Gangbusters: How a Street-Tough Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New York’s Most Dangerous Gang
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Even then, getting the Department to cooperate was inevitably a tricky negotiation for Arsenault. The police were reluctant to cede control of their cases—even old, unsolved homicides, even though HIU always gave credit back to the primary detectives for the arrests they made. Typically, Arsenault had to sell the unit to the precinct commanders, many of whom had never heard of HIU, using the lure of publicity—guaranteed seats at the press conference when the indictments were brought down—to convince them to sign on.
Meanwhile, Mark Tebbens remained the lone detective investigating Red-Top. Although he had help from Manhattan detectives Garry Dugan and Jerry Dimuro, who were pursuing leads in the Cargill case, Tebbens, at best, hoped to pry loose the shooters responsible for the Quad murders in the Bronx. He knew that as long as Red-Top remained entrenched on Beekman Avenue, he would have a hard time finding witnesses to testify against them. But then Tebbens was used to adversity in his dealings with the gang.
TEBBENS had first encountered the Red-Top gang two years before in one of his first cases in the Four-Oh, the public execution of two enemy drug dealers on Beekman Avenue by Red-Top gunmen that became known in police circles as the Double. It was a vicious, bloodthirsty affair. On September 3, 1989, Luis Angel “Chico” Rivera and Orlando “Tito” Berrios, drug dealers from another part of the Bronx, drove onto Beekman Avenue in a livery car with two cronies, Gee and Ant. They didn’t realize they’d entered Red-Top turf, nor were they aware that the gang had targeted them for killing a friend of theirs several months ago. Chico was visiting his girlfriend, who lived nearby with their son. The four had stopped to greet a prison buddy of Chico’s they’d chanced upon exiting a bodega at the south end of the street.
Moments after their arrival, they were spotted by Red-Top. It was a hot summer night, Labor Day weekend, and the streets were jammed with people playing music, drinking beer, hanging out. The gang, including Lenny, Pasqualito, and Victor Mercedes, quickly moved in on Chico and Tito. Mercedes, gun drawn, shouted at Rivera, “This is for my brother,” and pumped a bullet into Chico’s stomach.
Chaos ensued. Mercedes and Pasqualito shot Chico three more times, wounding him fatally as he tried to climb into the back of the waiting livery car, shooting the driver in the leg as he sped away. Ant and Gee, who had frozen like deer caught in headlights at Red-Top’s approach, took off up Beekman Avenue, escaping into St. Mary’s Park behind a fusillade of gunfire. Tito, who was wounded, ran around the corner onto 141st Street and then peeled off north on Cypress Avenue. People from the neighborhood watched in horror as Lenny, Pasqualito, and Mercedes raced after him down the middle of the street. On Cypress, Tito flagged down a green sedan that was making a U-turn, begging for help. When the driver waved him off, Chico dove through the passenger-side window, pleading for his life. Then the driver saw the advancing gang members and abandoned the car. Tito scrambled into the driver’s seat, but by now his pursuers had surrounded the sedan. As he floored the accelerator, they fired into the car. Badly hit, Tito crashed into a van parked on the west side of the avenue. The shooters quickly regrouped around the vehicle, firing some thirteen bullets into Tito’s shuddering body, nearly severing his left hand from his arm.
Tebbens had thrown himself into the investigation, and managed to build credible cases against both Pasqualito and Victor Mercedes. But though scores of people had witnessed the shootings, he was able to coax only a few to testify against the Red-Top enforcers. A year ago, he learned, Pasqualito had beaten the rap for a similar public homicide in St. Mary’s Park after the witnesses in the case withdrew. When he was arrested for the Double, Pasqualito bragged to Tebbens that the same thing would happen again. Worried, Tebbens took special measures to insulate his witnesses from threats and inducements. Nonetheless, one by one they defected, and two years later the case was taken off the calendar, and Pasqualito and Mercedes were released.
ON A BITTER January night three weeks after the Quad homicides, Tebbens sat in a surveillance van on Beekman Avenue watching for the Red-Top enforcer, Platano, to appear. “This don’t feel right,” Chubby whispered. It was freezing inside the van. Mark Tebbens could see the ragged outline of Chubby’s breath against the dim red glow of the cabin lights. A gang of street mopes circled the van. “They think you’re the police or some stickup guys.” Tebbens counted two or three in the passenger-side mirror poking at the side panels, working the door levers. But what got his attention was a lone black-jacketed figure sauntering deliberately toward them from across the street. He cupped his eyes and leaned his hooded face into the darkened windshield. Then he stepped back and lowered one of his hands to his waistband. “Gun,” Tebbens thought.
“Yo, Tebbens, man, if they think we’re rip-off guys, they’re going to start shooting,” Chubby said. “You better get your boys down here.”
Chubby was Benjamin Green, the older brother of Anthony Green, the Quad’s first victim. Chubby had turned up at the Four-Oh squad a few days earlier, saying that he wanted to help with the investigation. “I was going to take care of this myself,” Green told Tebbens. “But my mom’s already lost one son. She don’t need to lose another.” Short and skinny, Chubby was a smart, articulate street kid who seemed to know who was who on Beekman Avenue.
Tebbens had met with Detectives Dugan and Dimuro from Manhattan after the FBI agent brought Platano to his attention, and together the three investigators had decided to make the Red-Top enforcer their main target. Not only was he the common thread in their investigations—an eyewitness to the Cargill homicide, a shooter in the Quad—but he was clearly a psychotic killer, someone they wanted to get off the streets as quickly as possible.
Tracking down Platano hadn’t been easy. None of the detectives knew his real name or what he looked like. Though Tebbens had several Quad witnesses who referred to one of the shooters as Darkman or the Dominican—the man Tebbens suspected was Platano—only one, Angel “Chico” Puentes (a pseudonym), an unreliable street hustler, was willing to identify him by name. So when Chubby told Tebbens he not only knew Platano but could point him out to the detective, Tebbens spent the next few days cobbling together an arrest plan and scrounging equipment.
According to Green, Platano transported drugs onto Beekman Avenue most nights about midnight. Tebbens knew he didn’t want to take Platano near the gang’s stronghold or in the open, where he might be able to escape or, worse, trigger a shoot-out. Instead, he set up surveillance with Chubby and another detective, Mike Calderon, in a van across the street from the delivery point, and stationed an apprehension team—six police, two unmarked cars—a few blocks away. The idea was to trap Platano in his car as he tried to exit the block.
Tebbens knew the gang would be wary of any strange vehicle on the block, especially in view of stepped-up police activity following the Quad. So he picked a beat-up van that looked dirty from the outside. He recruited a Latino officer, dressed in street clothes, to drive them to the spot, then leave as though he were visiting around the corner. And just in case things went awry, he’d put two sector cars on radio alert. But he hadn’t reckoned on their being mistaken for another gang, nor was he prepared for the suddenness and ferocity of Red-Top’s reaction. Within moments of the van’s arrival, Red-Top’s workers had swarmed over them.
The gunman backed away from the windshield and rounded the side of the van. Tebbens lifted his walkie-talkie and quietly called in the radio cars. Then he slid back behind the side-panel door, drew his gun, and braced for a shoot-out. “Come on, guys. We’ve got a shooter here,” Tebbens whispered into the radio. He saw the side door latch jiggle back and forth and sensed the gunman’s impatience. Any second now, he would try to force the lock, perhaps shoot it out. If he did, Tebbens decided he would try to catch him in the chest as he entered the van, while his eyes were still adjusting to the dark.
“Here they come!” Calderon whispered from the back of the van. Tebbens moved to his side, and through a crack in the door panels saw two sector cars cruising up the aven
ue as their antagonists dispersed into the dark folds of the neighborhood.
Surprisingly, once the patrol cars moved on, the gang seemed to lose interest in the van. Across the street the gang’s headquarters, a five-story tenement at the north end of Beekman, rose like a fortress, commanding a clear view for blocks around. Crack sales were made from a covered walkway spanning the side alley, a gloomy corridor cut into the solid front of buildings crowding the street that Chubby called the Hole.
Green pointed out the gang members on the block, mostly young neighborhood toughs hired by Red-Top. The gang leaders themselves lived elsewhere, but they hung out on Cypress, the next street over, and made their presence felt on Beekman. While Lenny, Red-Top’s leader, was in jail on gun charges, he ran things through his brother Nelson and trusted lieutenants like Platano. He called the block every day, according to Green, sometimes leaving instructions for the gang with a local family who let out their apartment as a kind of clubhouse.
Tebbens adjusted the periscope hidden in an air vent on the van’s roof and scanned the block. It was past midnight and a chill wind gusted in from St. Mary’s Park at the north end of the avenue; still, traffic flowed ceaselessly—stockbrokers from New Jersey and Westchester in their BMWs and Suburbans, gang-bangers from the Heights in their Hondas and hoop-dies, slowly circling the block, trailing salsa music and raw, rumbling exhaust. Tebbens had known for a while that there was a Red-Top crew selling crack out of the alleyway at 348 Beekman; over time he had learned bits and pieces about the structure of their organization. But as Green continued his dissertation on the group’s activities, Tebbens began to realize the true scope of the scene before him. What had seemed at first glance to be just a lively street scene was in fact a complex, highly structured drug market. The men nearest the alley were in constant radio communication with lookouts stationed on the rooftops, who screened customers as they came onto the block, steering them into the Hole or, when the line backed up, to a vacant lot across the street. Youngsters on mountain bikes—seemingly at play—ran errands for the older crew members, bringing coffee and sandwiches and beer from a bodega at the south end of Beekman and providing another level of intelligence, while women, their faces framed by squares of tenement light, called down to the men huddled on stoops or around cars. At times the whole neighborhood seemed to pulse to the rhythms of the Hole, the steady beat of sales, the thrum of incipient violence.
“That’s him,” Green said.
Tebbens watched as a black Chevy Caprice, its windows tinted, pulled into Beekman from the park road and stopped in front of 348, almost directly across from the van. Tebbens thought he recognized the car. Platano emerged from the driver’s seat, dressed in black jeans and a puffed-out black army jacket over body armor. He was smaller than Tebbens had imagined him, and his expression under the arc light was grim. Suddenly the detective remembered why his car had seemed familiar. A month before he’d seen Anti-Crime chasing a black Caprice down Beekman Avenue—the target of an attempted gun search—and joined the pursuit through Mott Haven’s narrow side streets and onto the Queens-Bronx Expressway. Tebbens had watched helplessly as the sedan threaded traffic at speeds over 100 mph and, without slowing, tore through an automatic tollbooth, splintering the wooden guard arm. Platano, he realized now, had been the driver. He alerted the backup team and told them to be ready. Platano’s visit would be brief, Chubby had warned him. “Thirty seconds, no more.”
Platano’s effect on the block was electric. A group of men lounging near the entrance to 348 scattered at his approach. He was joined at the curb by his passenger, a tall, skinny youth dressed in identical black togs. Both men had drawn large-clip automatic guns—Mac-10s or Mac-11s, Tebbens guessed—and held them in plain view in front of them. Platano was carrying a large shopping bag full of what Tebbens supposed was crack. He moved slowly, looking left and right at almost every step. At the entrance they backed up against the building wall and checked the block a final time, their eyes resting briefly on the van. Then the tall, skinny kid—whom Chubby called Mask—peeled off and entered the building; Platano followed him in a moment later.
Tebbens used the seconds they were in 348 to move into the driver’s seat and to radio the other cars again to be ready. He intended to pull out behind Platano and block him in case he tried to back up the street. Meanwhile the other cars would converge on Beekman from either side of the avenue, cutting him off and hemming him in. A third sector car would provide backup. He felt that if they could surround him in a contained space they had a good chance of bringing him down. Watching Platano—his intensity, the military precision of his movements—he felt he might try to shoot his way out.
Platano exited the building with his partner, paused briefly for a word with the location manager, a local tough Chubby knew as Linwood, then moved swiftly to the Caprice and started up the engine. “He’s coming,” Tebbens called into the transmitter, then started the van as Platano accelerated down Beekman. Tebbens pulled out after him. “Come on, guys,” he said. “You better get over here. He’s coming fast.”
Tebbens was halfway down the block when he realized the backup wasn’t going to make it. He floored the gas pedal, but the van had no juice. Where the hell was everybody? He saw the Caprice turn left into 141st Street where the arrest team should have been and shouted into his radio: “He’s heading over to Cypress. He’s going to take a right at the next block.”
Tebbens rocked forward against the accelerator. The radio bristled. “We’ve got him, we’ve got him,” someone was yelling, the squawk and breakup adding hysteria to already excited voices. Moments later he heard: “We’re chasing him. We’re in pursuit on Cypress,” and Tebbens knew they’d lost him.
He rounded Beekman and saw one of the arrest cars slanted across 141st Street. Later he learned that the cops had improvised a roadblock and trapped Platano at the corner of Cypress Avenue. But when they went to arrest him, he backed into the car behind him, pushed it off at an angle, and sped away. A generation ago the cops would have fired on the fleeing car or at least tried to shoot out his tires—after all, Platano was the main suspect in a quadruple homicide—but new regulations governing the use of deadly force and discharging one’s weapon prohibited the officers from firing even a warning shot.
Platano had disappeared once again into the night.
IN MANHATTAN, Dugan and Dimuro also set up surveillance at places where Platano was said to hang out, but without success. Nor were their informants any help. Dugan resumed the search for Platano’s BMW. Drug dealers feel special about their cars. Dugan had known several who lived in hovels—flats without heat or furniture—who wouldn’t dream of leaving their cars unattended. He concentrated at first on the precinct’s garages, fanning out from the 600 block on West 171st Street, the gang’s home base. But the car didn’t show up and the attendants—usually a repository of information about neighborhood comings and goings—claimed to have no knowledge of Platano or the car.
Then, on a cold afternoon on January 6, his luck momentarily changed. Dugan and Dimuro had spent the day checking out lots and were driving back to the precinct, heading east along 174th Street in an unmarked squad car. At the Audubon Avenue intersection, Dugan suddenly spotted the BMW. “Don’t make it obvious,” he told Dimuro. “But check out the car on your left.” Dimuro tilted his head sideways. There, parked in the second spot along the avenue, not more than thirty feet away, was a white BMW with a blue convertible top.
“Jesus,” Dimuro said. “That’s the car.”
There were two men in it, their faces visible through the windshield. The driver matched the FBI’s description of Platano.
Like Tebbens, Dugan was chary of taking Platano head-on. He turned left into Audubon and went around the block. Dugan was already reaching for his gun as they coasted in behind the BMW. Then he froze. The car was empty. Platano and his pal had snuck out the passenger-side door while they had been stalled in traffic.
Barely pausing, Dugan drove do
wn the block to watch the car for the rest of their shift. Then Dimuro called Mark Tebbens in the Bronx to let him know they had Platano in their sights and to make sure his evidence was strong enough to justify an arrest. “Go ahead and grab him,” Tebbens said.
Dugan and Tebbens had talked regularly since their first meeting at the Three-Oh, unusual for detectives working in different boroughs, and had developed an instant rapport. They shared the same kidding sense of humor, and Dugan’s greater age and experience seemed to smooth the competitive edge that sometimes crops up between investigators. In time, they would adopt one another as mentor and mentee. But most important, they recognized a mutual appetite for hard work, that quality of perseverance that more than any other feature distinguishes good detectives from their mediocre counterparts.
MARK TEBBENS was ideally suited to be a street cop. A giant of a man, broad-shouldered and washboard trim, he projected confidence that he could handle himself in any situation. “Physical force isn’t the most important thing on the job, until you need it,” says Kevin Burke, who partnered with Tebbens during his early days in the Five-Two, a high-crime precinct in the North Bronx not far from where both men had grown up. “When the cops in our sector called in for backup and we’d pull up, they were always happy to see that big foot coming out of the car.”
Burke and Tebbens worked steady midnights in Anti-Crime, a special plainclothes patrol unit that targeted street crimes from auto theft to illegal gun possession. They were so effective that even after the Department disbanded their unit in the wake of corruption scandals at similar plainclothes units around town, their CO kept them on duty and out of uniform, the only Anti-Crime cops on the midnight tour.