Buddy Boys

I couldn't put this book down. What a great look into the mind of your average New York City cop. I was very sympathetic with them. They really seemed like nice guys! I felt their sense of self-disgust that they had to rat out their fellow corrupt cops. It puts you right inside the patrol car and you feel like you're a corrupt cop going along for the adventure. This is one of the best true crime books I've ever read. If you want a look at New York City when it was bad, look no further than this book about New York's "finest." Whoa!

"Unfortunately", says the author in a foreword to this excellent book, "this is a true story.""Buddy Boys" is an strongly written account of the nefarious doings of the infamous 77th Precinct of the NYPD. Located in the middle of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the 77th was notorious during the 1970s for being a precinct gone mad with corruption and venality. The cops were so out of control that they were more criminal than the criminals they were supposed to be chasing and arresting; lying on the witness stand and sabotaging their own prosecutions (grilled by a defense attorney on the actions of a defendant one cop had arrested for supposedly dealing drugs in his presence, the cop breaks down and yells "How the hell do I know? I wasn't even there!"), and robbing not only drug dealers but the people they are supposed to protect. At times the mayhem gets so over the top that it's hysterical. Example: one cop throws a suspect through a plate glass window, steps through the window, hauls the suspect to his feet, points to the broken window and tells him he's under arrest for "breaking and exiting". Mike McAlary, at the time an investigative reporter for New York Newsday, wrote the articles that helped break the scandal in the 77th wide open, from which this book was derived. McAlary tells the story from the perspective of one rogue cop, Henry Winter, who started out as an honest cop but then tried to be a "tough cop" and began to take the law into his own hands. So Winter was banished to the 77th Precinct -- then known as "the Alamo" -- a dumping ground for cops with bad records. In such an environment, Winter's bad tendencies flourished like a weed in a hothouse. Soon he was part of an elite gang of criminal cops who held up crack dealers in broad daylight and confiscated their money and supplies (later re-selling the drugs for their own profit) and acted as if they were a law unto themselves. We learn what happens when Winter was finally caught; under a promise of immunity from prosecution, he and his partner consented to wear a wire and set up a sting operation to catch other bad cops. One of the most incredible cases in the 77th involved a female cop whose father was a respected police sergeant; caught on tape offering to rent her shield to a drug dealer, she was tried and sentenced to four years in prison. After thirteen indicted cops were tried, Winter walked free, but his own career ended in disgrace. And Winter himself got off easy. Most of the indicted cops went to jail and one of them, Brian O'Regan, unable to face the prospect of prison, committed suicide. Reading this book brought back the "Alamo scandal" in all its immediacy; living in New York City, I remembered the days after the appearance of the McAlary articles in "Newsday" when people were shaking their heads in disgust and respect for the NYPD plummeted to an all-time low. As the commander of the detective squad, the only unit in the 77th that was untouched by the scandal, told

A real page turner. Very hard to put down. If you like true crime involving law enforcement this books for you.