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

by Stone, Michael

  Morales didn’t know whom to appeal to. Ramon Madrigal, one of the local managers, told her to speak to Platano, and offered to get a message through to him for her. Platano, after all, had been a regular at her apartment, and everyone knew he had a crush on her youngest daughter, Iris. But by the end of the day, she hadn’t heard from him. Finally Chumpy returned, advising her to leave immediately. “Don’t take anything with you or they’ll know you’re leaving. They’ve already decided that even if you return the drugs, they’re going to make an example out of you.”

  TEBBENS FOUND that the Cruz-Morales family were hardly ideal witnesses. Elizabeth was sly, cantankerous, at times profane; and her children were street kids—wild, defensive, barely articulate, and full of attitude. But they had been living on Beekman Avenue since before Lenny and Nelson opened their first location, and they knew all the Cowboys and the inside workings of their operation. Elizabeth had stashed the gun that Lenny used in the Double. Michael had closed down the Hole on orders from Platano a half hour before the Quad, and he’d seen Pasqualito’s partner, Daniel Rincon, handing out weapons to the shooters in the hallway of 348 Beekman. More important, his younger brother Joey, who’d witnessed eight murders by the time he was 14, had seen the entire incident from the street and was ready to testify that Platano was one of the shooters.

  With the Cruz-Morales family as witnesses, Tebbens was finally ready to go to the Bronx DA with his case.

  BUMPS IN THE ROAD

  SPRING 1992

  WHEN TEBBENS took the Quad case to the Bronx DA back in January, it was treated as a multiple homicide and assigned to an assistant named Cindy Elan-Mangano. Elan-Mangano, 32 years old, was a solid prosecutor whose record of convictions had earned her a promotion to deputy bureau chief. But she was also pregnant, and didn’t feel she could undertake a long, arduous and dangerous investigation. After meeting with the Cruz-Morales family and indicting Platano, she begged off the case, and it was transferred to Ed Freedenthal, the chief of narcotics investigations. Freedenthal assigned the case in mid-May to Don Hill, whose steady, low-key competence made him the best choice to head up the investigation. With a long, boxy face, heavy-framed glasses, and receding hairline, Hill, in his mid-thirties, projected an aura of solemnity and order. But although he was fair-minded and unpretentious, beneath his placid surface he could in fact be something of a hothead. Colleagues were used to his slow burns, his stiff-necked resistance when pushed too far. It was the kind of fire and grit that would serve him well in handling a difficult and complex assignment like the Quad murder case.

  When Hill first read through the case file, he realized just how weak his position was. There was no physical evidence linking any of the defendants to the crime. The witnesses against two of the defendants, Stanley Tukes and Daniel Gonzalez, were criminals themselves. And the witnesses against Platano—namely, several members of the Cruz-Morales family—were no more presentable. Nearly everyone in the family had worked for the gang, and despite their mother’s efforts, the boys had dropped out of school. With their street accents, they would be difficult to understand, and even when understood, barely credible. He knew they were also extremely wary about testifying. Elizabeth Morales had approached Tebbens with trepidation, desperate to protect her family; and though the detective had managed to gain the family’s trust, it was a limited trust that did not extend to the DA’s office.

  What’s more, Elan-Mangano had compounded these flaws in her deposition taking. Trial attorneys usually debrief difficult witnesses extensively, making sure their statements are consistent and free of errors and embellishment before committing them to paper. Even the most reliable and cooperative witnesses usually require some preparation to sort out the vagaries of memory. But Elan-Mangano was concerned about the Cruz-Morales family. At one time heavily involved in the drug trade, they seemed jittery and unreliable, likely to disappear or recant their statements if the Cowboys got to them with threats or inducements; and Elan-Mangano was eager to memorialize their testimony as quickly as possible, even at the risk of creating an inconsistent record later on. As a result, she had a stenographer take down the Cruz-Morales family’s statements without much preparation, then allowed them to testify in a like manner before a grand jury in order to indict Stanley Tukes, Daniel Gonzalez, and Platano. Reviewing the minutes of their testimony, Hill shuddered. They read like a mixture of street myth and rap stories, told more for effect than accuracy. The witnesses contradicted themselves and each other, as well as earlier statements they had given to Tebbens. A good defense lawyer would have a field day with them on cross-examination, using them not only to impeach the witnesses’ testimony but to undermine the prosecution’s credibility.

  Hill did what he could to stanch the damage, spending hours with Elizabeth Morales and her children, gently probing their stories and putting them at ease. But the family’s earlier testimony was irreversible; and in his haste to indict a fourth suspect, Daniel Rincon, a top-ranking Cowboy known as Fat Danny, he put two of the Cruz-Morales children before the grand jury, adding still more inconsistencies to the record.

  Fourteen-year-old Joey Morales, for example, tended to be melodramatic. He claimed one of the shooters used a “street sweeper,” a type of shotgun, which put him at variance with his sister Iris’ testimony and with the ballistics recovered at the scene. He also named as suspects Cowboy gang members who Hill was fairly certain were not involved. And at times he placed himself on top of the action; at other times crouching behind a car on the opposite side of the street. None of these errors were fatal to Joey’s credibility, and once Hill convinced him to stop trying to make the case and just tell the truth, he returned to the story that he’d originally told Tebbens and that matched the particulars by and large of the other witnesses. But Hill knew that Joey was going to get hammered on cross-examination, and there was little he could do about it.

  Hill almost overlooked a note in the case file requesting that he call Dan Rather at the Manhattan DA’s office. When Hill phoned him several days later, he learned from Rather that his investigation of the Quad murders and HIU’s investigation of the Cowboy gang overlapped. Rather encouraged Hill to consider working together. But Hill had all he could do to prepare for the upcoming trial of the Quad case, and he wasn’t much interested in Manhattan’s fledgling conspiracy case.

  HIU WAS HAVING its own troubles developing its case against the Cowboys. The heart of their case was the gang’s drug conspiracy, the multimillion-dollar crack-selling business that had already sparked dozens of murders, shootings, and assaults. As a result of his investigation into the Cargill murder, Dugan had created files on some of the Cowboys’ main players: Lenny, Nelson, and Platano; explored their tangled relations to the Cuevas crew, to whom he’d linked the Madonna, Compusano, and Platano shootings; and looked into Raymond Polanco, who Dugan knew had supplied guns to both Cuevas and Lenny. And Tebbens, in locking up three of the shooters in the Quad murders, had identified a number of the Cowboys’ top managers, and illuminated some aspects of their drug-selling activities in and around Beekman Avenue.

  But so far, neither Dugan nor Tebbens had been able to prove a connection between those activities and, Platano excepted, any of the Cowboy leaders; and HIU, busy with the Gheri Curls investigation, had not contributed much to the case. Rather had collated information gleaned from Dugan’s and Tebbens’ investigations, and along with Quinn had undertaken some preliminary intelligence gathering—reading through unsolved homicide files, looking for links to the Cowboys; ordering up rap sheets on known gang members; and putting together a photo book for use when questioning informants.

  But both Rather and Arsenault knew that penetrating the upper levels of the gang would entail a long, resource-intensive narcotics investigation—including video surveillance, undercover buys, and the execution of warrants on stash apartments and crack kitchens. Moreover, Arsenault knew that HIU didn’t have the manpower to undertake that kind of investigation on its own. With only s
ix full-time detectives, and at least three open cases in addition to the Gheri Curls, the unit simply had no one to spare. In the past, they’d recruited partners from other agencies to carry out these operations. Arsenault had teamed up with federal ATF agents when he targeted the Jamaicans. More recently in the Gheri Curls and several other cases, HIU had successfully joined forces with a team of NYPD detectives from the federally sponsored HIDTA (High-Intensity Drug-Trafficking Area) program. Arsenault wanted to reenlist HIDTA in the Cowboy case, and the HIDTA detectives were eager to continue working with HIU. But the NYPD wanted their elite teams such as HIDTA making cases that produced either large amounts of cocaine powder or numerous arrests—the kind of arrests that got the police on the local news as a result of a raid that confiscated ten or twenty or more kilos, or a “street sweep” that netted fifty or a hundred collars in a weekend. The sight of mountains of intercepted cocaine or dozens of drug dealers being hauled off in paddy wagons made community leaders feel like something was being done, even if the cocaine represented a fraction of current supplies, and even if the dealers were fungible, low-level workers, many of whom would be back on the street within days.

  Retail crack gangs that sold to the public, such as the Cowboys, rarely kept much cocaine on hand. Though they might sell hundreds of kilos over the course of a year, they bought and marketed their product in small amounts and rarely had more than a kilo in their possession at any one time. What’s more, locking up gang leaders like Lenny or Nelson, who insulated themselves from their organization’s street operations, entailed extraordinary risks and could easily tie up the unit for six months or a year. Over a year’s time, other narcotics units often generated hundreds of arrests. The fact that these gang leaders were responsible for numerous murders and shootings was beside the point for a narcotics division; credit for arrests in those cases were given, in accordance with police procedure, to the precinct detectives who had originally worked on the investigations.

  Finally, there was the never-ending issue of turf. HIU cases were run out of the DA’s office, not the NYPD’s 1 Police Plaza. Even though HIDTA operated autonomously in the field, and HIU was careful to credit them as full partners in press releases and at press conferences, there was no doubt among the media or law enforcement that when they worked with HIU, Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau was calling the shots. After working four investigations under the auspices of the DA’s office, Charles Rorke, the NYPD lieutenant in charge of HIDTA team No. 3, was under pressure to initiate cases of his own.

  Arsenault was in a bind. He could, of course, reach out to other agencies or to other units within the police. But developing a good working relationship with detectives as talented as Rorke’s HIDTA team would not be easy. Moreover, the Cowboys—as a result of their escalating war with Frankie Cuevas—demanded attention. Throughout the spring the two factions had clashed with increasingly violent results. In the weeks after Platano’s April 14 shooting, Cowboy enforcers repeatedly drove by Cuevas’ spot at the corner of Watson and Manor, spraying the area with gunfire. Once, Cuevas’ men were waiting for them. They piled into two cars and chased the Cowboy gunmen through the Bronx and back to Washington Heights, where the two crews squared off at 181st Street and Fort Washington Park. Remarkably only one person was wounded in the ensuing firefight, though police later recovered more than sixty shell casings.

  Three days later, a group of gun-wielding Cowboy associates barged into Cuevas’ restaurant, the Veinte de Mayo, after midnight looking for the gang leader. The gunmen forced ten people down to the basement, then set the place on fire, locking the doors behind them. The hostages managed to escape by throwing chairs through the plate-glass storefront, narrowly averting a catastrophe. Called to the scene, police exchanged gunfire with the fleeing Cowboys at 181st Street and Amsterdam. But they broke off their pursuit after one cop took a bullet in the foot.

  Meanwhile, the gang continued to raid Cuevas’ drug spot. One day in May, they shot six people, one of them, a bystander, fatally. A month later they shot eight people, killing another.

  Faced with the spiraling violence and fed up with HIDTA’s vacillations, Rather decided to reach out to a joint DEA-NYPD narcotics task force called Redrum (“murder” spelled backward). Part of a federally funded program that targeted violent drug gangs in key cities, Redrum seemed like the perfect unit to partner with HIU. But when Rather talked to Arsenault about them, Arsenault expressed reservations. Although Redrum’s New York unit had just been set up, the program had been operating for some time in Washington, D.C., and Arsenault’s sources told him they were more flash than substance—a lot of high-profile arrests and low-profile acquittals. Moreover, Arsenault was still hoping HIDTA would sign on. He told Rather to set up a meeting with Redrum, but not to make them any promises.

  The meeting Rather arranged with Redrum took place at HIU in early summer. In addition to Rather, Arsenault and Terry Quinn sat in. From the start it was clear that the units held widely different philosophies. Redrum’s agents wouldn’t do inside buys, meaning the Hole was out of bounds. Instead they wanted to develop the conspiracy case using wiretaps. It was a clean, safe approach, with no messy surveillance or undercover work. And by letting gang leaders incriminate themselves with their own words, it obviated the need for skittish, suspect witnesses. But Arsenault felt that, besides being extremely labor-intensive, wiretaps were a lot less effective in dealing with retail organizations like the Cowboys. While they were fine for investigating the Mafia or big drug importers and wholesalers, “street gangs, almost by definition, do most of their business standing around on the corner.”

  Arsenault’s approach to gang investigations at HIU was to get as close to the action as possible. Typically, that meant doing video surveillance and using undercover detectives to make recorded buys, then arresting lower-level workers and managers and getting them to tie the leaders and top enforcers into the conspiracy. Nothing, in Arsenault’s opinion, persuaded a gang member to cooperate faster than seeing himself selling drugs on TV. And no evidence was more convincing to a juror than a tape that showed defendants actually committing the crimes they were charged with. “Our approach was down and dirty,” Arsenault would say later. “The more violent the people are, the closer to the street they are. We feel that to get those people, we have to stay close to the street, to do buys instead of wiretaps, to get out from behind the desk, not sit in an office following paper trails, listening to phone calls.”

  One of the Redrum agents claimed that you couldn’t do video surveillance in Washington Heights. “Bullshit,” Quinn responded. Arsenault later explained: “There was an old canard among some detectives in the Three-Oh and Three-Four that the neighborhoods were too close-knit to bring in men and equipment without being detected. But I knew it could be done. Hell, we’d done it in our last four cases. Of course, you couldn’t just drive onto the block in a shiny new air-conditioned van, which was how the Feds liked to do surveillance. It took a little imagination. In the Super-King Bodega investigation—another Dominican crack case we were working on—our undercovers rented an apartment across the street from the target location. Quinn used to get to and from the observation post dressed up as an old woman, complete with wig and cane.”

  More irksome to Arsenault and Quinn was Redrum’s hubris. Somehow they’d got the impression that the case was already theirs, and with a typical federal attitude they were telling HIU what they were going to do. “The way it usually worked with HIDTA was when they were using their undercover, they called the shots; and when it was our undercover on the line, we were in charge,” according to Arsenault. “But even when they had the final say, we liked to think we had some influence on who they targeted and how and when they took them down. Basically Redrum was saying to us: ‘We’ll take the case and see you in a year.’” It was clear to Arsenault the two agencies could never work together.

  Unfortunately, Dan Rather came away from the meeting with a different impression. He thought the negot
iations had gone well enough, and told the Redrum agents that he would be in touch with them shortly. Clearly, Rather, who was heading the investigation, and Arsenault, who ran the unit, were not on the same page. A few days later Charles Rorke called Arsenault; HIDTA was ready to go forward with the investigation. The two men agreed on the spot to work together. Rather was taken aback when he heard the news. He was embarrassed at having to go back to Redrum without an offer, but more to the point, he felt he’d been left out of the decision-making process in a matter critical to his case.

  Arsenault had never concealed his preference for using HIDTA, and Rather would also have favored the HIDTA team, had he known they were available. But the misunderstanding pointed to the uneasy relations between Rather and Arsenault, which continued to fester under the surface. Since his arrival at HIU in January, Rather had felt unwelcome. Shunted off to a desk in the squad room, he had to wait months for an office. He was assigned to help Fernando Camacho prepare for the Gheri Curls trial, and told not to work on any new cases of his own—even though he’d come to HIU specifically to expand an auto-theft-ring investigation he’d been working on. At one point he felt that he was the target of a bizarre hazing ritual. Rather felt that when Arsenault dismissed Redrum, by extension he had dismissed Rather himself.

  Whether Rather’s grievances were real or imagined, they went unnoticed by the rest of the unit. Not only were they unaware of any tension between Rather and Arsenault, they thought the two men had hit it off well together. Arsenault’s injunction against opening new cases applied to all the unit’s prosecutors—HIU’s investigators were simply jammed up at the time. Moreover, Arsenault had assigned one of HIU’s biggest cases to Rather within weeks of his arrival.

  Nonetheless, Rather was stung by Arsenault’s decision to go with HIDTA. The fact that his chief seemed oblivious or, worse, indifferent to his mounting dissatisfaction only sharpened his sense of estrangement. His frustration would come back to haunt the Cowboy case in the months ahead.