Arsenault never looked back. He attended law school at Rutgers, interned at Stern’s old Camden office (Stern had been appointed to the bench by then), and joined the Bergen County prosecutor’s office after graduating in 1978. Working as a local prosecutor turned out to be the best move Arsenault could have made. He discovered he liked laboring in the trenches, dealing with cops and street people, the long hours and constant pressure, the camaraderie.
Arsenault would seek out the most dangerous cases, then investigate the hell out of them. If he needed a corroborative witness or an informant, he’d go out to the neighborhoods himself. “He was without fear, ballsy as hell,” Paul Polifrone, a veteran detective assigned to Arsenault, says. “He seemed to enjoy the prospect of confrontation. If he heard that someone was the baddest ass, he’d want to get right into his face, and he wouldn’t back down. He could handle himself too. He didn’t look it, but he was some kind of black belt. Still, I remember telling him, ‘I don’t care if you have ten black belts, you’re not going to stop a bullet and you probably won’t stop a knife.’”
Yet despite Arsenault’s freewheeling antics in the street, he demonstrated a balanced approach to his cases, and he advanced quickly, ultimately moving to the Manhattan DA’s office in 1984, before being plucked for assignment to HIU.
STREET INVESTIGATIONS, as Arsenault was quick to point out in explaining the success of HIU, rarely involve rocket science. Much more about common sense and doggedness, they require an ability to get along with all kinds of people, many of them skittish and unsavory. Arsenault still rode to the Harlem precincts at 3 A.M., when most potential cooperators seemed to get arrested, still spent hours every day talking to the army of informants he’d cultivated over the past four years. He had learned early that there were few secrets within the Jamaican community, and he bullshitted with everyone who came to his office—girlfriends, junkies, hustlers looking for a per diem, as well as convicted killers, who in different circumstances would not hesitate to pump a bullet into his head. Some of those he liked the best.
Ironically, it was the so-called good guys, his partners in law enforcement, with whom Arsenault was most likely to quarrel. His plainspokenness and pungent wit—qualities that served him well with juries and cops—worked against him when he had to deal with administrative issues. He was a reluctant manager at best, uncomfortable at second-guessing colleagues and heavy-handed, often tactless when he did. He distrusted authority, even his own, and so he acted from the zeal of conviction rather than the temperance of true leadership.
He was the same with higher-ups. He hated the turf building and credit grabbing that are a part of any bureaucracy, and he refused to play politics or humor those who did. He was often blunt with trial bureau chiefs who refused to hand over their gang-related cases, or with police commanders who denied there were gangs operating in their precincts—no problem, no need to fix it. Lately he’d learned to edit himself, but he’d made his share of enemies over the years and the frosty silence that replaced his normal candor was barely an improvement.
THE HOMICIDE Investigation Unit had been created in 1983 specifically to investigate and prosecute Manhattan’s violent street gangs. By 1992, those gangs—mostly Dominicans, Jamaicans, Puerto Ricans, and American blacks who banded together to sell drugs—had become New York’s No. 1 crime problem, the engine for its soaring homicide rate and a blight on its quality of life. Fueled by huge drug revenues and armed with automatic weapons, they commandeered chunks of the city’s real estate—buildings, blocks, parks, entire neighborhoods—preying on the poor, co-opting the young, and intimidating or killing the defiant. They were also one of law enforcement’s thorniest problems. Their layered conspiracies were virtually immune to the beat cop and squad detective. Special tactical units (TNTs) were good at busting street sellers and low-level managers, sometimes called Dixie cups because they were easily replaceable. But penetrating the top levels of those gangs entailed a dedicated, long-term investigation—and the police had neither the savvy nor the will to mount that kind of campaign.
Operating out of ramshackle offices in the Criminal Courts building, HIU not only initiated gang investigations but followed them through trial, a process that could easily take two years or more. It was also one of the few gang task forces in the country that was proactive. Most other units reacted to crises; HIU investigators linked up seemingly random murders and identified gang hierarchies before police knew they existed.
Every day, calls for counsel and intelligence poured in from London, Kingston, Boston, Baltimore—from sheriffs in West Virginia and Kansas whose towns had suddenly become infested with strange Jamaican posses. To other cities’ dismay, the violent drug-trafficking gang had become one of New York’s most notorious exports, and not by accident. New York City gangs discovered these new markets—where crack frequently sold for ten times the price in Spanish Harlem—when they went out of state to buy guns. (New York’s gun laws were among the nation’s toughest.) Whenever Arsenault traveled in the United States, he visited the gun shops whose names appeared on the firearms he confiscated off the streets of Washington Heights and the Lower East Side. His favorite was a store in Texas called Bob’s Guns ’N Toys.
But HIU’s mission was neither guns nor drugs. It was murder. In targeting the city’s most active and elusive killers, they were the only unit that seemed able to slow the train of gang-related violence then racing through Harlem and the Heights.
Lately that violence had begun spilling out of the slums, inundating the city’s justice system and menacing its toniest neighborhoods. In just the previous six years, New York’s murder rate had risen more than 50 percent and the number of shootings, robberies, assaults, and carjackings had also soared. Swamped by so much serious crime, the New York police had all but given up on misdemeanor arrests and the streets teemed with an army of malefactors—beggars, scavengers, squeegee men, graffiti artists, vandals, public urinaters, jostlers, drug pushers, and purse snatchers—fostering the climate for still more violence. Meanwhile, the courts and prisons were filled to overflowing. Trial dockets lagged by a year or more, prosecutors were offering bargain plea agreements to reduce their caseloads, and some arrestees were walking simply because the system couldn’t process their cases fast enough.
But numbers told only part of the story. More troubling was the quality of crimes being committed—wanton, senseless acts of which Cargill and the Quad were only the leading examples. What lawmen found so chilling was the casualness of the violence, the spate of shootings fueled neither by rage nor by any persuasive emotion. All over town young men, some as young as twelve, were spraying the streets with gunfire, resolving the slightest disputes with deadly finality. Murder itself seemed to have changed—the idea of it, what it meant to kill someone had become commonplace, commodified, an advertisement for itself.
The reasons for this new violence are still being debated. Clearly some ghetto neighborhoods became poorer, meaner places during the 1970s, breeding grounds for a host of pathologies from child abuse and teenage pregnancy to drug addiction and crime. For that, some experts blame the cultural upheavals of the 1960s that weakened traditional institutions, not least of all the police, whereas others point to government welfare policies that they feel undermined family structure among the poor. Others cite fair housing laws that inadvertently sped the exodus of the middle class from Harlem and other ghetto communities, leaving them underpopulated and disorganized. Still others trace their decline to the city’s deteriorating manufacturing base, the factories and shipyards that once provided stable employment for many “at-risk” males.
But nothing catalyzed the city’s convulsive violence during the 1970s and 1980s more than its expanding illicit drug trade. It created a vast criminal labor force, unmatched since prohibition, and an even larger population of addicts whose only means of supporting their habits were through crime. It attracted a dizzying, multiethnic array of importers who shattered the Mob’s monopoly over the ill
egal drug supply and set rival distribution groups at war with one another. And the huge profits that rolled in only sharpened competition and fueled the deployment of costly, high-tech arsenals.
The first violent drug gangs appeared on the streets in Harlem in the early 1970s. Before then, the city’s illegal narcotics market consisted almost exclusively of heroin and was dominated by the Mafia, who controlled the overseas supply and distributed the drug through a limited number of franchisees, mostly tough, experienced American black associates like Frank Matthews and Nicky Barnes. These “old hands” had hammered out their own territorial arrangements over the years and it was not unusual, for example, for several different heroin organizations to conduct sales peacefully out of the same Harlem hotel.
Later a number of other groups, chiefly the ethnic Chinese, challenged the Mob’s hegemony over the supply side of the heroin market; and the emerging popularity of cocaine brought still more outfits into the mix. The Mob, reeling from federal drug prosecutions and their own internal strife over narcotics issues—many Mafia bosses didn’t want to be associated with drug running—became one more player in a crowded market. But the competition for the consumer’s dollar played out most fiercely in the street, where droves of sales organizations began cropping up. With no one body to regulate their business practices, the retailers took matters into their own hands and the modern-day violent drug-trafficking gang was born.
These groups, volatile and heavily armed, began selling narcotics out in the open—the drug market’s equivalent of fast-food outlets—fueling the already ballooning demand and increasing competition for prized selling locations. From 1970 to 1980, the city’s murder rate climbed by more than 60 percent.
Under the best circumstances, the introduction of drugs and drug gangs into slum neighborhoods would have had deadly consequences. But in New York the emergence of the narcotics market coincided with one of the most dispiriting periods in NYPD history. In 1968 a series of federal inquiries in the wake of widespread urban race riots exposed shocking levels of bias and brutality in many big-city police departments and concluded that the police, far from being the solution to the disorders, were part of the problem. Meanwhile, theories linking criminal behavior to social factors were misinterpreted—often by cops themselves—in ways that marginalized the Police Department’s role in preventing or reducing crime. As a result, many officers, especially white police in minority precincts, hunkered down in station houses and radio cars, virtually abandoning the streets to drug dealers and other felons.
In New York, the 1972 Knapp Commission hearings further demoralized the police. Sparked by the disclosures of an honest cop named Frank Serpico, Knapp and other inquiries uncovered systemic corruption in the Department’s Vice and Narcotics divisions. Then, two years later, the city’s budget crisis triggered cutbacks that led to the resignation of many of the Department’s most experienced men. Between 1974 and 1981, manpower declined sharply and, more troubling, average tenure fell from thirteen to five years.
But the PD was especially unprepared to meet the explosion in drug trafficking. Still reeling from the corruption scandals, the Department adopted regulations that effectively barred regular officers from making narcotics arrests. The spectacle of beat cops blandly making their rounds while crack dealers blatantly pushed their product further disheartened the force and shattered the public’s already fragile confidence.
Special narcotics units were hardly more effective. Saddled with production goals, they specialized in so-called sweeps—saturating an area and arresting large numbers of fungible low-level street workers, mostly addicts themselves. But they rarely committed the time or resources necessary to capture the gang’s hierarchy because in the Department’s accounting system, the arrest of a gang’s leader received the same statistical weight as the arrest of his lowest-ranking worker. So when the “buy-and-bust” units moved to a new neighborhood, the gangs simply re-formed around their old leadership—sometimes with new workers, but often with the same ones. Flooding the system with hordes of small-time dealers choked the already overburdened courts and prisons, which disgorged them back onto the streets within days, if not hours.
Some narcotics units—often in tandem with the Feds—did conduct long, complex investigations. But they were generally interested in weight, in making the big bust, and they focused on the individuals and small groups at the wholesale level. Most violence, however, occurred at the retail or street level among the large, well-armed gangs battling one another for turf. But the way the Department was structured, Narcotics was given very little incentive to investigate violence. Whatever murders they solved were credited to Homicide, who, for similar reasons, had no interest in recovering drugs. As a result, there was very little communication, much less coordination, between the two divisions, even though they were frequently investigating the same people.
It was Jessica DeGrazia, Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau’s First assistant, who first recommended the establishment of a special homicide task force devoted solely to tackling gang crime. As a prosecutor, DeGrazia had discovered firsthand how ill equipped the system was to deal with the new violence.
In 1980, after she won a conviction in a difficult murder case, the police offered DeGrazia three detectives to continue working with, and over the next three years the Trinity Project, as the program became known, locked up a number of previously untouchable killers, most of them connected to Harlem’s increasingly violent drug gangs. DeGrazia learned that Harlem’s criminal subculture, especially its drug trade, was a very small world. Everybody knew everybody else. Informants developed in the course of one investigation were invariably helpful in the next. One case led to another.
In 1983, convinced that she knew how to slow down Harlem’s soaring homicide rate, DeGrazia worked up a proposal for a special unit, based on the Trinity program, that would proactively police gangs, and presented it to Morgenthau. As it turned out, Morgenthau had been looking for a vehicle to attack the violent drug gangs in upper Manhattan, an area of growing concern for the office. Recently a gang of Harlem-based heroin traffickers known as the Vigilantes had murdered Bobby Edmonds, a state witness in the upcoming trial of the group’s top enforcer, Nathaniel Sweeper. Morgenthau wanted to hit them back hard; anything less than the swift capture and conviction of Edmonds’ killers would be viewed by gangs all over Manhattan as an exploitable weakness.
As a result, that fall, Morgenthau appointed William Hoyt, a 43-year-old career prosecutor, to head a small task force called the Homicide Investigation Unit, and persuaded the Department to assign two detectives under him. Hoyt, an ex-marine, driven and demanding, was one of the office’s top homicide prosecutors, and a skilled, imaginative investigator. He quickly made his mark by bringing down the Vigilantes. It was an auspicious beginning for the unit and in short order they added a second prosecutor and two more investigators.
IT WAS ABOUT that time that crack first hit the streets. A drug could not have been better designed to promote violence and disorder. Its cheap, intense high garnered a broad new market, most notably inner-city women, the wives and mothers who had provided a measure of stability to poor, vulnerable households. Once, these women had been deterred from using hard drugs by needles and the high price of heroin and powder cocaine. Now for a few bucks they could experience euphoria with the ease of lighting a cigarette. It was the ideal coffee break, the five-minute getaway, a perfect antidote to the humdrum of slum living. It was also highly addictive and the long-term costs of maintaining crack’s short, peaky high turned out to be far greater than for other drugs.
Even more troubling was the pernicious, reinforcing relationship between crack use and crime. With more users committing exponentially more thefts, the market for stolen goods collapsed, accelerating the cycle of larceny and glut. A construction tool or car radio that once fetched $30 at a fence now barely brought $10; as a result, addicts had to steal three times as much to satisfy their habit. And whereas heroin has a so
othing, narcotic effect that lasts for hours, crack often produces a speedy, paranoid psychosis. Not only were crackheads stealing more, but their crimes were more brazen and more likely to end in violence.
But it was the business of selling crack that ultimately shredded any semblance of safety or order in the streets. As disorganized and violent as the drug trade had become, the necessity of finding a good connection, especially among the older, more established heroin suppliers, and the high price of entry into the market—a kilo of heroin cost up to $200,000—acted as a brake against unfettered competition and ensured some measure of stability.
Crack exploded that stability. No one group could control its spread. An ounce of cocaine that could be bought on the street for $1,000 yielded 320 to 360 vials of crack—more if cut—that sold initially for $10 apiece in many locations. Anyone with a hot plate and a few hundred dollars could go into business and triple his money overnight. The old order—already shaken—crumbled completely.
Unlike “crude” heroin or cocaine, where the purity varied, a vial of crack in the South Bronx and a vial of crack in Harlem were essentially the same. Enterprising dealers quickly realized they weren’t in the drug business, they were in the service or convenience business. More than ever, location counted, and the battle for turf broke out into open warfare.
Once the supplier had ruled the drug trade. You needed a good connection to do business, and if you had one, the addicts would find you, wherever you set up shop. Now the neighborhood toughs were king, the gangs with the most muscle, as long as they were willing to use it. Within months of crack’s appearance gangs began shoring up their troops. Jamaican and Dominican gang leaders called up young men from their native villages, men without police records or known identities, to protect their interests and ease their expansion into other territories. The murder rate began to spiral. The police estimated in 1988 that one in three homicides in upper Manhattan was gang-related, but many investigators felt that the rate was at least double that. And even those numbers underestimated the true impact of the gangs.
Gangbusters: How a Street-Tough Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New York’s Most Dangerous Gang Page 4