Months after Art Winstanley hammered out a cathartic, self-published account of his descent into crime, scandal, alcoholism and prison, the venture still finds him hundreds of dollars in the hole.

But the writing process, spread over three years and nearly 300 pages, had one definite payoff: It helped him reconcile a troubled past and his place in local history.

In 1960, Winstanley became the first domino to fall in what stood then as the biggest and most public case of police corruption in the nation.

More than 50 area law enforcement figures — nearly all of them Denver police officers — were swept up in a burglary ring in which cops cracked safes and made off with an estimated $250,000 from more than 200 heists involving businesses on their beats. More than 40 did time. The ring operated for at least a decade, insulated by police prerogative and a code of silence.

Then, as Winstanley sped away from a job one night, a safe literally fell out of his car trunk and into the path of a police cruiser. That began his half-century struggle to come to grips with his slice of infamy and the damage he inflicted on his family, friends and colleagues.

“Even though I made a lot of bad choices, it’s a barometer to measure how happy I am today,” says Winstanley, 74.

Many key players have died

Retired from a career in wastewater management, he wakes up in a nicely appointed Aurora house with his wife of 28 years and the sort of robust health that often finds him on the tennis court or his bike.

Most of the other key players have died. In deference to readers whom he considers the target audience for a 50-year-old tale, he had his book, “Burglars in Blue,” published in large print.

It’s primarily a collection of anecdotes and observations about his role in the scandal and his struggle toward rehabilitation.

“Some of the old-timers wonder why I would plow this dirt,” Winstanley says. “But it’s important to say that I don’t take pride in this. It ruined my own family. It’s just that I wanted to report what I saw. It took more courage than I thought.”

He recalls how research efforts at the library sometimes left him physically sick to the point he would step away from the project for several days.

At his computer, he recounted tales of how, as a rookie, he became the willing accomplice to a veteran cop; how he learned the art of safe-cracking; how he’d case a business during the day and come back later to rip it off, while he or a partner monitored the police radio in case someone came to investigate.

His fourth wife, Thais, helped edit his accounts. Finally, he sent the manuscript to a self-publishing house in Indiana.

He got an unexpected response.

“A guy calls and says it’s a powerful story, but he doesn’t believe it,” Winstanley recalls. “He wanted to see court records and transcripts.”

Documentation wasn’t hard to collect; the scandal dominated the local news in the early 1960s. His book came out last March.

Much of it describes the difficulty and danger of serving time as an ex-cop in Cañon City. But his stories about the actual heists detail a brazen subculture of crime within a troubled department.

He and his partner often would chat up a local business owner about an establishment’s security precautions — such as where receipts were kept and whether there was a night watchman or a silent alarm — and return later to steal the goods.

Winstanley tells of breaking into one safe and finding only a quarter and a nickel. Yet the next day, he took a report on the break-in from the owner, who claimed $1,500 had been stolen — the maximum amount covered by his insurance policy.

Pulled a heist while on bail

Sometimes, the incidents bordered on slapstick. In what turned out to be the last heist before his arrest, Winstanley and an accomplice loaded a safe into the trunk of his civilian car and then tried to elude a squad car that answered a call on the break-in.

The safe fell out into the street, right before the responding officers’ eyes.

“I do find humor in it,” Winstanley says. “Sometimes, I can’t imagine I ever did that. There’s no justification — I was a bad guy, a thief. But now people say: ‘Did a safe really fall out the back of your car?’ “

While he was out on bail pending an appeal, money troubles led Winstanley to pull a solo job at a south Denver drugstore. He was caught with the cash when Aurora police pulled him over on a traffic stop.

Winstanley, sentenced to four to eight years in prison, initially was cast as a lone bad apple by authorities. But other suspects soon came to light, and the burglary ring became a national disgrace.

Winstanley acknowledges he never should have become a cop — and today, probably would have been weeded out early in the process.

“I shouldn’t have been allowed to be a policeman when my agenda was to kick ass and be in charge,” he says. “Those were the wrong reasons. I wanted excitement. I needed the authority.”

Winstanley recalls watching veteran officers help themselves to merchandise at crime scenes but figured it was just a perk of the job.

“I think every policeman on the job knew there was some corruption,” he says. “But it’s one thing to know it’s happening and another to get in over your head to the point you can’t get out. I didn’t have the backbone to do what was right.”

John Haney, a longtime Denver officer from a family of cops, runs a northwest Denver coffee shop where several months ago, with some misgivings, he asked Winstanley to stop by.

“I was kind of skeptical about the fact that we’d have cops coming in, how they’d receive him,” Haney says.

But both Winstanley and his book were well-received, and Haney scheduled a second appearance.

“It opened my eyes,” says Haney. “He changed a lot of my perceptions about what really happened back then.”

One of the cops who showed up at Haney’s Coffee Shop was Rhonda Jones, the commander from Denver’s District 2. She finds the historical account fascinating, a reflection of attitudes that permeated a bygone era. She bought four copies of Winstanley’s book to give as gifts to the four lieutenants working her district.

But she also can understand how some cops, now long retired, retain bitterness over that breach of public trust and the backlash they endured. Others don’t look past the fact that he’s a convicted felon whom they see as profiting from his misdeeds.

“He paid a big price for the things he did,” Jones figures. “He’s remorseful and is accepting responsibility for what he did to the department and his family. You can see that in him when he talks about it.”

Sent back to prison

Part of Winstanley’s book chronicles the alcoholism that dogged him even after Gov. Stephen McNichols commuted his sentence to time served in January 1963.

When life didn’t go well upon his release, bitterness took root.

Three years later, he burglarized a bar and almost immediately got caught by Wheat Ridge police. He received seven to 10 years on that rap and was paroled in May 1970. He says he was the only cop rolled up in the scandal to re-offend.

After his second prison stay, he got a job in wastewater management and eventually parlayed that into a full-fledged career with the city of Aurora. But he didn’t address his drinking until 1980, when one particularly ugly bender prompted him to quit cold turkey.

“It was the biggest move in my life, other than marrying Thais,” he says. “It lifted my life up.”

When he retired in 2000, his co-workers baked a hacksaw blade into the celebratory cake — the kind of joke that, over time, Winstanley learned to appreciate. He applied for a pardon that same year but was turned down by then-Gov. Bill Owens.

“I thought it would be a stroke from society that I’d paid my debt and been forgiven,” Winstanley says. “I think my reasons were selfish. I’d screwed up, and people in law enforcement should be held to a higher standard.”

He says he won’t ask again.

Now, he continues to tell his story to criminal-justice classes or anyone else who cares to hear it. He’s glad he committed the account to print, but he notes that sitting in front of a computer and “spilling your guts” is about as appealing as it sounds.

“I think I pretty much said what I wanted to say,” Winstanley figures. “There’s not going to be a sequel.”

Kevin Simpson: 303-954-1739 or ksimpson@denverpost.com