Buddy Boys (7 page)

Joaquin, recognizing Henry as the ex-cop turned pizza delivery man, asked, “OK, but have you got your gun?”

“Nah. I left it home.”

The men reached the scene just in time to see the suspect jump into the car and speed off, heading west into the city.

“I just got a call on the radio,” Joaquin screamed to Henry. “They robbed the bar.”

Winter jumped into the delivery van and Joaquin sped off in the patrol car, chasing the robbers across the city line into Queens. Henry raced into oncoming traffic, cut off the Impala and jumped from the van. He ran to the passenger's side of the Impala, pretending to reach behind his back for a gun.

“Freeze, motherfuckers!” he yelled.

No one dared move.

“Now shut the car off and put your hands on the dashboard.”

One pair of hands, the one closest to Henry, placed a gun on the dashboard. He reached into the car, grabbed it and held it on the suspects until Joaquin arrived with his backups. “Is that your gun?” asked one of the arriving officers, Larry Robinson, another Nassau County cop, who recognized Henry as the ex-cop from the pizza parlor.

“No, this is their gun. My gun is at home.”

“You mean you took these guys without a gun?”

Henry laughed. One of the suspects began to curse.

“I told you we should have wasted the dude. He's a pizza man. We got nabbed by a pizza man.”

The Long Island cops scratched their heads.

“All yours, officers,” Henry said. “I got a pizza to deliver.”

Two days later, the New York
Daily News
carried an account of the arrest on page seven. The article, headlined, “With a Hunch and a Bluff, Laid-off Cop Corrals Six,” ran at the top of the page and explained Winter's exploits in detail. The lead to the story included a curious error, however.

“A young ex-cop, a casualty of New York City's fiscal woes, ventured from his Valley Stream home in quest of a pizza pie to share with his wife and wound up helping to bag a carload of robbery suspects by bluffing that he had a gun, Nassau County police said yesterday.

“Police said Henry Winter, 23, laid off from the city Police Department last July, spotted five men and a juvenile in a car near the Club 600 bar at 600 Merrick Road, Valley Stream at about 10
P.M
. Sunday while he was driving to a pizza parlor.”

Years later, Henry recalled: “All I knew was that these guys robbed a bar and they had to be caught. That's all I cared about. But when the
Daily News
reporter called me, I realized that I had to tell him I was driving to the pizza parlor rather than delivering pizzas. I couldn't have it printed that I was working for a pizza parlor, because at that time, hell, I was still collecting unemployment checks from the city.”

In April, Henry made the city newspapers again.

This episode began shortly before 1
A.M
. as Gus Sakellarios, Henry and a teenaged waitress named Jan Tragner prepared to close up Gus's Pizza Shop. Henry was at the front counter, counting his tips, when a black man entered the store. The man walked to the back of the shop and then returned to the front counter.

“Where's the bathroom, man?” he asked.

“Out of order,” Gus replied.

The man then left, but Henry, wearing a small revolver in an ankle holster, felt the hair on his arms stand up.

“Gus, we're going to be robbed.”

“Henry, won't you ever stop being a cop?”

“I'm telling you, Gus, it's going down.”

Two minutes later, the man returned to the parlor with a friend.

“Two slices,” he said.

As Gus put the slices on the counter, the man pulled a nine-millimeter automatic from his waistband and pointed it at the owner's head. The other man grabbed Jan, holding her in a choke hold.

“Open the register,” they shouted at Henry. “Move!”

Henry hit the ‘No sale' button and the register drawer popped open. One of the men dug his hand in, stuffing dollar bills into his pocket.

The gunmen then pushed all three workers into a back room and closed the door. For a split second, Henry thought about pulling his gun. Then he thought again. Jan was still in his line of fire. He heard the men run back to the front of the parlor, a bell jingling as they opened the door to the street.

“Don't follow or else.”

As the door closed, Henry ran out of the shop and into the street. He caught a glimpse of the license plate on the red Oldsmobile getaway car as it pulled away from the curb. He raced fifty feet to the corner, where his brother-in-law, Douglas Caufield, a Hempstead cop, was waiting in his car to drive Henry home from work.

Douglas and Henry took off after the robbers, chasing them at high speed across the city line. They lost track of the car in Queens, but stopped to give a description of its occupants and the license plate number to a patrolling team of city cops. They put out a radio call, alerting Nassau County officers, who later caught up with the fleeing robbers near the Nassau Expressway in North Lawrence. The cops recovered an automatic and fifty dollars, arresting two robbers and a driver.

Two days later,
Newsday
and the New York
Daily News
carried reports on Henry Winter, the cop without a police department. The
News
was really impressed this time, headlining the article, “Laid-off City Cop Helps Nab 3 in Store Robbery.”

The lead to the story read: “Stickup men who ply their trade in Valley Stream are on notice to watch out for Henry Winter. The 23-year-old laid-off New York City cop played a hero's role for the second time yesterday in the arrest of three Far Rockaway, Queens men who allegedly held up a store where Winter has a part-time job.”

Henry recalled, “I was gonna drop the guy with the gun. I wanted to shoot him dead. But I couldn't take a chance. The other guy was holding Jan. He could have been armed. Gus was still very happy, though. I was the best delivery boy he ever had. After that, I could eat anything I wanted in the store. Veal cutlets. Meatballs. Shrimp. Finally, I even said to Gus, ‘Hey, did you ever think of putting lobster on the menu? I really like lobster.' Gus just shook his head. He figured if I didn't get a job with a police department soon, I was going to eat him out of business.”

Henry Winter's big decision:

“I sent résumés out to various police departments in different parts of the country. The union told us that other police departments were looking to hire laid-off New York City cops. So I sent a résumé out to Arapahoe County, Colorado, about twelve miles east of Denver. They called and asked me to come out and take a lie detector test. I flew out at the end of June in 1976, just about a year after I got laid off. I met this sergeant in personnel, Reynolds. He gave me the lie detector test.

“It consisted of three questions: Did I ever steal anything? Did I ever cover up a felony? Did I ever have sex while I was on the payroll as a New York City police officer? Did I ever steal anything? Yeah, everybody steals. You take a little money out of your mother's pocketbook when you're a kid and you steal money from other kids when you're in school. Did I ever cover up a felony? The answer to that was no. I had never covered up a felony. Did I ever have sex as a member of the New York City Police Department? I answered yes to that one too. They didn't specify on duty or off duty. The sergeant says, ‘All right. We'll be in touch.' I figured, that's it—I flunked the damn thing.

“The following Wednesday I get a phone call. This guy said, ‘Henry Winter? This is Sergeant Reynolds, from the Arapahoe County Police Department in Colorado. We went over your application and we'd like you to work for us.' So I said, ‘Oh, fine. I'm interested. But it will take me about a month or so to get squared away here. I have a wife and child. When do you want me to start?' He said, ‘Monday.' I said, ‘I have no place to live. I can't just drop everything.' He said, ‘They're going to waive everything, all the learning and the academy.' They were going to set me up in the police barracks until I could find a place. I'd have to learn the new gun laws and things like that. He said I could look for my own place and eventually move out of the barracks. I talked it over with Betsy and she said, ‘Yeah, go out and try it.'

“So I loaded up our 1971 Volkswagen bug, and took off. I drove all the way out to Arapahoe County in three days. I went in, met the guys, everything was fine. They said, ‘Here's your hat, here's your shirt, here's your pants, here's your boots, here's your gloves, here's your jacket, here's your leather goods, here's the keys to your car.' The keys to my car? Turns out the car was mine twenty-four hours a day. We got to take the car home at night. That was nice. I didn't even need my Volkswagen out there.

“So there I was. Deputy Sheriff. Deputy Dawg. They called us ‘Pepsi cans'. Our cars were red, white and blue with red, white and blue lights on the top. You had a bluish pair of pants, highlighted with a red stripe down the sides and a white shirt. We even had Smokey the Bear hats. The town was beautiful. It was the great outdoors. Every other store was a sporting goods store. Everybody carried guns. They were legal as long as you didn't conceal them. I called up Betsy that night and told her it was really nice, clean.

“Eventually they found me an apartment in the nice section of town. It was four and one-half rooms, fully furnished, for one hundred forty-five dollars a month and five dollars more a month in the summer for air conditioning. An indoor/outdoor swimming pool. Tennis. I mean, really nice. It was excellent. I would ride up to Jefferson County, stand by the side of the road and see a deer crossing the field.

“After two months, I called Betsy up and told her, ‘I like it here. It's really nice country. Come on out and tell me what you think of it.' She said, ‘No, Henry.' I said, ‘What do you mean, No?' ‘I thought about it and I don't want to leave Valley Stream. I don't want to leave my family.' I told her, ‘Betsy, I'm your family. We're married now. Come on. I think this is going to be good out here.' But Betsy wouldn't budge. She told me, ‘No, it's too big a move. Come home.' So she put it, not in these exact words, but something like, ‘Make up your mind. Do you want to stay in Colorado or do you want me?' I said, ‘Okay, I'll be home.'

“I didn't even think about the decision. I just loaded up their cruiser, went into work, and handed everything back in. I even apologized to Sergeant Reynolds. I told him that I liked it there but I couldn't stay. He said that he understood. I wasn't the first New York City cop to do this to them. I got into the Volkswagen and drove nonstop back home. From Arapahoe County to Valley Stream in thirty-seven hours.

“Now I don't even think about what it would have been like if Betsy had come out to Colorado. I don't bring it up too often. I don't bring it up too often because that was me then, Colorado was Henry Winter. It was a hunting town where I could work as a cop. Arapahoe County was me and I left it.

Henry returned home in late August 1976, taking a job at a 7-Up plant in Mineola, Long Island. He drove a truck dispensing cases of soda pop on a route that included Queens, Brooklyn, and eastern Long Island, including some of the same streets his father had driven twenty-five years earlier while distributing beer. Henry's boss turned out to be a gun freak who liked cops. He wanted to hear all of Henry's stories, and Henry was only too happy to embellish. He and his boss started taking off from work early to drive to the Nassau County Police range, where they fired guns and listened to more cop stories. When the company started to lay off workers in the winter of 1977, the boss made Henry management, giving them even more time to fire guns and tell cop stories.

Henry didn't allow himself to think about Arapahoe County much. Mostly he just worked and waited. The city had started hiring back some of the laid-off cops. And then finally, in November 1978, Henry got a letter from the New York City Police Department asking him to report to the Police Academy for a two-week retraining session.

Blondie was getting his service revolver and silver shield back.

3

“I'm from Bed-Stuy. Do or die.”

“First I went to the academy for two weeks. Then they put me in something called the Neighborhood Stabilization Unit. We were housed in the Six-Nine Precinct on Foster Avenue in Canarsie, Brooklyn. The NSU was a new thing for rookies that was formed while we were laid off. Now they made rookie cops spend six months in NSU before assigning them to a precinct. None of the guys coming back from the layoff wanted to be in NSU. We were already cops. We knew what the game was. NSU was an insult. We all felt the same way. We came out of the academy with a class of rookies, but we weren't rookies. There were guys in my unit with three and four years on the job. So I couldn't take the Six-Nine. I was there for about a month, walking a beat on Avenue L, and I just couldn't deal with this precinct. It was a white precinct and I couldn't deal with white people. I had worked in Harlem and East Rockaway. If you arrested somebody in Harlem, they stayed arrested. If you took somebody off the street in the Six-Nine, the bad guy's lawyer would beat you back to the station house. Then the phone calls would start. Some political guy would call your captain or a lieutenant from another precinct would get you on the phone and say, ‘That's my cousin Sal you got there. What can you do for him?' I used to wonder what the hell was going on. I wanted out.

“I had a dynamite boss there named Frank Bunting. He came from the Seven-Five out in East New York—my brother-in-law Dennis Caufield's precinct. One day Bunting told us, ‘Look, we got a foot post open in the Seven-Five on Pitkin Avenue. It's a badass place. Does anybody want it steady?' I jumped for it. I took care of Pitkin Avenue from Crescent and Pine to Euclid, that whole section of East New York. And I loved it there, because now I was back with the skells, the guys who, when you collared them, they stayed collared.”