NYPD Green

by Luke Waters

  We began developing a file of those who made up the Creston Crew, starting with names and aliases, which I checked off old DD5 arrest reports and the NYPD’s NITRO, or the Narcotic Investigation and Tracking of Recidivist Offenders system, to give it its full title. (NITRO was rolled out in 2006 to replace the old mainframe computer databases which up to then allowed us to save complaints on everything from drug dealing to public moral offenses, such as prostitution; these are now compiled and networked into similar programs maintained by other law enforcement agencies, the intelligence constantly updated by investigators and Field Teams working on other cases.)

  We also started to tag the names of Creston Crew dealers and associates and began to build up photo databases of everyone involved, which were worked into a series of giant banners and hung on the office wall, showing how the players interacted, with lots of arrows leading to and from the various branches, every one eventually pointing to Levit Fernandini at the top of the tree.

  The gang’s main base of operations was 2600 Creston Avenue, so we photographed everyone who entered or left the address, or even hung around outside for longer than a minute or two, putting books together on people whom we considered suspects. In many cases we simply lifted the picture from the mug shot on their arrest report, and if that failed we could run their driver’s license or welfare card, copying-and-pasting the image into our files. If we still needed a head-and-shoulders, FBI agents would run the Con Ed truck trick, dressing as utility workers and discreetly taking pictures while they pretended to inspect perfect power cables, or covertly photographing our targets from inside vans marked up with the logos of a local pizza company.

  We had to use an array of tactics in this case, and I caught a break when we realized that Levit’s landlord had security cameras trained on the hallways and corridors of 2600 Creston, a common feature in both commercial and residential buildings in New York. The security was handled by SecureWatch 24, a Manhattan-based company specializing in property protection and management, its cameras’ data streamed through a secure website to their customers’ laptops. I rang the company, introducing myself as an NYPD detective, and learned that Levit had, unsurprisingly, decided not to pay the bill to have the activities of his dealers filmed.

  My very next call was to the landlord. “Sure. We got cameras in the building, Detective, through those SecureWatch people. But the damn cheapskate tenants I got? Won’t pay the fees. So I had to cancel,” he explained.

  “Well, you know the NYPD like to be proactive in the community and stop crime before it happens if we can. How about, oh … how about if, say, we pick up the tab? Would you have any objection?” I suggested.

  “None at all. That’s great. Go right ahead,” he replied, his mood immediately lifting.

  I passed on the details and the Bureau wrote the check, giving us access not only to 2600 Creston Avenue but to all the company’s cameras in the five boroughs. Our focus was on Levit Fernandini, though. Now that every deal his people made was captured on our hard drives, we were well on our way to closing down the Creston Crew—for good.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  LITTLE BY LITTLE

  The two men stand at opposite sides of the hotel room, sizing each other up. One has a gun; the other has money and wants to buy a gun. One of the two will soon go back to prison for a very long time.

  The bigger of the two, a three-hundred-pound, three-time loser named Roberto “Indio” Rosa, cradles a rusting Arminius Titan Tiger .38, a cheap, chunky “truck gun,” in one hand, click-clacking the ammunition for it between the fingers and thumb of his other hand. The other is Little, who is wearing digital recording equipment hidden under his clothes. Little seals the deal when he flashes a thick wad of buy money, the serial number of each bill carefully recorded on our database, which we handed him thirty minutes earlier as Agent Waller kitted him out for our covert recording.

  On the streets, or in a hotel room, you can’t trust an ex-con. It’s something Rosa will be reminded of when he is charged with a 924E felony, under U.S. Code 18, which for a loser like him could mean twenty years without parole.

  Back in the office we unhook Little from the hidden microphone and camera before I voucher the gun and take it to be swabbed for DNA and fingerprints. I organize for a Triggerlock detective to do the complaint against Rosa, but take no action against him for the time being. It’s another piece of leverage we hold in our efforts to take down Fernandini and apprehend the hit man Hector Garcia. When it suits us we will pick Indio up, sit him in a chair, and tell him he has a choice. Give up your homeys or take the fall for the gun sale—and by the time you are released from federal prison people won’t be using revolvers anymore. They’ll be using lasers.

  What Rosa had said on the wire had given me more than I could hope for, warning Little that if he appeared anywhere around 2600 Creston he was risking his life because Levit wanted him dead. Within a week we were reminded of just how much danger our CI was always facing. My phone rang. It was a familiar voice, but it was the first time I had ever detected panic behind the words.

  “Detective Waters? It’s me. Got bad news. Real bad. Man, you gotta do something! Indio just called me. It’s ’bout to go down. He’s gonna whack a guy, and he wants me to help him.”

  Normally unflappable, Little was close to losing it.

  “Okay, calm down, buddy. Take a breath. Nobody is going to get whacked. Who has Rosa got this beef with? Who’s he going to kill?”

  “Scooby. He’s going over to kill Levit Fernandini.”

  The leader of the Creston Crew might end up in a morgue by the end of this shift unless we stepped in and arrested everyone, killing our case stone-dead at a cost of thousands of man-hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the other members of the gang would melt into the background.

  It’s debatable whether planet earth would be a better place without gangsters like the leader of the Creston Crew, and nobody in the Bronx precincts or Group C-30 would lament his eventual passing, but we all took on a duty to protect the public and uphold the laws of the United States. We could not allow this murder to take place. Some reasons were moral, others practical. Power abhors a vacuum. The gang leader’s death would not solve anything, because if Rosa pulled off the hit it would simply put some other figure, from inside the Creston Crew or another organization, in the position he now occupied, and a year from now we would have to start our investigation against the new power broker.

  I tried to calm Little down, telling him that he was still the key to our case and he must convince his buddy Rosa to change his mind and leave Levit alone, at least for the time being.

  “I dunno, Detective Waters. Indio ain’t too smart. Scooby disrespected his woman, and he’s real mad about that. Plus, the homey’s afraid that Lev will pop him …”

  “Look, you have to stop him or stall him. One way or another you have to make sure he does not shoot Fernandini.”

  We got Little to come into our office, and I told him to call Rosa back right away, while the FBI and I listened to every word. Rosa was still highly agitated, and Riveros rolled his eyes when the man on the other end of the line asked Little to be his wheelman for the hit. Our CI played it smart, and played Indio, too, eventually getting him to agree to postpone the assassination and let Little know when he decided to go through with it, which meant we would at least have a heads-up on the possible future shooting.

  *

  Levit’s drug empire was centered on Creston Avenue, but another of his bases, an apartment on Clarence Avenue eight miles away in leafy Eastchester, was also coming up on the wiretaps—ones which had been put in place by the New York Organized Crime Drug Enforcement “Strike Force.”

  On November 21, 2010, several members of Strike Force, curious to see what was going on inside the apartment, used the direct approach and politely knocked on the door.

  Inside, the cops and agents found two of the gang, who were placed in cuffs while their visitors searched the join
t, quickly finding $276,000 in shoe boxes. The money was neatly parceled into bundles of ones, fives, twenties, and fifties, along with an off-the-shelf digital bill counter, the sort of gadget now on sale in your local Walmart, which would whirr through a thousand bills in under a minute.

  The seizure barely made a dent in Levit’s bank balance, and back on the wires the following day the feds picked up his boys congratulating themselves on taking such an easy hit, crowing at the small quantities of drugs that we had swept up. The more than a quarter of a million dollars seized by the cops and agents? Less than one day’s takings, according to the relieved gangsters, their admissions proving the importance of RICO statutes in proving a criminal conspiracy.

  Multiply $250,000 by 365 and you get some idea of the sums of money Levit and his friends were generating. With $90 million or so on the line, right and wrong go out the window.

  Our undercover buys continued while I reached out to the Violent Felony Squad to try to flush out Hector Garcia, who was keeping a lower profile than Salman Rushdie. Meanwhile, I got a call from DT Andy Bonan from Queens Vice, who, along with DT Mauricio Cortes, was working with Strike Force. Two of our subjects were crossing links with his case.

  On May 20, 2011, Strike Force members approached a man, Richard Gonzalez Santiago, on West Forty-fifth Street. He differed little from the tourists and office workers who thronged nearby Times Square, but they placed him under arrest. To judge by his heavy suitcases, the suspect looked like any other holidaymaker, but the cop popped the catches and found seventy-nine pounds of cocaine wrapped in plastic. Estimated street value: approximately $1.5 million.

  “Big Times Square Drugs Bust” screamed the New York Post the next day, but the reality behind the column inches was that our DTs and the agents knew what Santiago was packing. He had been under surveillance ever since his flight had landed at JFK from Puerto Rico, but we’d allowed him to pass through customs to pick up his contacts, one of whom, Linda Perez, was also coming up on our wires.

  The collar had been on the radar for several years and was wanted in New York, as well as by the feds in Philly. Santiago had risked a return to meet with another of Fernandini’s lieutenants, Francisco Rivera. On April 13, Vic Gomez and I arrested Linda Perez at 2600 Creston Avenue, where she was charged under U.S. Code 21, Section 812, for the thirty-six kilos of the drug under law deemed to be in her possession and was remanded, without bail.

  *

  When Little had refused to shoot Angel Diaz, Levit’s lieutenant, Levit had instead hired two outside hitters to carry out the contract, and on June 12, 2006, they walked up to a group of people outside 2592 Creston Avenue and opened fire, catching their target in the face, to the horror of a twenty-two-year-old woman and two older teenagers standing near him, who were also caught in the crossfire.

  The victims were rushed to Jacobi Medical Center and St. Barnabas Hospital, where the male victim was pronounced DOA. But Levit’s freelancers had got their wires crossed and instead had succeeded in murdering a twenty-seven-year-old father named Christopher “Gremlin” Santiago.

  After the shooting Levit told Little he wanted to meet him for a face-to-face, and they agreed to Orchard Beach on Long Island Sound—a man-made facility, part of the enormous Pelham Bay Park, which is many times the size of its more famous Manhattan cousin, Central Park, and is all but deserted outside of the summer months.

  The beach, complete with millions of tons of sand, miles of boardwalk, and several basketball and handball courts, dates back to the 1930s, promoted as the “Riviera of New York,” and is a popular spot with families, sun worshippers, and gangsters who want to “off” a rival, so Little was understandably nervous as he sat down for a chat with the murderous and possibly psychopathic gang leader whom he’d defied only a couple of days earlier.

  Levit claimed he wanted to smooth things over between them, and while Little gazed out at sunlight glinting on the broken bottles on Rat Island, he listened to his boss’s fairy stories about how he’d had nothing to do with the botched hit. Little was thinking he was glad he had a way out.

  *

  I had never stopped looking for Hector Garcia, whose actions had led to the launch of Operation Creston in the first place, and I was in regular contact with members of the VFS. If we hooked Hector it would free us up to concentrate solely on the other members of the gang, but although Danny Rivera and his team had been chasing him for months, putting pressure on their own snitches, their efforts had come to nada.

  The best lead we had was an address at 26 Pennyfield, a private waterfront apartment in a small development in Throgs Neck, a quiet, respectable part of the Bronx borough, located on a peninsula just a hundred yards from the prestigious Maritime College of SUNY—the State University of New York.

  The home was one of several financed by Levit with the millions he was laundering through drug dealing. He had chosen well, because even though Danny had cruised past the joint, he was adamant that proper surveillance techniques wouldn’t work, so Waller and I sat down to chat to the VFS and agreed that we needed a different perspective on our suspect’s possible hiding place—about ten thousand feet in the air. I reached out to NYPD Aviations, based at Floyd Bennett Field over in Flatbush, Brooklyn, to arrange a helicopter flyover of Pennyfield and the college campus to see if we could spot a good place to set up an OP—an observation post.

  One of Waller’s and Riveros’s colleagues, FBI Special Agent Rachel Kolvek, accompanied us on the trip. Our pilot was one of my closest pals on the Job, Sergeant John O’Hara, and he went through the usual preflight safety checks, telling us to strap into our seats and don our headsets, before taking off for the peninsula, which we reached in about ten minutes.

  O’Hara hovered over the location and it was pretty clear why the VFS had come up empty-handed so far. As well as offering panoramic views of the East River, Long Island Sound, and the Throgs Neck Bridge, the balconies of our three-story target apartment were also the perfect place to spot any potential surveillance. Agent Kolvek tapped my arm to get my attention and pointed at a sailing boat cruising Long Island Sound, her forefinger and thumb forming an “okay.” The water, which was about eighty yards from the apartment’s balcony, would offer us the only real chance to set up surveillance.

  Back in the office I rubbed my hands together, looking forward to a spin in a 150-mile-per-hour cigarette boat, as we prepared to set up the surveillance at Pennyfield, but Waller turned penny-pincher and burst my bubble. We stood at the jetty a couple of days later staring at something more practical and comfortable: a mid-sized luxury fishing craft that the Bureau had kitted out with cameras, binoculars, and other equipment, which we checked before heading on to Long Island Sound and up to the mouth of the East River towards our target apartment.

  We spent the next few days and nights offshore, taking turns staring through telephoto lenses in the hope of catching the merest glimpse of Hector, but countless hours of bobbing up and down produced no sighting. Soon after, I got a tip that he might be up in Boston, where his wife, with whom he had a child, was staying. The VFS wasted no time in following up on it and drove up to meet Hector’s old lady—but they got nothing. “I ain’t seen Hector in weeks. And I don’t know where he at,” Mrs. Garcia told Rivera at the door.

  With no warrant to search the house, the cop had little choice but to leave his card. I applied for Pen Register Trap and Trace for the two numbers we knew had been used by Hector, just to be on the safe side. We sat down with the feds and Gomez to work out where we’d go from there. How could we turn up the heat on Levit, somehow force his hand and get him to lead us to Hector?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SCOOBY DOO, WE GOT YOU

  The members of the Violent Felony Squad take a perp’s continuing freedom as a personal affront. Danny Rivera and his team were becoming frustrated by the fact that they had been unable to get any firm leads on Hector Garcia’s location. If we could take him down it would blow open the whole gang and help
us nail Levit “Scooby Doo” Fernandini. Although they’d been chasing Hector for months and months, putting pressure on their own snitches, the VFS’s efforts had come to nada. But I had an idea.

  I suggest that it’s time to do a little wallpapering. Detective Vic Gomez and I could cover every foot of Creston Avenue with “Wanted” posters of Hector, offering a two-thousand-dollar Crime Stoppers reward for information leading to his capture. Our chances of actually catching him this way are virtually nil, but the real idea is to raise up his pals. Without realizing their phones are “wired,” they might just ring him and tell him that The Five-O are on his case again—allowing the FBI to trace the location of our hit man’s cell phone. “Hey, why not, Luke?” FBI Agent Waller says with a shrug. “It might work. Let’s run it and see where it takes us.”

  “What do you think, Rod?”

  The other agent laughs at the simplicity of the plan, but is all for it. “Me? Hey, you know that I’m all about the teamwork, guys. Yeah, buddy, if you think it’s worthwhile, we can try it.” Riveros and Waller hit the wires. Gomez and I take to the streets. We’re not long into the operation when I spot a short, dark-haired female aged about thirty trying hard to look casual, her cell phone in hand, watching our every move. I recognize her immediately from the giant poster plastered over one wall of the FBI field office. It’s Karina Olivera—Levit’s girlfriend—a most trusted member of his gang. She is clearly conducting a little countersurveillance, a common move when we stake out a perp.

  I walk towards her, smiling, trying to appear as casual as I can.

  “Excuse me, miss. Could you take one of these flyers? We’re looking for the guy pictured.”

  “Sure, Office-ah. Thank you. Can I get a few of those? Maybe I’ll recognize this boy.”

  “Of course. Thanks for your help, have as many as you like,” I reply.