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

by Stone, Michael

  Hill did what he could. He compiled a list of the incidents of witness intimidation and made ex parte reports to Globerman; and he prevailed on the judge to conduct sealed hearings and issue protective orders. But he realized that sooner or later the Cowboys would deduce the identities of the witnesses they didn’t already know, and that one more serious reprisal would send them all fleeing for cover.

  COLLARED

  WINTER 1992–93

  DON HILL had always tried to separate his professional and personal lives. He rarely discussed his cases with his wife, Janelle, a 32-year-old software consultant, and never in front of his daughters, Katie, four, and Ellen, two. If he brought home work—cases to read, briefs to prepare—he waited until after the children had gone to bed before getting started.

  Hill lived on West 110th Street near Columbia University in a turn-of-the-century two-bedroom apartment. Most evenings, he managed to get home by 6 P.M., when he would shower, change into sweat pants and a T-shirt, and play with his daughters until his wife returned from late rounds of food shopping. Dinner was a ritual in the Hill household. Hill and his wife rarely ate out; they made a point of sitting down with the girls over a home-cooked meal. “We were trying to impose our own ethos on Manhattan,” Hill says. “We were trying to create a slower, more easy life.”

  Lately, however, that had become impossible to do. The extremes of the Quad case—the attacks on witnesses, the legal morass, the chilling particulars of the crime itself—simply didn’t chime with the rest of his life. He couldn’t fully decompress when he came home to his children, and he felt raw and emotional when he returned to work the next morning.

  The day he prepped Chico Puentes, Tebbens’ first eyewitness to the Quad, marked a turning point in Hill’s handling of the case. A small-time hustler, Chico had made a deal to cooperate, then disappeared after Platano stuck a gun in his mouth and dry-fired it repeatedly. He resurfaced after Platano’s arrest, and Tebbens held him to his promise to testify in the upcoming trial. Hill, however, wasn’t thrilled to see Puentes. He made a poor witness. A street kid with a record and an attitude, he was often contrary, and Hill couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. It took the prosecutor nearly an hour to get him to listen to his questions.

  Still, Hill felt sorry for him. They spent most of the morning going over Puentes’ childhood—his alcoholic and abusive mother, the way he’d slip out onto the fire escape to avoid beatings. He hadn’t had much of a chance. Slight, no more than five-five or five-six, with sallow skin, pouty lips, and a crew cut, Puentes was hardly twenty, although his face looked forty from the wear of street life.

  At lunchtime, Hill ordered Puentes a sandwich, then raced by subway to his elder daughter’s school in upper Manhattan, arriving just in time to see her in her Christmas pageant. The contrast between Chico’s childhood recollections and the soft-lit, innocent faces in front of him jabbed at Hill.

  In the afternoon Hill and Puentes sorted through the Quad. No matter how many times Hill heard the story, it still got to him, and Puentes had a way of using body language to make the details even more graphic. That day he acted out the narrative, cocking his hand as if it were a pistol, jamming it under Hill’s chin in imitation of the fatal shootings. At times like that, Hill had no trouble imagining Chico in Platano’s or Stanley Tukes’s place.

  That night, Hill pursued his usual routine at home. He showered off the Bronx; changed into sweats; boiled water for spaghetti; and read to his daughters. But even as he undertook these simple, prayer-like tasks, images of the day’s events kept cycling through his thoughts: Chico’s grimacing face as he reenacted the Quad, the victims—Cynthia Casado lying in the street, clutching a vial of crack like a vanished dream; Manuel Vera crumpled in a doorway, shot fourteen times—and Chico again, younger now, huddled in the alley behind his apartment, waiting out the wrath of his mother.

  Hill’s elder daughter, Katie, was pressed against his back, and Ellie stretched out on the floor, absorbed in the exploits of Pat the Bunny; but Hill was thinking about Chico, peeling back layers of his short rude life, imagining him as a child, a teenager. That made him think about the Cruz-Morales boys, Joey and Michael—were they any different now than Chico had been at their age? And how great a leap was it from Chico to Nelson or Lenny? The lines among them blurred. Where do you reach the point where a troubled kid becomes a dangerous adult? Who’s responsible? More important, how do you fix it?

  Hill had no answers to these questions, the same ones he’d been asking in one form or another since becoming a prosecutor. But now they’d invaded the calm and privacy of his home, the world he’d built to cushion his children—and himself, he realized—from the rigors of his work. The case was spinning beyond his control. And so he made a decision that night he knew would derail the trial.

  Hill filed a motion that asked the court to take extraordinary measures to shield the identities of his witnesses—to allow them to testify anonymously, in some instances with masks on and voices disguised. His papers described a clear pattern of witness intimidation by the Cowboys, implicating some of the defendants’ lawyers in the gang’s campaign. Benjamin Green, the brother of one of the victims in the case, the motion noted, had recanted his statements to police in the offices of one of Stanley Tukes’s lawyers and Hill’s papers charged that one of Platano’s attorneys was the suspected go-between in a $15,000 bribe offer made to another witness, Janice Bruington.

  Hill understood that the motion would effectively disqualify some of the defendants’ lawyers from litigating the case—indeed the impugned lawyers immediately resigned—and delay the start of the trial for at least several months. Moreover, he knew that his office barely had the resources to protect his witnesses now, and that any substantial postponement would force him to reach out for help from another agency, HIU or perhaps even the Feds. But he felt a responsibility to make the strongest argument possible on behalf of those witnesses who wished to remain anonymous in order to ensure their safety.

  The day after Hill filed the motion, he and Ed Freedenthal journeyed to Manhattan to meet with HIU to discuss joining forces and enfolding the Quad in HIU’s conspiracy case.

  The meeting between the two boroughs’ DAs went smoothly. Arsenault gave Hill and Freedenthal HIU’s pitch, but the Bronx prosecutors had already decided to throw in their lot with the unit. Nor did they require written agreements, memos, or detailed discussions of procedure. Having met with Arsenault several times during the investigation, they had been impressed by his candor and expertise. They merely wanted to make sure that the Bronx would be an equal partner in the case and that the Quad would not be given short shrift in favor of Cargill. In particular, they wanted guarantees that Fat Danny and Pasqualito would be locked up at the first opportunity. That they were roaming free in the Bronx was an affront to Hill, as well as a grave risk to his witnesses.

  Arsenault, for his part, was happy to agree to the Bronx’s conditions—terms that seemed more than reasonable under the circumstances. Despite HIU’s attempts to link the Cowboys’ illegal activities to Manhattan, it was now clear that the gang operated outside the unit’s normal jurisdiction. In fact, with the exception of Cargill and the two Brooklyn shootings, virtually all the violent crimes in the case, as well as the crack sales, had occurred in the Bronx. “If [Hill and Freedenthal] hadn’t come to us, I doubt there would have been a Cowboy case,” Arsenault says. “If we had tried to do the conspiracy without them, we wouldn’t have had any overt acts, and we wouldn’t have had the leverage to flip the people we did.”

  With the Bronx on board, HIU’s investigation ballooned. Overnight their case gained six homicides, and they inherited a wealth of new informants and witnesses. But Arsenault, looking ahead, was troubled. In previous cases, he’d learned the importance of locking up main targets—the so-called must-haves—as early as possible. The timing of these arrests was always tricky. Move too soon and you risked tipping your hand to the rest of the gang and scuttling an i
nvestigation prematurely. Wait too long, however, and the leaders might get wary and take off. The last thing you wanted to do was try a gang’s low-and mid-level workers without their bosses. But of the Cowboys’ hierarchy, only Platano was in jail. All the other leaders were at large and in a position to flee. Nelson, according to several CIs, had already absconded to the Dominican Republic and was not expected to return. Fat Danny and Pasqualito were out on bail and, at least for the moment, untouchable. And Lenny, who was in the city and wanted on several charges—the Double and Michael Cruz’s shooting among them—had so far eluded the authorities.

  Cowboy investigators had been tracking Lenny throughout the fall and early winter. They’d set up surveillance on Cypress Avenue in the Bronx, where he’d last been seen fleeing from Tebbens; on the West 171st Street block in Manhattan, where his family lived and the gang occasionally hung out; and at a luxury apartment building near Shea Stadium in Queens, where, according to an informant, Lenny was living with his wife and daughter. But Lenny knew he was being hunted and took evasive measures. He rarely went out, avoided old haunts when he did, and mediated his calls through a trusted lieutenant.

  Then, at noon on February 4, Lenny took everyone by surprise.

  “THEY JUST CALLED from the courtroom,” Dan Rather yelled over to Quinn. “Lenny’s there. Let’s go, let’s go.” Rather was poised at the entrance to the squad room, his jacket half on. Quinn didn’t ask him for details. He knew that Lenny, along with Pasqualito, had been scheduled to appear in court that day—in a gun case stemming from their August 4 car chase with Anti-Crime cops in the Three-Four. And Quinn was reasonably sure that Lenny’s lawyer had told Lenny he could get the charges against him dismissed, if Lenny would just appear. Still, Quinn hadn’t expected Lenny to actually show up at the Criminal Courts building. He’d spent the last six months dodging the police, and he’d ignored a series of court dates leading up to now.

  But then Quinn hadn’t reckoned with Lenny’s disdain for the system.

  Although Lenny knew that Bronx detective Mark Tebbens was after him, possibly for the Quad or the Brooklyn shooting of Michael Cruz, he had no idea that Manhattan was tracking him as well. In Lenny’s experience, the police were parochial and almost blindly bureaucratic. They seemed to have little knowledge of, and even less interest in, what happened in the next precinct over, much less in another borough. For years Lenny and his cohorts had tilted with law enforcement, tendering false identities, as Platano did in New Jersey, and employing lawyers schooled in the vagaries of the system; and the authorities had rarely connected the obvious dots in the gang’s records to discover the true nature and extent of their criminal activities. And he had no reason to believe the police were about to now. As far as he knew, the Three-Four cops who’d arrested him on the gun charge were ignorant of his operation on Beekman Avenue, and neither Lenny nor his lawyer suspected that Rather, who was handling the gun case, had any interest in Lenny beyond that charge. Ironically, Lenny felt safer from arrest in Manhattan Criminal Court than he did on the streets of the Bronx. This time, however, he’d miscalculated.

  Sitting with Pasqualito, his co-defendant, in the gallery, Lenny noticed several court officers eye them. When Pasqualito stood up to use the bathroom, one of them waved him back down, announcing that the courtroom was temporarily closed. Lenny confided his suspicions to Pasqualito, and as soon as the bailiff turned his back, they scrambled out to the hall. With several officers in pursuit, they headed toward the south stairwell. As Pasqualito hustled down to the lobby, Lenny, surmising that the cops would follow Pasqualito, ascended to the third floor.

  Meanwhile Quinn, accompanied by his case officer, Bobby Tarwacki, and another investigator, hurried after Rather, past banks of geriatric elevators, down thirteen flights of stairs to the second-floor courtroom where Lenny had been spotted. He wasn’t there. Cursing, Quinn ran over to the mezzanine railing and, looking down, saw a commotion at the south end of the lobby. A phalanx of white-shirted officers were leading a burly young man back into the building. Quinn and Tarwacki met them at the head of the stairs and checked out their prisoner. “That’s Pasqualito,” Tarwacki told the officers. “You can let him go.”

  “Shit, where’s fucking Lenny?” Quinn said, certain they’d lost him again. He began checking the building exits.

  “He’s up there,” Tarwacki shouted. Quinn followed Tarwacki’s eyes to the mezzanine and glimpsed Lenny limping along the railing. A blue neoprene cast extended the length of his leg, a souvenir, no doubt, from his scuffle with Tebbens in August. Quinn and his men bolted back up the stairs, mounting the steps two, three at a time.

  Lenny was trapped. As soon as he’d exited on the third floor, he’d begun looking for a way out. He knew he only had moments before the officers caught Pasqualito and began looking for him. He’d hobbled past the elevators on his left—too slow—then headed for the stairwell at the opposite end of the hall. He’d planned to double back to the mezzanine, check out the lobby, and if the way was clear, escape through the portals at the north end of the building. He’d got as far as the second-floor landing when an alert officer spotted him and began herding him back toward the courtroom he’d just escaped.

  Tarwacki got to Lenny first, pushed him brusquely against the wall, and began cuffing him. A moment later Quinn was at Lenny’s other side, and it was all over. When Quinn saw Lenny’s lawyer striding toward them from the courtroom, and felt Lenny stiffen, he decided to send the gang leader a message. Crooking his knuckle into the shape of a gun barrel, he slipped it between Lenny’s buttocks. “I ain’t playing wit’ you,” Quinn whispered into Lenny’s ear. “If you try to run, I’ll blow your nuts off.”

  IN ALL HER YEARS at the Brooklyn DA’s, her colleagues had rarely seen Lori Grifa take a step backward. She worked punishing hours, took every case that came her way, and never let herself be intimidated.

  Strikingly attractive with raven hair, smooth olive skin, and a lithe, athletic body, she leavened even her harshest attacks with an easy, knowing humor. “Lori takes her cases seriously,” Dawn Adelson, Grifa’s former trial partner at the DA’s office, says. “Not herself.”

  Still, Grifa’s hard-charging style had earned her her share of detractors. They viewed her candor as aggression, her exuberance as ambition; and it didn’t help that she had a knack for cultivating mentors among the male-dominated senior staff.

  But none of her colleagues doubted her abilities as a prosecutor. She was a shrewd assessor of cases who knew when to cut her losses and take a plea, and for all her feistiness, was cool and precise in front of a jury. “She wasn’t a showboat,” says Joseph Alexis, who later worked with her in the Homicide Bureau. “She didn’t try to be spontaneous or to turn a fancy phrase. She relied on preparation.”

  Nobody outworked Grifa. She switched on the office lights at the start of the day and flicked them off well after dark. But it was her activities outside the office that distinguished her. Grifa learned early on in her tenure that police were a scarce resource at the DA’s office. In the Police Department’s view, once an officer had made an arrest in a case, his job was done. What happened after that was the prosecutor’s responsibility. The problem with this kind of assembly-line justice was that the standard of proof needed for an arrest was often shy of the standard required for a conviction, and some cops, trained to get violent subjects off the street as quickly as possible, played a forensic version of Name That Tune: I can arrest this guy on just two scraps of evidence. Just getting a cop into court to testify could be a struggle for an ADA, much less getting him to enhance your case or track down a reluctant witness. Even when cops wanted to help out—and the good ones almost always did—their supervisors were not cooperative. Police don’t get credit for convictions, only arrests, and a cop working on a case that’s already been cleared is a cop not out clearing new cases.

  Grifa began doing her own legwork. She visited crime scenes, canvassed witnesses, was a regular at precinct houses that di
dn’t see many prosecutors. She was gathering new evidence and additional testimony, but she was also breathing life into her cases, getting them off the page—attaching faces to names in affidavits, giving sounds and smells to neighborhoods seen only on maps or in photographs, making sense out of the convoluted logic and improbable passions that lay beneath the surface of many crimes. And when the cops saw her taking an active interest in their investigations, they found ways of helping her out.

  But Grifa’s strongest suit, according to Geoff Kern, a fellow prosecutor, was her “urban mentality”—her instinctive feel for all kinds of people and her ability to communicate with them. No one was better, Kern says, at picking a jury, and she had a way of expressing herself—confident, straightforward—that made them respond. Equally important, she knew how to reach the witnesses, victims and cooperators—many of them poor and uneducated, street people who were skittish about any contact with the system.

  In early February, Grifa got an urgent phone call from HIU’s Dan Rather. Rather told her he’d just arrested the unindicted perpetrator in one of her cases, a gang leader named Lenny Sepulveda. Sepulveda, Rather informed her, had been one of the gunmen who’d fired shots at Michael Cruz, the government witness who had nearly been killed. Then Rather explained why he was calling. The yearlong conspiracy investigation he was working on was still months away from the grand jury, and the other charges against Sepulveda—a four-year-old double homicide in the Bronx and a weak gun case—were not enough to keep him in jail. He needed Grifa to draw up a warrant for the Cruz shooting.

  Grifa was backed up with work at the time, and the case had little meaning for her. On paper Cruz’s shooting looked like a typical drug-related dispute; Cruz, after all, had been arrested twice for crack dealing. But Grifa told Rather to send over a detective with the paperwork and she would write up a complaint. It was a courtesy among prosecutors, and Rather had conveyed a sense of urgency, the excitement of a big Manhattan homicide investigation that required, in some small way, her services. But Grifa certainly had no idea when she put down the phone that her career was about to change.