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

by Stone, Michael

Quinn grew up in the 1940s and 1950s in Williamsburg, a tough working-class section of Brooklyn, a paycheck away from the slums. His father, a bare-knuckle fighter during the Depression, sold insurance in the projects, and his older brother was a charismatic ruffian and racketeer; together they taught Terry the streets. He was one of those larger-than-life cops you’d expect to see in the movies—gritty, driven, with a big ego, fast with his hands and wits. A twenty-five-year veteran of the force, he had been one of the Department’s go-to guys, someone they tapped when they needed a case solved and weren’t particular how it got solved. And Quinn had rewarded his bosses with headline collars—the “Silver Bandit,” a Greenwich Village stickup artist who had eluded the police for years; the Columbia Rapist, the superintendent’s son who had raped and murdered a young Columbia student on the rooftop of one of his father’s buildings in 1984. The publicity from those and other cases had earned Quinn his share of detractors, cops who felt that he was precipitous, self-serving, not a team player. But even his critics conceded he got the job done.

  He rode his men hard, but he never asked them to do more than he was willing to do himself. He was often the first one through the door, and on several occasions he paid for it with serious injuries. During one crack house raid in 1986, he pursued a perp through a trap door and tumbled headfirst down a steep ladder, effectively scalping himself and fracturing his skull. Though his wounds were severe—later at the hospital he would be given last rites—he still managed to hold on to his man until help arrived; and afterward, when the Department offered him disability with three-quarters pay, he turned them down flat and returned to his unit.

  The older detectives in Dimuro’s squad advised him not to approach Quinn, and Dimuro knew that Dugan wouldn’t be pleased that he’d taken the case to the DA’s office. However, as the primary on the case, Dimuro decided he needed to do something. “I had detectives calling me late at night at home telling me I was making a big mistake by going outside the squad, that Quinn had fucked them before and he would fuck me now,” Dimuro recalled. “But I didn’t see any alternative. I felt there was no way we were going to clear this case without help.”

  A graying middleweight in the final strides of his forties, Quinn had mellowed since his days in the Department. Of medium height and build, he had short, springy hair, a pleasant Irish face, pug nose, and impish blue eyes behind steel-framed glasses. But he’d stayed in shape and never lost that aura of physical threat. He still moved like a boxer, constantly in motion, dividing space efficiently, pinning you down when he wanted your attention; even his speech, larded with street slang and police jargon, had a kind of corporeality, the terse phrases, delivered in a brassy Brooklyn timbre, like fingers jabbing into your chest.

  Quinn took Dimuro back to the unit’s lunchroom—a small office with a fridge and a conference table banking the squad room—and gave him HIU’s dog-and-pony. Dimuro already knew the broad strokes of the organization, but Quinn listed a few details that another lawman would appreciate: a back stairway that connected the unit directly to the “Bridge of Sighs”—the walkway that linked the Tombs to the courthouse—and enabled them to produce prison informants quickly and discreetly, as well as the fact that HIU tried most of their cases in front of Leslie Crocker Snyder, a special narcotics judge who understood complex gang investigations and remanded defendants who posed threats against witnesses.

  After talking to Quinn, Dimuro was certain he’d made the right decision in involving HIU, and Quinn was definitely on board. Dimuro’s only reservation was the amount of time Quinn said it would take HIU to do the investigation: three months just to get started, a year and a half before they made the first arrests. If Quinn was going to steal his case, Dimuro wished he’d hurry up and do it.

  HAVING TALKED with Dimuro, Quinn brought in Fernando Camacho, HIU’s Dominican gang expert, to bring him up to speed. The three men met for about an hour, and Walter Arsenault, back from a court hearing, joined them halfway through. Quinn and Camacho would recommend either taking on or turning down the case based on its viability and potential impact, but Arsenault would make the final decision.

  Quinn did most of the talking, embellishing Dimuro’s threadbare report, weaving the detective’s bits of fact, rumor, and supposition into a chilling narrative. First he reviewed the Cargill case, naming Lenny as the shooter and placing Raymond Polanco, the Brooklyn gun dealer, and Platano in the car with him. All three, Quinn told Camacho, belonged to a Dominican gang whom he called the Wild Cowboys, whose principal members had been friends since childhood and together attended George Washington High School in the Heights. He told Camacho that they were involved in heavy drug dealing and gun sales and had committed numerous homicides in the Heights, the South Bronx, and Brooklyn.

  The gang ran West 174th Street in the 500 numbers, Quinn told Camacho, and then went on to list a number of their other possible drug spots in Manhattan. He named two suspected dealers from Washington Heights, Reuben Perez and Jose Menor, who were said to be associated with the gang. He added that the Cowboys had recently extended their drug operation to the Bronx and were responsible for the quadruple homicide on Beekman Avenue in December.

  Having sketched the broad strokes, Quinn filled in some details about the gang that Dimuro and Dugan had put together. Lenny, the gang’s leader, was in jail for another five months on a gun charge. In his absence, Polanco and Platano were running the drug operations. Polanco, Quinn said, was a particularly nasty character: in addition to supplying gangs all over the city with guns, he had been involved in numerous shootings in Brooklyn and the Heights, both as the triggerman and as the target.

  But Platano, Quinn went on, was the one all the others feared. Rumor had it that several years ago a crony accidentally shot him in the back of his head. He miraculously survived and returned to the street more violent than before. He recently bragged to informants that he’d been involved in twelve homicides since July, and it was said he liked to finish off his victims with a shot to the back of the head, a kind of bizarre signature that reenacted his own brush with death. Among his victims were a high school baseball star, paralyzed from the neck down by a barrage of gunfire; a young man shot merely for using the same street name as Platano; a woman in her twenties, stabbed to death for reasons unknown; and a 13-year-old girl, killed by a stray bullet as she exited a chicken store in the Bronx during a shoot-out between rival dealers.

  Quinn’s presentation of the Cowboys to Camacho had been an exercise in speculation, an attempt to stitch together a few threads of information provided by second-and third-hand sources. No one really knew Polanco’s status vis-à-vis the Cowboys—he was a Brooklyn guy known for guns, not drugs—and Perez and Menor were even sketchier figures, the Guildenstern and Rosencrantz of the investigation, drawn from footnotes in an FBI report. Even the gang’s name was a Quinn invention. On the street, they were known as Lenny’s Boys or simply Red-Top. But in an interview with Dimuro, a teacher from George Washington recounted telling Lenny and his pals they were “just a bunch of wild cowboys.” With its echoes of frontier lawlessness, the epithet seemed ideally suited to their outfit, and carried a romantic imagery that Quinn knew would appeal to cops and reporters alike.

  Like any good politician, Quinn had already begun packaging the case, in order to command the office’s attention and resources. He had an ability, rare among his fellow detectives, to define investigative targets and, no less important, to sell them to the higher-ups who controlled his budget. Worried about jurisdiction, Quinn played up those parts of the investigation that established the Cowboys as a Manhattan gang. As a result, his written notes, summarizing the meeting, highlighted the Cargill homicide and made Polanco, a key player in that case, a member, even a leader, of the Cowboys. More important, he assumed the Cowboys’ drug operation was based in Manhattan—an assumption that would have far-reaching effects for the investigation—and linked the gang to Perez and Menor, dealers who were known to operate in Washington Heights. By
contrast, his report downplayed the Cowboys’ activities in the Bronx and failed to mention the Quad at all.

  Even before Quinn finished his presentation on the gang, however, Arsenault felt that they were going to be HIU’s next big case. They were not only violent but arrogant. There were plenty of homicidal gangs operating in Manhattan in 1992, but Arsenault was looking for the ones that murdered flagrantly, who acted as though they were above the law and were perceived to be untouchable. The Cowboys were clearly that. What’s more, Arsenault was not unmindful of the gang’s link to Cargill and the Quad. It never hurt to have a big, sexy centerpiece murder to grab a jury’s attention and hold it through a long, complicated trial.

  Arsenault did have certain reservations. HIU’s investigators were currently tied up—it would be six to eight months before Quinn was able to focus full-time on the gang, and Camacho, busy preparing for the Gheri Curls trial in the fall, would be unavailable for at least a year, probably longer. Moreover, Arsenault wasn’t fooled by Quinn’s presentation; he realized right away that most of the homicides that Quinn described had taken place in the Bronx, outside of HIU’s Manhattan jurisdiction.

  But given Arsenault’s frame of mind, these impediments seemed more like foothills than real obstacles. “We were pumped up,” he recalled. “We were finishing up the Spanglers and we’d just indicted the Gheri Curls on conspiracy charges. Nancy Ryan was then the most powerful person in the office after Morgenthau, and she loved us. We were going to be her next Jade Squad, the model for taking down violent drug-trafficking gangs worldwide. She’d got us two new prosecutors, and she was trying to get us new investigators with grants, and of course she was running interference for us on the eighth floor. With her on our side, it never occurred to us we couldn’t do a joint investigation with the Bronx, or that we wouldn’t have enough resources to do another big case, even one with forty or fifty defendants.

  “Camacho had this idea of taking back the Heights block by block, just marching up Audubon and Broadway and taking down every gang along the way. The precinct detectives all said he was crazy, that there were too many crews, that they weren’t organized in a way that you could take them down together. But privately I agreed with him. We were sending out a message: If you killed people in Manhattan, we were coming after you, and we were the biggest, toughest gang around.”

  Still, Arsenault kept quiet at the meeting. He preferred to let his senior people warm to an investigation in their own way. HIU’s cases could run for years and required extraordinary dedication; he wanted to make sure his key players were fully on board before getting immersed in the process. Besides, he never had a problem motivating his investigators. His problem was stopping them from taking on too much.

  Shortly after the meeting broke up, Ray Brennan, one of the unit’s senior investigators, overheard Quinn talking to Arsenault about the Cargill homicide in the lunchroom. “That’s one case you’ll never solve,” he said.

  “If there was any question before whether we were doing the case, that capped it,” Arsenault recalls. “Telling us we couldn’t solve Cargill was like waving a red flag in front of a herd of charging bulls.”

  THE SEARCH FOR PLATANO

  JANUARY 1992

  WHILE DIMURO lobbied HIU to take over the Cargill-Cowboy investigation, Tebbens and Dugan continued their search for Platano. In mid-January, a week after his abortive stakeout on Beekman Avenue, Tebbens and three Bronx detectives drove down to the Palladium late one night. The Palladium was a stadium-sized dance club on East 14th Street created by former Studio 54 founders Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, and a reputed Cowboy hangout.

  Tebbens befriended the chief of security, an ex-cop who said he knew Platano. He told Tebbens he hadn’t seen him that night but that Platano sometimes paid the doormen to take him around to a back entrance in order to avoid the lines and the metal detectors. Then he took Tebbens to a bar area featuring Latino music and pointed to a large, powerfully built Hispanic man with a fat, bushy mustache. “That’s Frankie Cuevas,” he said. “If Platano’s in the club, he’ll be drinking with him.”

  Tebbens walked over to the bar and stood a few places down from Cuevas. The muscular detective was used to dominating a room, but Cuevas nearly matched him in size. He was six feet, about 230, with stabbing black eyes. Wearing a sporty black suit, a white silk shirt with a spread collar, thick braided gold necklaces, knuckle-sized gold cuff links, and double rows of gold rings on the fingers of each hand, Frankie was not someone Tebbens was likely to forget.

  It was after midnight, but the nightclub was crowded. At one end people were dancing, the women’s dresses glinting red, green, and gold in the aquarium light of the dance floor. Still Cuevas manned his post at the bar, and throughout the evening a stream of flashily dressed men and women came up to pay their respects to him. Platano, however, was not among them, and after several hours Frankie left and Tebbens and his team called it a night.

  MEANWHILE, in one of those flashes of coincidence and good detective work, Timmy Burke, an Anti-Crime cop in the Four-Oh, told Tebbens that he had arrested a guy some eighteen months back named Platano, who was a suspect in the murder of a Bronx dealer. There wasn’t enough evidence to hold him and he had been released. But before letting him go, Burke had filled out a stop-and-frisk report, on which Platano’s address was listed. Burke had spent a few weeks rummaging through the precinct’s antiquated filing system for the form, but he’d at last located it.

  According to the stop-and-frisk report, Platano’s real name was Wilfredo De Los Angeles, and he lived at his mother’s home in Washington Heights. Tebbens was elated; finally he had a bead on the shadowy figure that had eluded him for nearly a month, and Dugan and Dimuro for a good deal longer than that. That afternoon, Tebbens and another detective paid Platano’s mother a visit.

  Anna De Los Angeles turned out to be a petite, fortyish woman with a polite, demure manner. She wore a simple housedress when Tebbens called on her, with no makeup or ornamentation save a small gold crucifix. After Tebbens introduced himself, Mrs. De Los Angeles explained that she spoke little English; she went to fetch her daughter to translate.

  Tebbens found himself looking into a modest, well-kept apartment. A crucifix and a picture of the Virgin Mother hung on the livingroom wall facing him across the small entrance hall. There were more religious icons on shelves and tabletops. The only jarring note was the expensive furniture, new and garish under plastic covers, a present, no doubt, from Platano.

  When Anna returned with her teenage daughter, Tebbens made up a story about his investigating an anonymous tip of child abuse in the building. Did she have any other family members living with her? Mrs. De Los Angeles told Tebbens she had an older son, Wilfredo, but that he lived away from home and rarely visited. She didn’t know where he lived. Wilfredo had grown up in the area and attended nearby George Washington High School. It was as much as he could glean about Platano from the cover story he had used. On his way back to the Bronx, however, Tebbens stopped in at George Washington High and managed to get a yearbook photo of Platano. For the first time he had a sense of what Platano looked like. A routine motor vehicle check on De Los Angeles turned up a handful of unanswered summonses and at least four suspensions. But Platano’s rap sheet was clean. Despite his reputation, he had never been arrested or spent a day in jail.

  Two weeks later, on January 29, the FBI received a tip that Platano had scheduled his car for service in New Jersey and would be carrying drugs. Special Agent Harold Bickmore alerted the New Jersey State Police. They arrested Platano as he rode through Englewood, a sleepy commuter town twenty minutes west of Manhattan. Bickmore phoned Jerry Dimuro the next morning. He told Dimuro that Platano was being held at the Bergen County jail under the alias of Paul Santiago, pending arraignment. Dimuro called Dugan at the Three-Four and the two detectives hurriedly drove to the jail.

  Dugan was taken aback when he caught his first glimpse of his deadly quarry. Flanked by Corrections officers, Pl
atano looked like nothing more than a slight, scared young man with cropped hair and a slender, clean-shaven face. There was nothing intimidating about him. His head was bowed, his shoulders sloped, his hands and feet were small. “From all that I had heard, I expected a wild animal,” Dugan recalled. “He walked toward us with these small, mincing steps as though he had ankle bracelets on, which he didn’t, and his hands cuffed and extended in front of him like an altar boy.” Dugan told him he and Dimuro were from New York, and that they had no interest in his business in New Jersey. It was Platano’s first arrest, and he was obviously petrified, which Dugan took advantage of, explaining that New Jersey’s drug laws were more stringent than New York’s, that he might never see the light of day.

  Since there were no interview facilities at the jail, Corrections officers had partitioned a small area in the main corridor and set up a folding table and chairs. Platano, wearing a bright orange prison jumpsuit, sat between Dugan and Dimuro, his back to the parade of prisoners marching to and from court. “The conditions were far from ideal,” Dugan recalled. “To get a confession or any kind of statement, you need a private room, just you and the subject one-on-one, or two-on-one. Instead we were squeezed together in the center of the jail, one of those paper accordion dividers separating us from the other inmates. You could overhear everything going on outside in the corridor.”

  Platano seemed intent on convincing his interrogators they had the wrong man. As Dugan began the interview, he leaned forward, balling his hands on the table, pinching his uniform material from time to time, as if to say: What am I doing here in these clothes?

  “Why do they call you Platano?” Dugan asked, to break the ice.

  “It means green banana,” he said. “I’ve had it since I was a kid.”

  “Did you give them your real name?”