Free Buddy Boys by Mike McAlary Page A

kill Henry Winter with a car agreed to a plea-bargain arrangement with the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. The arrangement called for the man to pay a fifty dollar fine.
    The foot patrolman tells his secrets:
    â€œI must have made eight or nine good robbery and drug collars in the Seven-Five using the binocular trick. If you sit in a room and stake something out, it’s easy to see what’s going on. Nobody sees you.
    â€œThere was this one family named Garcia up on Pitkin Avenue. They were heavily into drugs, especially the woman, who had blonde hair. And I loved breaking their chops. I just missed getting her good one day too. I had just come on duty when one of the kids ran up to me and yelled, ‘Henry. Henry. Henry.’ I liked it better when they called me ‘Henry.’ It was a little easier to deal with people when they said my name rather than ‘officer’. So the kids yelled ‘Henry, Henry, Henry. You just missed something. The blonde lady just came out and got in a fight with one of the girls. Then she pulled out a little .25 automatic.’ So I stayed there and watched because I wanted her so bad. But she was good. I couldn’t get her. I got her husband, but I never got her.
    â€œOne day she even invited me and my partner, Al Haymen, up for coffee. She knew I was giving her business a beating. So she says, ‘Well, we’d like to buy you a new hat.’ I’m thinking, I got a hat, what does she want to buy me a new hat for? Then the light went off. Bribe. So I went back and told Frank Bunting about it. He told Internal Affairs. That night the IAD guys came down and wired me up, put a tape recorder on me. Then I went out and tried to make contact with her, but she was too slick. She must have gotten word back, somehow. She wouldn’t even stand on the same side of the street with me.
    â€œThat was the first time I wore the wire. I wore it just that one night on her. And it was the only time I ever wore a wire where I didn’t get some type of conversation.”
    Traditionally, city cops pay little heed to rumors about pending investigations, particularly investigations of cops by other cops in high crime areas. Like bad guys without badges, crooked cops tend to see themselves as somehow beyond the reach of the law. It’s always the other guy that gets caught.
    In the 75th Precinct, a group of four crooked cops in an elite detail called the Anticrime Unit were positive that they could continue to burglarize apartments, rob drug dealers, and steal money off dead bodies whenever they wanted to. They would assure each other: If we can’t catch the robbery and burglary suspects out here in this jungle, how are other cops—spit and polish Manhattan cops, who don’t know the area—ever going to catch us dirty. You’d have to be one of us to catch us.
    These officers who had been at the top of the precinct’s overtime list, suddenly quit working extra tours and making arrests. One began wearing a lot of gold jewelry. Another drove a brand new Cadillac to work. Two others bought expensive new homes. Lumped together, these signs had the effect of raising a giant red flag over the 75th Precinct.
    In 1979 rumors flew through the locker room of the station house on Sutter Avenue. Cops began whispering to each other that there was a big investigation of guys in Anticrime going on. It was even said that cops were going to jail.
    Police Officer Henry Winter heard the rumors too. But he couldn’t have imagined how the truth would effect his own career. All he knew was that he wasn’t dirty. Sure, he bent the rules a little to make a good collar here and there, but he never stole anything. He wasn’t what Internal Affairs would call “a player.”
    Then on a humid night in August something happened that threw a fright into Henry Winter. A team of four cops assigned to the Anticrime detail were driving an unmarked car