Buddy Boys
McAlary, Mike
O n July 13, 1977, New York had its second major blackout and in ghettos across the city people interpreted the darkness as license to steal. Tony Magno, a cop in the BedfordStuyvesant section of...
...Tony Magno, a cop in the BedfordStuyvesant section of Brooklyn, had just completed a day shift, but he decided to return to the precinct, and then to an appliance store, to help control the frenzy...
...After all, the Buddy Boys did put some drug dens out of business, and what drug traffic they permitted (or participated in) was funneled to "responsible" dealers...
...As each looter exited, bearing a TV or stereo, Magno was there to smash him in the face with a billy club...
...Mike McAlary/G...
...But Magno's notion of jurisprudential expediency was shared by many of his fellow officers...
...The looters came out in a long line, and Magno smashed each one...
...One of the corrupt officers, Brian O'Regan, committed suicide on the day he was to be arraigned...
...Magno decided that he might accidentally get hit if he went inside, so he positioned himself instead just outside the front door...
...So Winter drove the kid to an isolated pier in Canarsie, took his sneakers, and left him there to find his way home by himself...
...Soon cops in the 77th were taking payoffs from favorite dealers, robbing victims, taking government cheese intended for the poor...
...Of course, none of the rationalizations justifies vigilanteism by police officers...
...Officers Magno and Winter took similar extralegal measures against drug dealers, as Newsday reporter Mike McAlary makes clear in Buddy Boys: When Good Cops Turn Bad, a chroniDavid Brooks is book editor of the Wall Street Journal...
...If we caught them they just went down and paid the fines...
...There was no glory in being virtuous for the cops on the midnight shift, and no disgrace in being a crook...
...Civilization still stands for something...
...Nevertheless I didn't finish Buddy Boys thinking that cops in the future should be paid on commission, for crimes against the bad guys set the precedent for crimes that were indiscriminate...
...Buddy Boys is a typical newspaperman's book...
...As anybody who has lived in a mafia-controlled neighborhood can tell you, it is far safer to live in a section controlled by organized crime than in one plagued by disorganized crime (so long as you don't want to be a mafioso...
...P. Putnam's Sons/$18.95 David Brooks THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1988 47...
...Almost all his sources were members of the Buddy Boys gang, and as they tell it corruption in BedStuy is practically inevitable...
...They'd crash into the dealer's apartment, taking care to let as many suspects escape as possible...
...These extralegal incentives turned ordinary frayed police officers into hyperaggressive vigilantes...
...Then they would scoop up any cash, drugs, guns, or paraphernalia they could find...
...A drug dealer...
...I was robbing a lowlife," Winter told McAlary...
...The law couldn't touch these guys...
...cle of cops who steal from the bad guys...
...And it worked...
...When the call went over the police radio, the cops who'd phoned in the fake complaint would volunteer to handle the case...
...Certain drug houses were driven out of business...
...Then the cop would go back inside the apartment and the dealer would run away...
...Certain judicial authorities, those with an especially broad view of due process rules, might object to the way Officer Magno brought a measure of justice to the streets that night...
...But in places like Bedford-Stuyvesant, it is standing for less and less...
...The standard procedure was this: Magno, Winter, and other cops on their shift would locate one of the neighborhood drug dens...
...Hell, they were making money hand and foot...
...If not, they would split up the cash, sell guns and paraphernalia to a fence, and sell the drugs back to another dealer...
...There, at three a.m., he took the kid's sneakers, pants, and shirt, and left him standing alone in a parking lot, thereby giving him an opportunity to learn how to travel light...
...What is most troubling about Buddy Boys is that the rationalizations seem so persuasive...
...As often happens, the woman refused to get involved in a prosecution...
...With the influx into Bed-Stuy of Uzi-toting Jamaican thugs who seem to enjoy murder, "responsible" drug dealers are easier to identify, and will seem more and more an attractive option...
...Suddenly the midnight shift officers of the 77th precinct were crashing through windows and smashing down doors to get to drug dealers...
...Then one of the cops would "drop a dime," that is, disguise his voice with a Jamaican accent, dial 911, and report drug activity...
...After sensationalizing the crime, McAlary comes close to excusing the criminal...
...They put us in a cesspool and expected us to swim," he wrote in his suicide note...
...Someone who shouldn't be there to begin with...
...This sort of lesson is known as rehabilitation, which academic penal experts are so much in favor of...
...If one of the dealers was stupid enough to get caught, a cop might bring him out into the hall and tell him, "Wait here...
...When Winter later caught the kid a second time, he drove him an hour further away to Jones Beach...
...Henry Winter, for instance, Magno's partner, once caught a young mugger stealing a woman's handbag...
...Already a handful of officers were inside the store swinging clubs at the dozens of looters ransacking the merchandise...
...If a line of drug buyers formed while Magno and Winter were ransacking a dealer's apartment, they'd happily sell bags of crack or dope through the slot...
...They could afford the fines...
...T he Buddy Boys system—that's what these crooked cops called themselves—was a nascent form of organized crime...
...When he found he couldn't in good conscience smash women in the face, he waited until they passed and then he smashed them in the back of the head...
Vol. 21 • May 1988 • No. 5
