The NYPD’s Lone Ranger always sits tall in the saddle in his kemosabe’s memories.
Retired Det. 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.
The 76-year-old Sepe — nicknamed the Lone Ranger because of his John Wayne swagger and his affinity for sporting sunglasses — died of cancer in early July.
“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.
And their costumes got more and more elaborate each year.
While investigating a series of robberies in Williamsburg, for example, the two men dressed as Hasidic Jews.
They had a rabbi dress them to add a measure of authenticity to their disguises — and stunned everyone around them when they jumped a crew of teenagers who tried to hold them up on Lee Ave., Telano recalled.
The grizzled detectives acted as lovers when they learned that a group of thieves were terrorizing gay couples in Coney Island and walked arm in arm along the boardwalk in tight white jeans and muscle shirts — until a woman who went to high school with Sepe outed him.
“It was hysterical,” Telano told the Daily News Friday as he prepared for his show. “John is trying to hide from this woman, but she was screaming ‘I went to school with him!'”
The married father of seven was a bit embarrassed — and livid at his partner.
“You always talk me into these things!” the Lone Ranger said, according to his Tonto.
But Telano knew better.
“We always collaborated on the costumes,” he said.
When the detectives heard that nurses were being held up outside a hospital that is now Cumberland Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Fort Greene, they quickly agreed to strap on wigs and panty hose with their firearms.
“We got the women’s clothing from family,” Telano told the Daily News. “We were too embarrassed to go into a store and try on women’s clothes, which you could do today. You couldn’t do it back then.”
The two were adept at all types of role play: they rolled around Brooklyn as Hippies one year, spent a few shifts in a Mr. Softee truck and swept up the streets as garbage men so they could keep an eye on a drug dealer.
“(The dealer) hardly noticed us, so we were able to make the arrest,” Telano said. “They were shocked when we dropped the brooms and handcuffed them.”
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.
Yet officers like the Lone Ranger and Tonto filled a void top NYPD administrators couldn’t in the 1970s, according to Eugene O’Donnell, a professor of police studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
“(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. “(The NYPD leadership) was totally disengaged from real people problems. When that happened (the cops) took on the job to go after the bad guys themselves.”
