Buddy Boys by Mike McAlary Page A

fight him. Instead of doing it the sneaky way, trying to get behind him, and hit him with the stick or something, Pete would just call in the troops, call in the medics, drop the radio, and go to war.”
    Even a casual visitor to the 77th Precinct could see there was something inherently wrong at the station house. In a neighborhood where cops were literally stepping over dead bodies and running into robbers on the streets, the most that anybody in a position of authority wanted to know was why the number of traffic summonses was down and the precinct’s overtime up. The bigger questions went unresolved.
    â€œI believe crimes are being committed by Members of the Service in uniform,” wrote Captain Donald T. Bishop, the precinct commander, to his zone commander shortly after taking over the 77th Precinct in February 1982. “There’s a good possibility that late tour personnel are committing larcenies at the scenes of past burglaries.”
    Bishop’s warning, like those of a previous zone commander, went unheeded. Police officers assigned to the precinct sensed that most of their supervisors simply wanted to get their time in and move on before a major scandal broke. The department seemed to care little about the 77th and even less about what cops did in the neighborhood. Henry Winter was about to discover that a cop in the 77th Precinct could pretty much do whatever the hell he or she wanted.
    Henry Winter got in trouble with his superiors shortly after he arrived. Oddly enough, he got “jammed up”—a cop phrase meaning in trouble—after he caught a bad guy who was supposed to be a good guy, driving a stolen car through his sector.
    One night in 1981, Henry was teamed up in a squad car with a rookie, patrolling a section near Eastern Parkway, when he looked over to his right and saw a black man with wild-looking hair and a ragged shirt driving a beat-up Ford. Henry studied the man’s car for a moment and then spotted a portable radio on the dashboard.
    â€œHey,” Henry said to his partner, “that looks like a police department radio.”
    Edging up, Henry finally got close enough to read the insignia on the side of the radio—NYPD. Henry was excited. This guy couldn’t be a cop.
    â€œLook, I bet we got a member of the Black Liberation Army here with a stolen radio,” Henry said. This imaginary scenario wasn’t so wild. Recently, two members of the black supremacist gang had jumped from a van on a quiet Queens street and fired more than twenty shots at two police officers trapped in their radio car. Neither cop had time to get his gun out of his holster—one was killed, the other critically wounded. The surviving cop’s father had a heart attack in the hospital and later died. The shooters, although later captured and convicted of murder, were still at large.
    The light turned green and the driver took off. Henry followed, running the man’s plate over his own portable radio. Within seconds the plate came back as a ten-sixteen (stolen). Henry reported his location over the air, hit the siren, and started to give chase. He felt good, too, figuring he was chasing a fugitive with a stolen police radio in a stolen car. He was going to be praised as one alert cop when this was all over.
    Henry continued chasing the car and finally pulled it over at an intersection. He and the driver got out of their cars at the same time. Henry looked at him and felt sick. They were both wearing standard issue police trousers, shoes, and gun belts. Henry had caught a cop.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” the driver yelled. “I’m a cop.”
    â€œWhat do you mean you’re a cop?” Henry yelled back. “Show me something.”
    Henry was mortified. Any second now there would be a half-dozen other police cars converging on the scene.
    â€œWhat are you doing in a stolen car?”
    â€œAh, the car’s not stolen,