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

by Stone, Michael

  With their vast incomes they drove the market for illegal guns and stolen cars. (Federal reporting laws made it imprudent for them to buy cars with cash.) Gang members moonlighted as stickup artists or let themselves out for contract murders. Worst was their impact on the young (whose status as minors shielded them from New York’s draconian drug laws). In many neighborhoods the gangs functioned like a centrifuge, sucking in impressionable kids, arming them and schooling them in violence, then spewing them back into the streets. In the drug-ridden Three-Four, the murder rate had more than tripled from 35 in 1980 to 119 in 1991, even while the burglary rate had nearly halved during the same period.

  THROUGH THE SPRING of 1988, Hoyt’s tiny HIU unit had convicted seventeen gang members for twenty-one murders—a remarkable record given the difficulty of the cases and HIU’s limited resources. But still a drop in the bucket. By Hoyt’s own reckoning, there were at least sixty gangs selling drugs in upper Manhattan alone, and those gangs, according to police estimates, were responsible for five hundred or more murders in the four years since HIU began operating.

  Then in 1988, with the addition of Walter Arsenault, HIU began to change the way it tackled gang enforcement. Arsenault at the time was a 36-year-old senior counsel laboring in one of the office’s six trial bureaus, chafing under the constraints of conventional casework. Before joining HIU he’d prosecuted several gang murders, and like DeGrazia and Hoyt before him, each time he’d stumbled into a rat’s nest of related crime. “There was all this stuff going on in the shadows of those cases—murders, robberies, drug operations,” he recalls. “The defendants and the victims were at the center of Harlem’s drug world, and at one time or another their lives intersected with most of the gangs and stickup groups in the area. We learned about one gang in the Black Park housing project which was employing off-duty Corrections officers to guard their sales spots. But the way the system was set up, the detectives who were assigned to my cases were authorized to work only on those particular cases, and there were no resources in the Trial Division to follow up on the leads. It was very frustrating. I had all this good information, but I didn’t have the arms and legs to pursue it.”

  Arsenault’s efforts to expand the scope of his investigations would have a profound effect on HIU.

  WITHIN WEEKS of Arsenault’s arrival at HIU, Hoyt enlisted him in a case that would change the way the unit prosecuted gang crime. Asking Arsenault into his office, he showed him a photograph of a severed head sitting like a soccer ball on Edgecombe Avenue, a busy Harlem thoroughfare that was the center of Jamaican life in Manhattan. The victim, Hoyt said, had been “jointed”—cut into pieces, starting with his fingers and toes, while still alive. Hoyt had information that the killers were members of a Jamaican crack crew. But the Jamaicans were an insular community, poorly understood by law enforcement, and that case and numerous other homicides in the area were still unsolved. Hoyt asked Arsenault to take them on.

  Several days later, Arsenault escorted a BBC film crew to Edgecombe Avenue with Ray Brennan, a PD detective assigned to HIU. The first thing he noticed, apart from the crowds of shoppers thronging the sidewalks, was the brazen way the dealers did business. Again and again he saw them doing hand-to-hand sales in the open, counting their receipts in plain view. Nor did they scatter when the van approached, as almost any other gang would. Instead they held their ground, at most turning toward the building walls when the camera was pointed at them. Then the bricks started raining down from the rooftops. Several bounced off the van, leaving huge dents in the roof and sides, and terrifying the BBC reporter. “Don’t they realize you’re the police?” she asked Brennan.

  “Sure they do,” he replied. “That’s the whole point.”

  In fact the police were powerless against the posses. When they showed up in force to clear the corner, they were outnumbered. “In 1988, 1989, the Spanglers were convinced that that was their corner and the police thought so to,” Arsenault says. “The Department would never admit it, but a lot of cops from the Three-Oh used to tell me that they were under affirmative orders not to get out of their cars on Edgecombe Avenue.”

  Arsenault spent the next three months—a lifetime in law enforcement—studying his adversaries. Hoyt paired him with newly recruited Terry Quinn, a former police sergeant familiar with the area—he’d been Garry Dugan’s boss at Manhattan North Homicide—and the two men scoured Harlem in search of informants. They had the cops in the Three-Oh and neighboring precincts call them whenever they arrested a Jamaican; they would drive over and pick up the case, often debriefing the suspect on the spot. They copied unsolved homicide case folders, took them home, and pored over them at night. They ordered up rap sheets and mug shots and put together photo albums. And they compiled lists of nicknames, real names, gang affiliations until finally the data began to blur and run together. “There was no scrap of information we weren’t interested in,” Arsenault recalls. “Most precinct detectives, when they debrief an informant, only want to hear about the case at hand. They don’t have time for a lot of other stuff. But you couldn’t tell us anything we didn’t want to know, that wouldn’t somehow fit in later on. A lot of times guys would come in still thinking about cooperating and we’d tell them some obscure detail about themselves that we’d picked up along the way—where they were born, who their girlfriend was three years ago—and they’d be awestruck. Then they’d tell us everything because they thought we knew it anyway.”

  Their first break in the investigation came from a jailhouse informant named Rohan Smith (a pseudonym). A veteran of the posse wars, Smith was built like a fireplug, with a big coal-colored head as bald as prison barbers could make him. “Rohan was the franchise CI,” Arsenault recalls. “He’d been around forever and knew everyone and everything. The first time he came into my office, he said to me, ‘I know who you are and I’m going to tell you everything you want to know, but I want some things from you too.’ So I asked him what he wanted and he said, ‘I been in jail for two months, mon, I want a blow job,’ and I kind of looked him over and told him, ‘Sorry, you’re not my type.’ Well, he thought that was about the most hysterical thing he’d ever heard and we became friends and he ended up telling me everything I wanted to know and more.”

  Jovial and smart, Smith spent days at a clip in Arsenault’s office educating the prosecutor about the history and lore of the posses in Kingston and New York. He explained how the gangs correlated with certain neighborhoods back in Kingston—the Spanglers were from Matthews (pronounced Match-ez) Lane, the Dunkirk Boys from Franklintown—and how they had aligned themselves with the political parties there in exchange for protection and patronage, much as the Irish, Italian, and Jewish gangs did in old New York. He said the politicians had armed the gangs with U.S. and Cuban weapons during the turbulent 1960s, turning long-standing, but relatively nonviolent rivalries into bloody vendettas.

  The posses exported some of that violence to New York and other cities. But the splinter crews managed to coexist peacefully until crack came along. The Jamaicans were the first groups to market crack in the city, Smith said, and for a while everyone made “wild money.” But the competition over sales spots reignited long-simmering tensions among the posses and the murder rate exploded.

  The Spanglers were the largest and most violent of the posses, boasting a membership of 200 to 300, at least ten times bigger than any gang HIU had encountered in the past. The Spanglers, Smith said, “owned” the corner of 145th and Edgecombe and the blocks on either side. But numerous other groups controlled locations in Harlem as well—Two Mile Posse, the Cocaine Cowboys, the Dunkirk Boys among them. Smith described the major players in each gang, their rank, pedigree, sidelines—who were the shooters, stickup artists, and suppliers. Gradually a picture of gang life on Edgecombe Avenue emerged, and Arsenault began to see the complexity and enormity of what he was up against.

  Arsenault and Quinn drew up a list of all the known posse members in upper Manhattan, ranked them from most to
least dangerous, and started building cases against them. “It was just a wish list, really,” Arsenault says. “At first we went after the Spanglers, but it was all linked. We’d bring someone in to talk about an old Spangler homicide and he’d tell us about four other murders that happened the week before in London, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Baltimore. We had no idea what we’d find. The Spangler investigation led us to the Cocaine Cowboys, which led to Two Mile, which led to the Dunkirk Boys. We just started going down the list, taking out targets of opportunity.”

  Their tactics were equally helter-skelter. Mainly, they’d find Jamaicans with drug cases against them, then use New York’s tough drug laws to lever their cooperation against more violent associates. If they wanted someone badly, they’d use an undercover to buy them and turn them over to Immigration for deportation. Then if they tried to reenter the United States, as they inevitably did, they’d bust them again and send them away for five years. Arsenault wasn’t particular about his methods. He used any tool to chip away at the gangs. He reached out to the Feds and to local authorities in other jurisdictions. Just one of his targets, a walking murder machine named Kirk Bruce who was suspected of killing 60 people in the United States, and roughly 200 in all, if you included his native Jamaica, was convicted on murder charges in Maryland thanks to witnesses supplied by Arsenault.

  What distinguished their investigation from previous HIU cases was their determination to take out all the members of a gang, and then all the gangs in an area, to dismantle every bit of infrastructure so that new or hybrid groups couldn’t re-form. The plan worked far beyond their expectations. Once Arsenault and Quinn had assembled a critical mass of informants and evidence, the posse members turned against one another and flocked to the unit to make deals for themselves. In 1989 HIU locked up the Spanglers’ top five lieutenants. (The gang’s leader fled to Jamaica and was killed by rivals shortly afterward.) In 1990, working with the Feds, the unit took down nearly 200 more gang members. By 1991 the posses either were in jail or had fled Manhattan.

  ARSENAULT’S “whole gang” approach was a break from the past. The unit was changing in other ways as well. Hoyt had always run HIU as though it were a kind of independent authority. But HIU’s heightened profile and the introduction of forceful personalities like Arsenault and Quinn raised issues of oversight and set Hoyt on a collision course with his supervisor, newly appointed Trial chief Nancy Ryan.

  A graduate of Yale Law, Ryan, then in her late thirties, was known around the office as a brilliant and ambitious lawyer, a good friend and an implacable enemy. Tall and lithesome with aquiline features and straight-cut chestnut hair, she had joined the office in 1975, risen quickly, and founded the Asian Gang unit, a precursor and model for HIU. In fact, Ryan had been DeGrazia’s first choice to head HIU, but she was then in the midst of an investigation into the Ghost Shadows, the largest and most violent of Chinatown’s youth gangs, and she reluctantly declined.

  Some office insiders felt that Ryan and Hoyt were bound to clash. Both were strong-willed and had a proprietary interest in HIU. Ryan wanted to create a new post at the unit—a kind of supervising investigator—and install James McVeety, a former police sergeant who had worked for her in the Asian Gang unit. Hoyt accepted the need for better supervision, but was a stickler for loyalty and perceived McVeety as Ryan’s man. When Ryan hired him over Hoyt’s objections, Hoyt abruptly resigned.

  Ryan appointed Arsenault to succeed him, and expanded the unit, adding six new prosecutors and investigators. In response, Arsenault broadened its approach to gang removal. Wrestling with the Jamaican posses had convinced him that the best way to neutralize a violent gang was to pull it up by its roots, and he’d begun casting around for a legal strategy that would enable him to do that. By 1991 he’d found a way: rarely used state conspiracy laws that allowed prosecutors to target an entire gang at once. All Arsenault needed was the right case to try it out.

  THE GHERI CURLS, so called because their members all wore the same permed hairstyle, were the latest incarnation of the violent drug-trafficking gang—well organized, well armed, and extremely violent. In the late 1980s the gang sold weight cocaine from a string of apartments on West 157th Street, but their true product was terror. Like an occupying army, their leaders, the five Martinez brothers, commuted to the block from expensive suburban homes in identically gold-painted cars. And they brought enforcers with them, imported from the Dominican Republic to protect their operation and threaten and brutalize residents who dared complain that their homes had been turned into an all-night drug market. When one of those residents, a retired city worker named Jose Reyes, ignored the gang’s threats and began organizing tenants to go to the police in early 1990, a Gheri Curls triggerman tracked him to a crowded neighborhood park and shot him in the back of the head. Though dozens of people witnessed the execution and Reyes was a popular figure on the block, no one came forward.

  A Three-Oh beat cop named James Gilmore—himself the target of death threats—had been trying for more than a year to get the Department to move against the Gheri Curls. Gilmore had a number of confidential sources in the neighborhood who gave him information about the gang’s activities. But they were afraid to press charges against the gang because they felt that cops in the precinct were in league with the dealers. (In fact, authorities in 1994 indicted 33 officers from the Three-Oh on corruption charges, of which 28 were found guilty.) Narcotics failed to launch an investigation and the precinct did nothing, so Gilmore brought the case to HIU. Arsenault assigned it to an eager young prosecutor named Fernando Camacho.

  THE GHERI CURLS became HIU’s “first big modern case,” in Arsenault’s words, the culmination of its long learning curve and a template for future investigations. With Gilmore’s help, Camacho, a chubby, baby-faced prosecutor with an engaging, excitable manner, amassed intelligence about the gang and used investigators to make numerous undercover buys into key gang members. He didn’t want to just take the Gheri Curls down; he wanted to annihilate them.

  In November 1991 he arrested the entire gang on drug conspiracy charges, enfolding Reyes’ murder and other violent acts into the indictment. New York State’s conspiracy laws were poorly understood by most prosecutors; their use marked a radical departure from the traditional homicide investigations that had been HIU’s hallmark. But they allowed Camacho to get all the Gheri Curls off the street at once, leaving no one to retaliate against potential witnesses. With the streets clear, Gilmore’s sources began to come forward and gang members began to cooperate against each other.

  The “whole gang” approach paid another dividend. In the past HIU’s piecemeal arrests of gangs like the Spanglers and the Jamaican posses, though opportune, often diffused the larger story behind those investigations. Camacho’s lightning strike against the Gheri Curls focused attention on the gang: their uniform hairstyles and gilded cars, their battles against the police and their reign of terror over a neighborhood. It was a compelling story and the media loved it, generating a windfall of publicity for the unit and, more important, for Morgenthau.

  Not everyone was well disposed toward the unit, however. Many police chiefs, for example, felt that the DA should get out of the investigation business altogether and let the cops do their job. HIU’s success only sharpened their resentments.

  Moreover, there were tensions between the DA’s special investigative units and the Trial Division, the mostly anonymous line assistants who catch 90 percent of the office’s cases. That Morgenthau, having begun his career as a proactive U.S. Attorney, lavished attention and resources on big-case units like HIU did little to endear it to turf-conscious police commanders, or some of Morgenthau’s own bureau chiefs.

  But with Morgenthau basking in the reflected glow of HIU’s success and Ryan running interference for them in Trial, HIU had equipment and support staff.

  They would need those resources and more in the following year, as they launched an investigation into an even bigger case, the gang behind the Qua
d murders and the Cargill case.

  THE WILD COWBOYS

  JANUARY 1992

  THROUGH JANUARY 1992, Walter Arsenault had only the sketchiest notion of who Lenny, Platano, and the Red-Top gang were. He’d been hearing about them for some time from Fernando Camacho, whose informants invariably named them among the most feared organizations in the city; and Terry Quinn had apprised him of conversations he’d been having lately with a precinct detective named Jerry Dimuro, the primary in the Cargill case. But other than an apparent connection between the Cargill shooting and the Quad murders in the Bronx, Arsenault had little hard information about the Red-Top operation.

  More to the point, he didn’t have the manpower to go after them. Camacho was getting ready to take down the Gheri Curls. Ellen Corcella, a senior HIU prosecutor, was working on Black Park, the American black gang that employed Corrections officers as guards for their heroin operation in the eponymous Harlem housing project. And Camacho, a tireless rainmaker, had three other Washington Heights gangs in the pipeline.

  Because of their limited resources, HIU depended on the police to investigate the early stages of their cases—to help identify the members of a gang, where they sold and stashed their drugs, who they’d reputedly killed. Over the years, Hoyt and then Arsenault and Quinn had developed an extensive network of so-called buffs—cops and detectives who loved their work and went beyond the routines of their job to try to root out the core sources of crime on their turf. HIU functioned as a kind of clubhouse for these buffs, who regularly stopped by the unit on their way to and from court to get information about targets or just gossip about the street. More important for Arsenault, they acted as emissaries for the unit, recommending them to police with tough gang-related cases. James Gilmore, the beat cop who sparked the Gheri Curls investigation, for example, had been referred to HIU by detectives in his precinct. Similarly, detectives in Jerry Dimuro’s old Narcotics module would convince him to pay a visit to Terry Quinn.