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

by Stone, Michael

  He turned off the highway at 158th Street—where Cargill’s friends had exited a few hours before—and again headed down Broadway, passing the Church of the Intercession, hunkering on its Gothic haunches, and Trinity Cemetery on either side of the avenue. Broadway widened here and the uneven rows of headstones were just visible over the stone retaining walls girding the sidewalks. It struck him that he was driving through a churchyard on his way to a murder investigation and he thought about the people buried there, the strata of earlier immigrants—Germans, Irish, Jews, Greeks, and West Indians—whose graves marked the changing character of the neighborhood. Now it was the Dominicans’ turn. They had been pouring into the Heights—a million strong by some estimates—renewing the old cycle of poverty and striving. But the factory and waterfront jobs that had fueled the livelihoods of earlier generations were gone, replaced in large measure by the drug trade. The Dominican Republic had become a way station for Colombian cocaine importers during the late 1970s and the 1980s and Dominican wholesalers had forged links with their countrymen in the Heights. Dugan saw evidence of these links on nearly every block along his way—in the beeper stores and the wire and travel agencies that served as conduits for coca dollars; in the pool halls and empty-shelved bodegas that sold powder under the counter; in the silvered fronts of restaurants and nightclubs that catered to cash-laden dealers. Dugan knew that many, perhaps most of the shops he was passing had been bought and stocked with drug profits. And he knew the price those profits exacted from the community. In 1965, just a few years before he joined the force, there had been one homicide in the Three-Four. Last year there had been 113—113 murders, 113 bodies, almost all of them young men, fifty, sixty years from a natural death. But they wouldn’t be buried here, he thought as he left the graveyard. The Dominicans sent their dead back home, their dead and their dollars, sometimes in the same casket.

  CARGILL’S FRIENDS were able to give Dugan a partial description of the shooter’s car, and Kevin Kryzeminski, sitting beside Cargill, had caught a glimpse of their assailants—two dark-skinned males in their twenties, possibly Hispanic. But neither young man had an explanation for what triggered the shooting. Instead they described a Saturday night of youthful high jinks—a beer party in Elmsford, a brief visit to a bar in neighboring Tarrytown, and then the thirty-minute ride to the city. They had driven to Manhattan in search of women and had cruised the grid of gloomy streets opposite the Intrepid, a refurbished World War II aircraft carrier docked along the highway. “What kind of women?” Dugan asked John Raguzzi, the young man who had ridden in the back of the cab.

  Dugan, despite being tall and solidly built, with a builder’s callused hands, was surprisingly mild in appearance. With his blue eyes, trim mustache, and a tam of fine white hair, he might have been mistaken, in his natty blue summer suit, for a bank manager or an insurance salesman or even a priest, if you overlooked the lay collar. Dugan was aware of the way people perceived him—his colleagues used to call him Father Dugan—and he encouraged that view. He was unfailingly polite, and spoke softly with just the hint of a brogue.

  “Hookers,” Raguzzi said, sitting across from Dugan at a folding table in one of the cinder-block cubicles banking the squad room. He was a good-looking kid, with a medium build, short black hair, and the shadow of a beard. He was still wearing his clothes from the night before—jeans, sneakers, a plaid short-sleeved shirt. He rested his hands on the table, lacing and unlacing his fingers while he spoke.

  “Did you want to get laid?” Dugan asked him.

  “No, we wanted a blow job.”

  “Did you get your blow job?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get laid?”

  “No.”

  “Did you stop or talk to any of the girls?”

  “No, there were too many cops around,” Raguzzi said. “We didn’t want any trouble, so we decided to head back.”

  “Did anyone follow you?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Are you telling me that you were just driving on the highway and someone came alongside and shot at you for no reason?” Dugan asked.

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m telling you,” Raguzzi said.

  Outside in the squad room, Dugan huddled with Jerry Dimuro, the young precinct detective assigned to the case. Short and stocky with an energetic way about him, Dimuro had partnered with Dugan on several homicides since making detective two years ago and the two got on well. They had been working in tandem all morning, Dimuro questioning one witness while Dugan interviewed the other. “Do you believe what these guys are telling you?” Dugan asked him.

  “Naw, they’re leaving something out.”

  Given the location and the time of the shooting, Dugan felt certain that drugs were involved—a robbery, a bad transaction, a prior debt. But the young men denied that they’d had any dealings with drugs; indeed they denied that anything remarkable at all had occurred prior to the shooting. “Did you take a physics course at your high school?” Dugan asked Kryzeminski, after listening to his account several times.

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you remember the part about every action causes a reaction?”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  “Well, what you’re describing to me is the reaction. There had to be something that caused that reaction. I want to know what that was.”

  He questioned the young men repeatedly, comparing their stories with each other, and with their own earlier versions. He built up a series of pictures in his mind, a kind of movie of the night’s events, then homed in on the details—the route Cargill took after leaving the highway, the lighting conditions on the Intrepid—searching for an inconsistency that would signal a lie or an omission.

  But their stories held and Kryzeminski was becoming impatient, rolling his eyes and drumming the table with his fingers.

  Dugan rose purposefully from his chair. “Calm down,” he told Kryzeminski, his voice low and even. “You’re going to be here with me a long time. You can either love me or hate me and right now I don’t particularly care which. ’Cause I’m not happy with your story. Look, can you think of anything, anything at all out of the ordinary that happened last night?”

  Kryzeminski started to shake his head, then stopped. “Well, we almost had an accident getting onto the highway,” he said.

  Dugan sat down again. “Tell me about it.”

  Kryzeminski explained that on the way home, Cargill may have run a red light, cutting off another motorist on the ramp that leads to the elevated section of the highway at 57th Street. The other vehicle was a white sports car, possibly a BMW or Mercedes. But the incident had been minor—so minor that Raguzzi, crammed into the back of the cab, would later say he hadn’t registered the event. The vehicles, after all, hadn’t made contact. There had been no exchange between Cargill and the other driver, no gestures or threats. Moreover, the car that Cargill cut off was not the same car from which the shots had been fired.

  Dugan was skeptical. He’d heard of similar kinds of shootings on California’s freeways. But that kind of thing didn’t happen in New York. Still, he didn’t discount anything. He went over Kryzeminski’s story several more times, then checked back with Raguzzi.

  By midafternoon, Dugan felt he had gotten all he could from the young men. He still thought they were holding back and he hadn’t finished questioning them. But he wanted their parents to speak to them overnight and he broached the idea to the Cargills as they were about to leave for the morgue. He had met them earlier that morning, a graying, somewhat rumpled couple huddled at the back of the squad room. A scientist, Innes Cargill had a flat, farmer’s face and wide-set inquisitive eyes—a legacy, perhaps, of years spent hunched over a microscope—and his wife, Dugan noticed, was still wrapped in her coat, though it was warm and humid in the precinct. He had offered them his condolences and parsed their appearance with a policeman’s eye: middle-aged, middle-class, not flashy, no conspicuous jewelry.

  Later,
he interviewed them at length about their son. He had liked them at once. Although they were in shock, dazed and deflated like survivors emerging from a wreck, they had held their feelings in check and tried to answer his questions thoughtfully. No, they didn’t think David used drugs. He had always seemed to be against them, was scheduled to take a test for his pilot’s license the very next day. Still, they left room in their replies for doubt and reassessment. They didn’t try to control the investigation like so many of the victims’ parents he interviewed. They weren’t trying to hide things about their child, to sanitize or exculpate him or themselves. They just wanted to know what had happened, to understand who and what had killed their son and why he had been murdered. And finally that was what was so frustrating about the whole business. Dugan could not tell them. He could offer neither Cargill nor his wife an explanation, much less justice; and he could see that the mystery at the heart of the case was adding to their misery, infecting their grief and turning it inward.

  At the end of his tour, Dugan picked up his car and headed home. It was nearly seven and a low, golden light had settled over the city. He took the highway at 125th Street, again retracing Cargill’s route from the night before, this time matching the eyewitnesses’ descriptions of events to the actual setting. He drove slowly in the center lane, imagining Cargill at the wheel, the blare of the speakers damping the noise from the road, the dark form of the shooter’s car sharking into his peripheral vision, and then the popping of automatic gunfire, the last sounds he would ever hear. The case was dead in the water, Dugan thought. There wasn’t any physical evidence to speak of. Raguzzi and Kryzeminski had provided little helpful information, not even a partial plate number. And without a motive or some precipitating action, the vital link between crime and criminal was missing. The killer could have been anyone.

  But something else was troubling the detective and it had nothing to do with solving the murder. During his twenty-three years in the Department, Dugan had investigated his share of incomprehensible crimes. He had known men bludgeoned and stabbed to death for the change in their pockets. A few years ago he had assisted in the investigation of a series of unprovoked shootings, the work of a Dominican gang who had targeted Yeshiva students up in Inwood Park just because they looked different. And then there was his most recent case—a grueling six-month investigation into the rape and ritual murder of a 13-year-old Colombian girl, Paola Illera, abducted on her way home from an East Harlem school. (That case had been especially frustrating for Dugan. As ordered by the squad commander, he’d worked around the clock, without success, and then had been sanctioned for racking up too much overtime.) But even these brutal acts had been caused by something—greed, bias, perversity, obsession. Random murder, the spontaneous, reasonless generation of violence, was new to Dugan’s experience and it contradicted his most deeply held assumptions about criminal behavior. After five years working homicides, murder still disgusted Dugan—all murders, not just the murders of the innocent—but this killing scared him.

  DUGAN COULDN’T have known that the Cargill case would embroil him in one of the biggest homicide investigations in New York City history, a case that would come to rule his life over the next four years. In fact, the investigation started slowly, with Dugan and Dimuro chasing the wispiest of leads: They interviewed Cargill’s friends and fellow partygoers in Tarrytown, canvassed the prostitutes in the area around the Intrepid, and searched through motor vehicle and auto dealership records trying to find the cars Kryzeminski had described to them. All without success. Then, in July, Dugan traced a handgun that an off-duty cop had recovered near the site of the shooting to an illegal firearms dealer living in the same Florida town where Cargill had attended college. Speculating that the weapon may have played a role in Cargill’s murder, Dugan called Anne Cargill to ask if David had owned a gun.

  The Cargills were not coping well with their son’s death. Over the course of the summer, they had phoned Dugan and Dimuro on an almost daily basis and Anne in particular involved herself in the minutiae of the investigation. The detectives always took time to respond to their calls—Dugan even visited them several times in Tarrytown—but they had little progress to report, and the frustration wore on both parents.

  When they’d come here from Scotland some twenty-five years ago, the Cargills had two babies and no savings; but they wanted the opportunities the United States offered them, and they believed that if they worked hard, they could build a good life for their family. Innes Cargill parlayed a postdoc at Columbia into a career as a research chemist, and in 1987 started his own pharmaceutical testing firm. Anne Cargill taught school, and devoted herself to bringing up her children. Both she and Innes were the kind of parents who rose at 5 A.M. to drive their teenage daughters to swim practice. And they wouldn’t hesitate to show up at a party or a dance club if one of their kids overstayed their curfew.

  Their efforts seemed to have been rewarded. As their fortunes rose, they’d moved to the suburbs, settling in their own home on a tree-lined street in Tarrytown. Their children attended good schools, growing up happy and drug-free. And David, after a few troubling years, seemed headed for stability and success. So the bullet that slammed into his neck in the early morning hours of May 16 not only claimed his life; it also pierced the very certainties, the core beliefs around which Innes and Anne Cargill structured their lives. How, they now asked themselves, could all those years of industry and careful planning be wiped out by one apparently random act during the course of a single night? What was the point of good schools and safe communities if they couldn’t even protect the life of their child?

  At first both parents had been preoccupied with the practical details of burying their son. They couldn’t wait to get his body back from the police, though for very different reasons. The suddenness and senselessness of David’s death had left his father traumatized, like an amputee who dreams that his limbs are still intact. Reason told him David was gone, but the feeling part of his brain couldn’t grasp the fact of his son’s death. “It was very important to see him,” Innes remembered. “I just had to touch his body, even though it felt so cold and rubbery, to run my fingers through his hair.”

  If Innes was seeking closure, Anne wanted nothing less than to bring David back to life. A former schoolteacher with a master’s degree in education, she had curtailed her career to raise her son at home. “I had always been very hands-on with David, getting him out of scrapes, talking to his teachers, helping him with school projects,” she recalled. “I felt if I could just get to see him now, I could make everything all right. They had shown us a photo of him at the morgue, but that wasn’t real enough. I had to touch him all over, to close and open his eyes, to make it not real. I felt if I just prayed hard enough, I could bring him back. It was a long time before I realized he was gone forever.”

  Anne didn’t confide her thoughts to anyone and busied herself instead with arrangements for David’s funeral. But at least Anne was functioning, and she seemed well as long as she was able to do things for David. After the funeral, though, she sank into a long, deepening depression. “I was okay for about four days,” she says. “Then I used to sit by myself. I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted to think about him—when he was a little boy, a trip we took to the Grand Canyon. I was desperately depressed. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t want to do anything. I just wanted everyone to leave me alone.”

  Her family forced her to see a psychiatrist. He prescribed antidepressants, pain pills, migraine pills for the headaches she’d been having. “Which I immediately abused,” she says. “The whole family was worried about me. But I didn’t care. I didn’t want to kill myself, but that’s exactly what I was doing. I said to Innes, ‘I just want to be with David.’”

  It was around that time that Dugan, unaware of her precarious state, phoned Anne and queried her about the gun he had traced. She had seemed composed during the call, Dugan recalled. But later she seized on the idea that David h
ad provoked his own death and became hysterical. She was hospitalized the next day.

  Innes seemed to be adjusting better than his wife. He had been visiting David’s grave two to three times a week—Anne couldn’t bear to think of her son in the ground and stayed home—and he returned to work, administering the small, but profitable, company that he owned. But he also was experiencing problems. A teetotaler since the early 1970s, he fell off the wagon with a thud. “I went to work; it took me a day to do what I previously could do in two hours and I couldn’t wait until five o’clock to get a drink. Beer, scotch—once I started, it was impossible to motivate myself to stop. The cycle went on for years. Some days I’d feel better, then I’d feel guilty about it. Why should I feel better?

  “There was no way to tell from day to day how I’d feel. Most of the time I’d walk around with this feeling in the pit of my stomach—a gnawing feeling, an emptiness. Something was missing in my life, and I wouldn’t know what it was and then I’d realize: It’s David.”

  THE FIRST real break in the case didn’t come until six months after the shooting, and as often happens, was unrelated to the exacting investigation that had preceded it. The traced gun, like all the other leads, went nowhere. Then, on November 27, Edwin Driscoll, an NYPD detective working with the FBI on an auto theft task force, phoned Dimuro at the Three-Oh squad and told him that the Feds had a CI (confidential informant) with knowledge of the highway shooting. He said that the informant had told FBI agents that Cargill had been murdered by drug dealers from Washington Heights, who killed for the fun of it, and had identified one of them by his street name: Platano. Cargill had cut the dealers off at the entrance to the highway, but the traffic incident was a pretext. The shooter, the leader of a brutal crack-trafficking gang, wanted to test-fire a gun that he had bought earlier in the evening.

  Driscoll promised to try to set up a meeting with the informant, but later that afternoon when Dugan called back to expedite the process, FBI agent Jamie Cedeno, one of the informant’s handlers, vetoed the request, claiming the risks of exposure were too high. “I’m not going to let you burn this guy,” he told Dugan.