and Park Place where they would discover another set of cops standing next to a burglary or robbery suspect in handcuffs. The cops would then hand over the suspect and the case to the arriving officers, who returned to the precinct and fabricated arrest reports. If the case ever went to trial, the cops took the stand and perjured themselves, entertaining the judge and jury with a false story of how the arrest was made.

In September 1984, Stephen Christiano, a police officer who worked the late tour, was fidgeting in the witness box in a Brooklyn court, under heavy cross examination from a defense counsel. A burglary suspect insisted that when he was arrested months earlier, Christiano had not been at the crime scene.

“Where was the defendant standing, Officer Christiano, when you entered the apartment.”

“How the hell would I know?” Christiano screamed. “I wasn't even there.”

The case was thrown out of court and Christiano was suspended for seventy-five days for supplying false information on an arrest report.

By now, some of the supervisors in the 77th were having trouble staying clear of the mayhem. Morton Lavan, a probationary sergeant, drove past a corner one summer day and spotted a group of dice players arguing over a pile of money. As Lavan approached, the men stepped back, leaving money piled up on the sidewalk. Lavan bent down and picked it up.

“Whose money is this?” he asked.

The dice players, reluctant to admit ownership of the cash and risk imprisonment, said nothing. Lavan shrugged. He looked across the street and spotted four or five kids on a corner. He called them over and handed them the money. The neighborhood kids were ecstatic. The police department regarded the act as a robbery. Sergeant Lavan, suddenly regarded on the streets as a Robin Hood, was demoted to the rank of police officer.

Internal Affairs investigators watching the 77th Precinct were intent on catching members of the late tours who were breaking the law. In July 1983, a team assigned to the Field Internal Affairs Unit set up an “integrity test”. The investigators drove two nondescript vans into the precinct one night, parking one across from a firehouse and the other a half block away. The first van, which was left unlocked, with the side door open, contained several cases of Newport cigarettes. The second van contained two police officers, armed with enough movie equipment to start a small film company.

While the surveillance team trained their cameras on the bait van, another investigator took control of the radio and ordered two police cars into the neighborhood. According to police records, the operation had been designed to test the integrity of Sergeant Stinson and police officers William Gallagher, David Williams, and Joseph (Zeke) Zayas. The officers—particularly Zayas, who smoked Newport cigarettes—might have gone for the bait but they were forewarned of the test by a friend in Internal Affairs earlier that night.

Gallagher later told friends that he was the first to notice something fishy.

“Why do they keep sending us down this street?” he asked, after passing the open van and its poisoned cargo for the third time. “They must think we're stupid.”

Eventually Sergeant Stinson noticed the surveillance and parked down the street from it. He motioned to a friend on the street.

“How long has that van been parked over there?” he asked.

“About a half hour.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Yeah. The van pulled up. Two guys jumped out and got into the back. A third guy from the van got into another car and pulled away.”

Insulted, the four officers then approached the surveillance van. They began rocking it back and forth, banging on the doors and prying at the windows.

“Come on out, you scumbags.”

“We know you're in there.”

The integrity test ended with the officers taking the bait van back to the precinct, where they vouchered it according to the book. One of the officers even added an extra pack of cigarettes to the confiscated cargo to further confuse the frustrated investigators, who arrived at the precinct hours later to reclaim their bait.

News of the bungled test swept through the precinct. The cops made the investigators look like idiots, everyone agreed. Amid much laughter, it was decided that the 77th Precinct cops were untouchable. They were just too street-smart. Their moles in the Internal Affairs Division and police union kept them well insulated. “Hell, guys,” they told each other, “We're practically bullet proof.”

Henry Winter was feeling equally immortal. He had just survived his first two shootouts, dodging bullets aimed for his head as he patrolled the Bedford-Stuyvesant streets.

“I was coming back from court in downtown Brooklyn one day. I had gotten off the subway and was walking up Utica Avenue to the station house when I spotted this badass kid named Melvin Blunt standing across the street. I know this kid is trouble because he's got numerous arrests in the city for robberies. He always carries a gun. I had just reached the intersection of Sterling and Utica when I looked across the street and spotted Melvin talking to a group of kids. So I keep my eye on him. I got up a little closer and spotted a kid showing Melvin a silver gun. I thought, ‘I'm going to sneak around and just grab the fucker.' But the kids saw me and took off.

“I chased them to Sterling Place and onto the roof of a building. Suddenly this other kid, Richard, turned around and took a shot at me. It surprised the hell out of me. The shot missed me by a foot or two. The kid had turned and fired from about twenty feet in front of me. I peeled off the chase and called for a backup. I wasn't afraid, just pissed. The cavalry came out after that. The guys found Melvin Blunt about three buildings down. The shooter got away.

“Not too long after that I had the second incident with a guy named Raoul Morgan—they're still looking for him. He was a Franklin Avenue drug dealer. He took a shot at me. I was chasing him and he took a shot at me. He got away. I spotted him across the street and he took another shot at me. After he shot, I chased him across Eastern Parkway, through a bunch of abandoned buildings. He ran right past his house, which is why we are able to identify him. His little nephew waved to him as he ran by. ‘Hey, Uncle Raoul,' the kid yells. And I'm behind him. He went over a couple of fences and I lost him. To this day, I'm glad I never caught him.

“I didn't know this until afterwards when the detectives canvassed the area—he was waiting for me. I was chasing him and we kept going over fences, but I just couldn't make it over the last fucking fence. He ran into an apartment building, made it up to the second floor, and broke into an old woman's apartment and held her at gunpoint, waiting for me.

“He would have had me cold. If I would have kept on following him up to that apartment and gone into it he would have been behind the door waiting for me to come in. I'm glad I never caught up with him. I would have been dead.

“At first when someone pegs a shot at you, you don't even think. It's amazing, but you don't. You just react. After everything calms down, then you get a little shaky. A little nervous. Then you think, ‘What could have happened?' And that's the worst time, because in the street, after the guy shoots at you, you want to beat him, you want to kill the fucking guy. But it happens very fast. Afterward, when you're doing the paperwork about a half hour later, you realize that this fuck sitting across from you could have killed you. Because now it's just you and him sitting across the table from each other. Then you start, you know, digging him. If you're so inclined, that's when you hit them in the head.”

Henry was not usually inclined to beat up his prisoners. In fact, he seemed to get along with most of the people in his sector. Some cops, his partners included, even thought that Henry liked skells more than cops.

Sometimes he arrived at the scene of a robbery or a mugging to find cops beating a black suspect.

“That's enough,” he would say.

“Screw off, Winter, he ain't your prisoner.”

Then Henry would try the pragmatic approach. “If you beat the guy to death, he's not going to be anybody's prisoner.” Sometimes the beatings even stopped.

In time Henry began handing out his own form of street justice. At first, instead of simply arresting young mugging suspects, Henry would drive the teenagers home. He realized that the kids would be back on the street the next day if he arrested them for petty theft, and he thought that they would get into bigger trouble if he personally talked to their parents.

But Henry was being naive. He was being “Long Island.” Henry based his opinions on his childhood in the suburbs, not the ghetto. When Henry was a kid and a cop brought him home, he got a beating from the cop and his parents. Now, when he brought a ghetto kid home and stood in the tenement doorway, his badge shining and his blue uniform looking immaculate, Henry took the beating—an emotional one. If he said, “Your son robbed a person. He stole an old lady's pocketbook. Talk to your kid. Straighten him out,” the kid's parents often screamed, “What the fuck are you bringing him home for? He's no good. You handle him. He's yours. He's in the street.”

In the beginning, Henry even cried. Things bothered him back then. Finding dead infants in garbage pails bothered him. It bothered him to see elderly people dead too. Dead kids and elderly people bothered him most of all. And in order to keep some semblance of sanity, Henry Winter set up little emotional guidelines for himself. Any victim falling between the ages of sixteen and sixty was fair game, he decided. He wouldn't care about them. But he would allow himself to be bothered—and even cry—if he saw a victim of a crime younger than sixteen or older than sixty.

A cop from the 77th had to set up some sort of immunity system against tragedy and trauma, Henry decided, if he didn't want to wind up like Peter Heroin.