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

by Stone, Michael

  Unfortunately, Lenny turned out to be a dead end in the investigation for the time being. His lawyer contacted Dugan several days after his interview with Lenny and instructed him to steer clear of his client. Dugan had arranged with prison officials at Ogdensburg to record Lenny’s telephone calls, but they provided no fresh leads.

  Dugan had better luck tracking down Felipe Capellan, the registered owner of Platano’s BMW convertible. Capellan, a 26-year-old car thief, had been holed up in Massachusetts since the summer, but he had recently moved back to his family’s Washington Heights apartment in anticipation of a court appearance on March 25. He had cases pending against him in New York and New Jersey—one of them for assault and reckless endangerment—and seemed cooperative when Dugan contacted him.

  Dugan learned Capellan had met Platano two years before through Lenny and his brother Nelson, whom he had known growing up in the neighborhood. Lenny had wanted to buy Capellan’s BMW for Platano, but then went to prison before paying him. Nonetheless, Capellan “lent” the car to Platano out of fear, and Platano had kept it indefinitely. Recently Platano visited Capellan at the garage where he worked and tried to exchange it for an M-3—another, sportier BMW that Capellan owned. “I told him that his convertible was a better car, that he didn’t want the M-3,” Capellan said. “He took out a gun and shot three times into the driver-side door of the M-3. Then he said, ‘Now you don’t want it either.’”

  Capellan got the door replaced and gave the car to Platano.

  Despite the information Capellan had given him, however, Dugan felt like he had reached a wall in the investigation. Lenny’s lawyer had barred him from speaking further with his client, and neither of the men who had been with Cargill the night of his murder could identify the photos that Dugan had assembled of Lenny, Platano, Frankie, and Polanco. There was little the detective could do but wait for something to break.

  As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait long. On March 16, a black Ford Taurus pulled alongside Frankie Cuevas as he sat in his car talking to friends on Audubon Avenue and 185th Street. It was almost spring, a brisk, sunny afternoon, and Cuevas had his guard down. His most trusted soldier, Manny Garcia, a man almost as burly and menacing as Cuevas himself, was sitting in the driver’s seat beside him. A second bodyguard, Gilbert Compusano, was parked behind them, protecting their rear. Suddenly, the passenger-side window of the Taurus slid down and a gunman opened fire. Cuevas was only winged, but Garcia was hit in the back as he turned from the bullets, and he pitched forward, unable to move. For a moment confusion reigned. Then Compusano took off after the shooter, while Cuevas ran six blocks to the 34th Precinct, where he flagged a ride to nearby Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital.

  Dugan stopped in to see Manny at the hospital two days later. The 20-year-old Dominican was lying on his back, his head propped at an angle. He was said to be permanently paralyzed from the chest down. But Garcia still refused to cooperate, even when Dugan offered him official help with disability payments. “Frankie will take care of me,” he said.

  “No one’s going to support you anymore,” Dugan said. “You’ll be a burden to your family.”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ll get by.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Dugan asked.

  Manny glared at him.

  “Don’t you realize you’re never going to have sex again?” Dugan said. “You’re never going to have children? Why don’t you help me get the guy who did this to you.”

  “Fuck that,” Manny said. “That’s the risk I took. I gambled and I lost.”

  Dugan went to see Cuevas next, but it was clear Cuevas intended to take care of “the motherfuckers” himself.

  CUEVAS checked himself out of Columbia-Presbyterian the next day, against his doctor’s advice. A day later, Dugan responded to a call at Cuevas’ address on West 174th Street. He found a trail of blood leading from the snow-covered sidewalk to Cuevas’ apartment on the fifth floor. Police broke down the door: there was a gun lying on the floor immediately inside the doorway, and a trail of blood that led past a series of bedrooms to the living room. Blood was splattered everywhere, and the furniture was in shambles.

  Dugan found two more guns in the apartment and a single set of fresh footprints in the snow on the roof leading to and from the edge.

  Dugan quickly pieced together what had happened. Cuevas and at least three others, given the number of guns, had been beating the hell out of someone, trying to extract a confession, or information. That explained the mess in the living room. He figured one gang member—probably Frankie—held a gun on their hostage and at some point, out of anger or carelessness, shot him. Surprised by the violent turn of events, the assailants then tossed their guns and ran, leaving the victim for dead; Frankie, or whoever the shooter was, went up to the roof to ditch his gun over the side. (Police recovered the gun in a lot directly below the roof.) Sometime later, the victim regained consciousness and escaped. Of course, it was possible the victim was dead and Cuevas’ henchmen had carried him out of the apartment. But the even distribution of blood on the stairs seemed to indicate that whoever had been shot was ambulatory.

  When Dugan called Columbia-Presbyterian to inquire if they’d had any trauma patients the night before, the duty nurse told him that Gilbert Compusano—the second bodyguard at Frankie’s shooting—had been treated for a gunshot wound to his head. He was in critical, but stable, condition.

  Clearly Cuevas decided Compusano had betrayed him.

  After the uniforms had left, Dugan lingered outside the building, surveying the neighborhood. He jotted down plate numbers of the parked cars, a habit of his at crime scenes, and questioned the people at the bodega around the corner. Yo no se, they knew nothing. As he returned to the building, he intercepted a slouch-limbed young man in dungarees and an expensive leather jacket as he was about to enter. “May I ask what apartment you’re going to?”

  The man said he was going to 5A, Cuevas’ apartment.

  “Who are you going to visit there?” Dugan asked, producing his shield.

  The man blanched. He identified himself as Victor Nazar, an off-duty cop from the Four-Oh, Tebbens’ precinct. Nazar said he was a friend of Cuevas—that he knew him from the Veinte de Mayo and occasionally dropped by to say hello.

  “When was the last time you came by?” Dugan asked.

  “Two, three weeks ago. Why?” Nazar asked.

  “We’re investigating an accident inside the building.”

  “What apartment?”

  “A different apartment,” Dugan lied. “But we’re limiting traffic going in and out of the building.” Encountering a cop who was friendly with Cuevas set all of Dugan’s inner alarms off. He didn’t want him to see the blood trail inside. But Nazar was already backing away.

  AT COLUMBIA-PRESBYTERIAN, Dugan found Compusano sitting on his bed. Dugan realized that Cuevas shot Compusano either because he felt that his bodyguard had set him up or because he failed to take proper actions to protect him. Dugan was hopeful that Compusano could tell him who shot Cuevas, as well as who had assaulted and attempted to kill him. But the neurosurgeon who had operated on Compusano was less optimistic. “He’s conscious,” he told Dugan. “But you won’t get much out of him. I had to remove the part of his brain that has to do with short-term memory.”

  Compusano’s speech, as he responded to Dugan’s queries, was slow and slurred. “Who shot you?” Dugan asked him after a few preliminary questions.

  “I was shot?”

  “Don’t you remember? Feel your head.” Compusano rubbed the top of his large round head. It was shaved and stitched together like a baseball.

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  FRANKIE CUEVAS’ EYES slid across the glass toward Dugan, darting left and right, the eyes of a fish in unfamiliar waters. Standing in a darkened corridor on the other side of the one-way mirror, Dugan couldn’t help but draw back at the intensity of the gang leader’s glare. Cuevas had shown up at the precinct several hours afte
r Dugan had left word with his brother Miguel at the Veinte de Mayo that he was asking for him. Dugan had escorted him to one of the squad’s two interview rooms, a cinder-block cubicle with a table, chairs, and a one-way mirror built into its rear wall. He had left Frankie to stew there, and had circled around back to study him through the glass. Thicker through the middle than Lenny, Cuevas had the same powerful build and swarthy skin as his rival; his mouth was turned down at the corners, halfway between a pout and a sneer; and his bushy black eyebrows and mustache concentrated his expression. He was dressed neatly in casual clothes and new sneakers (no chance of matching the treads with the footprints on the roof) and was holding a newspaper from upstate in his big soft hands. Dugan waited until he could see that Cuevas was becoming impatient. He wanted him nervous, not mad.

  But Dugan’s calculations were for naught. From the start, Cuevas made it clear he wasn’t going to cooperate. When Dugan asked him how Manny was doing, Cuevas barely looked up from his paper. “These things happen,” he said. “He’ll get over it.” And later, when Dugan suggested he ought to contribute to his former worker’s support, Cuevas claimed he was a worker himself, employed as a manager by his brother’s restaurant.

  “What kind of work do you do at the restaurant?”

  “I order the food and beverages.”

  “How much do you make there?”

  “Two hundred dollars a week.”

  “What about the cars that you drive?”

  “They aren’t mine. They belong to my brother.” Cuevas’ eyes broke off from Dugan and drifted to the newspaper lying on the table. He began to turn the pages as he spoke.

  Dugan didn’t like Cuevas. He thought he was a bully and a coward. At 19, Cuevas had badly beaten an old woman, who surprised him while he was burglarizing her apartment. (The woman died shortly after, though police were unable to prove her death was caused by the assault.) And after he was shot on March 16, Cuevas had run to the precinct house, abandoning his more seriously wounded bodyguard, Manny Garcia. Cuevas later told Dugan he thought his friend had been killed, and Garcia remained intensely loyal to the gang leader; but Dugan felt that Cuevas had panicked and fled.

  Cuevas was a gangster of the old school. He hated the police and, even more than Lenny, ruled by intimidation. There seemed to be no give in the man, no room for negotiation; and Dugan’s sources confirmed his intuition. They were not only reluctant to speak to the detective; they didn’t want to be seen anywhere near him. With Frankie, they told him, if he suspected you, he killed you.

  As Cuevas turned another page, Dugan reached across the table and grabbed the newspaper with a sweeping motion, crumpled it, and tossed it on the floor behind him. The move startled Cuevas; he clearly was unused to being challenged. His shock quickly turned to anger, but Dugan had made his point. “I wanted you at this office because I wanted to talk to you,” he said. “Not watch you read the newspaper.”

  Cuevas just glared.

  After a few more questions, Dugan had had enough. Cuevas clearly wouldn’t give them anything.

  THE ATTEMPT on Frankie’s life sparked an explosion of violence in the Heights and the Bronx. A day later, members from Lenny’s and Frankie’s crews exchanged gunfire on St. Nicholas Avenue and 173rd Street, wounding Frankie Gonzalez, a dealer with links to both groups. Later the same day, Platano was collared by the police a block from where Gonzalez had been wounded, carrying a 10 mm pistol. Platano told the police he was Paul Santiago and was released on minimal bail. Later that night, Juan Carlos Pena, a Reuben Perez associate, was bounced from a local nightclub for refusing to remove his hat and coat for a security check, and allegedly returned to the club with a gun, fired wildly into a crowd of people at the entrance, and hit a bystander in the head. The next day, the word on the street was that Platano had shot three workers for Orange-Top, a crew thought to be associated with the Cowboys in the Bronx. Three weeks later, 17-year-old Levington Rojas, a rising star in the Cowboy organization known as Mask—the same Mask whom Tebbens had spotted with Platano delivering crack to Beekman Avenue—was shot and killed.

  Each new shooting raised questions about the genesis of the war and the quicksilver loyalties of the gang members. Then, on April 14, Platano himself was gunned down while sitting in his double-parked car on St. Nicholas Avenue and 187th Street. The shooter emerged from behind a van that was parked next to him, and fired twice into the car at point-blank range. One bullet entered Platano’s side and creased his liver. The other punctured his lung. Critically wounded, he managed to drive as far as 173rd Street, where a friend came to his aid and drove him the rest of the way to Columbia-Presbyterian. Dugan understood he was not expected to live.

  But Platano proved to be luckier than many of his victims. Two days after the shooting, Dugan found him alert and on the mend. Although he was weak from his surgery, hooked up to tubes and barely able to speak, his doctors were optimistic. Dugan pulled up a chair. “It looks like you’re not going to make it,” the detective lied to him. “It doesn’t seem right that the person who did this to you should walk away.”

  Platano nodded, his eyes fixed on Dugan’s. “No one had the right to do this to you. Let me do my job and I’ll bring the guy in.”

  Platano continued looking at Dugan, shaking his head in agreement. “Who did this to you?” Dugan asked.

  “Frankie,” Platano whispered.

  ON A WARM DAY in early spring, Arsenault went for his daily lunch-hour jog. He’d run the New York marathon the previous November and was already training for the next race. There was a group of dedicated runners from the office who jogged the six or more miles with him, and he enjoyed their camaraderie; but he also used the time to draw back from the myopia of investigative work and to try to gain some perspective on the unit’s cases.

  He took his usual route behind the Criminal Courts building, through the paved-over Five Points intersection, once home to the city’s most notorious gangs; past the Greek Revival Mariners’ Temple, its Ionic pillars fronting Henry Street; and down Chinatown’s twisty streets to the Lower East Side. The Gheri Curls had occupied his thoughts through the winter, but increasingly the Cowboys claimed his attention. The first one in the office, Arsenault fielded the precinct reports of the preceding night’s mayhem. Invariably, he noted, the Cowboys were involved—as shooters or targets, or as friends or relations of the participants. Arsenault remembered the morning that Dugan informed him Levington “Mask” Rojas had been killed in the Three-Four. “Guess who got shot now?” Dugan had begun his report: it became the question Arsenault heard repeated, almost every day it seemed, through the next few weeks.

  Arsenault and the others with him turned down Madison Street, past two Italian social clubs, remnants from Little Italy when it spread south below Canal and east to the river. Middle-age wise guys with potbellies and portable radios sat outside on folding chairs, listening to Sinatra or Jimmy Roselli. Sweating lightly, striding easily, Arsenault fell into the unconscious rhythms of the run. His thoughts quickened as he passed through the Rutgers projects on the Lower East Side, then headed north at the river, barely noticing the crack dealers doing a brisk business in the park along the drive. The Cowboys had forced themselves on Arsenault’s attention—the sheer amount and audacity of their violence. Quinn had taken to briefing him every afternoon, and lately they’d been having a running argument over which gang was deadliest. Quinn insisted the Cowboys were the most lethal; Arsenault countered that the Spanglers had been equally violent. In fact, the Spangler posse had been larger—some three hundred strong—and with factions all over the world, they’d killed as many as fifty people, Arsenault estimated. But now, despite pride of authorship—every prosecutor thinks the gang he tried is the bloodiest—Arsenault had begun to agree with Quinn.

  It was cool and breezy by the shore, and the traffic on the river was light. Arsenault spied a police patrol boat among several yachts, and farther out one of the city’s two orange, green, and white sewage ships, trailing
seagulls. He realized he couldn’t wait any longer on the Cowboys. Despite the unit’s already overburdened agenda, he knew he had to get started.

  Arsenault picked up his pace. The ball fields where the Fire Department team practiced and cooked out flashed by on his left. He watched them for a moment fielding grounders and shagging flies, and inhaled the aroma of grilling meat. On his right, a group of old Spanish guys fished for striped bass. And looming ahead at the three-mile mark, the 14th Street fire-boat station—an enclosed pier jutting out into the water—came into view. Arsenault turned around and headed back to the office.

  Later, he stopped on the eighth floor, as he did most days, to see Nancy Ryan and update her on the unit. As always, he was impressed by her grasp of their investigations, given the number of cases, many of them already in trial, she had to keep track of. Then he confided his thoughts about the Cowboys. “This is going to be a huge case,” he told her. “The biggest one we’ve done yet.”

  Her response was simple and unhesitating. “What do you need?” she asked him.

  MEANWHILE, in the Bronx, Mark Tebbens was having problems. His informants had been more cooperative than Dugan’s, and several months before, on the basis of their statements, Tebbens had been able to lock up two of the Quad shooters, Stanley Tukes and Daniel Gonzalez. But since then Tebbens had been losing witnesses as fast as he found them, the first of whom was Chico Puentes, the small-time felon from Beekman Avenue who was the first informant to identify Platano as one of the shooters in the Quad. Having heard that Puentes was wanted for assault, Tebbens had picked him up and made a deal for his testimony in exchange for leniency. But somehow the Cowboys had gotten wind of the deal. In late January, shortly before his arrest in New Jersey, Platano, along with two other gang members, took Puentes for a ride, supposedly to have dinner at a restaurant outside the neighborhood. Instead, they stopped by the side of a quiet road, and Platano shoved the barrel of a gun in Puentes’ mouth. “This is what happens to snitches,” Platano told him, and pulled the trigger. The chambers clicked once, twice, then a third time. They were empty. But Puentes got the message, and disappeared.