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

by Stone, Michael

  Brownell debriefed Michael about his employment history— his introduction to the gang as a 13-year-old (he transported drugs around the neighborhood in a book bag and was paid twenty to thirty dollars per trip), his later duties as a pitcher and lookout, the names of his bosses and co-workers. Brownell then directed Michael’s attention to September 3, 1989, the night of the Double. Michael, then 14, recalled that he’d been visiting a girlfriend on Cypress Avenue when he heard gunfire. Looking down from her apartment into the street, he saw Lenny, Pasqualito, and Victor Mercedes surrounding a green sedan and shooting repeatedly and at close range into the front of the car. Later, he said, he ran downstairs and examined the victim’s bullet-ridden body before the police arrived.

  After drawing out a few more details, Brownell skipped to the Quad. Michael said he’d been on the rooftop of 348 Beekman on that night, working as a lookout for the Hole. He told the court he’d overheard a brief conversation on his walkie-talkie between Platano and Fat Danny in which Fat Danny said, “They’re here.” Right after, Michael said, Platano ordered him to go down to the Hole and close the spot.

  Michael got to the second-floor landing moments before his sisters, and stumbled onto the shooters, who’d assembled there before heading over to the alley. Standing by the entrance to the Hole, he was able to pick out Platano, Tukes, Rennie Harris, and the X-Man among the group in the hallway. Then while Michael waited for the pitcher to make a last sale, Fat Danny arrived in the elevator laden with firearms—the same guns Little Iris had testified she’d seen Platano, Tukes, and the others in the process of loading. Michael said he’d collected the cash from the pitcher, sent her home, then departed to the stash apartment next door to deposit the money. By the time he got back to No. 348, he said, he heard a volley of shots and saw Platano and Tukes firing into the alley at the other end of the block. This time, in an odd reversal of form, Michael didn’t hang around for the shooting to end, but ran around the corner to his girlfriend’s apartment and holed up there until much later that night. Apparently, he’d lost his curiosity about, much less his appetite for, carnage in the two years since the Double. He just wanted to be somewhere safe.

  But Michael had run out of safe places. Within months of the Quad, he’d been busted for drug sales in the Hole, then driven out of the neighborhood by Pasqualito’s death threats. Michael and his family entered the city’s shelter system, moving several times as a precaution; still the Cowboys pursued them, and caught up with Michael in August as he sat parked in his stepfather’s car on a darkened street in Brooklyn. “Did something happen to you the summer you left Beekman Avenue?” Brownell asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I got shot in my face,” Michael said.

  As the jurors edged forward, Brownell elicited details of the incident: how Michael looked out the window, prompted by his brother-in-law Edgar, who was sitting beside him in the front seat; how Michael saw a blue four-door sedan that he recognized from the old neighborhood parked alongside him. “And when you looked up and saw the blue car, what, if anything, did you see?” Brownell asked him.

  “Lenny.”

  “Where did you see Lenny?”

  “In the passenger’s side on the front.”

  “And what, if anything, was Lenny doing?”

  “He had his hand out with a gun in his hand,” Michael said.

  “About how far away were you from Lenny when you saw him with the gun in his hand?”

  “A couple of feet.”

  “And do you know whether or not he was actually firing the gun?” Brownell asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I heard shots,” Michael said.

  “What direction was the gun pointed in? This is the gun that Lenny had when you heard shots.”

  “In my direction.”

  “Did you see anybody else?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who else did you see?”

  “Pasqualito.”

  “And where did you see Pasqualito?”

  “In the driver’s side.”

  “And what did you see Pasqualito doing?”

  “He got out the car, opened the door and put his hands on top of the hood, and started firing.”

  Brownell asked a series of further questions about the positions of the two shooters, then inquired whether Michael actually got hit.

  “Yes,” Michael said.

  “Did you realize at first that you had been hit?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you tell us what happened.”

  “Right after the bullets, I seen blood. So I thought my brother-in-law got shot.”

  “Where exactly did you see the blood?”

  “All over the car.”

  “Was there a lot of blood or was there a little blood in different spots?”

  “There was a little blood in different spots.”

  “Okay … Did you determine where the blood, in fact, was coming from?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was it from your brother-in-law?”

  “No.”

  “Where was it?”

  “From my face and the back of my ear.”

  “Do you know whether or not the bullet stayed in your face or whether it went through some other place?”

  “It went through.”

  “Do you know where it came out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “Behind my right ear.”

  With the completion of Michael Cruz’s testimony on December 15, one day short of the third anniversary of the Quad, the prosecution had laid the foundation for their case. They’d depicted the Cowboy conspiracy—its history and inner workings—from a dizzying array of perspectives, and furnished close-up, if somewhat fragmented, accounts of the gang’s most shocking crimes: the Quad and the Double. Moreover, their witnesses had stamped a human face onto the corruption and suffering caused by the Cowboys. Janice Bruington, Chubby Green, Fat Iris, Little Iris, and her brothers Joey and Michael had all been subject to the gang’s bullying and threats, had all been forced to give up their homes and go into hiding. Chubby had lost a brother; Fat Iris, her husband. Bruington and Michael Cruz had actually been the targets for Cowboy bullets.

  Now, with the holidays approaching and the trial grinding to a halt, it was time to regroup. Grifa and her husband had bought a house in New Jersey, and she took advantage of the break to move her things in from Brooklyn. Hill spent a few quiet days over Christmas with his family. Brownell got up to Syracuse to visit his parents. But mainly they went back to work, bringing in witnesses that needed to be prepped, analyzing where they were, plotting strategy—doing the things they wouldn’t have time for once the trial got started again after the new year. “In a way it was harder being out of court because we didn’t have that structure every day,” Grifa recalls. “That’s where Dan was so good, motivating himself. He started going over the transcript, outlining the main points of each witness’s testimony. He never let up. He just had this amazing self-discipline.”

  The others worked hard too, not so much long hours—Hill, for instance, tried to leave each night by six to spend time with his children—but with remarkable intensity. Neither Hill nor Grifa could remember taking a meal together outside the office. Often there simply wasn’t time. But they also shared a feeling, never articulated then, that if they let up—even for just an hour or two—they might never recapture the focus that had sustained them over the past fifteen months. Civilian life had become a memory. At one point that winter, Grifa discovered three paychecks in her wallet. But it hardly mattered, she realized; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been shopping.

  Both Brownell and Arsenault had had to caution Grifa to cut back on her hours, advice Brownell might well have taken himself. Brownell, who knew the importance of pacing from his days as a distance runner, had made a rule when he took over the case never to wor
k more than six days a week. But as the trial wore on, it became impossible to escape, even if he was only thinking about it. Something of an insomniac at ordinary times, he was unable to sleep more than a few hours—a condition not helped by the unfamiliar surroundings of his safe-house apartment. Often he’d rise in the middle of the night and take the subway to his apartment uptown so he could sleep in his own bed, much to the consternation of the police officers charged with bringing him to court the next day. Sometimes he’d simply head to the office. “It was still dark most mornings when I’d arrive downtown,” Grifa recalls. “That meant I was actually getting up around five o’clock—four-thirty when I started commuting from New Jersey. I know it was really early because I always got the first parking spot in the station, the one closest to the train tracks. But I never got to the office before Dan.”

  VERDICT

  WINTER-SPRING 1995

  BEGINNING in January, the prosecutors called a series of mid-to high-level gang members who had agreed to cooperate, including Frankie Robles and George Santiago. Both Robles and Santiago had grown up on Beech Terrace in the building where Red-Top had their first spot, and had literally come of age in the organization, starting out as errand boys and moving up through the ranks to become top managers. Examining them was a long, arduous process, due to their wealth of knowledge about the gang, and much of their testimony was dry and technical, concerned with the minutiae of the Cowboys’ drug operations—the functions of the different jobs, who reported to whom, personnel problems. But by the end of February, the prosecutors had amassed an extraordinary amount of testimonial evidence establishing the Cowboy conspiracy and linking the defendants to that conspiracy and the vicious acts committed in furtherance of it.

  The jury also learned firsthand about two more homicides. In the so-called Rooftop murder, perhaps the most senseless crime charged in the indictment, the defendant, Linwood Collins, a manager for Orange-Top, shot and killed Oscar Alvarez, a 33-year-old crackhead in May 1991. In fact, Collins had been looking for Alvarez’ best friend, a pitcher known as Shrimpo, who had run off during his shift with a bundle of crack and about $250 in cash. But Collins couldn’t find Shrimpo, and when he came upon Alvarez smoking crack on the rooftop of 600 141st Street, he threatened to throw Alvarez off if he didn’t disclose the whereabouts of his friend. According to Sero Rodriguez, a gang member who was with Collins at the time, Alvarez told Collins he didn’t know where Shrimpo was and offered to pay Collins back for the missing drugs and cash. Not satisfied with Alvarez’ response, Collins emptied his revolver, killing the hapless young man.

  Some two years later, the Cowboys committed another senseless murder. According to witnesses, Fat Danny spotted a man parked by a phone booth on Jackson Avenue in the Bronx whom he believed had shot and paralyzed El Feo. Aware that El Feo had put out a $10,000 contract on his assailant, Fat Danny ordered one of his workers, Rob Lopez, to go to the phone booth, as if he were making a call, and shoot the driver of the car. After the deed had been done, Fat Danny drove to 171st Street in the Heights and bragged to Pasqualito and other gang members that “My son got one.” Several days later, Fat Danny learned he’d ordered the execution of the wrong man.

  But the highlight of the winter session was Brownell’s examination of Nelson Sepulveda. Brownell had saved him for the latter part of the trial, despite his extensive knowledge of the Quad; the prosecutor knew the jury would be flagging by then, and he wanted to regain their attention. He succeeded. Grifa recalls that the jurors were literally at the edge of their seats. And the electricity between Nelson and the defendants was such that despite beefed-up security—Nelson alone had two guards flanking the witness box—Snyder felt the need to caution the lawyers to keep an eye on their clients. “There’s a tremendous amount of tension in this courtroom,” she said during a sidebar. “I want all of you to be careful. I don’t know if anything is going to happen here. I have no reason to think anything is going to happen here. I am feeling a great deal of tension and I am looking at the defendants, and I am not getting any good feeling.”

  Nelson had hardly seemed threatening at first. Of medium height with a wiry frame, deep-set eyes, and dark curly hair, he’d entered the courtroom without incident, and when, after taking the stand, he spilled the glass of water a court officer handed him, he apologized so profusely, it seemed hard to imagine him as the ruthless leader of a drug gang. Moreover, he had an unfocused quality—not exactly shyness, or any kind of nervousness—but a way of seeming only half present. As Brownell later put it, he was spacey.

  But Brownell knew it was a mistake to underestimate Nelson. Expelled from high school for punching out a dean when he was 18, he could snap back in your face on the springs of his tightly wound temper, then “chill” just as quickly, without reflection or remorse. Once he began testifying, and let his eyes roam over his former associates with a kind of languid arrogance, there seemed little doubt that he had been their boss.

  Brownell led Nelson through a summary of his early career—his apprenticeship under Yayo and Capo, his move to Beech Terrace—paying particular attention to his recruitment of his brother. “When did [Lenny] start to work with you on Beech Terrace?” Brownell asked.

  “When the spot wasn’t going nowhere, you know, under my leadership. Nothing was happening,” Nelson said.

  “When you say nothing was happening, what did you mean by that?”

  “No sales.”

  That changed quickly under Lenny, Nelson said. “How much money a week was that particular spot making—and I mean on Beech Terrace—around 1987?” Brownell asked him.

  “It was making like thirty thousand dollars.”

  “A week?”

  “A week,” Nelson said.

  “How much of that would you get approximately?”

  “Two or three thousand.”

  “And how much would Lenny get?”

  “Four or five.”

  “Why would Lenny get more than you?”

  “He was the brains. You know, everybody respected him, you know. He was the brains, you know. He practically took over, like.” Nelson then traced the Cowboys’ dramatic rise through the 1980s, and their expansion as friends from the old neighborhood came to the Bronx looking for work—Pasqualito, Victor Mercedes, Fat Danny, Platano, Freddie Sendra, Tezo—and as the gang absorbed tough young kids from the Beekman Avenue area—Rennie Harris, Stanley Tukes, and Linwood Collins.

  One of Red-Top’s first workers was Miguel Castillo, a professional baseball prospect, who was killed in a rip-off by dealers who hung out around Marcey Place in the Bronx. Nelson related how the Cowboys drove by their spot and sprayed them with bullets on two occasions, and then gunned down the leader of the crew and his top lieutenant when they wandered inadvertently onto Cowboy turf. But Nelson wasn’t present for the Double, as the incident became known, and the victims, murderers themselves, were hardly sympathetic.

  But Nelson’s description of the events leading up to the Quad had an altogether different, chilling effect. Those events began, Nelson said, when Lenny went to jail on a gun charge in August 1991 and Nelson took over the gang’s operations. “During that time when you were in charge, during the fall and winter of 1991, did anything happen in the spot?” Brownell asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  “The sales was going down,” Nelson said.

  “When you say the sales was going down, what are you referring to?”

  “We wasn’t selling as much as before.”

  “Do you know why that was the case?”

  “Yellow-Top was selling treys.”

  “When you say Yellow-Top was selling treys, what’s a trey?”

  “A crack for three dollars.”

  “How much was Red-Top being sold for at the Hole?”

  “Five dollars.”

  Nelson said he had conversations with Platano, Tezo, and Fat Danny, whose Orange-Top sites were also suffering, about the competition. They a
greed, he told the court, that something had to be done.

  “Because of Yellow-Top, and the fact that they were cutting into the business at Beekman Avenue, did that affect the amount of money you were paying your own workers?” Brownell asked.

  “Yes.”

  “In what way?”

  “I had to pay them less,” Nelson said.

  “When you say you had to pay them less, who are you referring to?”

  “To the managers.”

  “Who were the managers at that particular time?”

  “My cousin Mask, Linwood, Rennie, Platano, everybody else.”

  “Did they ever say anything about the fact that their pay was cut?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who said anything to you?”

  “All of them.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said if my brother wasn’t locked up that … If my brother was out, they would still be getting paid.”

  Nelson explained that managers normally making $700 to $800 were being paid $400 to $500, and that they were pressuring him to act.

  “After some of the managers had their conversations with you about the fact that they were being paid less, did you take further steps with regard to Yellow-Top?” Brownell asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went and spoke to El Feo about it,” Nelson said.

  “And what, if anything, did you say to El Feo when you went to speak to him?”

  “I told him if he could lend me his people …”

  Van Leer-Greenberg objected, citing the inadmissibility of a hearsay conversation, and after a sidebar Brownell resumed his examination. “Mr. Sepulveda, did you in fact have a conversation with this individual known as El Feo?”

  “Yes.”

  “As a result of this conversation, were you able to elicit the help of anyone concerning the problem with Yellow-Top?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who is he—who did you get?”