Gangbusters: How a Street-Tough Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New York’s Most Dangerous Gang

by Stone, Michael

  “Hey, nobody wants to burn your guy,” Dugan told him. “The interview would be in the strictest confidence. Nobody would even know we’re talking to him.”

  “I can’t let you do that,” Cedeno said, adding that he would be meeting the CI in two days and would ask him for more information then.

  “What kind of crap is this?” Dugan asked Dimuro after Cedeno hung up.

  CEDENO CALLED two days later, offering little new information. Dugan suggested a variety of compromises: Dugan and Dimuro would question the CI in Cedeno’s presence; the CI could keep his name and all identifying details secret; or the CI and Cedeno could call the detectives from a secure location and Dugan would conduct the interview, if need be, over the phone. But Cedeno nixed them all, explaining that the gang was extremely violent and his informant was afraid that any leak would cost him his life. “Somewhere in the conversation you will ask him something about his identity or he will say something, and I’m not going to let that happen,” he said. “Ask me the questions and I’ll relay them to him.”

  Dugan was reluctant to do this. Interrogation is more art than science. The investigator needed a firm grasp of the details of a case in order to know what questions to ask, or to sense when a source was lying or perhaps even digging for information himself. It was clear to Dugan from what Cedeno had told him that his CI knew a lot more than he was saying—typically the case with informants—and it was also clear that Cedeno’s priority was protecting his source. But Dugan was at an impasse. “Okay, let’s play it your way,” he said. “Ask him: Where does he know Platano from? Where did he meet him?”e

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because that answer will reveal my CI’s identity.”

  “What are we playing here? What’s My Line?” Dugan was boiling. “We can’t run a homicide investigation like this. These guys are a bunch of cold-blooded killers. They could kill others before we get them.”

  “Well, that’s the chance we’ll have to take,” Cedeno said.

  THREE WEEKS LATER, with Christmas just days away, the streets of Mott Haven were busy with traffic. But along Beekman Avenue—a two-block stretch of tenements in the heart of the South Bronx—there were hardly any signs of the holidays, unless you count the special low price Anthony “Amp” Green was running on his crack sales. The reed-thin drug dealer for the Yellow-Top gang, a foolish 17-year-old out to make a quick buck, was holding a fire sale of crack vials in the middle of another gang’s—the Red-Top’s—turf. He had been told to clear out—shots had even been fired over his head—but he just ignored the warnings.

  On the cold night of December 16, two sedans rolled up to the narrow alleyway where Green did business. Sales were brisk; a dozen people clogged the cement corridor as hooded gunmen surrounded the spot. Two of them quickly pinned Green to a wall near the entrance to the alley and pumped six bullets into his legs and stomach. As Green crumpled to the ground, fatally wounded, as many as eight gunmen trained their weapons on his workers and customers, and in a scene of unimaginable horror, opened fire. For thirty seconds or more, chaos reigned as people clambered away from the lit-up guns, the building walls ringing with the stammer of automatic weapons.

  Some were able to escape through a tear in the chain-link fence at the rear of the alley. Others were less lucky. One customer got cut down as he tried to scramble up a fire escape. Another, Cynthia Casado—a mother of three—was headed back to the street when she ran into a man who shot her in the head. She died on the spot, still clutching the yellow-topped vial of crack she had bought only moments before.

  A slim, fortyish woman named Janice Bruington was on her way to visit her son and was passing the alley as the men started shooting. She had known the man who shot Amp Green since he was a small boy, but he didn’t hesitate before whirling and firing at her as she fled the scene. She felt the bullet slam into her back and then her face hit the pavement. Wounded, she managed to roll under a parked car.

  Manuel Vera was not as fortunate. The gunmen chased the harmless old crackhead sixty feet to the doorway of an adjoining building as he ran from the scene. Police would later find him there in a pool of blood, a necklace of crepe-paper Christmas decorations visible through the door. He’d been shot fourteen times.

  By the time the gunmen returned to the sedans, and the cars had sped away, four people lay dead.

  The case fell to Mark Tebbens, a 33-year-old precinct detective well known in the neighborhood. Standing six and a half feet, with the muscled arms and shoulders of a weight lifter, he was one of the few officers who commanded respect on Beekman Avenue. Not only was he big; he had what people in the street call heart—a kind of cold, fatalistic courage that values sinew and reputation above concerns over safety. Having grown up in a tough, diverse section of the Bronx, he had an innate grasp of his constituents and how to communicate with them. Moreover, they liked him. Boyishly handsome with an easy joking manner and an infectious laugh, he, like Dugan, dealt with people fairly and with respect—not just the working people but also the thieves and users and welfare moms, the people down on their luck who normally shun the police.

  Tebbens quickly surmised the gist of what had happened. Amp Green had been killed by rival dealers who operated at the north end of the street. But Tebbens had a hard time grasping the additional carnage. Moreover, none of the victims other than Green were part of the Yellow-Top organization. Apparently, the shooters, members of the Red-Top crew, intended to send the block a message: We not only kill our competitors, but anyone who does business with them.

  As Tebbens began investigating the case, he quickly realized that it had the markings of a double homicide he’d been assigned to in his second year on the squad, in 1989. In fact, he had locked up two of the Red-Top gang for the murders. One of them—a burly, garrulous Dominican known as Pasqualito—arrogantly told Tebbens that all the witnesses would either recant or disappear and that he would be back on the street inside a year. He was wrong—but only by a couple of months.

  Although his sources gave him his first suspect within hours of the shooting—a local thug named Stanley Tukes—Tebbens knew that Tukes was a hired gun, incapable of planning, much less carrying out, an operation like the Quad, as the case was being called. Several eyewitnesses mentioned another gunman, but referred to him only as Darkman or the Dominican. Such was the fear of the Red-Top gang on Beekman Avenue that none of Tebbens’ informants—some of them hardened criminals themselves—dared name the gunman in question, much less offer to testify against him in court.

  Shortly after the incident, however, Jamie Cedeno, the FBI agent who had been in contact with Dugan and Dimuro a month earlier, came to Tebbens with information about the shooters. He told Tebbens they belonged to a gang called Lenny’s Boys, and quickly outlined the organization’s Dominican hierarchy, who lived across the river from the Bronx in Washington Heights. Much of what the agent told him, Tebbens already knew—the names of the gang’s leaders: Lenny Sepulveda, who was then serving a nine-month jail sentence for gun possession, and his second-in-command and older brother Nelson. But the agent also talked about someone who sounded like he could be Darkman. A brutal killer, he was the gang’s top enforcer and was said to be one of the leaders in the shooting in the Quad. The agent told Tebbens that he should contact a detective in Manhattan named Dugan. They were both, he said, looking at the same player.

  Darkman was known on the street as Platano.

  THE HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION UNIT

  1992

  THE CRIMINAL COURTS building rises seventeen stories above Centre Street in lower Manhattan. Built in 1940 over slums that spawned the city’s first gangs, it houses the DA’s offices and the county jail—familiarly known as the Tombs—as well as the courts. With its massive limestone towers and setback casement windows, it bears an impregnable, sharp-eyed look—justice not blind, but wary.

  Most mornings that winter, Walter Arsenault, newly appointed chief of the Homic
ide Investigation Unit, HIU, arrived at his desk before dawn and found it littered with excrement—piles of bullet-sized mouse turds, like spent cartridges at a drive-by. Arsenault, a veteran prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, had been complaining to Maintenance about the rodent problem for more than a year, and for just as long, Maintenance had been denying there was one. No problem, no need to fix it. After a while some of the investigators in his unit began laying traps, photographing their quarry with the office’s crime scene camera, and Arsenault presented Maintenance with a pasteboard mock-up of their work—lurid snapshots of dead mice, each corpse neatly labeled with cause of death: blunt-force trauma, poison, asphyxiation. Maintenance was unmoved.

  After fourteen years of government service, Arsenault was happy just to tweak the bureaucracy now and then. Besides, he already had too much on his desk to worry about mice. Head of a twelve-man task force of prosecutors and police that targeted the city’s most dangerous killers, he was about to try a double-murder case, he was supervising several other big investigations, and mounting administrative chores depleted what little oxygen remained in his day. Law enforcement, Arsenault had long ago discovered, was an exercise in triage. It was easy to ignore a few small mice when you spent the bulk of your days prosecuting animals like Kenneth Bernard. Bernard, the defendant in Arsenault’s upcoming murder trial, was a crack dealer who’d shot his client’s brains out while she was giving him a blow job. Now there was a rat.

  At 39, Walter Arsenault had been catching and convicting brutal killers all his adult life, and many felt there was no one better at it. A gifted trial lawyer, equally at home in the courts and on the streets, he’d spent six years in New Jersey at the Bergen County prosecutor’s office, rising to head their Trial Division before he was 30. Later, after transferring to Manhattan in 1984, he led a four-year campaign against Harlem’s Jamaican crack crews that reduced gang-related murders from about forty per year to nearly none. Now, as the chief of HIU, Arsenault directed New York’s only dedicated drug gang unit, and in those dreary first few months of 1992, he was one of local law enforcement’s few bright stories. Little did he know, though, that HIU’s already strained machinery was about to be tested by the biggest, and one of the longest, investigations and prosecutions in its storied history: a multiborough case that would include both the Cargill shooting and the quadruple murders on Beekman Avenue.

  Arsenault’s corner office was a cool, dim cave at the rear of the unit. Although he had windows overlooking Chinatown with a view east to the Brooklyn Bridge, he blacked them out to shield his informants—the offices of Probation and Parole faced his across an air shaft—and ran the air conditioner year-round in protest against the building’s antiquated and imperious heating system. The cluttered room contained shelved rows of souvenir police hats, a wall full of mug shots and crime scene photos, and, beneath his desk, a box overflowing with sweaty running clothes. He jogged from five to ten miles during his lunch hour. The early part of his mornings he spent hunched over his computer, updating his files from eye-high stacks of arrest reports and correspondence.

  Arsenault was at the center of a network of gang specialists who tracked the movements of some 20,000 Jamaican drug traffickers worldwide. Until a few years ago, the Jamaican gangs—or posses as they called themselves—were shadowy, anonymous groups who moved with impunity from country to country, and even from city to city. One of Arsenault’s first innovations after joining HIU was to coordinate his Jamaican initiative with police and prosecutors from Harlem to Hong Kong to the back alleys of Kingston, where the mention of Arsenault’s name was said to inspire trembling.

  For all of that, he was mild-looking, with a cherubic face, a bowl-cut curtain of lank brown hair, and goggle-sized glasses that at unflattering moments made him look nerdy, almost froggish. In fact, nothing could have been further from the truth. He’d been an athlete in school—soccer, hockey, lacrosse—and he’d kept his defenseman’s squat build, thick through the legs and torso, tough to knock off balance.

  It was easy to underestimate Arsenault, and many did. Padding through HIU’s bunkerlike quarters in baggy jeans, a rumpled blue oxford shirt, and beat-up moccasins—his uniform out of court—he affected a scruffy undergraduate air, an indifference to the protocols of rank. Lori Grifa, a young Brooklyn prosecutor who worked closely with the unit, mistook him for a junior assistant the first time she saw him, and even after they were introduced, he was so “un-self-important” and Puckishly amusing, she had trouble squaring him with his title or reputation. Steve Fitzgerald, another young assistant who later joined HIU, recalls that he was so taken aback by Arsenault’s informality during his interview that he thought someone was playing a joke on him—until Arsenault began to explain the details of HIU’s operation. Then Fitzgerald’s opinion changed dramatically.

  It was often like that. He was so intense in his approach to things, yet personally so private and self-effacing, that at times there seemed to be two Arsenaults: one smart, authoritative, and entertaining; the other a little lost and out of sync—the soldier off the battlefield, a chemist away from his lab. In truth, he had a highly selective focus. The usual civilian pursuits—art, music, theater, television, restaurants, fashion, politics, most sports, making money, and material possessions of any kind—left him cold and mute. He had no social aspirations and no social graces, no talent for small talk or what is sometimes politely called polite conversation. People who met him outside the boundaries of his obsessions—his work, his family, his lifelong passion for ice hockey—came away with a fuzzy recollection, if they remembered him at all.

  But he snapped into focus in a courtroom. Holding forth in a navy suit, his hair brushed back off his high forehead, his voice rich with candor and conviction, he was formidable. Even more so in small strategy sessions or alone with a colleague in his office, when he could relax and give full vent to his enthusiasms. He was a natural storyteller with an earthy sense of humor and a taste for hyperbole. Mostly, though, he was a historian. He had a computerlike mind, an ability to process huge amounts of information instantly, then spit them back—names, dates, the minutiae of cases that investigators had forgotten in their entirety. Grifa recalls showing him a mug shot at their first meeting, one Errol Williams, a small-time Jamaican hit man she had just convicted on murder charges. Arsenault glanced at the photo, then ticked off the subject’s pedigree—his street names, gang affiliations, running mates, criminal history—right down to the neighborhood in Kingston where he’d been born. Grifa was stunned. She’d spent two months investigating Williams prior to his trial, and in the span of minutes, Arsenault, a prosecutor from another borough, had told her things about him she’d never guessed at. And that was not an isolated instance. Police and prosecutors would frequently come to Arsenault for help with some sketchy gang-related case and leave his office dazzled, convinced they had been in the presence of genius.

  THE OLDER of two boys, Arsenault grew up in Hasbrouck Heights, a suburban idyll twenty minutes by bus from Manhattan. His father, George Arsenault, a U.S. Customs inspector for thirty-nine years, was scrupulous, stiff-necked, and outspoken. The son of Irish and French-Canadian immigrants, he weathered the Depression and World War II, and emerged, like so many of his generation, with a can-do optimism, an unshakable faith in himself and the future that he passed on to his sons. Walter was a quiet, even-tempered youngster, but he never backed down from an argument or a fight, no matter how much older or bigger his adversary. “When Walter felt he was right,” George Arsenault says, “you couldn’t move him left or right.”

  Even as a boy, he was an avid reader, devouring thick tomes—mostly history, but also literature, adventure, and science—at a single sitting. When his school sponsored a speed-reading course, 12-year-old Walter whipped through the test material so much faster than everybody else, indeed so much faster than the course’s objective that his teacher accused him of faking—until Arsenault took a comprehension test and scored 100.

 
; He had a peculiar, obsessive turn of mind. He would focus on a subject for a year or eighteen months at a time, learning everything he could from books, museums, movies, field trips, then lose interest and move on to the next thing. At eight he became an Egyptologist, trekking to the Museum of Natural History on weekends to view the mummies. Later he delved into the Civil War and dragged his parents to battlefields in Virginia and Maryland. Later still he took up karate and Japanese culture, followed by an excursion into World War II. In high school he read the Iliad repeatedly, which led him to Greek and Latin, archeology, and Schliemann’s Cretan digs and the search for Troy.

  He earned a scholarship to Johns Hopkins, where he continued his eclectic approach to education, majoring in the classics before quickly switching to the social and behavioral sciences. For a while he wanted to teach, and he had all but decided to join the Peace Corps when in his senior year he read Tiger in the Court, a memoir by Herbert Stern, the crusading U.S. Attorney who rooted out political corruption in North Jersey. Oddly, law was one of the few areas Arsenault had not dipped into at Johns Hopkins, but the rhythm and intensity of Stern’s investigations reminded him of his own intellectual flights, the thrill of exploring hidden worlds, of unearthing core truths. More important, Stern was working on the side of the angels. His triumphs represented the power of the prosecutor to stand up to the world’s bullies—not just individual felons but organized gangs like the Cosa Nostra and political conspiracies like that of the Kenneys of Hudson County, New Jersey, the ones who thought they were untouchable.