This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 65%. (I'm a bot)
> Lou Telano can't help but grin when he recalls all the adventures he had with his late partner John Sepe in the 1960s and '70s - when the weapons the two plainclothes investigators had ranged from their trusty revolvers and street smarts to, when necessary, long skirts and high heels.
> "We had fun with the different costumes," Telano said earlier this month as he dedicated his Long Island radio show "Streetwise" to his former partner.
> "We weren't the first cops to do undercover work, but we definitely paved the way," said Telano, also 76, who still proudly refers to himself as Sepe's "Tonto" as he regales listeners to his radio show on WGBB. As the number of murders in the city jumped from 1,185 in 1968 to 2,100 in 1979, the Brooklyn detectives ran their own investigations with very little oversight.
> The two cowboy cops - the inspiration for the '70s TV show "Starsky and Hutch" - made an art form out of "Decoy work," in which cops dressed like potential victims to draw out criminals in high crime areas, according to Telano.
> The NYPD still deploys decoy officers to catch criminals, according to officials, but the costumed cops of the new millennium aren't the devil-may-care cowboys Sepe and Telano used to be.
> "(Sepe and Telano) were emblematic of a time when the police department was perceived by its own cops as unnecessarily bureaucratic," said O'Donnell, a former cop.
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