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him.”
    â€œI’m not gonna blame Henry. It’s not his fault. He didn’t put a gun to my head. But now there are a couple of things I can do. I can go to jail or I can cooperate. If I cooperate some guys could go to jail. Guys you know. What do you want me to do?”
    Marianne looked at her husband like he had six heads—all of them empty.
    â€œWhat do you mean, what do I want you to do? I’m not going to tell you to go against your friends. But I don’t want you to go to jail. I don’t want you to do anything. This is something you got to live with. These are your friends. You’ve got to live with this the rest of your life.”
    â€œI’m not making any decision until you tell me what you want me to do.”
    Marianne finished the discussion at 4 A.M . “All I’m telling you is that I don’t want you to go to jail.”
    Tony Magno knew exactly what he would have to do. The most trusted and popular cop in the 77th Precinct would have to help send his friends to jail. He would remain Henry Winter’s partner. And they would become the first partners in the history of the New York City Police Department to turn against an entire precinct.

2
    â€œSome of you will be arrested.”
    When Henry F. Winter was born on July 29, 1952, a group of nurses in a Queens hospital gathered near the infant’s bassinet. With his turquoise-colored eyes and curly wisp of amber hair, little Henry was the talk of the maternity ward.
    â€œGet a load of Blondie,” one nurse was heard to say. “He’s the most perfect baby in here.”
    The child’s father, Henry H. Winter, felt his chest inflate when he heard these words. Earlier that year, Winter, a floor supervisor with a Schlitz beer distributorship in Brooklyn, had moved his wife and two children out of a tiny New York City apartment and into a suburban world of polished cars, manicured lawns, and commuter trains. For $8,500 he bought a two-story, wooden frame home with a finished basement and one-car garage in the Long Island village of Valley Stream, turning his back on the big city and its problems.
    There was a comfortable world awaiting little Henry Winter. And at that moment, no one could have imagined what the name Henry Winter or the nickname Blondie would mean to drug dealers and crooked police officers in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn’s black ghetto.
    Mildred Winter doesn’t remember the first time her son Henry uttered the word “cop.” But she can recall his fascination with guns and badges, and the many times he imagined himself a miniature Eliot Ness or a pint-sized Joe Friday. There was even a day when ten-year-old Henry sat his mother down at the kitchen table and interrogated her with a plastic gun.
    â€œJust the facts, mom,” he insisted.
    As a kid Henry liked three things—cops, guns, and hunting. He grew up catching things, using a pole to pull carp out of a pond behind Central High School and tracking down rabbits with a bow and arrow in a field near his house. Henry liked to imagine the scurrying animals as fleeing felons. There was no place to hide from a fledgling twelve-year-old New York City police officer named Henry Winter.
    In the mid-1960s when other kids gathered to play catch on neighborhood baseball diamonds and talk about their idols Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, Henry retired to his father’s basement den. He would stand before a mirror and push live .38-caliber shells into his father’s handgun.
    â€œFreeze!” he’d yell, assuming the classic combat position and pointing the gun at his own image. “Police officer!”
    Certainly Henry knew right from wrong at an early age, having attended a Catholic grammar school, Blessed Sacrament, from first through sixth grades. He also learned about trust in school. His best friend was Jimmy Hoffman, a neighbor and classmate. Regarded as the class hellions by the nuns, Hoffman and