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

by Stone, Michael

  THE COWBOYS continued their intimidation tactics in the wake of Michael Cruz’s shooting. A day after the incident, Elizabeth Morales, having moved with her family to a new shelter in Queens, returned with Tebbens to her Brooklyn apartment to pick up her belongings, and found it had been broken into and ransacked. Photographs of her family had been ripped from their frames and taken. A few days later, when Elizabeth was driving back to Queens after visiting her son in the hospital, she noticed a Cowboy enforcer following her, at one point writing down her license plate number. When Tebbens learned about it, he realized it was no longer safe for Elizabeth Morales or her family to remain in the city. He made arrangements through the Bronx DA’s office to move them to an apartment motel upstate.

  Around that time, the gang attacked another Quad witness, 24-year-old Raymond Jimenez. A longtime resident of Beekman Avenue, Jimenez, like many of his neighbors, made his living as a small-time scam artist—hustling, burglarizing, selling drugs. He had worked from time to time as a spot manager for the Cowboys. But he drew the line at wanton murder. Jimenez had been repulsed by the Quad, and he was one of the few witnesses who’d come freely to Tebbens and offered to testify against the shooters. Somehow the gang had found out about it, and Lamar Taylor, a local arm-breaker, confronted Jimenez with a six-inch hunting knife. Mouthing the enforcer’s mantra—“Snitches get stitches”—Taylor attempted to slash his face. Jimenez warded off the blow, but nearly lost two fingers from his right hand in the process.

  Tebbens was able to track Taylor down and arrest him on an assault charge. But as long as Lenny and Pasqualito remained at large, he knew his witness problems would continue.

  Just before Labor Day weekend, with the Quad trial about to begin, a series of events occurred that baffled even the most cynical investigators in the case. On Thursday afternoon, September 3, Benitez, along with three HIDTA detectives, apprehended Pasqualito while he was picking up receipts at a Cowboys crack spot on 141st Street, around the corner from the Hole. The arrest had been difficult. Pasqualito had resisted when the detectives tried to cuff him, wrestling with them in the street, drawing a crowd of about fifty. As the mob closed in, Pasqualito began moaning about brutality, inciting them to intervene, and some onlookers began tossing bottles and stones at the detectives, forcing Benitez to call in emergency backup.

  “What the hell’s wrong with you?” Benitez asked Pasqualito, once he got him back to the Four-Oh.

  “I’ve always got to fight,” he replied. “I don’t just give up.”

  “You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.”

  “I can handle myself,” Pasqualito said, smiling, at ease now. He seemed eager to talk. “Why the hell are you locking me up anyway?” he asked.

  “On account of the kid you shot.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pasqualito said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I’m just a cabdriver.”

  “Yeah? What are you doing with twelve hundred dollars in your pocket?” Benitez asked, referring to the wad of bills the police had taken off the burly enforcer.

  “I had a good day.”

  As it turned out, Pasqualito also had a good night. Benitez processed his arrest in the Four-Oh, then transported him to Brooklyn, where Benitez swore out a complaint for Pasqualito’s role in Michael Cruz’s shooting. Benitez was careful to inform the young recording prosecutor about the circumstances of the case: the difficulty the police had apprehending Pasqualito, the fact that Cruz was a witness in numerous murder cases, and Cruz’s importance to ongoing investigations in the Bronx and Manhattan. Benitez also notified Don Hill, who drove to the Brooklyn courthouse that night to make sure the arraignments judge understood the gravity of the arrest. Now that the Cowboy investigators had Pasqualito, they were determined not to lose him.

  But then the inexplicable happened. Not only did the judge deny the prosecution’s request for remand, but he granted Pasqualito a relatively low bail of $25,000—even though Pasqualito had just shot a government witness in the head, was a suspect in at least four other homicides, including the month-old Brooklyn murder of Papito, and belonged to a violent drug organization whose members were known to skip to the Dominican Republic.

  The Brooklyn DA’s office used an assembly-line system, breaking down cases into their constituent parts—complaint, indictment, arraignment, trial—with the youngest, least experienced assistants responsible for the early stages. The ADA who handled arraignments that night was not the ADA who took Benitez’s statement. Moreover, Hill had gone home moments before Pasqualito’s appearance, having been told by Pasqualito’s lawyer that his client was in lockup for the night and wouldn’t be produced until the following morning. But none of that altered the facts of the case that were communicated to the judge, however inexpertly, by the arraignments assistant. Eddie Benitez was shocked to discover, when he arrived at work the next day, that Pasqualito was back on the street.

  THE INFORMER

  FALL 1992

  THROUGHOUT the fall of 1992, Walter Arsenault arrived at work with a heady, pulse-quickening sense of anticipation. In October his last two Jamaican murder cases pled out, winding down what had been, by any measure, an enormously successful three-and-a-half-year campaign against Manhattan’s posses; and the Gheri Curls trial—the unit’s first big conspiracy prosecution—was slated to begin in November. With nearly twenty gang members agreeing to testify against the six top leaders and enforcers, the prospects for conviction were good. But having so many witnesses multiplied the burdens of preparation, and the stakes for HIU—in the press, in the office, and on the street—were immense.

  What’s more, the unit was suffering growing pains. Having already doubled in size since Arsenault’s arrival in 1988, HIU had begun another round of expansion in the wake of the Gheri Curls takedown. The added administrative duties were crowding Arsenault out of the courtroom, and HIU’s rising profile had triggered distractions in and out of the unit. Arsenault let Nancy Ryan handle the larger office politics—the inevitable squabbles over resources, perks, and publicity—but it was difficult to ignore the grousing in his own ranks. Some of the old-time investigators, who had worked with Hoyt, resented Arsenault’s ascendancy, and Terry Quinn, who worked closely with Arsenault, was unhappy reporting to James McVeety, the former Jade Squad sergeant whom Ryan had installed as the unit’s chief investigator.

  Adding to the ferment at the office, Arsenault was about to become a father again. His wife, Beth, a 35-year-old telephone company executive, was due to deliver a girl in February, and at inappropriate moments—while viewing crime scene photos or teasing out the details of a horrific murder for a grand jury or sitting through an arid administrative confab—Arsenault would feel an unreasonable happiness welling inside him.

  With all this going on, the Cowboys, nonetheless, were a constant presence in his thoughts. At the end of each day, Terry Quinn would stroll into Arsenault’s unkempt office and hold forth on the latest developments in the investigation. Since the end of August, Quinn had been interviewing potential cooperators, many of them gang members who’d been locked up and were looking for a deal. Much of the information he extracted was fragmented, inconsistent, exculpatory, slanted, or just plain made up. Still, Quinn, working closely with HIDTA, was gradually able to piece together a picture of the gang, its size and structure, its allies and rivals, its method of operation, its history, and many of the past crimes that contributed to its myth.

  As always, Arsenault was stunned by the sheer wealth of information Quinn had been able to gather on a group that, until recently, had been largely nameless and faceless. But two themes that troubled him emerged from the welter of detail. First, unlike the Gheri Curl leaders, none of the Cowboy bosses participated in their organization’s drug sales. Although it was exactly what he’d predicted about a gang involved in retail sales, it meant that prosecutors would have to rely on witnesses—most of them gang members themselves—to tie higher-ups like Lenny a
nd Nelson into the conspiracy. Second, it was becoming increasingly clear to Arsenault that the Cowboys really were a Bronx case, as Hill and Tebbens had been insisting all along. Based on his conversations with Hill and his supervisor, Ed Freedenthal, Arsenault was confident that their office would continue to cooperate with HIU. But Arsenault also understood that he would have very little leverage should their two agencies clash over policy later on. In short, HIU needed the Bronx far more than the Bronx needed them.

  Those caveats aside, the Cowboys were already becoming HIU’s biggest case ever. Quinn estimated that even without the Frankie Cuevas and Reuben Perez pieces, the gang numbered forty to sixty members, more than double the size of the Gheri Curls. And even those numbers underestimated the magnitude of the case. Retail drug gangs are violent by nature. Since their product is fairly standardized, their capital is their location, and their workers must be prepared to use force to repel would-be competitors from their turf, as well as to defend themselves against stickup artists and rowdy customers. Most gangs employ specialists to handle the bulk of their enforcement tasks—the contract hits and drive-bys. Like Platano, they strive to build cultlike reputations in the street that shield their organizations from vagrant attacks. Usually gangs employ one or two such enforcers, rarely more than a handful. But as far as the Cowboys were concerned, Quinn observed, “they were all shooters.”

  EVEN AGAINST that backdrop, the Cowboys’ Victor Mercedes stood out as a loose cannon. Fat Danny’s older half brother, Mercedes, 23, had grown up next door to Lenny and was one of the gang’s original members, serving as a manager-enforcer. As far back as 1987, he was rumored to have killed a rival drug dealer in the Melrose section of the Bronx and to have blown off a chunk of his own thumb while running from the scene. Then, in 1988, he gunned down another competitor in St. Mary’s Park, wounding him in the arm. More recently, he’d fired the shot that set off the Double, the blatant, public executions in 1989 that solidified the Cowboys’ hold over Beekman Avenue and led a month later to Mercedes’ arrest and jailing by Mark Tebbens. Although he spent nearly two years in prison until his release in 1991, after the witnesses in his case disappeared or recanted their testimony, the experience had done little to curb his appetite for gunplay. Just two months after his release on October 18, he fired a bullet into the leg of Michael Turner, a reputed drug dealer visiting Cypress Avenue. Neither Turner nor his cousin, who witnessed the shooting, would file complaints against Mercedes, but three weeks later, Mercedes copped a plea in his still-pending 1988 case and returned to jail, where Quinn found him in August 1992.

  Short and stocky, with a pumped-up prison physique and sullen, shifty demeanor, Mercedes was not a promising interview subject. But as Quinn quickly discovered, Mercedes was nursing grudges against several of the Cowboys and could not resist taking shots at them. He blamed the Quad on Platano, Stanley Tukes, Nelson, who he told Quinn had fled to the Dominican Republic, and a fourth individual Quinn had not heard of before named Tezo.

  Mercedes talked about several other murders as well, including the Compusano and Mask homicides, which he claimed was the work of Frankie Cuevas. But he seemed to reserve a special animus for Tezo. According to Mercedes, Tezo had shot and killed a small-time weed dealer known as El Gordo in Washington Heights the previous fall on Halloween night. Quinn had been tracking the homicide, which he suspected was linked to the Cowboys through Reuben Perez, El Gordo’s competitor in the marijuana business. Until now, however, Quinn had been unable to identify the shooter, who had worn a Halloween mask. Of course, Mercedes might be lying, implicating Tezo in crimes that actually he or one of the other gang members had committed. But Mercedes’ description of Tezo matched the one in police reports: a tall, slim, dark-skinned Dominican, 23 or 24 years old, with a “fade” hairstyle.

  Quinn began a search for the new suspect. Mercedes thought that Tezo’s real first name was Rafael, and he recalled that he’d recently been arrested with Lenny’s brother-in-law, Rafael Fernandez, in a car stop near the 207th Street Bridge in the Heights. But Quinn’s initial efforts to find him were unsuccessful.

  As it turned out, Quinn was not the only one looking for Tezo. Richard Gwillym, a Brooklyn detective investigating the July 14 murder of Papito, was also searching for the lanky young man, who, according to witnesses, had pointed out Papito to Pasqualito, just before the Cowboy enforcer fired six shots into his chest. Gwillym didn’t even know Tezo’s street name—his informants referred to him as Flaco—but he learned that earlier that summer Tezo, or Flaco, had opened up a spot in the area with a partner named Ramon Madrigal, whom Papito had caused to be arrested. In a nifty piece of police work, Gwillym got hold of Madrigal’s arrest folder and discovered that his bail had been posted by Rafael Perez. Was this Flaco? Then Gwillym ran Perez’ name through the Bureau of Criminal Investigation records, and found that on July 21—just a week after Papito’s murder—Perez had been arrested for possession of nearly 400 vials of crack and an AK-47 in the Three-Four, not far from the 207th Street Bridge. Gwillym figured this must be his man. Perez’ record indicated that he had a court date on September 11 in Manhattan. Gwillym decided to arrest him when he arrived.

  In one of those odd coincidences that often befall law enforcement, Gwillym bumped into Terry Quinn in the lobby of the Criminal Courts building on the morning he went to arrest Tezo. Gwillym had worked for Quinn on a Manhattan task force in the mid-1980s. The two men exchanged pleasantries, and Gwillym mentioned his current mission to collar Perez. At the time, Gwillym didn’t know Perez was called Tezo, and Quinn had no idea that Tezo was Perez.

  Back in Brooklyn, however, after arresting Perez, Gwillym called the Three-Four to get some background on Tezo prior to questioning him. Gwillym was referred to Garry Dugan, who just that afternoon had discovered Tezo’s identity. (Dugan had run Rafael Fernandez’ rap sheet and found he’d been arrested with Tezo, just as Victor Mercedes had told Quinn that he would.) Dugan told Gwillym to contact Quinn. When Quinn heard the news, he gathered up Rather and Mark Tebbens and headed over to the Six-Oh in the Coney Island section of Brooklyn, where Tezo was being held.

  The Brooklyn prosecutors were hardly thrilled to see the Manhattan contingent, and kept them at bay for four and a half hours, while they conducted their own interviews with Tezo. Finally, around 3 A.M., Gwillym made Tezo available to Rather and Quinn. But it was worth the wait. While the investigators didn’t feel they had enough solid evidence against Tezo to confront him with the Quad or the Halloween murder, Tezo was voluble on a broad range of subjects, including the Papito homicide, which he ascribed to Pasqualito.

  Tezo had known Lenny from the Heights for ten years and had started working for him about a year ago as his driver and aide. With an insider’s knowledge of the gang, he was able to provide the investigators with much more detail about its operation. Lenny, he confirmed, was the gang’s boss, and Nelson, his brother, his second-in-command. Platano was the gang’s chief enforcer, but Pasqualito had taken his place since Platano’s arrest. Jimmy Montalvo, a 300-pound Dominican known as Heavy D because of his uncanny resemblance to the eponymous rap singer, was the general manager of Lenny’s spots. Other high-ranking managers included Rennie Harris, who ran their Red-Top spot, and Frankie Robles, who managed Orange-Top.

  The gang cooked up their crack 100 grams at a time in coffeepots in an apartment on Sedgwick Avenue and 183rd Street in the Bronx. Three to four workers did the packaging, and then a transporter named Mikie brought the “bundles” to Heavy D, who distributed them as needed to several sales spots in the Beekman Avenue area. Confirming the estimates of other informants, Tezo calculated that the business, which operated continuously, grossed $30,000 per day.

  Tezo was also able to provide background on Lenny’s war with Frankie Cuevas. He told them that the two men had been associates until Cuevas tried to take over Lenny’s spots while Lenny was in jail and that Lenny retaliated by ordering Platano to kill Cuevas. This was familiar ground to the investigators.
But Tezo added a new wrinkle. Platano had indeed set up Cuevas’ execution by paying off Gilbert Compusano to give him the address of Cuevas’ cocaine supplier and the time of his next pickup. Then he’d hired out the contract to a hit man known as Freddy Krueger.

  Neither Quinn nor the other detectives had heard of Krueger. Tezo told them he was notorious within the Washington Heights community, feared even more than Platano. Krueger, Tezo said, worked for a big weight dealer in the West 160s who was closely allied with Lenny. But there was another reason why Krueger did the hit, Tezo explained. Cuevas had given Krueger’s boss a “bad package” a couple of years ago and didn’t make up for it. Krueger’s boss—whom Quinn later discovered was Jose Reyes, or El Feo—had wanted to kill Cuevas then, but Lenny had intervened. Now all bets were off.

  Quinn was taken aback. As if their investigation wasn’t complicated enough with Cuevas’ and Lenny’s gangs, now a third drug organization had entered the picture, along with someone purportedly more lethal than Platano. How many bodies would they find this time? And who was Freddy Krueger?

  Quinn reasoned that if Krueger was even half as infamous as Tezo claimed, other informants would know about him as well, and he’d almost certainly have had some contact with the law. Mark Tebbens recalled a Red-Top manager named Freddie Sendra who fit Tezo’s description of Krueger. He’d been arrested on Beekman Avenue a few years back for shooting at police. But when Tebbens pulled Sendra’s record, he saw that Sendra was still in prison serving out a seven-year sentence: he couldn’t have been the shooter in the March attempt on Cuevas.

  Nevertheless, Rather wanted Sendra brought in. His highest priority was to talk to former gang members and top-ranking managers who could give him some perspective on the Cowboys. “We were looking at each individual event: How did it relate?” Rather recalls. “We’d start to see patterns, like a jigsaw puzzle. The first pieces were Cargill, the Quad. Sometimes we’d get pieces from another puzzle, like the ballplayer shooting, or the Chicken Store murder, where Platano was supposed to have killed a 13-year-old girl. Then there were the drive-bys and the shootings around Frankie Cuevas and Gilbert Compusano.