Buddy Boys (16 page)

“Brian took the gun in his right hand and aimed it at his left. I stopped him and said, ‘No. Do it the other way around. Take the gun in your left hand and shoot yourself in the right hand. Who gives a shit about your left hand? You shoot right-handed. Shoot the right hand.” Brian looked at me and said, ‘Okay. I just wasn't thinking there for a moment.'

“So now Brian's got the gun in his left hand and he's pointing it at the palm of his right hand. And I said, ‘No, don't do it like that. The bullet will just go right through your hand and you won't do any damage that way. Close your hand, make a fist and then shoot into the fist.' I was trying to psych Brian out. Nobody would shoot through a closed fist. But I said, ‘Go ahead, if you shoot into your fist you'll take your finger, your knuckle, and everything.' He goes, ‘You think so? You think this is the way?' ‘Believe me.' He held the hand open again. ‘Not like that?' I tell him, ‘Not like that Brian. It goes right through if you do it like that. How many times have you seen guys shot in the hand like that, it goes through and nothing?' He says, ‘Yeah, yeah, you're right about that.' Finally I said, ‘Make a fist and shoot yourself through the fist.'

“He stood there for a second pointing the cowboy gun at the fist but he couldn't do it. ‘No way Hank. I ain't doing that.' I said, ‘That's right. You shoot yourself in the fist and there goes the whole fucking hand.' Brian put his gun away and we drove back to the precinct. Brian couldn't shoot himself.

“Later Brian and I used to sit in the car in the Seventy-seventh Precinct asking each other, ‘What the fuck are we doing here?' He should have been in Broward County in Florida and I should have been in Colorado. Now we were both sitting in the middle of a slum with a banged-up patrol car and frayed uniforms. We felt like two idiots. But really, that's it with life, isn't it? You make a choice somewhere along the way and then you live and die with it. There's no turning back.”

7

“I was exhausted. I couldn't hit another person.”

Tony Magno grew up in an Italian section of Brooklyn and as a kid he loved two blue uniforms. One uniform belonged to the New York City Police Department, the other to the Brooklyn Dodgers.

At first Tony dreamed of wearing Dodger Blue. He played sewer-to-sewer stick ball on 71st Street between 19th and 20th Avenues, pretending to be his favorite Dodger, Carl Furillo. He idolized Furillo as a baseball player because he was Italian and his middle name was Anthony. But Tony liked all the Dodgers, even Jackie Robinson, and he told his Italian friends that anybody who played for the Dodgers was socially acceptable, even if he was black.

“Jackie Robinson isn't black anymore,” he said. “He's blue. It's the same with the cops. Once a guy puts on the uniform, he's a cop just like Jackie Robinson is just a Dodger.”

He hung out with a small, loosely-defined, relatively harmless group of Italian kids from the neighborhood who laughingly referred to themselves as “The Seventy-first Street Faggoteers.” They rarely got into fights and carried metal combs and a ready supply of Vitalis instead of weapons, but they did wear motorcycle jackets, garrison belts, white Keds sneakers, tight jeans, and white T-shirts. Mostly the Faggoteers played baseball, but in time they gave up the game for girls.

When Raymond Giamanco bought a 1958 Chevy convertible, the gang expanded its horizons, traveling into the nearby neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Bath Beach to meet new girls in new Italian neighborhoods. Tony nicknamed the car the “pushmobile.”

“Half the time when we took the car out we wound up pushing it back home,” Magno later remembered. “We were always running out of gas and having breakdowns.”

By the early 1960s, Tony had set aside his stickball bat for a pair of wooden drumsticks. He sat in his living room, beating on a pair of telephone books, keeping time to Benny Goodman and other Big Band sounds on his father's stereo. After wearing out the yellow pages, he started on the furniture. His father rescued the family sofa when his son turned fourteen, buying him a set of Gretsch black diamond pearl drums which he set up in the basement. Soon all the neighborhood rock and rollers were hanging out in Tony's cellar, dreaming about playing in nightclubs and deposing the Beatles.

Unable to read music and unwilling to read textbooks, Tony was regarded as a mediocre musician and an uninterested high school student. He had to attend night school for a full year after his senior year in order to qualify for a high school diploma. When he eventually graduated, in 1965, Tony took a job as a stock boy at May's department store on 14th Street in Manhattan, where he was known as a soft touch who would sometimes switch the price tags on clothes.

At this stage in his life, Tony had little understanding of geography or history. He knew, for example, that there were run-down black neighborhoods in Brooklyn but he had never really seen a slum. And the one time he tried to make a killing through thievery—stealing a yellow parchment from the basement of his drum teacher's home—he embarrassed himself.

“I thought I really had something big—the original copy of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. When I tried to sell it, they laughed me off the block.”

In early 1966, when he was seventeen, Tony decided to join the Army, asking his father to co-sign his enlistment papers. Ernest Magno, a World War II veteran who saw action in North Africa and Italy, refused, telling his son, “I ain't signing your death certificate. I did enough fighting for both of us.” Tony dropped the idea of becoming a war hero.

In July of that year a guitar-playing friend invited Tony on a boat ride with two girls, one of them a shy blonde from the neighborhood named Marianne. The foursome headed out into Jamaica Bay, listening to the radio for hours while basking in the sun. Midway through the trip, Marianne decided that she was extremely impressed with Tony the drummer. She liked the way he looked in tight black chinos, and the way his starched white and yellow shirt hung off his string-bean frame. He seemed to be a cross between Fabian and Elvis. So when the boat docked, Marianne sprinted away with Tony Magno's ID bracelet.

“I was pretty sure he'd call me anyway,” she explained. “But I wanted to make sure.”

Within weeks the couple was dating seriously and by early 1967 they were talking about getting married. But there was one small problem. Tony couldn't offer Marianne any long-term security, and she wasn't the type to marry a department store clerk, even if he was fairly adept at switching price tags and looked like Fabian.

Tony knew that he wasn't going to make it as a rock-and-roll star either. His band—they called themselves the Paragons—had flopped at its one nightclub audition, stumbling through versions of “Hang on Sloopy,” “In the Midnight Hour” and “House of the Rising Sun.” To make matters worse, several customers came to the club hoping to see the real Paragons.

“They claimed false advertising,” Tony said. “They came in to see the Paragons and saw what amounted to the Slobs instead. We never got to play another club after that.”

A week or so later, Marianne told her boyfriend that he couldn't marry her until he got some sort of normal job.

She suggested that he study for an upcoming civil service exam and follow up on his dream to join the police force, now that the Dodgers had moved west. The couple got copies of old tests and studied for long hours in the evenings, sitting on the girl's couch and whispering sweet nothings like “perpetrators,” and “homicides,” into each other's ears.

Nineteen-year-old Tony Magno was contacted by the Police Department in mid-1967 and offered a job as a police trainee, a job that carried a military exemption. He was ecstatic—he was going to be a cop once he turned twenty-one. Marianne couldn't have been happier that she was going to be a cop's bride. They were married on January 5, 1969, ten days before Tony was sworn in as a police officer. Because he was still in the academy, he was only given two days off. They honeymooned in Manhattan, taking a room at the Sheraton Motor Inn for the weekend.

“It was a nice way to start a marriage,” Marianne thought. “We worked and struggled together, and we got somewhere. So we appreciated the little that we had. We were very happy with very little.”

Tony was appointed to the New York City Police Department on January 15, 1969. They took away his police trainee uniform and gave him a silver shield and a .38-caliber service revolver. He joined a group of recruits on a trip to Smith-Gray Uniform Tailors in Manhattan where he plunked down $200 for two uniforms. After working for a week during a snow emergency in the 17th Precinct, Tony Magno was assigned to his first command, the 77th Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn.

“The first corruption I ever did, I was a police trainee. I was too young to actually come on the job but they had started this new unit. Police trainees. We had a stupid little uniform. Gray pants and a gray shirt with a little blue tie. We had a hat too, but we didn't have to wear it. It was one of those fold-over World War II hats. They sent us out into a borough command office and we either did paperwork or answered phones. I got sent to the old Eight-Oh, which is now part of the Seven-Seven. One night I'm on the switchboard with a fill-in lieutenant from the old Thirteenth Division. Somebody needed a tow truck, so I called one. But after the job was completed, the driver came into the station house, handed me fifty dollars and said, ‘Thanks.' I just stood there with my mouth open. I was making one hundred and twenty-nine dollars every two weeks at that point, and I didn't know what to do with the fifty dollars. I was scared shitless.

“So I told the fill-in lieutenant, ‘The tow truck driver came in and walked out leaving me money. Do you get half? I don't know what to do.' He looked at me and said, ‘Kid, this was your contract. You got the money. You keep the money.' I didn't know what to do so I put the money in my pocket and that was that. I didn't even think about corruption. I didn't even know what the word ‘corruption' meant.

“The only other thing that I knew was wrong was guys sleeping on the job. Even guys that were radio dispatchers used to sleep. They set up beach chairs behind the radio receiver boxes, and guys that worked right in the radio room would go in there and sleep. At three o'clock in the morning one guy could handle the job, so they took turns. I remember when the sergeants came off patrol, if things were quiet, they'd go upstairs to the dormitory too. Everybody slept. The lieutenant on the desk slept. There were times I was the only guy alive in the station house on a twelve-to-eight shift. There were no lights on except the desk light and the switchboard light. The only way a person could tell it was a station was the two little green lights out in front that said ‘Police.'

“Before we graduated, I had told everybody in the academy that I knew where I was going. I had a hook. I was going to the Six-Two out in Bensonhurst, my old neighborhood. It was all arranged. My uncle, who worked in a bakery, knew some inspector in Brooklyn South. The inspector used to come in for coffee and free pastries in the morning and one day my uncle tells him, ‘Look, my nephew is in the academy. Do you think we can get him out here?' The inspector said, ‘No problem. I'll just make a phone call.' So it was set. I was going to the Six-Two. My uncle said, ‘This guy is a Scotch drinker. When this is all over, you might have to buy him a case of Scotch.' No problem. My father would have bought the Scotch. All the other guys were worried about where they were being sent. Not me.

“But then, when they called us up to the podium, I looked at the paper and saw the number Seven-Seven next to my name. I couldn't believe it. ‘Holy shit,' I thought. I went from the Eight-Oh to the Seven-Seven, from working on the switchboard to working on the fucking street on the same blocks that run through the Eight-Oh.

“It was the same shit. Black area, the whole fucking bit. I came from a completely white neighborhood and I didn't even know that fucking area of Brooklyn existed. I didn't even know there were black people, that many anyway, in Brooklyn. The guys sure got on me good. ‘Oh, you got the Seven-Seven, huh, Magno? Well you must have one hell of a hook to get that assignment. Who's your hook with the department anyway, Malcolm X?' I never even called my uncle. I just said, ‘Aw, fuck it,' and went to work in the Seven-Seven.”

As a member of the New York City Police Department, Police Officer Anthony Carl Magno, shield number 259, had only one major failing. He didn't like to arrest people.

Having spent close to two years in a slum station house as a police trainee, Magno had already decided that he didn't have to arrest people to be a successful cop. He had watched veteran cops skate through their tours, drinking beer, cooping, and eating free meals while handing over the few arrests they made to the more ambitious younger cops who hoped to parlay their staggering arrest and overtime totals into a gold detective's shield.

Tony wasn't interested in a gold shield. He liked the intimacy of a patrol car. It was the guys in the precinct locker room that Tony really cared about, not the criminals in the street.

And so he arrived at the 77th Precinct in February 1969, determined to assist on as many arrests as he could but never to get stuck with one of his own.

“I can't take court,” Tony explained to his partners over the next seventeen years. “I don't like that part of the job. Going to court makes me feel like a prisoner.”

Although he would have been happy to give all his arrests away to other cops, he finally had to arrest somebody. The arrest was given to him by two of the precinct's most legendary cops, David Greenburg and Robert Hantz.

Known as “Batman and Robin” on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant, Greenburg and Hantz were alternately regarded as heroes and rogues by other members of the department. They certainly put the 77th Precinct on the map, collaborating with author L. H. Whittemore on a bestselling book about their exploits entitled
The Super Cops: The True Story of the Cops called Batman and Robin.
They were the most active cops in the precinct, so Batman and Robin rarely wasted their time with two-bit thieves and burglary suspects.