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

by Stone, Michael

  Tebbens not only knew who the bad guys were, he wanted to collar them all, according to Burke: “He had this intensity, this fire in his belly. We all start out that way, but after a few years most guys begin to burn out—the politicking, all the bullshit on the job. But Mark never lost that resolve. You could see it. He’d get that look like ‘You can come with me or not, but I’m going to get this guy,’ and you knew how it was going to end, that you were going to be out all night if that’s what it took.”

  Tebbens was used to being on the outside. The son of an NYPD cop, he grew up in Wakefield, a working-class community in the northeast section of the Bronx. During the 1960s, Wakefield was a neighborhood in flux. Mainly Irish and Italian, but with expanding pockets of black and Hispanic families, the area broke down along ethnic and racial lines. Tebbens, whose father was white and whose mother was Puerto Rican, was caught in between, not wholly accepted by any one group.

  There was tension at home as well. Mark’s parents divorced when he was five; and his father, rarely around before the breakup, remained a shadowy figure throughout his childhood. Grace Tebbens tried to fill in the void, but she was forced to work two jobs after the separation, and was often absent herself. What’s more, divorce was still taboo within the conservative Catholic precincts of Wakefield, and it added to the stigma of Mark’s mixed parentage.

  A big, sullen kid full of pent-up anger, he was expelled from Catholic school at five for disruptive behavior. Then at 11, he was removed from his local public school for fighting and transferred to PS 78, a tough minority school located in the nearby Edenwald projects. Mark had to fight for respect on a daily basis.

  With his spotty school record and penchant for getting into scrapes, Mark was headed for serious trouble. What saved him was athletics. He loved sports, especially basketball. Well over six feet and nearly 250 pounds, he dwarfed the other players. Under the tutelage of the school’s athletic director, the first in a series of coach-father figures, Mark developed the skills and work habits that enabled him to use his size and toughness to good advantage. By the time he was 14, he had made himself into one of the top players in the area, and was offered a full scholarship to attend Dalton, an elite private school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

  Nothing in his background, however, prepared him to compete with his new schoolmates academically or socially. Once again he was the outsider. They lived, many of them, in spacious apartments and brownstones in the city’s toniest neighborhoods and vacationed in the Hamptons or Europe. Those who had summer jobs interned at top law firms and investment banks. Tebbens commuted to Dalton on the subway, and helped out after school—when he didn’t have practice—at his uncle’s ice-cream shop.

  But Tebbens had endured too many disruptions to be intimidated by his new surroundings. He didn’t try to pretend to be someone he wasn’t; in fact, he regaled his classmates with tales of the street. He worked hard and muddled through the curriculum—and he played ball, winning the school’s most valuable athlete award and earning a football scholarship from Northeastern.

  But months before he was scheduled to leave for college, his mother, who worked as a store detective in Westchester, was hit by a car while chasing a shoplifter in the street. Critically injured, Grace Tebbens recovered, but her rehabilitation was slow and strained the family’s finances. Tebbens’ brother lacked Mark’s drive and discipline, and had fallen in with a bad crowd and begun drinking heavily and using drugs.

  Mark completed a year at Northeastern, but that summer he decided not to return to Boston, in order to help out at home. He found work at a number of security-related jobs, while continuing his education at John Jay, a Manhattan-based college specializing in criminal justice.

  After taking up boxing—his father had offered to train him for the Golden Gloves, and after a year of hard work he’d made it to the semifinals—he took the NYPD exam, and entered the Academy. His father, interpreting Mark’s choice as a betrayal, saw him only one more time, a year later at the funeral of Mark’s brother, who died of a heroin overdose.

  Tebbens got his detective’s gold shield seven years later in 1989 and transferred to the Four-Oh in the Bronx. His strengths as a detective grew out of his experiences as a youth—crossing racial, ethnic, and class lines; learning to deal with all kinds of people. “Mark was my idea of a complete detective,” HIU’s Terry Quinn would later say. “He could do investigations, he knew how to interview. But he never lost touch with the street. A lot of detectives, a few years behind a desk, they get lazy and forget what it’s like out there. But Mark always had good instincts.”

  IN MANY WAYS, Tebbens’ style was the opposite of Dugan’s. Tebbens, ten years younger, was a product of the street whose approach to cases was visceral and reflexive; he charged at suspects head-on, pawing them until he found an exploitable weakness. Dugan used a subtler and more methodical approach in his investigations, circling his adversaries, tracking them through careful observation, learning their histories through police, motor vehicle, and phone records, weaving intricate webs of evidence.

  Still, Dugan admired Tebbens, his youthful raw energy and streetcraft, and Tebbens respected the older man’s wisdom about investigations and the arcane politics of policing. But their different methods may have had less to do with age than background. Tebbens had grown up amid a jumble of classes, races, and ethnic groups; he was used to conflict, the scrum of confrontation and direct action. Dugan, on the other hand, was the product of a happy and homogeneous working-class childhood, a second-generation police officer and the consummate insider, born into a large Irish-American clan with roots in the city three generations deep.

  Dugan’s father, James, was a detective on the police force. Slope-shouldered and potbellied with a round Irish face and brushed-back white hair, he was a dead ringer for the 1970s sitcom character Archie Bunker, at times comically hidebound. When Garry’s older sister asked her father to teach her to drive, he refused, claiming that it was not a proper role for a woman.

  James Dugan had come of age during the Depression, and his character had been even more firmly forged in the war. He faced life’s vagaries with stoicism and quiet, uncomplaining dignity. He revered his wife, Alice, a devout Catholic as warm and expansive as he was but-toned-down; and when she fought long battles against cancer and kidney disease—though she survived into her fifties, she was hospitalized for long stretches—Garry never heard his father utter a bitter word.

  The last of three children, Garry grew up in Carroll Gardens, a tidy working-class enclave in downtown Brooklyn, studded with three-story painted-brick houses, with patches of lawn and hedgerows that formed a single green line in summer. When Garry was 10 the family moved to Staten Island, where his father had transferred to help form the borough’s first narcotics squad. Garry’s days were tightly bound by the regimens of school and church, and the routines of his mother’s lace-curtain domesticity.

  Weekends and holidays, Garry helped his father with household repairs, learning his way around pipes, wiring, and Sheetrock. He was clever with his hands and enjoyed the physical work and the slow, methodical progress from plans to finished product. His moral education centered on the church, and he took his job as altar boy seriously, learning Latin so he could participate in the services.

  A feckless student, he preferred to spend his afternoons with the girls from the nearby convent school, and he had no aptitude for athletics. But he possessed judgment and uncanny discretion, a core of self-control that set him apart from his peers. Some of that restraint had been bred into him by his father; and some, no doubt, sprang from his religious training. Perhaps the largest part stemmed from his mother’s bouts with illness, ordeals that tested her family’s resolve and forced Garry early on to confront the prospect of loss and mortality. Whatever the source of his maturity, he was a leader in his circle of friends, steady and self-confident, someone others went to when they were in a jam.

  Garry could not help noticing the powerful effect
his father’s gold shield had on other adults. Friends, neighbors, relatives came to him for counsel, and tradesmen were only too happy to offer his son a free seat in the local movie theater or a sandwich at the Automat. Although he studied dental technology at Brooklyn Community College, the mystique of the Police Department won out, and he decided to take the NYPD entrance exam. After entering the Academy, he married Lorraine Wiest, an education major, who lived near him in Staten Island, and took night courses at NYU, receiving a bachelor’s degree in English literature in 1973. For a while he thought of going to law school, but the fact was he loved being a cop. After his first daughter was born the following year, he dropped the idea of law school for good.

  His first assignment was to the 7th Precinct on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a melting pot for immigrants and the city’s poor and elderly. Having lived his entire life in the clannish confines of church and parish, he might have been walking a beat in another country. His ears buzzed with the street cadences of Spanish, Russian, Yiddish, Arabic, and Urdu; and his senses reeled from the exotic sights and smells of a dozen different cultures and cuisines.

  He spent the majority of those first years getting to know the people in this new land. He developed an inexhaustible curiosity about his neighborhood, and he had a knack for talking to the shop owners and residents on his beat—pleasant, practical, nonjudgmental—that invited their confidence. He picked up Spanish, the way he’d once studied Latin as an altar boy. He revisited crime victims and complainants in their homes and at their workplaces, and he stopped in at every shop and restaurant in his sector, learning about their histories, their families, their businesses.

  Thanks to his many contacts, he was privy to a continuous stream of information about the neighborhood—who the troublemakers were, where they hung out, what they were up to. And he was diligent about collecting that information, collating lists of suspects, nicknames, addresses, known associates, license plate numbers. He was also a natural leader among his fellow officers, who elected him as their union representative and usually deferred to him in the field and at crime scenes.

  In 1983, he transferred uptown to the Three-Four to shorten his commute to the home he and his wife bought four years earlier in upstate New York. The Three-Four was becoming New York’s busiest precinct, the nexus of the city’s cocaine and contract-murder markets. Most of the violence was directed at local drug dealers and the stickup artists who preyed on them. But some victims were bystanders and, occasionally, cops. One night in 1989 two Three-Four officers were shot dead in separate incidents, just hours apart.

  Always among his precinct’s arrest leaders, Dugan was one of the Department’s most heavily decorated officers, demonstrating coolness and courage under fire on numerous occasions. In 1983, after foiling an armed robbery, Dugan finally accepted an appointment to the precinct’s newly formed robbery unit. In short order, Dugan’s team became one of New York’s most effective at curbing the soaring robbery rate. Three years later, he was drafted into the Department’s elite Manhattan North Homicide unit and promoted to detective.

  The skills that made Dugan an outstanding street cop—a talent for dealing with people, an unusual ability to spot patterns of criminal activity—served him well as a detective. He was a meticulous investigator, a tireless collector of facts who constructed cases with the same patience and precision he had learned as a teenager working with his father on their house in Staten Island. “Garry would exhaust every lead, track down every witness; he was relentless,” says Sylvester Leonard, a veteran lieutenant, who was chief of Dugan’s robbery unit. “Garry had what all good detectives have: a passion for the work, a way of inhabiting a case and making it his own.” But unlike other investigators, many of whom would become personally involved in their cases, often to the point of obsession, Dugan kept his feelings at a remove. His passion stemmed from his craft, the satisfaction he got from doing the job well. “He was the steadiest man in the unit,” Leonard says. “You never had to worry about him taking shortcuts or not doing the right thing. He approached every case in the same way.”

  But Cargill wasn’t like other cases.

  METHODICAL AS EVER, Dugan called in to the precinct and put a tracer on the BMW, then settled in for a long stakeout. He was prepared to stay all night if necessary, and when Platano hadn’t returned by midnight, Dugan phoned his squad and put in a request for overtime. But he wasn’t optimistic. Overtime was arguably the most divisive issue on the force, pitting career-minded supervisors, charged with holding down expenses, against active police, whose numerous arrests generated long hours and extra pay. Always a source of tension, it was especially frustrating for investigators like Dugan in the early 1990s, when police bosses felt that the causes of crime were outside their control, and thus were reluctant to expend scarce resources on cases that didn’t make headlines.

  The problem went beyond that. Dugan had seen plenty of good officers jammed up, transferred from line duty to desk jobs because their bosses knew that a cop making arrests in the street not only taxed their budget but was more likely to trigger complaints of corruption and brutality. Yet cops who never made collars were left alone year after year. Precinct commanders were promoted for keeping the peace and not rocking the boat. The crime rate could shoot up during their tenure, but as long as there were no riots or major corruption scandals on their watch, they were thought to be doing a good job.

  In fact, Dugan had never had a real problem over his activity. Though he routinely headed the list of his precinct’s overtime earners, he was also among the leaders in arrests—and not the bullshit kind, but serious felonies. His supervisors knew they were getting good value with Dugan, and they backed him up to the chiefs who flagged his record. In cop talk, collars justify everything.

  But in his last case—the highly publicized murder/rape of 13-year-old Paola Illera—Dugan had been unable to make an arrest, and his boss, a deputy inspector new to the command, failed to protect him when the chiefs questioned his overtime allotment. Instead, the inspector ordered an inquiry, and Internal Affairs, after poring over six months of records, uncovered a minor error in Dugan’s memo book. As a result, Dugan was docked three vacation days, and prohibited through the next quarter from earning overtime.

  Dugan hoped the bosses would be more farsighted tonight. After months of patient investigation and plenty of legwork, he and Dimuro had stumbled on one of the cars Kevin Kryzeminski had described to them the day after his friend’s murder, and with it an opportunity to unlock two of the city’s most nettlesome cases. At the very least, they had a chance to take one of the city’s most fearsome killers off the street and preempt future acts of violence. How many, he couldn’t begin to know. But Dugan was certain that lives would be saved.

  When he called the squad, however, Dugan was told that his request had been denied. The squad sergeant told him he’d alert one of the sector cars to keep an eye on the BMW. Disappointed, Dugan went home. He didn’t even feel right tracking Platano on his own time. The Department discouraged such actions. The Supreme Court had mandated that governments must pay employees overtime, even when unauthorized; and the NYPD automatically investigated any off-duty arrests. When he returned the next day, Platano’s car was gone, as he knew it would be. What he didn’t know was that in failing to lock up Platano—when Tebbens had an eyewitness ready to identify him as one of the shooters in the Quad—they had lost a chance to avert a gang war.

  THE POLICE traced the BMW through its plate number to Felipe Capellan, a small-time hood with a Massachusetts address. Although Dugan was unable to locate him, he learned from his rap sheet that Capellan had an upcoming court date—March 25—in Manhattan.

  It was Dugan’s partner, Dimuro, who moved the case forward first. He had worked Narcotics before becoming a detective and he knew the kind of terror gangs like Red-Top exercised in the street, as well as how tough it was to build cases against their top people. Early on, he’d despaired of solving the case. Now that he
knew some of the killers behind the murder, and had read the FBI reports, he was even more pessimistic.

  A couple of detectives from Dimuro’s old Narcotics unit told him about the Homicide Investigation Unit’s work in cracking the Jamaicans and the Gheri Curls in the Three-Oh. As a result, Dimuro decided to look up Terry Quinn. “They told me that Quinn was a big pain in the ass, but that he gets results,” Dimuro recalled. “I’d already heard about Quinn and I knew what he was doing with the posses on Edgecombe Avenue. So I figured: Who gives a shit about personalities? I’m a big pain in the ass myself.”

  Dimuro called Quinn several times about Cargill, giving him some of the details about the gang behind the shooting. Quinn expressed interest in the case, but counseled patience. HIU’s investigators were busy helping Fernando Camacho prepare for the Gheri Curls trial. In the end, Dimuro decided an appeal in person might spark some action.

  He found HIU tucked into a corner of the fifteenth floor. Hunkered down behind anonymous, bulletproof glass doors, the unit had a functional, unfinished look—two spare office suites flanking the investigators’ squad room, a large, loftlike space studded with cheap metal desks, carpeted by some scabrous, mud-colored material. It looked like an office out of Dimuro’s own precinct, and he immediately felt at home. Only the carpeting seemed out of place, and that, Quinn later explained, was a gift from the Feds. A team of ATF agents who briefly shared space with the unit had installed the stuff in compliance with federal work rules.

  Dimuro was apprehensive about meeting Quinn. If Arsenault was HIU’s head, Quinn was its heart and sinew; the force who drove the unit through hard times, who gave it its toughness and credibility in the street.