Buddy Boys by Mike McAlary

less than four shootouts with drug dealers and robbery suspects during his first six months in the precinct—a remarkable achievement when you consider that most city cops retire without ever having fired their guns in the heat of battle.
    In an interview with a newspaper reporter years later, Heron even admitted shooting an unarmed man in a Manhattan park during an argument over heroin. He dropped a knife at the fallen man’s side before police arrived. The arriving cops then charged the victim with attempted murder. Eventually Heron—nicknamed Peter Heroin by the cops in the 77th Precinct—was arrested for attempted murder. He defended himself saying the stress he experienced in the precinct had led him to use drugs and had ruined his life. In earlier years, Heron had taken Brian O’Regan and Henry Winter aside and warned them that a routine of mayhem and misery could change one’s perspective on life.
    â€œGet out of this precinct while you still can,” he advised them.
    â€œPete Heroin and I worked together for awhile when I first got there. One night we were over by the Albany projects and a robbery went down. A guy with a gun had just ripped a lady off. The guy took off into a building and Pete and I ran after him. He ran to the roof and we could hear him, he was always like one landing ahead of us. When we got there we couldn’t find him. We’re the only people on the roof. I go to check the other entrance and it’s locked. Where the hell could this guy go? We searched the top of the air shafts. We checked the elevator shaft. Nothing. Finally Pete spotted the guy’s fingers. He was hanging over the side of the building waiting for us to leave, but before we could get there he lost his grip. He had been hanging there for at least five minutes. It’s a standard ghetto trick, but he fell.
    â€œWe both thought the same thing. Fort Apache. The Bronx. We could see the headline: ‘Cops hurl suspect to death from rooftop.’ There’s no witnesses. We’re both going to jail. We ran downstairs and found the guy moaning in the courtyard. He hit a tree on the way down, breaking his fall. A crowd gathered and somebody was already yelling, ‘You cops threw him off the roof. We saw you do it.’ We rushed the guy off to Kings County Hospital. He came to in the emergency room. We didn’t know if he was going to make it. A doctor asked him, ‘What happened up there?’ And the guy said, ‘I lost my grip. I fell.’ Then he blacked out. But we were all right—he had told the truth. Everybody heard him. But imagine if he comes to and makes a dying declaration, something like, ‘The cops pushed me off the roof.’ The funny thing was that we never found the mutt’s gun. I think somebody stole it off him when he hit the ground.
    â€œPete and I were on another robbery in the Albany projects. I arrived on the scene as the backup. I saw a guy come running around the corner with Pete chasing him in a patrol car, driving his car like a cowboy with his gun out the window. Pow. Pow. He’s shooting away. Pete dropped the guy with a shot in the ass.
    â€œI did a lot of strange things in my time. But Pete, he was the weirdest of the weird. Like I wasn’t afraid of anybody. If I had a job to do, I’d do the job. If a guy was six-foot-six and weighed 260 pounds, I would take the diplomatic approach. I knew I couldn’t take him out right away, so I’d bullshit with him a little, bullshit with him a little more, try to get behind him, and then cold-cock the son of a bitch with my jack or nightstick. Pete would go right up to them. He was an ex-Marine. Every situation was Tripoli to him. He would go face-to-face with them. And lose. Get his ass kicked. He’s the type of guy who would say, ‘Give me a ten—eighty-five [backup] with two units and call an ambulance.’ And then he’d walk in on the guy and