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

by Stone, Michael

  THE INVESTIGATION gained momentum through the winter and into spring, each new break leading to other valuable sources of information. Almost every week, prospective witnesses turned up for interviews at HIU. The Cruz-Morales family members were still the hub of the case. They had detailed, firsthand knowledge of the gang’s drug operation, had witnessed each phase of the Quad from planning and preparation to execution, and they could link Lenny, as well as Pasqualito and Victor Mercedes, to the Double. Michael had seen Lenny shooting at one of the victims as he tried to get away in a hijacked car, and the gang leader had ordered Elizabeth Morales to stash the gun he’d used in her apartment.

  But the Cruz-Morales family members were not alone on HIU’s prospective witness list. With Nelson in the Dominican Republic, and Platano and Lenny in jail, Tebbens had been able to coax several Quad witnesses—including Chico Puentes and Benjamin Green, who had recanted their original statements—into cooperating once more. Meanwhile, HIDTA’s detectives produced a handful of low-level workers who had witnessed a spate of Cowboy shootings and stabbings that Rather and Quinn were tracking.

  But what continued to surprise the investigators was what they didn’t know, the staggering number of shootings, assaults, and rapes that went unreported because of the victims’ fear or cynicism. Chico Puentes told Quinn about the skirmish that took place in the fall of 1991 when a rival gang headed by drug kingpin George Calderon invaded Beekman Avenue. As two carloads of gunmen pulled up in front of the Hole, Lenny recruited neighborhood youngsters to defend the block, supplying them with automatic weapons and promising to pay them $150 each for their services.

  More often, gang members directed their violence against the community. When the elderly owner of a local bodega refused to extend their credit, three Cowboy thugs, including Quad suspect Daniel Gonzalez, broke into the cash register, then set fire to the store and broke all the windows with pipes.

  But the gang reserved its fiercest savagery for its own. Cowboy managers routinely disciplined their workers by crushing their knuckles with a brick. Repeat offenders were gouged, stabbed, shot, or molested. Twenty-two-year-old Martha Molina was typical of a group of women employed by the gang. Crack-addicted and destitute, Molina began pitching for the Cowboys in 1990 as a way of supporting her habit. Molina performed her chores reliably, but in the spring of 1992, her spot manager decided that she had shorted the count—withheld receipts—and smashed her face with a gun butt. Later he discovered he’d made a mistake in his calculations, but by then it was too late. Molina developed a blood clot near her eye, slipped into a monthlong coma, and woke up blind. She recovered her sight, but only bits and pieces of her memory.

  She did recall her assault, however, and described it in some detail to Quinn. Molina considered herself lucky; under similar circumstances, she said, Cowboy enforcers dragged another worker into St. Mary’s Park, raped her, beat her, and stuffed twigs and dirt into her vagina. Lulu, a pitcher for the gang and the girlfriend of a Cowboy manager known as Rob Base, was a bystander in 1990 when Fat Danny Rincon got into a dispute with a motorist on Cypress Avenue. When Rincon fired wildly at the driver, Lulu was hit in the head. She recovered eventually, but later, while she was pregnant with Rob Base’s child, Nelson shot her in the leg for tampering with Red-Top’s product.

  What was most troubling to the DAs was the way the victims told their stories and their depiction of the brutal character of life at the bottom rungs of the gang’s organization. “In any conspiracy case of any scope you deal with crimes you feel you can prove and crimes you can’t prove but feel happened,” Hill says. “That first set of crimes—those are the bones and tendons and sinew of your case. Those other crimes, the ones you can’t prove or that don’t rise to the level of a felony, are the case’s flesh—the penumbra, what in legal terms we call the surrounding circumstances. That’s what we were getting into during that period, and the chilling aspect of that was that these stories came out so matter-of-factly, so routinely, not because they were traumatic or devastating—although they were—but because they weren’t isolated or extraordinary. What made the Cowboy case unique was the stuff we left out—the crimes that would have been major crimes in another case, but that had never been reported, and then barely mentioned, because there was no expectation on the part of the victims that anything would be done about them, or that if they did say something, they would just get hurt again.”

  And Hill felt that their expectations had been justified. What would have changed for the people of Beekman Avenue had he tried the Quad murders in the Bronx? Even if he’d been able to protect his witnesses, even if he’d won convictions in that case, the Cowboys would have continued to operate the Hole, a new generation of enforcers would have replaced Platano, Stanley Tukes, and the other defendants, and the murders and beatings would have gone on unabated. Worse perhaps for the neighborhood’s law-abiding families, so too would the muggings and harassment, the petty theft and rampant drug abuse that multiplied in the margins of gang violence. But now working alongside Rather, Arsenault, and Quinn, with ample resources and a plan to lock up the entire gang, Hill felt for the first time as though he was able to make a difference.

  DISSENSION

  WINTER-SPRING 1993

  IN FEBRUARY, two days after Walter Arsenault’s wife delivered their second child, the jury in the Gheri Curl trial handed down its verdict—guilty on all counts. HIU’s first big conspiracy case had culminated in a landmark victory and vindicated a long, resource-intensive investigation. Arsenault didn’t realize how complete HIU’s triumph had been until sentencing six weeks later. Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder, appalled by the gang’s wanton murders, parceled out prison terms of more than 100 years to most of the defendants; Rafi Martinez, the organization’s leader, got 213 years. “Bowling-score sentences,” Arsenault thought, sitting stunned in the front of the courtroom.

  News of the verdict spread through the streets and prisons and sent a powerful message to potential cooperators. Lenny was in the holding pens behind Snyder’s courtroom when Martinez’ sentence was announced, and he spoke to the gang leader immediately after. It was a moment he wouldn’t forget.

  For years Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau had been out front in the battle against Manhattan’s violent drug gangs: HIU had been his shock troops. But their previous successes had barely won a nod from the media. The Gheri Curl case was different, however—because of its size and the conspiracy format that allowed prosecutors to tell a story, to weave together the gang’s many acts of violence and the details of their culture into a rich, gripping narrative. The press seized on images of the gang’s uniform permed hairstyles and their identically gold-painted cars, and ran stories throughout the trial, as well as its dramatic conclusion.

  Buoyed by the Gheri Curl verdict, pumped up with new resources, HIU seemed possessed by a spirit of unlimited possibilities. Earlier in the year, Morgenthau had asked Arsenault to list the gangs operating in Manhattan, and Arsenault had sat down with Fernando Camacho, Terry Quinn, and Ellen Corcella, a veteran prosecutor who handled the unit’s American black and Puerto Rican targets, and literally mapped out the whole of Harlem and the Heights and the Lower East Side, law enforcement’s first encyclopedic look at gang activity in the borough—some 150 organizations from small street-corner crews to big supply and retail outfits with multiple outlets and ranges of several blocks. It was a template for action, and Camacho for one was chipping away at the whole—167th Street, 155th, 156th, 159th; the Gheri Curls, Super King Bodega, Diamedis, Los Brothers, La Compania; one investigation bleeding into the next.

  In years past the unit trucked along one big case at a time, and that case would be broken down into smaller cases—a gang’s leader, his top lieutenants, hit men, managers; one murder here, a double homicide there, an assault, a drug sale. HIU consisted of William Hoyt and maybe one assistant, Arsenault tackling the Jamaicans, and just a handful of detectives spread out among them. Now Arsenault would walk through the unit on a
busy morning and there would be seven, eight prosecutors and twice as many police, including the detectives from HIDTA and the precinct cops who were working on joint cases, or who’d come in to interrogate prisoners or just trade information; the offices would be humming, alive with the din of the squad room and the clap of male laughter; six, seven, eight investigations going at a time.

  But the Cowboys had become the jewel in HIU’s crown. With the Bronx and now Brooklyn on board, and given the size and complexity of the case, not to mention the sheer avalanche of violence, the Cowboy operation dwarfed the Gheri Curl investigation. And that didn’t count Cuevas’ gang or Ray Polanco, El Feo or Freddy Krueger, or the whole pantheon of drug lords and killers who orbited Lenny’s world. Arsenault found himself coming into work with the same enthusiasm and sense of anticipation that he’d felt as a young prosecutor in Bergen County.

  But not everyone was so exhilarated.

  Despite progress in the case, Dan Rather was becoming increasingly uncomfortable about his role in the investigation. He’d never quite forgiven Arsenault and Quinn for the way he felt they’d foisted HIDTA on him a year ago, a decision that continued to haunt him through the spring. HIDTA’s detectives had been instrumental in building a strong surveillance case against the Cowboys; they’d engineered the raid that had netted Louise McBride; and they’d made scattered small buys into the gang’s sellers at the Hole and other nearby locations. In May, a HIDTA undercover had worked his way into the graces of Rennie Harris, one of Lenny’s top managers, and busted him for a 300-vial sale, enough to charge him with a top felony. But to Rather’s thinking, HIDTA had been too cautious in their investigation; Benitez and his CO, Charles Rorke, had never authorized as many buys as Rather had been pushing them to, and it was only thanks to Quinn’s intervention that they’d undertaken the Harris bust. By then Rather’s communications with Rorke were barely civil.

  But it was his relations with Arsenault and Quinn that troubled Rather most. Rather had felt Arsenault to be personally chilly, almost unapproachable, from the start, and his sense of estrangement had deepened with time. Rather got on better with Quinn; the demands of the investigation forced them into close daily contact, and they had a good working relationship for the most part. But Rather viewed Quinn as Arsenault’s man, someone he couldn’t trust or control.

  Rather’s resentment toward Quinn flared up in the spring over an incident that he would later term “the single most outrageous act he’d witnessed during his career in law enforcement.” Until then he’d felt Quinn had been merely difficult, producing some witnesses when he didn’t want to see them, continuing to prepare others after he’d decided not to use them. But now he felt that Quinn was deliberately challenging his authority in a matter of vital importance.

  Rather had knowledge that Lenny, then in jail, was calling his lieutenants at the apartment of Blue Eyes—Garry Dugan’s Washington Heights informant—and issuing orders to the gang. Rather wanted to wiretap the phone line, feeling that the taped conversations would “kill all the top leaders.”

  Quinn balked at the idea, however. He reminded Rather of HIU’s policy against wiretapping. It was too costly; the unit simply didn’t have the manpower. Besides, Quinn pointed out, the case against Lenny was already formidable; the unit’s resources could better be used in other ways.

  Rather discounted Quinn’s objections. He knew that Quinn had never used taps, and felt—as did others in the unit—that he was biased against the technology because he didn’t understand how it worked. What’s more, Rather felt he should have had the last word. Though HIU’s DA’s almost always deferred to detectives over tactical issues involving the street, its cases were prosecutor-driven. The DAs shaped the unit’s investigations to fit their trial strategy. So Rather was shocked when he learned that Quinn had either directly or indirectly informed Blue Eyes of the proposed tap, effectively sabotaging Rather’s plan.

  But the situation appears to have been more complicated than that. In addition to his usual objections to using phone taps, Quinn was concerned about Blue Eyes’ safety. He says he discussed the matter with Dugan, who convinced him that if the recorded conversations became evidence, they could cost Blue Eyes his life; and that he may have advised Dugan to alert Blue Eyes to the danger he was facing.

  Dugan adds another perspective to the events. He clearly recalls telling Rather the plan was fraught with unacceptable risks, and that Rather himself informed Blue Eyes about the wire tap in order to secure his cooperation. In contrast, Rather points out that with a warrant Blue Eyes’ consent would have been unnecessary, but Blue Eyes confirms that Rather called him to get him on board. It was only then, Dugan says, that he took it upon himself to apprise Blue Eyes, whom he felt had been insufficiently warned by Rather, of the substantial risks involved.

  These kind of arguments are all too common in law enforcement. Strong personalities, highly subjective decisions, and life-and-death stakes are a recipe for disagreement. Indeed all these elements, along with an apparent breakdown in communication, played a part in the current case. Rather felt that the tap was an invaluable investigative tool that could ultimately save lives, and that “under even the highly unlikely worst-case scenario, involving revelation to the gang of the existence and basis of the wiretap,” Blue Eyes would not be in jeopardy. “On the contrary, it would protect [Blue Eyes] by creating the impression that [he] was an investigative target.” Quinn, Dugan, and Tebbens, who was also party to the discussions, strongly disagreed. They felt the tapes would inevitably become part of discovery, and that the gang—known to kill on the slightest of suspicions—wouldn’t require proof to retaliate against Blue Eyes. But regardless of the merits, Rather felt that Quinn had unilaterally countermanded his decision to use electronic surveillance, and once again apparently good intentions led to bitter feelings among the principals in HIU’s investigation.

  Much of Rather’s frustration at that time may have been rooted in Arsenault’s management style. Arsenault treated his assistants as colleagues, giving them wide latitude in their cases, rarely interfering with their day-to-day tactics, unless asked. He also kept a sharp eye on how things were going through daily briefings by Quinn and through his own quiet wanderings about the office—listening in to his detectives’ conversations or even riffling through reports on a prosecutor’s desk. But Rather interpreted Arsenault’s arm’s-length approach to supervision as indifference to his case, and had begun to solicit the guidance and support of Trial Division chief Nancy Ryan, with whom he shared a close, personal friendship.

  Such an occurrence was not unprecedented. As handpicked professionals, Morgenthau’s assistants viewed the chain of command with a good deal less reverence than, say, their counterparts in the police. And as Trial chief Ryan had the authority to take command over any of her division’s cases, a prerogative she exercised from time to time in big press cases like the Cowboys. In other instances, she took a personal interest in the attorney handling the case. Ryan had mentored Ellen Corcella’s career at the DA’s office, for example, and continued to monitor her cases after Corcella joined HIU. In fact, as Arsenault’s boss, Ryan was expected to oversee the unit’s cases in a general way.

  Nonetheless, members of HIU were shocked that a relative newcomer to the unit like Rather would try to short-circuit Arsenault’s instructions or that Ryan would interpose herself between Arsenault and an investigation he was actively supervising. What’s more, neither Arsenault nor Quinn knew about her growing involvement in the case or her consultations with Rather.

  The fact was that Arsenault, so perceptive about the behavior and psychology of suspects in criminal investigations, could be remarkably guileless about what was going on in his own office. He had no idea that Rather was nursing grievances toward him, much less that he’d confided them to Ryan, or that Ryan might be sympathetic to them. In fact, Arsenault regarded Ryan, rightly, as having been HIU’s, and indeed his own, greatest champion. It was Ryan who had built up the unit, who
had stocked it with her favorite DAs, including Arsenault, and who had guided its progress, and his, through the political thickets on the eighth floor. Ryan was a constant visitor to the unit, and Arsenault stopped in at her eighth-floor office almost daily after his lunchtime run to update her on the latest developments. “Nancy was more than just a friend and supporter of Walter,” recalls Barbara Jones, Morgenthau’s chief of staff at that time. “She made him.”

  Thus the stage was set for a blowup between Arsenault and Rather. Rather was likely to perceive any attempt at intervention by Arsenault as arbitrary and ill informed, and Arsenault was just as likely to be galled by Rather’s efforts to bring Ryan in to mediate their differences. Moreover, both men were proud, at times uncommunicative, and stubborn in their convictions.

  Arsenault got his first inkling that things were not as he expected on one of his post-jog visits to Ryan’s office in late spring. Arsenault had been venting some of his concerns in the Cowboy case. Rather, he told Ryan, had at times been unavailable to the witnesses, shutting himself in his office, saying he was too busy to see them when they came to ask him for some favor, or just to talk about the case. Normally this kind of thing wasn’t troubling; the witnesses in most of the unit’s cases were cooperators, felons and former gang members who were testifying in exchange for leniency. But HIU had no leverage over most of the key witnesses in this case; many of them were victims or bystanders, and many had been threatened or offered bribes not to testify. They were also street people, like the Cruz-Morales family—frightened and thin-skinned, with tenuous connections to the legal system. They needed to be stroked, to have their hands held.