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

by Stone, Michael

  Platano started. “No,” he said.

  “What is your real name?”

  “Wilfredo De Los Angeles.” At least Platano was being truthful to that extent.

  Dugan first took Platano’s pedigree—names and addresses of family members, girlfriends, a snapshot of his life to date.

  “Are you employed?” Dugan asked.

  “No. I used to work as a mechanic.”

  “Where?”

  “Porfirio’s,” he said. “In the Bronx on Featherbed Lane.”

  “What kind of repairs did you do?”

  “Engines,” he answered vaguely. Dugan glanced at Platano’s soft palms. It was clear he’d never done a day’s work in his life.

  “You know that we didn’t come here to talk to you about the narcotics charge that they have you for,” Dugan announced then. “Detective Dimuro is from the Three-Oh squad in Manhattan and I’m from the Manhattan North Homicide squad. We’re here to talk to you about a homicide in New York. If you can help us, we can probably help you get out of this mess.” The detectives then related the details they knew about Cargill’s murder—the near fender bender on the on-ramp, the presence of Platano’s white BMW, the shooter’s burgundy sedan—in order to convince Platano that they already knew what had happened. “We know that you didn’t shoot anybody,” Dugan told him. “However, we know that you saw this.”

  Platano began to nod.

  “The kid on the highway,” Dimuro said.

  “It wasn’t me,” Platano blurted out nervously. “It was Lenny.” He looked quickly left and right to gauge the impact of his statement on the detectives. Clearly he’d resolved to give up Lenny in hopes that it would bring him a ticket out of jail.

  “Who’s Lenny?” Dugan asked him disingenuously.

  A wave of confusion crossed Platano’s features. Didn’t the detectives already know about Lenny? They seemed to know everything else about the shooting. “He’s the boss,” Platano said.

  “The boss of what?”

  “Our boss. The boss of our location in the Bronx.”

  “Where in the Bronx?”

  “Beekman Avenue.”

  “And you belong to that group?”

  “Yeah, I’m part of it.”

  “Who else belongs to that group?”

  Platano named Lenny’s older brother, Nelson, and two others whom he placed in the car with Lenny on the night of the Cargill shooting: Fat Frankie and Raymond, who he said supplied the gang with guns.

  “What do you do?” Dugan asked.

  “I make deliveries,” Platano answered.

  When Dugan asked about his other duties, it quickly became clear that Platano wasn’t going to implicate himself further. So the detectives focused on the details of his drug deliveries: what cars he used, the “clavos”—secret compartments—where he hid the drugs, his methods of delivery. “What’s Lenny’s last name?” he asked suddenly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Manhattan—171st Street, near Broadway.”

  “Who’s he live with?”

  “With his mother. And his older brother.”

  “Where did you meet him?”

  “In the streets—near there.”

  Dugan and Dimuro asked him questions in rapid-fire sequence, not giving him time to think. He tried to limit his responses, but he was on a slippery slope, giving up more and more details in an effort to seem cooperative. Suddenly he folded his head into his arms and began to cry.

  Dugan looked over at Dimuro, who rolled his eyes. Platano’s tears seemed forced. Still, there was an element of genuine fear in his demeanor.

  “If Lenny finds out I’m talking about him, he’s going to kill me.”

  “Is he tougher than you?”

  “Of course, he’s the boss.”

  “Who else has he killed?”

  Platano looked up at Dugan, his face set. “I’m only going to talk about this one thing,” he said.

  “Okay,” Dugan said. “Let’s talk more about it.”

  Over the course of two hours, Dugan and Dimuro quizzed Platano relentlessly about the night of May 19, making him describe each link in the chain of events leading to Cargill’s murder. That Saturday night Lenny had taken a group of his top workers nightclubbing—a custom among gang leaders. Platano had gone out separately with his girlfriend, Christina Torres, and ran into Lenny after midnight at the Limelight. He stayed at the bar with Torres, while Lenny and his group drank $150 bottles of Cristal champagne at one of the tables. Later, as he was leaving, he ran into Lenny again in the parking lot. Lenny was getting into a red Monte Carlo, with Raymond Polanco, who was delivering an AK-47 that he had repaired for Lenny, and Fat Frankie, another drug dealer. Platano was driving. Lenny sat next to him.

  Platano told Dugan and Dimuro that he headed up to the Heights along the West Side Highway with Torres. On the ramp, leading to the elevated portion of the road, Cargill’s red truck, coming at an angle from 57th Street, veered into his lane and cut him off. Polanco, who had been behind Platano, pulled alongside him, and Lenny asked what had happened. Platano told them that the guy driving the truck was crazy. Polanco took off after him. Platano described a wild chase up the highway that ended after he passed the other two cars and saw flashes of gunfire in his rearview mirror. Later he heard that Lenny had “iced a gringo.”

  Dugan doubted some of the details of Platano’s statement, but in the main, his version jibed with Dugan’s understanding of the case. For the first time, the detective realized he knew what had happened on the night of Cargill’s murder.

  But in law enforcement, knowledge without proof is worthless. Even with Platano’s detailed statement, Dugan could not arrest Lenny for the shooting. Prosecutors don’t like to try homicides on the basis of one witness’s account—especially a witness like Platano. And though Platano had been careful not to incriminate himself, any defense lawyer would claim that Platano was a co-conspirator in the crime; in state law, unlike federal law, testimony by an accomplice is insufficient for conviction.

  Given what they had, Dugan and Dimuro couldn’t even keep Platano off the street. Dugan contacted Tebbens to let him know that Platano was in custody. But already the witnesses in the Bronx who had named Platano as a shooter in the Quad had backed away from their original statements, undermining Tebbens’ ability to get an arrest warrant. It was frustrating, but only too common in the case of gang crime. Everyone was terrified of retribution from the remaining Cowboys. Three days after his arrest in New Jersey, Platano walked on $45,000 bail.

  JOINING FORCES

  FEBRUARY 1992

  DESPITE THE FACT that Platano had gone free, Dugan felt encouraged by his progress in the investigation. He now had his first solid piece of evidence against Lenny, numerous leads for his investigation of Platano, and the names of two more possible eyewitnesses in the Cargill case: Fat Frankie, whoever he was, and Platano’s girlfriend, Christina Torres.

  After interviewing Platano, Dugan and Dimuro got Torres’ address and went to verify Platano’s story with her. A heavyset, plain-looking woman several months pregnant, Torres lived in a roomy but nearly empty apartment in the Gun Hill section of the Bronx. Except for a large aquarium in the hall and a bed and night tables in one of the rear rooms, the apartment was unfurnished.

  It was immediately clear to the detectives that Torres had not been with Platano on the evening of Cargill’s shooting. When Dugan questioned her about the incident, she looked genuinely puzzled. “What shooting?” she asked.

  “Were you in Wilfredo’s BMW on the West Side Highway anytime when there was a shooting involved?” Dugan asked her.

  The phone rang before she could answer him. She picked up the receiver and spoke rapidly in Spanish. Dugan understood enough to recognize the caller as Platano, who seemed to be coaching her. “Well, were you there during the shooting?” he asked after she put the phone down.

  “Yes, I was there.”

&nbs
p; “When did it happen?”

  Torres looked blank.

  “Do you remember what season it was? Was it summer, winter?”

  The phone rang. Platano again. When Dugan heard her asking Platano what the weather had been, he lost interest in the interview. Clearly, Platano wanted Torres—someone he could trust would not talk to the Cowboys—to back up his story. Later, as Dimuro quizzed her about Cargill, Dugan inspected the room. He saw a stack of mail on the bed; the letters were addressed to Christina Maldonado—a family name?—on Manor Avenue at the other end of the Bronx.

  After finishing with Torres, the detectives decided to check out the Maldonado residence as well. The apartment was located in a nondescript walk-up in the middle of a quiet residential block. But there was an unusual amount of activity on the corner, where Manor intersected with the main thoroughfare of Watson, despite the cold and the late hour. The detectives realized they were looking at a thriving drug market.

  A doubter of coincidence, Dugan tried to make sense out of the events of the day. Platano’s link to Torres indicated to him that Platano had business on the block. His first conclusion was that he had discovered another Cowboy sales spot. It also occurred to him that Platano might be moonlighting. As it turned out, neither assumption was true. But the intersection of Watson and Manor would play a significant role in the case.

  AT HIU, prosecutor Fernando Camacho was eager to launch the Cowboy case, despite the fact he was in the midst of preparing for the Gheri Curls trial, and had three other cases already in the pipeline. Terry Quinn, as HIU’s investigative chief, was a somewhat grouchier gatekeeper. Twenty-five years in the Department had sensitized him to the politics of policing, and the prospect of a long, resource-intensive investigation—with its logistical and jurisdictional tangles—always brought out the prickly side of his nature. After running some quick checks, however, Quinn, too, began lobbying Arsenault to take on the Cowboy investigation. “At the start of every investigation,” Arsenault would tell people, “Terry’ll give you a hundred reasons why we can’t do this case, and then the next day you’ll see him at his desk surrounded by the homicide folders and he’ll be telling you: We have to do this case. He’s like this punch-drunk fighter who tells you he’ll never raise his fists in anger again, and then the bell rings and he comes out swinging.”

  Still, Arsenault recognized that there were substantial problems with the Cowboy case. First, many of the violent acts attributed to the gang, including the Quad, took place in the Bronx, outside of HIU’s Manhattan jurisdiction. Quinn expected to uncover more murders in Manhattan, and Arsenault was pretty sure the unit could get clearance to investigate the Cowboys’ Bronx drug activities; yet even then they could end up with the worst possible combination: a large, time-consuming drug conspiracy case with relatively few homicides.

  Second, it became evident early on that the gang’s crack operation was strictly retail. That made it unlikely that HIU’s undercovers would be able to buy the Cowboys’ leaders, as they did with gangs that sold wholesale like the Gheri Curls. In the wholesale world, the money was so great that the gang leaders couldn’t help but involve themselves—they couldn’t trust tens of thousands of dollars to a low-level flunky. Because the Cowboys sold retail—directly to individual users—HIU would have to deal with the gang’s low-level street sellers, then try to flip them against the higher-ups. But the relatively small transactions—and correspondingly low penalties—would give investigators little leverage when negotiating with the dealers they arrested. What’s more, those dealers—often junkies and street people themselves—made unreliable informants and unpersuasive witnesses.

  The third and most immediate obstacle was the backlog of cases that jammed up the unit’s investigators through the summer. It would be six to eight months before Quinn and his people could focus full-time on the Cowboys. And Arsenault knew Camacho would be busy for at least a year, probably more. Arsenault was pretty sure he could finesse the investigative shortfall. He knew, for instance, that Garry Dugan and Jerry Dimuro were already looking at the gang in connection with the Cargill shooting, and that by having that case assigned to HIU—an easy matter for Ryan to arrange—they would benefit automatically from their research. He’d also heard about Mark Tebbens in the Bronx, and was confident he’d share what he knew about the Cowboys with the unit. And by spring, Arsenault knew, he could enlist outside help—the Feds or a police Narcotics unit—to begin surveillance on the gang’s drug operation. But he knew if he waited for Camacho to take over the reins of the investigation, the case might never get off the ground. So Arsenault asked him to hand off the investigation to a new prosecutor whom Ryan had brought up to the unit that winter. Reluctantly, Camacho agreed, and in a move that he would come to regret, Arsenault assigned Dan Rather to the case.

  WHEN YOU FIRST met Dan Rather, you experienced a kind of double vision. With his square good looks, boyish earnestness, and gentle Texas accent, he was a dead ringer for his father—the famous CBS news anchor—when he was an up-and-coming CBS reporter. But the younger Rather adamantly discouraged the comparisons. He never talked about his father to his colleagues, or revealed much at all about his private life. Not that he was standoffish. He played basketball and softball in the office leagues, he shot pool and drank with his bureau mates after work, and he was especially popular among the younger assistants, who frequently sought his advice for their cases. But even in groups he was something of a loner—pensive, remote, a little wary, as though he were used to being under scrutiny. And perhaps in a way he was under scrutiny.

  Many of Morgenthau’s young litigators had prominent surnames—Kennedy, Cuomo, Vance, D’Amato. The prosecutor’s office has always been a stepping-stone to public life, and Manhattan was the Harvard—part training ground, part finishing school—of big-city DAs. Typically, these young scions glided through their three-year tours, then moved on to other challenges in law and politics. But there was no indication that Rather was biding his time or looking for an easy ride. From his freshman year in 1985 he distinguished himself as one of the brightest and hardest-working among his class. He seemed to revel in being a prosecutor.

  The elder of two children, Rather, 34, spent an itinerant childhood growing up all over Texas. He was by his own account a rowdy teenager, more interested in playing basketball and fighting with the local gangs than in going to school. He had calmed down when he moved East to attend college at Columbia, where he majored in philosophy. Later at Georgetown, the gritty imperatives of criminal law drew him to the bar. But he never lost his taste for ideas. “Dan was a legal eagle,” Luke Rettler, at the time one of Rather’s intimates, says. “He read all the journals, he liked comparing cases. A lot of DAs, myself included, have a much more fact-based approach. We’re mainly interested in the law as it applies to our cases. But Dan wanted to know why certain laws were the way they were.”

  Rather also showed a real talent for investigation. He seemed to enjoy the challenge of large, complex cases, and he was passionate about the work. “I felt it was God’s work, that there was no higher calling,” he says. “I felt that if you really care about justice in poor communities, you needed to do violent-gang work.”

  After joining Morgenthau’s office in 1985 out of law school, Rather rose to become a Criminal Court supervisor and homicide assistant before Nancy Ryan tapped him for HIU at the beginning of 1992. But despite her enthusiastic recommendation, Rather had his detractors. Some colleagues interpreted his aloofness as arrogance; others objected to his behavior on the basketball court, where he was a trash talker who always seemed to be on the edge of provoking a fight, an unnecessary quirk, in that he was a gifted player. But the most troubling rap against Rather was his dearth of big-trial experience. He had a reputation in the office for being a reluctant prosecutor, someone who overinvestigated his cases, then pled them out before they came to verdict. The fact is that most cases settle before trial, and the better a prosecutor prepares his case, the more likely his
defendant will try to plead. Still, Rather was joining a homicide unit without ever having tried a homicide.

  Rather saw the Cowboys as the case of a lifetime. Moreover, it seemed to dovetail with an investigation he had conducted before joining HIU involving a car theft ring that stole cars on consignment for big drug dealers allegedly based on West 171st and 174th streets.

  Rather jumped into HIU’s investigation of the Cowboy case by doing AGIS dumps—computer runs on NYPD arrest data—to find out who’d been collared on West 171st and 174th street during the past year. Surprisingly, relatively few names came up. Clearly the gang members weren’t being arrested in their own neighborhood. But when Rather searched for people arrested citywide who lived on those blocks, the list of names expanded dramatically. What’s more, many of them were being arrested in the 40th Precinct—the Mott Haven section of the Bronx, where the Quad occurred.

  The case of a lifetime began slowly, however. With HIU’s investigators jammed up through the summer of 1992, Rather did what he could on his own, pulling arrest folders, assembling photos and going over them with informants. But his most important move was in reaching out to NYPD detectives Garry Dugan and Mark Tebbens.

  Dugan, for his part, was furious when he learned that Dimuro had taken the case to the DAs. Like many of his colleagues, he hated going outside the Police Department chain of command; too often, he knew, it meant ceding control of the investigation to the prosecutors. Moreover, he’d never heard of HIU. Nor did he see how the DA’s office could help them at that embryonic stage of the investigation. In his experience, you went to a prosecutor only after you had solid evidence. Despite his skepticism, however, Dugan agreed to accompany Dimuro on a visit to meet Rather a few days later.

  The visit was a revelation to Dugan. Rather began by assuring Dugan he wouldn’t interfere with his investigation. For the moment he just wanted to act as a repository for intelligence on the Cowboys, to help coordinate Dugan’s investigation with Tebbens’ investigation in the Bronx. What particularly impressed Dugan was Rather’s sweeping vision of the case. He made it clear that he intended to target the entire gang, not just Cargill’s killers. What’s more, he had a plan that would enable him to do it. First, he would identify the members of the gang and exhume all the old unsolved cases they could find that were connected to them. Next he would enlist the assistance of a special narcotics unit, either from the NYPD or from a federal agency like the ATF, to do a joint investigation into the Cowboys’ drug operation. Then he would arrest selected lower-and mid-level members with knowledge of the gang’s activities and attempt to “flip” them against the gang’s leaders and most violent enforcers. Finally, when he had accumulated enough evidence, they intended to “take down” all the remaining Cowboys at once, so that there would be no one left to carry on the gang or to threaten witnesses.