Buddy Boys (15 page)

“Somebody said, ‘Did you drop the dime?'” Brian later remembered. “I didn't understand. I just looked at him.”

On another occasion he and another veteran cop were called to a smoke shop on a late tour. As Brian watched, the veteran and a patron started arguing. Suddenly, the cop picked the customer up and hurled him through the storefront window. Then the patrolman stepped through the broken window and picked the man up off the sidewalk by the scruff of the neck.

“You're under arrest,” the cop said.

“What for?”

“Breaking and exiting,” the cop decided, pointing at the window.

Brian also knew the lesson of Francis Shepperd, a black cop from the 77th Precinct. Shepperd barged into a numbers spot in full uniform and robbed the place at gunpoint. He then returned to his radio car and handed over half the haul to his new partner, saying, “Here's yours.” Anthony Longatano was petrified, certain the department was staging some kind of integrity test. He left the money on the seat beside him and turned his partner in. Shepperd was arrested and fired.

“I'm going to take a lot of white boys from the midnight tour with me,” Shepperd was heard to say. But nothing ever came of it. Longatano was left behind in the 77th Precinct. Later, Brian watched the cops he worked with on the midnight tour scrawl the word “rat” on Longatano's locker. One of the few cops in the precinct that the department could trust not to act like a criminal, Longatano was taken off patrol and assigned to a seat in front of a typewriter.

Brian had been in the precinct for a short time when he responded to a radio run of a burglary in progress at a Nostrand Avenue dress shop. The store's plate glass window was smashed by the fleeing burglars. Brian pulled up to the scene with another squad car from the 71st Precinct, and the cops entered the store. One officer walked over to the register and pushed a button. The cash drawer slid open. The cop dug his hand into the drawer and came up holding a fistful of dollars. Brian couldn't believe what he saw.

“What do you want?” the cop asked.

“I don't do that,” Brian insisted. “I do not do that. I don't want any of it.”

Although shocked by the sight of another cop robbing a store, he chose to overlook the incident. He was not a corrupt cop, at least not yet, and he wasn't a rat either. He still believed in something called esprit de corps.

No matter what he saw other cops doing, Brian decided he would never turn one of them in to the Internal Affairs Division. He would not crack the Blue Wall of Silence. Rats did that. And rats were bad for morale.

“I just can't turn,” Brian said later. “The Blue Wall. You don't tell. I couldn't tell. I'd eat the gun first.”

Steadily, life in the 77th began to bother Brian. There seemed to be one horror after another as he turned each corner. He responded to a call about a dispute one evening and found a woman sitting on the bed in her apartment next to an open window. From the look of the bed sheets, it was obvious that she had just given birth. But there was no baby in the room. And there was no baby in the apartment. Brian shined his flashlight out the bedroom window and saw a tiny mound on the ground below. He realized it was a baby.

Brian went downstairs and stood over the dead infant, crying. “I stood there and stared at it and I kept thinking, “It's so little, it's so little. Before long you build up a wall. Now I wish I could care about something, like if somebody jumped out a window. After awhile, anything could have happened in that precinct and I didn't care. I did not care. You can love something and you can hate something. I just didn't care.”

Brian kept arresting people, though. He delivered a half-dozen babies and made nine gun collars in a single month. He accumulated department commendations by the handful. But then his depression deepened. He started giving his gun collars away to other cops. His overtime dropped. His outside interests waned.

Brian became less interested in arresting bad guys and more interested in getting back at them. He couldn't stand putting people in jail anymore because he couldn't bear the sight of them waving from street corners the very next day.

A drug dealer named Mitch who operated a business on the corner of Lincoln Place made a mockery of Brian and the law. He arrested Mitch regularly, sometimes catching the dealer with guns and cocaine. But Mitch was always back on the street the next day, smiling broadly and waving at the cop who had just arrested him.

“How come you can have combat fatigue in the service but you can't have it on the job?” Brian would soon ask. “They say that in the ghetto, it's a war on crime. At least in a war you can kill a guy and feel good. He's not around anymore. But out here you arrest people and the next day they're out on the street, waving to you. So, really, what did you accomplish?”

In early 1983, the newspapers and television stations carried a story about two cops from the 77th Precinct who had been accused of robbing a Nostrand Avenue smoke shop. Brian's younger brother Kevin, a high school classmate of Henry Winter, phoned to ask Brian what was going on in his precinct. The answer disturbed his younger brother.

Brian said, “I don't know, but sometimes you just work too long in a precinct, and things can happen.”

At about this time, William Gallagher, the precinct's union delegate, was looking for a new partner. Considered to be a braggart and a bully by other cops, Gallagher liked to call himself a hero. In fact, he had the medals to back up his boasts. After coming on the job in March 1969, Gallagher amassed twenty-nine commendations for Excellent Police Duty, five citations for Meritorious Police Duty, and one Exceptional Merit Award.

But when other cops in the precinct looked at William Gallagher they saw a thief, not a hero—a bloated man with a swollen sense of self-importance. He avoided arrest by keeping an ear open to rumors emanating from his union, fancying himself an infallible thief.

Gallagher looked at Brian O'Regan and saw a potential disciple, someone to mold and shape, belittle and ravage. In time, Brian would become the perfect partner for a cop like William Gallagher, which is no partner at all. Sometimes the two men rode in their car for hours, but Gallagher never deemed it necessary to speak to the man he worked with.

“Gallagher was cement,” Brian would say later. “He was macho. He wanted me because I'm easy, because I'm a follower.”

Just as the union delegate had earlier exposed his midnight shift fill-in partner Henry Winter to the dark and deliberate acts of bribe-taking and suspect-robbing, Gallagher now initiated Brian O'Regan into thievery. During one of their first nights together on a midnight tour, he led Brian into an all-night smoke shop, saying as he entered, “I want to do this place.”

At first, Brian had no idea what his partner was talking about. But then he saw. And Brian O'Regan was never the same cop again.

Using one hand to hold a gun on the storekeeper, whom he was threatening to arrest for selling marijuana, Gallagher located a cash-filled tray under the counter. He grabbed three hundred dollars and then returned to the radio car with his prisoner, taking him for a short ride around the block and lecturing the man on the perils of dealing drugs in his sector.

“You want to play, you got to pay,” the police union rep said before freeing his victim.

Later Brian watched his partner count the stolen money out and split it into two equal piles. Then Gallagher held out $150 to his new partner. Brian froze. Gallagher kept his hand out. Brian didn't want to embarrass a cop he idolized. He didn't want a confrontation with a hero. So finally, he just squeezed his hand around the money and shoved it into his pocket.

Much later Brian said, “I felt like I was one of the boys.”

Within days after accepting the money, Brian was lost to the New York City Police Department. He brought a new single-mindedness to his work. Like Henry Winter, Brian had become the law. Guys like Mitch from Lincoln Place were no longer a problem. If Brian caught Mitch with drugs now, he would just steal them and walk away. And unlike other cops in the precinct, Brian wasn't simply robbing people to get their money. He was using the act of robbery as a vehicle for punishment.

“I did it for the glory,” he said later. “It was all done as a way of getting back at the people you couldn't hurt. No one becomes a cop to steal.”

By mid-1984, Brian and Henry had adjoining lockers. And sometimes Brian would see Henry counting out large sums of money after a tour. The word on the street was that Henry was crashing through windows into drug locations and stealing money. Brian was conducting similar raids on his own tours.

“I used to see him standing there counting hundreds of dollars,” O'Regan said. “Henry would turn to me and say, ‘Not a bad night.'”

Shortly after hooking up with Gallagher, Brian met a twenty-one-year-old rookie policewoman in the 77th Precinct named Cathy. In Brian's eyes, she made a police uniform come to life. A petite Polish girl with wavy hair, soft blue eyes, and a high forehead, Cathy was equally impressed with Brian. They met on an arrest, during which Brian subdued a prisoner without benefit of a nightstick.

“I like the way you handled yourself out there,” the rookie said later.

“Really?” said Brian, blushing.

Soon they were dating. And then they were doing more than dating. Brian was talking about his dreams, filling the night air on walks through Park Slope with talk of children and a home. To his surprise, Cathy listened.

But he had some advice for her too. The veteran told the rookie, “Get out of this precinct as soon as you can. Get out of this precinct before it changes you.”

She took his advice, and transferred out, getting a job in a Manhattan command. The relationship continued to flourish even as Brian continued to rob people. Soon he was showing up for work in a tattered, stained uniform. He grew fat and unhappy, his mind and body taking on the consistency of jelly.

“I had no pride,” Brian said of his deteriorating personal appearance.

Over the months and years, Brian O'Regan lost more and more of his resolve. The same cop who dreamed of joining the Emergency Services Unit now drove around with a sledgehammer in his trunk. He bought special steel-tipped shoes so he could kick down doors more easily. He even thought about sending away for a portable rope ladder. “I wanted excitement. Some kind of adventure.”

Soon Brian put his military training to work, surprising fellow thieves with his knowledge of tactical maneuvers and theories of attack. He became known as a tactician, spending hours scouting out fortified positions for weaknesses, taking an inventory of lookouts, bodyguards, and potential gunmen. Henry Winter, among others, was in awe of O'Regan's organizational ability.

“Other cops robbed people,” Henry said. “Brian conducted operations. He missed his calling.”

Brian later agreed. “I would have done great in narcotics.”

No robbery was beneath Brian, who had a reputation for spending both sides of a dollar. Tony Magno, who rarely got his hands dirty while conducting illegal drug raids, was amazed at O'Regan's staying power. Although he was nervous on the streets when discussing an upcoming burglary, saying things like, “No bullshit, guys. This time just in and out. Please.” Brian was always the last one to leave a drug raid. He would get down on his hands and knees to search floorboards for secret compartments. He stood on chairs to poke holes in ceilings and punched his fists through false walls. It was not beneath O'Regan to lay on the floor and search behind broken toilets. “See,” he once yelled, pulling a bag of drugs from underneath a feces-filled bathtub in an abandoned apartment, “I told you the shit was here.” By the end of a tour, Brian's hair was often littered with Sheetrock dust and his uniform covered with grime and filth. He never seemed to notice.

“You just couldn't stop what was happening,” Brian said. “It was like we had a fever or something.”

But by this point even Brian knew he had more than a simple illness. He knew he had psychological problems, perhaps triggered by some physical ailment. He went to see a physician on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, only to be told there was nothing physically wrong with him. The doctor suggested that Brian see a psychiatrist. Soon.

Instead, he began taking antidepressant pills. One night Brian mentioned in confidence to Gallagher that he was thinking of getting some help. The next day, cops were pointing at Brian with one hand and twirling a finger near their heads. “Woo, woo,” they said. Brian had a new nickname in the precinct—the other cops called him Spaceman. Officer Spaceman stopped looking for help. “If you tell someone you have psychological problems, they think you're crazy.”

“Brian kept saying that he wanted to get off the job, that he wanted to get out on a medical disability. We used to talk about it. He'd say, ‘Henry, I got to get out while I still can.' So I said, ‘No problem. I'll just shoot you.' We decided to stage an accidental shooting. Brian loved the idea. Guys in the Marines did stuff like that to get out of Vietnam. He kept asking, ‘When are we going to do it? When are we going to do it? And so one night we decided to do it.

“We drove down to a building on Portal Street, on the borderline between the Seven-One and the Seven-Seven. We were working together on a late tour. So he says, ‘What do you think? Should we do it?' I didn't want to, but Brian said, ‘Aw, come on.' He was carrying a .22-caliber pistol that looked like some kind of cowboy gun. A big gun with a long barrel. He kept saying, ‘Aw, come on, let's do it.' And I kept telling him, ‘Nah. We can't do this.' But Brian was persistent. I finally agreed to shoot him.

“At first he wanted to be shot in the leg. But I told him, “No, no. You can't do it in the leg, Brian. You got arteries all over the place there. You could bleed to death. Do it someplace else. Just take a finger off. Shoot the trigger finger off and you'll never be able to qualify with the other hand. They'll have to give you a medical disability.' Brian thought about it for a minute and said, ‘No, I don't want to lose a finger.' Then we started passing the gun back and forth on the street, saying, ‘You do it,' ‘No, you do it.' We went on like that for awhile. Then I just said, ‘Brian, I can't fucking shoot you.' He said, ‘Come on. Will you just shoot me? We'll set it up like we chased some skell into the building and shots were fired.' I said, ‘No, no, here, you take the gun, you shoot yourself.'