Fred Hurley (center), with NHPD dive team members Al Gambardella (left) and Frank Perolla after recovering the bodies from the Mill River in November 1988. Credit: Courtesy of Fred Hurley It was November 1988 in the midst of a nationwide four-day search for four missing East Lyme teenagers last seen at a New Haven bar, and a police officer by the name of Bobby Malone was parked in the driveway of the Alderman-Dow scrapyard on Chapel Street. As he sipped his coffee, he contemplated the concrete barriers above the Mill River. They seemed wide — wide enough for a car to drive through. “He goes, ‘Those kids are in the water,’ ‘I guarantee those kids in the water,’” recalled Fred Hurley. Malone was right. As a member of the New Haven Police Department’s (NHPD) underwater search and recovery team, Hurley wound up helping pull the four teens’ bodies out of the water. Hurley, who retired in 2004 after 33 years on the NHPD, was at the Eel Pot in Branford on a recent Sunday afternoon, nursing a beer and reminiscing with his brothers, who are also retired city police detectives. Robert Greenberg, founder of Lost in New Haven, was also there with the Hurleys. His exhibit of the NHPD at his Hamilton Street local-history museum has spurred renewed interest in the brothers. Among them, the three Hurleys share 85 years of service to the city. “I’m actually surprised they all showed up,” said Greenberg, as the sounds of a baseball game filtered in from the bar. “They’re not the type to be looking for accolades, but you gotta remember they gave their lives, their careers, to the City of New Haven. They’re living history.” Joe Hurley, the oldest, blamed the cool weather and overcast skies. “Otherwise, I’d be doing yardwork,” he said. “Mr. Neat,” said Billy, grinning, the youngest, who, with a hot sheet taped to his dashboard, turned nabbing car thieves into an art form during his 31 years on the force. Kids Of The Cove The three Hurleys grew up in Morris Cove with a no-nonsense mother from Charlestown, Mass., and a father who landed in the second wave on Omaha Beach and fought in the trenches in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. Until Joe Jr.’s  fifth birthday, the family lived at 135 Canner St., a short walk from Contois Tavern, their father’s preferred watering hole. “He knew Big Billy,” Fred said. “We knew Billy’s son.” (Now another Billy Contois, the third-generation one, tends the bar.) After Joe Sr.’s discharge, he worked for the New Haven Railroad for 50 years, taking a taxicab to the station each day until his sons had their licenses. “Never drove,” Fred recalled. “You got the foot shake in the morning, ‘you gotta drive.’” “We knew a lot of people growing up in Morris Cove,” Joe said. “Good guys, bad guys.” One was Vinny Mazetta, who played saxophone with the Five Satins in the iconic “In the Still of the Night.” The recording took place in the basement of St. Bernadette’s, where the brothers attended school; it had good acoustics. “The story was that Vinny flubbed a note,” Fred said. They kept it in. “If you listen closely, you can hear it.” There were other figures milling about — among them, notorious mobsters Salvatore “Midge Renault” Annunziato, Billy “The Wild Man” Grasso, and Ralph “Whitey” Tropeano. Joe remembered the students at St. Bernadette’s being walked to the intersection of Townsend and Fort Hale to see President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade. “He had the brightest, most vivid red hair,” he said. For a time, Joe worked for the New Haven Register, covering the police and fire departments. He took to the police. “It seemed cohesive, the way it was run,” he said. He did a stint in the Navy during Vietnam, where he wrote for the base newspaper while stationed on the northwest tip of Australia. Fred was there too, serving as a ship storekeeper. Billy, six years younger than Fred, sent them audio letters on cassette tapes. Upon his discharge, Joe signed up for the NHPD. Fred followed two years later, in 1974. Then Billy joined up, in 1979. “A Lot Of Things You Can’t Unsee” There were incidents that assumed larger significance. For Fred, it was defusing a hostage situation after a 15-hour standoff at the Connecticut Mental Health Center, then on 34 Park St., in 1982. Then there was the time that the owners of Peschell’s Pastry Shop in West Haven baked him and his partner a cake after the two caught the perpetrators that had mugged and robbed them in New Haven. Billy recalled escorting Elton John to Tweed, and Ted Kennedy Sr. bursting through the doors when he was guarding a prisoner at the hospital. The senator’s daughter was giving birth and he was famished. Fred met Elvis when he was performing at the New Haven Coliseum in July 1975. “Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet,” he said. “At times it was rewarding,” Joe said. “But other times it would be Christmas Day, and you’d have to go to work.” “You see a lot of things that you can’t unsee,” said Billy. “But there was always Jack’s,” Fred rejoined, referring to Jack’s Bar and Grill, the legendary police hangout at East Street and Water Street. Then there was the time on Aug. 7, 1994, when Billy was one of three police officers to chase down and subdue a man brandishing a Crocodile-Dundee-style knife. As the New Haven Register’s Randall Beach reported on the incident’s 25th anniversary, the man had used the knife to stab and severely wound seven patrons at an Audubon coffee shop, believing they had killed his mother. “Just another day on the job for these guys,” Greenberg, the Lost in New Haven founder, said. Billy shrugged. “None of us really likes to toot our horn,” he said. “Well, maybe Fred does. But you know, if anybody ever asked us what we thought we were, I’d just say I hope the guys we worked with would say that we were good guys, that we weren’t slugs, and we always showed up when the shit hit the fan.” Fred Hurley Gracing the cover of Paul Bleakley’s “No Haven: The Connecticut Mob and the rise of America’s Model City,” Salvatore “Midge Renault” Annunziato, Ralph “Whitey” Tropeano, and Billy “The Wild Man” Grasso. Credit: Lisa Reisman photo Contois Tavern. Credit: Lisa Reisman photo Fred Hurley, pictured in a May 19, 1982 New Haven Register article, during a 15-hour siege in which six people were taken hostage. Credit: Lisa Reisman photo The post 3 Brothers, 3 Ex-Cops appeared first on New Haven Independent. ...read more read less