Buddy Boys (6 page)

In July, Henry invited Betsy out for dinner at the Lincoln Inn in Rockville Centre, Long Island. It was the first restaurant he had ever been to where someone parked your car. Betsy was similarly impressed. She ordered chicken cordon bleu. Henry got the veal. Over appetizers, he popped the question: Would she be interested in becoming a cop's wife? By the time a waiter rolled the dessert cart over to the table, the couple had agreed on a May 1975 wedding.

From the start, Henry liked the military atmosphere and the feeling of confederacy at the academy. But it wasn't too long before he spotted a way to circumvent certain rules and regulations. All recruits, he noted, were given three yellow “gig cards.” They were to be carried at all times in a uniform shirt pocket. If a recruit with dull shoes or a stained uniform was spotted by a supervisor, he had to surrender a gig card. If he lost all three cards, he got a reprimand from the captain. Repeat offenders faced expulsion.

Although Henry Winter lost twelve gig cards during his four-month stay in the academy, he was never disciplined. He and the other recruits always seemed to have enough gig cards, even though they often weren't in the right names.

In October, Henry graduated from the Police Academy. There was no official ceremony, just a party at an East Side Italian restaurant. He was assigned to the 25th Precinct, a Spanish Harlem command housed on East 119th Street. The day before leaving, the class watched a training film that included a message from a member of the department's Internal Affairs Division, the unit which polices the police.

“Don't ever forget that we're out there watching,” said an IAD investigator.

As the film ended and the lights came on in the auditorium, a sergeant stood at the podium, scanning the faces of recruits.

“There are a few of you out there who won't make it as cops,” he said, holding up a pair of handcuffs. “Some of you will wind up being arrested.”

The words meant nothing to Henry. He had the gun and he had the silver badge. He was the good guy and had a blue uniform to prove it. That night, he went home and had one of the most powerful dreams of his life. Henry dreamed he was standing before hundreds of bad guys with his gun drawn and his badge sparkling.

“You're all under arrest,” the patrolman said in his dream. Before awakening, Henry Winter dreamed he had every bad guy in the city wearing handcuffs.

The voice of Henry Winter:

“My first day on the job and I'm standing on the corner of Lexington Avenue and East One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street with my thumb up my ass on a foot post when I suddenly get a call on the radio. It's a ten-two. I didn't even know the police radio codes yet, so I just ignored the call. A few minutes later a sergeant pulled up to my foot post in a car. He said, ‘Hey, Winter. Didn't you just get a ten-two?' I said, ‘Yeah sarge. Should I call the station house or something?' The sergeant looked at me for a second and then said, ‘You dumb rookie hump. You don't call the station house on a ten-two. When you get a ten-two, you return to the station house, pronto.'

“So I ran back to the station house and reported to the front desk. The sergeant there is smiling and holding up my license plate. I said, ‘Oh, did it fall off the car or something?' The sergeant said, ‘No. And don't get excited now, Winter, but, ah … this is all that's left of your car.' I was stunned. The sergeant had to put a hand over his mouth to keep from laughing.

“It turned out a drunk cab driver had smashed into my car on One Hundred and Nineteenth and Park, pushing it up against a pole. The car looked like an accordion when I got there. It was a beautiful car too—a 1972 Grand Torino with white leather interior and a midnight blue paint job. The car had a 351 Cleveland, a four-barrel engine. I couldn't believe it. My first day on the job and some drunk turned my car into an accordion. I cried.

“I made my first collar in October on a burglary. It was a radio run—we responded to a call over the radio. We came up the street with our lights off and arrived at a warehouse on the corner of East One Hundred and Eleventh Street and Second Avenue. When we got there a sixteen-year-old kid was swinging down off the roof on a rope with a knapsack full of radios. He looked like Batman. He hit the ground and we arrested him. He was real surprised to see us.

“Later I took him to the old Central Booking at One Hundred Centre Street. In those days you stayed with the suspect right up until his arraignment. The whole process could take thirty hours. Anyway, in the hallways, there were all these empty lounge chairs. Some had little pieces of cardboard tacked to them with names on them. I thought they were police department property, so I fell asleep in one. Finally I wake up and there is this oldtimer kicking at my feet, yelling, ‘Get the fuck out of my chair.' By the next week I had my own lounge chair. I used to keep it in my car and then grab it out of the trunk whenever I made a collar. I did a lot of sleeping on the job back then.

“I didn't see much corruption in the beginning. The biggest thing was that we'd go into a store and get a free sandwich. I didn't think that was wrong. Probably the worst thing I saw was two days before Thanksgiving in 1974—my second month on the job. The city pulled a tractorload of turkeys into the precinct one night and parked it on the corner of Park Avenue and One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street. They were going to give the turkeys away to the poor in the morning. I got the foot post guarding the turkeys, to make sure nobody broke in and stole them. But throughout the night I got sergeants, lieutenants, captains, and borough commanders driving up to the truck and demanding free turkeys. I'm just out of the academy. The Supervisors are yelling, ‘Hey kid, let me have a turkey.' What am I supposed to do? Say, ‘Excuse me, Captain, but you can't have a turkey?' No, I give him the turkey. If I don't give him a turkey, my ass is grass.

“But that was a good job too, because the next day when we started giving out the turkeys, a line formed. It was good. Blacks, Hispanics, whites, all the poor people from the neighborhood were coming out to get a free turkey. One of us was supposed to hand a person a bag of potatoes while the other guy handed him a turkey. But it got crazy. People started grabbing us and pulling us off the truck, just to get another turkey. And then they'd sell them. On the next corner there were guys selling frozen turkeys for five dollars apiece. So we threw them out at the people, yelling ‘Here's a turkey for a turkey, here's a turkey for another turkey.'

“The same thing happens today with the cheese the government gives out. In a ghetto area like the Seventy-seventh Precinct, you can go into any bodega and you'll see packages of cheese, honey, and butter stamped ‘U.S. Government, not to be sold.' But in every bodega they've got them for sale. I guess once you slice cheese and put it on a piece of bread, it doesn't say ‘Not for sale' anymore.

“The cops were just as bad as the skells, though. A sergeant in the Seven-Seven and two other guys went down to a Catholic Charities cheese giveaway. They pulled up and said, all somberlike, ‘There are some disabled people on the far side of the precinct who can't get over here to get the free cheese. If you can give us some, we'll gladly distribute it amongst the poor and handicapped.' A priest gave the cops the cheese, said ‘God bless you, officers,' and sent them off with a trunk-load of free cheese. The cops drove right back to the precinct and split up the cheese among themselves.”

On March 10, 1975, as rumors persisted that there would soon be massive police layoffs because the city was facing a fiscal crisis, perhaps even bankruptcy, Henry arrived for work in the 25th Precinct only to learn that he had been transferred from Spanish Harlem to the 100th Precinct in Rockaway, Queens. He was surprised by the move—he had only spent five months in his first command—but he was happy because his commute to work would be cut from an hour to just under fifteen minutes. But soon Henry learned that there was no rush to get to work anyway—there was no work to be done. Throughout the city, young police officers facing July 1975 layoffs had simply stopped arresting people.

“They told us not to make arrests, because we'd have to go to court and if I'm laid off why should I go to court? The word was: Don't give out summonses, don't make arrests, don't do anything. Just be in Limbo. I went about three months without making an arrest. Nobody was.

“It got so that we'd just go out, drive around, and if we saw somebody committing a crime, we'd just pick up the radio and say, ‘Anybody catching collars tonight?' If nobody answered, we let it go. Just drove away.

“I remember one time I was up on One Hundred and Sixteenth Street in the One Hundredth Precinct and I see two mutts pull up in a green Comet. I said to myself, ‘They don't belong in that car.' So I put the plate number over the radio to see if it had been reported stolen. My partner was an oldtimer. He was in the bank, cashing his check when I spotted the car. He came out and got in the car just as the central dispatcher came over the air and said, ‘One hundred [sector] David, that's a ten-sixteen [stolen car], wanted by Yonkers.' My partner just looked at me. So I said, ‘Hey, we got a stolen car here with two guys in it.' He just looked at me and said, ‘Kid, you think that I'm going to make the arrest?' And I said, ‘Well, I ain't making the arrest either. I'm getting laid off.' He said, ‘And I'm too old to make arrests.' I picked up the radio and said, ‘Wrong plate, Central.' We let them go. We just let them drive away, go to the beach and do whatever they wanted to do. I didn't give a shit.”

Betsy and Henry were married on May 30, 1975 in Valley Stream's Blessed Sacrament Church. But even as the couple sat on the dais, toasting the future, Henry was worried about losing his job. Mayor Abe Beame was already preparing police union officials for the biggest layoff in the history of the New York City Police Department. The wedding guests, some of them cops, pushed envelopes containing checks and money into Henry's hands.

“Sorry about the job, kid,” people said, offering condolences on what should have been the happiest day of his life.

Three weeks later, Henry came home from his honeymoon to the bad news that he didn't have a job. He walked into the precinct house in late June only to be handed a teletyped message by a desk sergeant. The message listed all those police officers in the department being laid off on July 1, 1975. Henry found his name, tax registry number, shield number, and command listed with the W's near the bottom of the sheet. It was official. Henry Winter had become an ex-cop three-quarters of the way through his rookie year on the job.

“That was it. The words were there. We weren't supposed to work, we didn't work. Actually, they wanted our guns as of July third, but everybody had it up to here. We said, ‘Fuck you, take my guns, take my shield, take my patrol guide, take everything now,' and that's what we did. We went to the desk and turned everything in. Why should I work? I was getting laid off in three days. I wasn't going to go out and get shot up on the day before I got laid off.”

“Being laid off was like a kick in the pants, because I made good collars. I didn't cause anybody headaches. If they told me to do something, I did it. I was the type of cop who, if I thought you were dirty and you were in my sector, I would fuck around with you or get you to come after me until I could get you. There were times when, if I saw a stolen car parked on my foot post, I wouldn't budge. I'd hide, wait for somebody to get in the car, and then pounce just to make a collar. But now, why should I do stuff like that? I'm getting laid off. My benefits were going. When I was in the Two-Five, there was a cop who just got out of the academy, but he was getting laid off. He went to answer a call on One Hundred and Tenth Street with a day or two to go on the job, and a bomb went off. He lost an eye and his job. The department didn't do anything for him until the story hit the newspapers.

“Anyway, we all went up to Dingy Dan's on One Hundred and Eighth Street and Beach Channel Drive and had a party and a half. It was a good place, a cop's place, and he put out a spread with pitchers of beer. It was all for free. Officially, we still had three days left as cops. We weren't civilians yet. Dingy Dan knew that. He didn't make us pay for anything.”

Disappointed, Henry headed back permanently to his apartment in Valley Stream. Soon he was collecting unemployment and working part-time making deliveries for Gus's Pizza Shop on West Merrick Road. He continued to look for police-type work, applying for jobs with a variety of security firms that guarded warehouses at night and accompanied armored car deliveries of cash. Ordinarily, an ex-cop like Winter—one with no criminal record and two commendations—would have been snapped up by a security firm. But the timing was all wrong. There were literally hundreds of laid-off New York City police officers vying for security jobs. Henry's application got lost in a flooded job market.

Within a year of his firing, however, Henry was already developing a reputation in the New York City and Long Island newspapers as something of a heroic figure. He was delivering a pizza for Gus shortly after 10
P.M
. on March 7, 1976 when he noticed a car with six black men in it parked in front of a Merrick Avenue bar, the Club 600. The car was running, but the lights were off.

Henry parked his delivery van about sixty feet behind the suspicious car, a beat-up Chevy Impala. He watched one man get out and enter the bar, spotting a gun butt sticking out of the man's waistband.

His cop instincts working, Henry jotted down the car's license number and headed off to a nearby corner where he knew he would find a Nassau County Police call box. Instead, he met a uniformed Nassau County patrolman and neighborhood acquaintance, Vincent Joaquin, sitting in his patrol car.

“Follow me,” Henry said. “There's six black guys holding up the Six Hundred bar.”