Buddy Boys (20 page)

“How did it go in there?” Tony asked.

“Good. I just left Oscar the Grouch sitting back there in a garbage can.”

“Tony and I got medals for handling one dispute back in the summer of 1984. There was this new kid in the precinct, a guy we called Scoop Mahoney. He was walking a foot post one day and called in a ten–eighty-five—officer needs assistance. Scoop was yelling, ‘Man with a knife, man with a machete.' So Tony and I decided to go see what Scoop wanted. There's Scoop on the corner with a guy with a big machete, swinging it like crazy. And every time Mahoney went near him, the guy took a swing at him. The guy was acting really flippy. Other people went after him and he'd swing at them too. Tony and I arrive on the scene and there's all these cops with guns drawn. I said, ‘What's he calling in an eighty-five on this for? The guy's got a machete, he's swinging it at you, just drop him. Shoot him.' We're sitting in the car looking and looking, and finally Tony looks at me and I say ‘All right.'

“So we get out of the car and now the place is loaded with cops. I don't have a night stick on me. I never liked carrying a stick. I figure if you really have to hit somebody, I mean hit them in the head with all your might, you're gonna kill them anyway, so why not use a gun? Mahoney comes running over to me and says, ‘What do I do? I can't get the machete away from him.' I said, ‘All right. Give me your stick.' So Tony starts talking to the guy, ‘Hey, put down the knife. I'll fucking jack you up.' I tell Mahoney, ‘Just get his attention for a second.' Mahoney does it and I walk behind the guy and pow. He goes out cold. I get the machete, I give the machete and the stick to Mahoney, then me and Tony get back in the car and pull away.

“It was Mahoney's collar. We met him back at the station house and he tells us, ‘Look, I'm putting in for a medal and I'm putting you guys in for one too.' I says, ‘No. No. You handle it.' He says, ‘No, I'll put down that I did everything, but you were there, so I'm putting you in too.' And that's the way it went. We got some dipshit medals and Scoop later made detective.”

On February 17, 1984, Henry and Tony made the city's daily newspapers for the first time as a team. Henry had narrowly escaped serious injury the night before, when a robbery suspect turned and fired a .357 magnum at him during a chase. The
New York Post
ran an account of the shootout at the top of page four under the headline, “‘I was lucky,' says cop who ducked bullet.” The article was illustrated with a large photograph of Henry leading a bloodied suspect away in handcuffs. It was a nice photograph, a graphic picture, the very same photograph that the
Post
later ran on page one to illustrate an even bigger story about Police Officers Henry Winter and Tony Magno.

“It was about one thirty in the morning. Tony and I were out on patrol, driving down Park Place when we reached the corner of Bedford Avenue. Two guys waved us over and said, ‘We just got robbed,' and pointed to five or six guys across the street—like a wolf pack. I said, ‘Anybody got guns?' and one kid says, ‘Yeah. Two guns.' We drove up to the pack and they took off. I jumped out of the car—I was driving—and took after two guys. This fucked Tony up because now he had to come all the way around the car from the passenger's side to get into the driver's seat. I used to do this to him all the time, it drove him crazy. He used to scream, ‘If you're driving, you stay with the car. I run when you drive.' But I always forgot. Sometimes I even forgot to put the car in park. I'd just jump out and start running with the car rolling down the block after me. I'd be chasing the bad guy and Tony would be chasing the car.

“So Tony is running circles around the car and I'm chasing this guy down the block. He got to the corner first and made a right turn down Park Place. I came around the corner and there he is standing in the combat position behind a car pointing the magnum at me. And the fuck fired the gun. The bullet hit the wall behind me and I dove behind it. I stayed there for a minute and then stuck my head out again in time to see the guy rounding the corner with a silver gun in his hand. I ran past the spot he fired at me from and found the magnum. He had two guns. We chased him to a building and then other cops responded to the scene. They found him hiding in the closet of an abandoned building and brought him up to the roof.

“I felt like beating the shit out of him. We tried to take care of him but there were too many people around. I smacked him around a few times but then the guys pulled me off. Everybody was uptight. Some parolee had just shot three cops in the South Bronx the night before, killing one of them. They had to call me off. I was going to kill him. I was going to throw him off the roof. He would have been gone.

“When he heard the shot, Tony broke off his chase and started looking for me. We were both scared. I caught up with him just before they found the guy. He says, ‘You okay, shithead?' And then I remembered, we had just ordered chicken wings with hot sauce before all this shit broke, so I said, ‘You know we just ordered our food.' So while all this shit's going on, Tony runs down to Nostrand Avenue and picks up our chicken wings with hot sauce. As they're transporting this guy to the station house, we're just sitting there eating our chicken wings and hot sauce in the car, trying to pretend that someone didn't just try and kill me.”

9

“Buddy Boy, Buddy Bob.”

In the beginning no one in the 77th Precinct was sure who could be trusted to steal.

Henry and Tony had worked together for six months before they learned that there were other bluefish cops out there, particularly on the midnight tours, running in schools, robbing almost each and every drug dealer they came in contact with.

Throughout most of their careers Tony and Henry worked around the clock. They would work a week on the 8
A.M
.-to-4
P.M
. tour, then spend another week on the 4
P.M
.-to-12
A.M
. shift, before finishing out the cycle with a tour on the midnight-to-8
A.M
. detail. In the beginning, they stole only when the right moment presented itself, in broad daylight and the dark of night. They used their uniforms for camouflage and their badges as passkeys. Their guns provided security.

But the precinct's most prolific robbers were found on the midnight tour. Police Officers William Gallagher and Brian O'Regan and another half dozen cops lived for the night, when the darkness hid their misdeeds from prying eyes. By late 1984, with their daylight escapades already well known to the men on the midnight tour, Henry and Tony had been welcomed into the After Midnight gang—a group formerly known as Sergeant Stinson's Raiders. They were deemed fit company by Gallagher, a swaggering presence who used his ties to the police union to warn the cops of investigations.

Soon Henry and Gallagher were standing off to the side after roll call, plotting a series of moves that would ultimately land them in reinforced apartments where they were free to terrorize dealers at gunpoint, stealing drugs, money and guns. The cops made up nicknames for each other and talked on the radio in coded messages. Henry became Buddy Boy, Gallagher became Buddy Bee. Brian O'Regan was known as Space Man and the rest of the thieves fell under a single title: The Buddy Boys.

“‘Buddy Boy' was a word that we used among ourselves. ‘Buddy Boy' was me. ‘Buddy Bee' was Junior Gallagher. ‘Buddy Bob' was the code word for what we did. It meant, ‘Are we doing anything tonight? You agree to make a little money tonight?' We used the codes over the radio. If Junior was calling our car, he'd say, ‘Buddy Boy, Buddy Bob.' That meant, ‘Hey Henry, are we doing anything tonight?' If I called Junior it would be, ‘Buddy Bee, Buddy Bob.' Pretty simple stuff. But no one listening to the radio could have figured out what the fuck we were talking about.

“Now, if we wanted to hit a place, we'd answer with a ‘Hey, two-three-four,' ‘Two-three-four' was the code name for a park on Bergen Street between Troy and Schenectady, behind the St. Johns Recreation Center across from a fire house, old Engine Company Two-Three-Four. That's where we got the name. We'd drive into the park and position our cars next to each other between two ball fields and a handball court. If there was anybody hanging out in the park, they'd take off as soon as we drove in. We could see out in all directions, so if the shoofly—some supervisor trying to check up on us—came into the park looking for us, we could see him coming. But nobody ever came. We could talk about whatever we wanted once we got to two-three-four.

“So we'd drive in there and discuss what we wanted to do. I'd say to Junior, ‘What place you got in mind?' And he'd answer, ‘Two-sixty-one Buffalo. I came in that way before work and scouted it out. I didn't see too many lookouts in front of the place.' And then we'd talk about how we were going to do it. Who's going in the front? Who's going to go in the back? Who went in the back last time? Who got dirty last time? Things like that. Then we'd say, ‘All right. Let's do it.'

“We'd drive down the streets with our lights off. We'd give the lead car about a four- or five-second head start to get around the corner first. They'd go in the front or back way and we'd go in the other way. Sometimes we'd even park down the block and walk in, just to get the jump on the lookouts. If it was a heavy drug area, with a lot of lookouts, the scouts would start whistling back and forth as soon as they spotted us, yelling their own code words. We'd sneak up on places through backyards and alleys. It was almost like stalking a deer. Tracking through brush and making sure no one saw you doing anything. It was exciting. We created our own thrills.

“Sometimes it was easy and we didn't even need to show our guns. We'd just knock on the door, they'd open the door up and we'd walk in. They never stuck around to see what we wanted—they just ran, jumping out windows and climbing down fire escapes. We didn't care. We weren't there to arrest anybody. We were there to scoop up their money and drugs and then get the fuck out.

“But we always tried to make them think they were getting away. If a guy stayed and we came up with shit, we'd act all serious. I'd say, ‘Whose collar is this?' and Brian would say, ‘I got him.' Then someone else would say, ‘Take him out in the hallway and put cuffs on him.' But as soon as Brian got the guy into the hallway, we'd call him back on some excuse and Brian would tell the guy, ‘Now don't move. You stay right here. You're going to jail as soon as I get back out here.' Then Brian would come back into the room and we'd hear the guy scurrying down the hall, making his getaway. We'd laugh and say, ‘Oh, the bad guy just got away.'

“We had this one idiot one time. Gallagher, Brian, me and Tony were on a job. We actually left the guy in the hallway, went back into the apartment, and shut the door. When we came back out five minutes later, the guy was still there. I look at Brian. He looks at me. We can't believe this guy. We go back inside, shut the door, and wait another five minutes. The guy is still standing there. So we closed the door and we ran away. We went out the fire escape because the fucking guy just would not leave. We made some noises in the apartment, and then left one by one, going down the fire escape thinking this was the dumbest fucker we'd ever seen. We had to run away from him! Then we got back in our cars and drove to the park to see who got what and divvy up the drugs and cash.”

The Buddy Boys became more brazen with experience. Henry, having nearly broken his foot when he tried to kick down a metal door with sneakers, bought a pair of steel-tipped boots. Gallagher and O'Regan began carrying a sledge hammer, crowbar, and pinch bar in the trunk of their patrol car. They all packed screwdrivers in their attaché cases along with their paperwork.

Some of the cops became experts at kicking down doors and crashing through walls. No door could hold them. They split oak doors with one mighty swing of their hammers and used crowbars to pry metal doors off their hinges. If the cops wanted to get into a third-floor apartment, they would climb to the roof, tie a rope around an elevator housing and then rappel down the side of the building, crashing feet first into the apartment window. Some Buddy Boys also carried ash cans—small but powerful fireworks—which they would light and slip through mail slots, literally bombing people out of their apartments.

If the cops found themselves ill-equipped for a manuever, one of them would rush off to a firehouse to borrow axes and bolt cutters. The firemen, unaware of their role in the burglaries, scratched their heads and asked each other, “What the hell are these guys doing out there?”

One night the Buddy Boys arrived at a building on the corner of Eastern Parkway and Rogers Avenue, only to discover they had no means of getting to an adjoining roof. They had to place a man on the roof to keep the dealer they were after from escaping out his apartment window with his drugs and money.

“We need a ladder for this job,” Gallagher decided.

“I saw a ladder at an excavation site on the way in to work today,” Henry said.

So Tony and Gallagher sat in the apartment while Brian and Henry tore off in a patrol car, driving to the far end of the precinct where they found a wooden ladder at an excavation site. The cops wedged the ladder between the lights and the roof, ruining the car's paint job in the process, and then sped back to the scene, laughing as they raced through the city streets with an eight-foot ladder hanging off the top of their patrol car. Then they drove the car up on the sidewalk next to the building and put the ladder on top of the car. Henry and Gallagher climbed up the ladder, entering the dealer's apartment. Tony and Brian broke through his front door.

“He was very surprised to see us,” Henry later remembered.

“Brian started talking about making his own equipment. He wanted to put together a scaffold that would fit into the back of his car. Then he talked about mailing away for things. He was going to get one of those rope ladders that you throw up, it hooks on, then you pull a string, it comes down, and you climb up. He was actually going to send away for this thing so we could rip places off. I told him, ‘Come on. What are we going to do, start a business here? Do you want to get a van, too, and paint “H and B Removal” on the side?' Holy shit. That's what it was like. I mean, I'm not glad this happened to me, but it was getting pretty crazy on the midnight tours. Anything and everything went. You could do whatever you wanted to do and nobody could stop you. Getting a van wasn't out of the question. I think that if this was still going on we'd have a van by now. We would have all chipped in, got a van, and set it up with everything we needed—crowbars, helmets, axes, ropes, ladders, and acetylene torches. We could have parked it somewhere in the precinct before heading into work. Then we could have said on the radio, ‘Buddy Bee, Buddy Bob. Get the Buddy-Boymobile.'