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

by Stone, Michael

  Benjamin Green, the young man who had accompanied Tebbens in the surveillance van on Beekman Avenue, had also had a change of heart. Threatened by the Cowboys, he’d signed a letter in the office of one defendant’s lawyer recanting his statements to Tebbens. Then, on February 12, two Cowboy enforcers cornered James Singleton, a third witness in the Quad case, in a yard behind his home. Saying “Snitches get stitches,” one of the gang members pinned Singleton’s arms, while the other slashed his face. Tebbens was able to arrest and lock up the offenders a week later and to get the resources to relocate Singleton to a new address. But increasingly the detective felt like a juggler who tries to keep too many plates spinning, as one after another they wobble and fall.

  Moreover, Tebbens’ bosses in the Bronx were pressuring him to wrap up the Quad case. As a rule, the Department allots precinct detectives four days to work on homicides before they begin catching cases again. Because of the exceptional nature of the Quad, Tebbens had been allowed to pursue the case exclusively, and had been assigned a small task force of three investigators to assist him. But by March, with the precinct under siege, Tebbens was fielding new cases once more. What little time Tebbens was able to give to the Quad that spring was frequently his own.

  The Cowboys were under no such constraints. Despite an increased police presence in the wake of the Quad shootings, the gang seemed to be operating at full force. In early January, Anthony Villerbe, a former Corrections officer, was shot dead in his car while apparently trying to buy crack from Red-Top. And almost every day through the winter, Four-Oh cops received complaints and reports of violence from Beekman Avenue.

  Tebbens and his colleagues were able to lock up a number of lower-level gang members, but the Cowboys could easily replace them from the pool of neighborhood youngsters. What concerned Tebbens far more, however, was Dugan’s revelation, during one of their periodic meetings to go over their separate investigations, of a possible link between the gang and Victor Nazar, the off-duty Four-Oh cop Dugan encountered in front of Cuevas’ building. Tebbens recalled that Nazar had spent an inordinate amount of time hanging around the detectives’ squad room at the Four-Oh. Internal Affairs was investigating Nazar, and had placed him on limited duty. (Nazar resigned from the force and later was arrested with Frankie Cuevas on a gun charge but was never prosecuted.) But Tebbens couldn’t discount the possibility that Nazar had learned details of the Cowboys investigation—the names of informants and potential witnesses—and had sold or given the information to the gang.

  But whether or not Nazar had compromised his witnesses’ anonymity, Tebbens was aware that their identities would become public soon enough—through either court proceedings or their own loose tongues. Moreover, he knew that he would not get the time and resources he needed to protect them.

  Then, on March 20, a seemingly routine murder on Beekman Avenue changed the course of the investigation. Though it would take him another month to realize the implications of what had happened, Tebbens was about to encounter a family who could help him take down not only the killers in the Quad case but the entire Cowboy organization.

  CATCHING A BREAK

  SPRING 1992

  IN THE END, it was mere chance that brought the Morales family to the attention of Mark Tebbens. Elizabeth Morales had agreed to testify against Cowboy enforcers Pasqualito and Frankie Robles in an assault case. The police arranged to put Morales and her son Tito—the target of the attack—up at a hotel outside the precinct for protection. The next morning, however, the hotel complained that she had boarded her entire family—more than twelve children and relatives—in the room. “I can’t leave my family behind,” Morales told them. “[The gang] would kill them.” Forced to move to a shelter, they found conditions intolerable. Families were segregated into male and female living areas, and Elizabeth and her husband were forced to quit their jobs and withdraw their children from school.

  Morales called the precinct daily, pleading for help. She realized that convicting Pasqualito and Robles wouldn’t protect her family against reprisals by the rest of the gang. In desperation, Morales hinted to the detective in charge of her case that she could supply him with information on other cases, including the quadruple murder on Beekman Avenue. The detective inexplicably made no attempt to draw Morales out or to hook her up with Mark Tebbens, whose search for potential informants from Beekman Avenue was well known to the squad. It was weeks later that another Four-Oh detective, fielding one of Morales’ calls by chance, advised her to contact Tebbens.

  For the next two weeks, Tebbens visited the shelter almost every day to interview Elizabeth and her children, and to help them out in whatever small ways that he could. But even before he left their apartment that first day, he realized his investigation had taken a giant leap forward.

  ELIZABETH MORALES had lived in the Beekman Avenue area all her life. Her parents had come from Puerto Rico in the 1950s, part of the postwar flood of migrants who’d colonized East Harlem, then spilled across the river to the South Bronx. As the city’s newest arrivals, Puerto Ricans were low men on the economic totem pole. They competed for a dwindling number of manufacturing and union jobs with white ethnic and African-American workers, and they bumped up against blacks in their search for decent housing. Segregation was the rule then, and the South Bronx had become a ghetto, a uniformly poor community without Harlem’s institutions, bourgeois neighborhoods, or political clout.

  Elizabeth’s father found work as a super at several buildings in the neighborhood, and spent four nights a week at their kitchen table drinking himself into oblivion. When she was 16, she married Angel Luis Cruz and began having children of her own. Her mother had married at 12.

  But for all the hardship, life in her South Bronx neighborhood was good. In the warm months, the men cooked out and the women pulled picnic tables together and closed off the block. Neighbors were like family then; they watched over each other’s children and came to each other’s aid in hard times. There was crime—Mr. Philip, an elderly Italian gent said to be “connected,” lived on the corner and ran the numbers and other sundry rackets—and there were gangs: the Bachelors, the Suicides, and the Ching-A-Lings. But they didn’t carry guns and there was relatively little violence.

  Drug sales first spilled onto the street in the 1970s. When Elizabeth moved with her mother and burgeoning family onto Beekman Avenue, there were “cheese lines”—queues of drug customers—in front of the abandoned buildings on Beech Terrace at the north end of the block. But the operations were small and self-contained, and rarely impacted on the neighborhood. It wasn’t until the late 1980s, after a fire destroyed their stronghold on Beech Terrace, that the Cowboys moved into the Hole, the alley adjacent to Morales’ building at No. 348, and life changed forever.

  The gang announced their arrival on the block with a flurry of murders and assaults. Almost every day, Pasqualito and Victor Mercedes, one of the original Cowboys, seemed to be beating someone up. It was common knowledge in the neighborhood that Pasqualito had shot and killed a dealer on Beech Terrace, and Morales witnessed him slashing the throat of another potential competitor who sold crack in a vacant lot across from No. 348. Another local dealer lived downstairs from Morales. She remembers looking out her window one day, after hearing a commotion, and seeing Pasqualito firing into his second-floor apartment from the street.

  The gang solidified their hold over the neighborhood in 1989, when they publicly executed two dealers from another part of the Bronx whom they suspected of murdering one of their friends, in the killing that became known as the Double.

  Bribing and bullying the residents of No. 348, the gang quickly gained control of the building. They picked up tenants’ rent, used their apartments to stash drugs and guns, and hired tenants as low-level workers. Nearly all were grateful at first for the infusion of cash and jobs. But the relationship soured once the Cowboys moved in—and then it was impossible to move them out.

  When Loretta Baker tried to sever her “sublet�
�� plan with the Cowboys—they had slapped her niece and treated the place as their own—Lenny, Nelson, Platano, and Ulysses Mena, a Cowboy enforcer known as Dominican Chino, paid her a visit. Platano had tossed a bag of crack onto the living-room table, aimed a gun at her, and mouthed “pow-pow-pow.” He placed the gun on the table, and Mena picked it up and shot her in the head. They dumped Baker’s unconscious body in the hallway—a message to other uncooperative tenants. (Baker later recovered.)

  Baker was not the only tenant bullied by the Cowboys. Elizabeth Morales’ downstairs neighbor fled the building, leaving her belongings behind, after her brother was beaten by the gang for stealing their drugs. When another neighbor ran afoul of the gang, they broke into her apartment and hanged her dog, and shot at her through her peephole.

  Elizabeth also made a deal with the Cowboys, to her subsequent regret. Her husband had left her five years before with four children to support. She had begun living with Chino Morales, a laborer in the Hunts Point grocery market, and she had found work in a nursing home. But with her mother, various relatives, and the addition of another child and four grandchildren, she had nineteen mouths to feed. So when the gang offered to pay her to cook for them, she accepted, only too glad to have the extra money coming in to help feed and clothe her family. In exchange, her living room became a kind of clubhouse for the Cowboy hierarchy.

  Before long, Lenny, Nelson, and Platano became regular visitors. They’d slip her fifty dollars to fry up chorizos with rice and beans, and hang out on her couch, discussing the day’s business or watching TV. The arrangement worked well enough. They called her Ma, and her husband Pa, and Lenny briefly dated her oldest daughter, Ita. But good relations only went so far with the Cowboys. Platano used to tip Joey, her youngest, fifty dollars to carry a book bag full of drugs from his car to the Cowboys’ stash apartments. Michael and Tito, now 16 and 18, started as lookouts at 14, and became part-time managers. When they began cutting school, Elizabeth complained to Lenny and Platano.

  “They’re in a man’s world now, and they got to learn to live by a man’s rules,” Lenny had told her.

  MEANWHILE, sales at the Hole skyrocketed, with clients pouring in from bedroom communities in New Jersey, the North Bronx, and Westchester. The Hole became a cash machine operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. During its peak, between 1988 and 1991, the organization grossed $30,000 per day.

  As the money flowed in, Cowboy justice became not only vicious but capricious—a kind of impulsive mayhem that couldn’t be explained by any street code. In May 1991, Oscar Alvarez, a Cowboy seller, was shot dead after his best friend absconded with company crack and cash, even though Alvarez had offered to work off his debt. Six months later, the Cowboys caught another worker, a local youngster named Eddie Maldonado, stealing from them. Platano, Tukes, and others surrounded him in St. Mary’s Park one afternoon. Amidst a crowd of children, they pulled out machetes and a serrated Rambo-style knife and gutted Maldonado.

  As frightening as these eruptions of violence were, they were still connected, however tenuously, to the operation of the gang’s drug business. But there were gratuitous acts of violence as well, the sudden, casual use of force to solve even small, everyday problems: Lenny punching out his girlfriend during an argument, leaving her unconscious in the street; Stanley Tukes throwing a thirty-pound weight from the roof of 348 Beekman at a young deaf girl because he felt she was making a disturbance. (The weight hit her in the head, causing permanent brain damage.)

  Worse, the gang’s culture had begun to seep into the life of the block, poisoning relations among neighbors and corrupting the youngsters who grew up in their shadow—Morales’ sons among them.

  But Elizabeth felt trapped. It was dangerous to complain to the Cowboys, and the city landlord did nothing. A few tenants organized patrols, but they were powerless against the heavily armed dealers. The police had done virtually nothing in three years to curtail the gang’s activities. And with her sons all working for the organization, what would she say to them? Besides, everyone on Beekman Avenue knew that the gang had a cop in their pocket. Complaints to the precinct seemed to be channeled back to the Cowboys. Nor could Elizabeth afford to give up her rent subsidy. Where else would she find a four-bedroom apartment for $93 a month?

  In the wake of the 1991 Quad murders, things seemed to calm down in the neighborhood for a while. Lenny was in jail, Nelson was rumored to have absconded to the Dominican Republic after killing a customer—the former Corrections officer, Anthony Villerbe—in early January, Platano rarely visited the block after narrowly escaping the police, and Stanley Tukes had been arrested. The Hole still did business, but much of the sales seemed to have migrated a block east to Cypress Avenue, where the gang had another spot.

  Then, on March 20, all hell broke loose in the lobby of 348 Beekman. Marion Frazier, the 18-year-old son of Louise McBride, Elizabeth’s upstairs neighbor, held up Esteban Clemente, a Cowboy manager, who lived across the hall from Elizabeth with her friend Fat Iris. Frazier had been acting strangely. Just a few days earlier he had shot and killed a local dealer for insulting his mother. When Clemente refused to hand over the cache of drugs and cash he was carrying, Frazier shot him in the stomach and fled. Fatally wounded, Clemente made it back to his apartment, and begged Fat Iris to get the bag of drugs and cash he was still holding out of the apartment before the police arrived. Fat Iris gave the bag to Ita, Elizabeth’s oldest daughter, who in turn gave it to her brother Michael.

  To Michael and his brothers, a bagful of crack and cash was a windfall, and they set off on a shopping spree, oblivious to the ramifications. By noon the next day, Pasqualito had traced the pilfered drugs to the Cruz-Morales family and had cornered Elizabeth’s oldest son, Tito, in front of their building. While Elizabeth and her youngest daughter, Iris, watched in horror from their window, Pasqualito, accompanied by Frankie Robles, pistol-whipped Tito into unconsciousness.

  Elizabeth raced Tito to the hospital. But when the police questioned him in the recovery room, Elizabeth ordered him not to say anything. She was still unaware of the extent of her children’s folly or the magnitude of Pasqualito’s rage. Hours after bringing her son back from the hospital, Pasqualito and Frankie showed up at her apartment demanding their drugs.

  “I don’t know nothing about your drugs,” Elizabeth had said. “I was at work all yesterday. I don’t know what went on here.”

  “Ask your kids,” Pasqualito said, waving his gun between her mother and her granddaughter. Elizabeth had never seen him so angry. He was pointing a gun as big as a hair dryer at the back of her mother’s head. “I’ll kill her right now if I don’t get my drugs back.”

  Frankie Robles stood in the narrow hallway to her apartment, his short, fat frame blocking the front door, a cocked gun at his side.

  “He’s going to kill us,” her granddaughter Daisy said. “The man is going to kill us, Mama.” Only three years old, she knew about death the way children in war zones knew about death.

  Fear, like nausea, roiled Elizabeth’s stomach. She knew if Pasqualito harmed her mother, he would have to shoot them all. Suddenly, everyone was talking. Fat Iris, who’d come from next door; Elizabeth’s husband, Chino, who emerged from the living room at the rear of the apartment and was pleading with Pasqualito to spare his family. Loudest of all was her mother’s defiant incantations. “Reprendre el Dominica,” she keened repeatedly. “Take back the devil.”

  “Take the old lady inside,” Pasqualito snapped. Elizabeth’s daughter Iris hustled her off to her bedroom, but they could hear her prayers through the paper-thin walls.

  “Please, let’s talk,” Chino begged Pasqualito. “Don’t do anything to my family. We were working. We didn’t know nothing about this.”

  “I’ll get you your money,” Elizabeth promised. “If I have to give you my whole paycheck.”

  “Talk to your kids,” Pasqualito said. “Get all the drugs and money.” He started for the door. “You have until midnight
,” he said.

  ELIZABETH and Fat Iris searched the apartment, turning up crack bottles from under the washing machine, from the back of closets. The kids themselves couldn’t remember where they’d hidden all the drugs. Then the two women went to Ita’s apartment to recover her share. But her husband, Edgar, told them he had nothing to give back, and Elizabeth could see why. All around them was the evidence of their daylong shopping jag: a new baby crib, Nintendo, expensive stereo equipment.

  An hour later, Elizabeth handed Pasqualito a bag with the drugs and cash she’d been able to retrieve. He began counting the bundles.

  “If there’s something missing, please let me pay you back,” Elizabeth offered again. “Don’t hurt my family.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Pasqualito said.

  “Are we all right?” Elizabeth asked. “Is my family all right?”

  Pasqualito’s sidekick, Frankie, laughed at the question.

  THE NEXT DAY, Chumpy, a young man from the neighborhood who worked for the Cowboys, advised Elizabeth to take her family and leave. A Cowboy enforcer known as Tezo had permission from the “big boss” to kill them if she didn’t return all the drugs and money that day.