role. Dennis’s name was on the list. Last
March, the Daily News revealed that the
link on the union’s Web site had not
worked for five years. In late April, Pat-
rick J. Lynch, the union’s president, held
a press conference, in Albany, accompa-
nied by widows of N.Y.P.D. officers who
had been killed. The P.B.A. had brought
three hundred and sixty cardboard boxes,
which they claimed held some eight hun-
dred thousand letters to the parole board,
signed by supporters. “An attack on a po-
lice officer is an attack on the laws we
uphold and the public we have sworn to
protect,” Lynch said recently, in an e-mail.
“Every time a cop-killer is released, it
sends criminals a signal that there are
really no laws worth following, because
our justice system is unwilling to protect
those who enforce them.”
Robert Denton’s best friend was Ron-
ald Bellistri, who grew up with Denton,
in Levittown, and joined the N.Y.P.D.
with him, in 1969. Bellistri told me that
he and Denton had attended grammar
school and high school together; that
Denton’s first car was a 1957 Oldsmo-
bile; that Denton was drafted into the
Army after high school and ended up
at Fort Lee, in Virginia, for two years.
Bellistri had encouraged Denton to join
him in the Thirteenth Precinct, in Man-
hattan, but Denton wanted to stay at
the Seventy-third Precinct, in Browns-
ville. “He said, ‘I love the action,’ ” Bel-
listri recalled. Sometimes they would
run into each other when extra officers
were called in to work at Vietnam War
demonstrations. Bellistri said that Den-
ton had recently married “the love of his
life” and, two weeks before his death, he
had bought a used Corvette, which he
drove over to Bellistri’s house, beeping
the horn in the driveway to show it off.
Every year on July 24th, Bellistri sends
flowers to the Seventy-third Precinct,
and he stops in during roll call to speak
to the officers about his friend. “I don’t
want them to forget him,” he told me.
Over the years, Denton’s friends and for-
mer colleagues have contributed remem-
brances to the Web site NYPD Angels,
which honors members of the force who
were killed in the line of duty, going back
to the mid-eighteen-hundreds. Earlier
this year, Bellistri wrote on the site,
“BOBBY, NOT ONE DAY GOES BY THAT
I DO NOT THINK OF YOU.” Four months
later, he wrote, “THIS JULY 18TH THRU
20TH IS OUR LEVITTOWN MEMORIAL
HS REUNION. YOU WILL BE MISSED MY
BROTHER.” This year, Bellistri, now sev-
enty-three years old, made flyers, which
he distributed at the Seventy-third and
other precincts, urging people to go to
the parole board’s Web site and send a
letter opposing Dennis’s release at his
next hearing. The top of the flyer read
“URGENT” and identified Dennis as “Bob
Denton’s murderer.” Bellistri said about
Dennis, “He deserves to stay incarcer-
ated for the rest of his life for what he
did to Bobby.”
In the visiting room at Auburn, Den-
nis told me that during his decades in
custody he had been confined in almost
every maximum-security prison in the
state; his current stay at Auburn, he said,
was his third there. Auburn Correctional
Facility, which opened in 1817, is one
of the oldest operating prisons in the
United States. The city of Auburn grew
up around the prison; today, there is a
Tex-Mex restaurant next door and a Hil-
ton Garden Inn down the street. From
the windows in the prison’s visiting room,
incarcerated men can see townspeoplestrolling by, but, when I visited, Dennis
had no interest in peering out the win-
dows. “It puts me in a bad mood,” he
said. “It makes me feel alone.”
One of his strategies for holding on
to his sanity had been to make certain
that he always had a job. Over the years,
he had stocked shelves in the commissary
at Auburn; helped cook the food at Com-
stock; mowed the grass at Attica; worked
early mornings baking bread at Green
Haven. From 2000 to 2008, he had toiled
in the laundry at Elmira, helping clean
the uniforms of other incarcerated men.
(“Inmate Dennis is the laundry’s #1 ma-
chine operator, he is an excellent worker,”
his boss wrote in 2006.) Besides his work
ethic, Dennis was known for his intense
exercise regimen: running endless laps
barefoot around the prison yard, lifting
weights, doing hundreds of pullups and
pushups. He also meditated and prac-
ticed yoga in his cell. His volunteers had
told me that he was so strong and fit
that he could do pushups on only his
thumbs. When I mentioned this during
our meeting, a guard who happened to
be passing by asked if I wanted to see“Someday I’ll buy a little place in the country and
take my finger off the Zeitgeist.”