Lenny went to school on his bosses. He learned how to set up a secure location, how to supply his spot from stash houses, how to run the business and keep his workers in line. Yayo himself taught him the most important lesson: always stay open, never run out of “work.” Crack customers are, almost by definition, creatures of habit. If you provide them with a quality product at a reasonable price, they will keep coming back. But if you allow them to go elsewhere—even once—you might lose them forever.
For all his success, Yayo was a difficult boss to work for: greedy, demanding, bullying. When the revenue from the spots Lenny and Nelson were managing failed to meet his expectations, he fired them.
In the fall of 1985, Nelson opened his own spot in an apartment at 603–605 Beech Terrace in the Bronx, a tenement at the north end of Beekman Avenue. But he had a hard time making a go of it. Crack was still a relatively new drug in the South Bronx, good local workers were scarce, and rival crews kept undercutting Nelson’s sales. Nelson had never been a careful manager like his brother; he didn’t have the same patience for details or single-minded focus. In fact, Nelson was still in school, playing football and hoping to graduate; he had to delegate authority, and his workers exploited his absence, slacking off and stealing from him. Finally, around Christmas, Nelson came down with pneumonia, and asked Lenny to run the spot.
The change was immediate and dramatic. Nelson had been buying his crack already cooked and packaged, kicking back 70–75 percent of his revenues to his suppliers. After paying his workers and taking care of expenses, he was barely breaking even. Lenny sought out wholesalers who’d front him raw cocaine in bulk (El Feo was his first supplier), then set up a crack kitchen, got Ramon Tijada to teach him how to cook, and began producing and packaging the signature Red-Top brand—not only improving quality control but more than doubling his profit margins. Meanwhile, he fortified the apartment in which he sold against stickups and police raids, hired new workers, brought in Miguel Castillo as a transporter to make sure they were always well stocked, and initiated a marketing campaign, distributing free samples to neighborhood users.
Business boomed. The line of Red-Top customers stretched through the building’s first-floor hallway, out onto Beech Terrace, where the chill December wind gusted in from St. Mary’s Park. As news of Lenny’s success spread back to the Heights, Lenny’s childhood pals started showing up, looking for work: Pasqualito, then Victor Mercedes and Fat Danny, who brought Platano, who in turn brought Freddie Sendra, a former running mate from the neighborhood. Lenny employed them all as managers and enforcers, insulating his brother and himself from the street, much the way Yayo and Capo had.
That strategy was only partly successful. While Lenny and Nelson never touched the drugs they sold, their workers expected them to “pull the trigger” when necessary. In early 1987, for instance, Lenny shot a disgruntled customer who attacked him with a machete in a lot outside 603–605 Beech Terrace. Nelson, who had rushed to his brother’s side, was arrested and took the blame for the shooting. He eventually pled to gun possession, and was sentenced to five years’ probation. Lenny, meanwhile, took a monthlong “vacation” in the Dominican Republic, where he hooked up with Yayo, who was also fleeing U.S. law enforcement.
When Lenny returned to Beech Terrace, the spot was humming along more profitably than ever; crack was then selling at $10 per vial and the brothers were clearing about $15,000 per week. As crack revenues climbed, competition for prized locations increased, and turned ever more vicious. Guns proliferated, as did the circumstances under which the younger, hungrier dealers were prepared to use them. And each new increase of violence attracted more attention from the police.
Lenny came back to Beech Terrace colder and more ruthless. He beefed up security and initiated a shoot-first, ask-questions-later policy. “One year everybody had guns,” Lenny recalled. “It seemed like the whole world was going crazy, that every week, everywhere you looked someone you knew was getting killed. I wasn’t going to let no little kid make his name off me.”
Lenny had grasped, sooner than most rivals, that they were operating in a new paradigm, and adjusted quickly. Unlike Yayo, who didn’t like mixing guns and drugs at his sales spots, Lenny made sure his managers were armed with automatic weapons, and expected them to use them, to counter threats and slights with calculated, preemptive violence. More than most, if not all other gangs, the Cowboys gained a reputation for knee-jerk brutality.
Initially, Lenny’s tactics served as an effective deterrent, but the genie of violence, once out of the bottle, became impossible to contain. It not only spurred competitors to new heights of aggression. It also had an unpredictable, at times destabilizing effect on members of Lenny’s own gang. Platano had been an auto mechanic and wheelman when Lenny hired him in 1987 to transport his crack. Small and frail, he changed once he learned to use firearms. With a gun in his hand, he became a fierce, unpredictable killer, the gang’s most feared enforcer. Pasqualito underwent a similar transformation. Growing up, Pasqualito had struck Lenny as a mama’s boy. No one was more surprised than Lenny when Pasqualito, in 1988, gunned down Guy Gaines, a former Corrections officer and stickup artist who had been preying on Red-Top’s customers and workers.
But while Platano was content to remain a loyal soldier of the gang, Pasqualito’s forays into violence emboldened him to the point where he began to challenge Lenny’s leadership. Arrested for Gaines’s murder, Pasqualito spent five months in jail before he was acquitted at trial in December. Back on the streets, Pasqualito was a changed man—cockier, more assertive, and tougher than before. When Red-Top moved to Beekman Avenue after their spot on Beech Terrace burned down, Pasqualito led the way, shooting and slashing local dealers who failed to make way for the gang. By spring, he, along with Fat Danny and Victor, was lobbying Lenny for his own spot in the neighborhood.
Power in New York’s drug world was a constant negotiation. There were no deeds or titles to crack spots, no legal contracts or stocks or bonds that defined ownership. There weren’t even rigid hierarchies or reinforcing rites or traditions as there were among Mafia-type organized crime groups. The city’s drug gangs were loose-knit associations of mostly violent young men with guns and authority problems. A leader’s signal virtue—more important than his connections, his organizational skills, or even his toughness and charisma—was a kind of brutal pragmatism, an ability and willingness to accurately size up his strengths in relation to his competitors, to know when to quash a rival, when to pay out line.
In the summer of 1989, Lenny agreed to set up Pasqualito and Danny on 138th and 141st streets, each location a few blocks from the Hole. But he attached a stringent set of conditions to the deal. Pasqualito and Danny would have to buy their product packaged from Lenny, and return up to 80 percent of their revenues to him. They would have to sell orange-capped vials, to distinguish them from Red-Top’s better-established brand. Most important, they would have to stay off Beekman Avenue.
Pasqualito balked at the conditions. He felt he’d been doing the lion’s share of the work—he, Victor, Danny, and the other managers—supervising the workers, providing muscle, and policing the block. They were entitled to at least an equal cut of the profits. Hell, they didn’t need Lenny anymore. Pasqualito and Danny got “Caballon,” a major dealer from the Heights, to front them cocaine, and began selling on Beekman Avenue.
Lenny confronted his former workers in a tense meeting on Beekman Avenue. Outgunned and outmaneuvered, Pasqualito and Danny retreated to the terms of their original agreement, narrowly averting a war. But ill feelings among the onetime childhood friends continued to simmer.
Meanwhile, Lenny had forged an alliance with Frankie Cuevas, back on the streets after serving eight years in prison for burglary and aggravated assault. While Cuevas had been a celebrity in the Heights as the leader of the Bad, Bad Boys, by the time of his release in November 1989 he was an anachronism. The cocaine revolution, then two generations old, had passed him by. His former
running mates had already made their fortunes, and most young men Lenny’s age, just kids when Cuevas was arrested, viewed him as a relic. But Lenny remembered Frankie and respected him. Lenny was looking to expand his business, and Cuevas, who had secured a crack spot at the profitable intersection of Watson and Manor, was desperately seeking someone to set him up in the business. Lenny agreed to front Cuevas in exchange for a cut of his profits—$2,000 for each kilo Cuevas sold.
The spot flourished, and Lenny and Cuevas became fast friends, hanging out at each other’s home and clubbing together.
Though their friendship contained elements of gratitude and respect, it was also grounded in violence, a shared readiness to use force—even lethal force—to achieve their ends. When one of Cuevas’ local workers absconded with a stash of drugs in early 1990, Lenny helped orchestrate Frankie’s response, “renting” two hot cars and driving with Platano, Cuevas, and Cuevas’ chief enforcer, Smiley, to the building where the worker lived, blasting the apartment with “heavy artillery,” shattering windows and serving notice on the neighborhood. Similarly, whenever Lenny needed assistance, Frankie was there for him. At the height of Lenny’s quarrel with Orange-Top, Lenny wanted to put out a “contract” on Fat Danny, but didn’t want to use anyone from his own gang. So Frankie “lent” him Smiley, who shot Danny seven times on the pretext of some minor argument. (Danny eventually recovered.)
But the seeds of Frankie’s and Lenny’s own rivalry had been sown earlier that spring, when El Feo had opened a spot on Watson and Manor right next to Cuevas’. Lenny promised to handle El Feo, but Frankie decided to take matters into his own hands. That afternoon, he loaded two cars with armed workers and drove over to El Feo’s Manhattan stronghold at 167th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Nelson and Lenny were already there, sitting with El Feo on the stoop of his building, trying to negotiate a way out of their dilemma. When Nelson saw Frankie’s armada rolling up the block, he intercepted them and managed to defuse the situation before any shots were fired. But the damage had been done. Frankie had invaded El Feo’s turf, earning El Feo’s implacable enmity; and Cuevas, discovering that Lenny was a friend of his competitor, began to question his partner’s loyalty.
THE VIOLENCE continued unabated. Two days before the new year, Lenny ordered the executions of a dealer and his pregnant girlfriend at the request of Supra, Lenny’s hot-car connection. There were rumors Lenny was also behind the murders of two dealers in the Beekman Avenue area, and he was known to have shot another, Miguel Guzman, over a business dispute. Stanley Tukes got 1991 off with a bang, shooting Quentin Lee five times at a New Year’s Eve party. A couple of weeks later he shot Nathan Wilder, a potential witness to the Lee shooting, seven times, blinding him. A month after that he allegedly tossed Renee Brown off a balcony at 370 Cypress, critically injuring her. Platano, in one drive-by in the Bronx, shot and accidentally killed a 13-year-old girl. Freddy Krueger, El Feo’s chief enforcer, carried out several hits for El Feo in the Heights, then teamed up with Platano on June 4 to gun down Cuevas’ onetime enforcer, Smiley, and a friend of Smiley’s.
Some of these acts were gratuitous or just careless, like David Cargill’s shooting. Other assaults were so savage that they shocked even Lenny. In January, Red-Top workers hauled a stickup artist named Quincy Norwood into St. Mary’s Park and set him on fire, burning him to death. It was later in the year that Platano, Tukes, and others disemboweled Eddie Maldonado.
In September, George Calderon, one of the Bronx’s biggest drug lords, sent a squad of armed “rent collectors” to the Hole, sparking the Beirut-style firefight that riddled cars with bullet holes the length of Beekman Avenue. Sensing the violence closing in around him, Lenny decided to take a plea on a gun charge that was coming up for trial. He was sentenced to a year in jail (eight months with good behavior). Before leaving, he made peace with Pasqualito and Victor, agreeing to pick up disputed fees owed to the gang’s lawyers for the Double murder case they had been charged with. He placed his brother in charge of the Hole, and made Platano second-in-command.
Given his careful preparations, Lenny’s subsequent falling-out with Frankie Cuevas mystified everyone. Some members of his gang thought Cuevas was trying to move in on Beekman Avenue, that he felt slighted because Lenny hadn’t asked him to take over the Hole during his prison term. Lenny, however, thought that Freddy Krueger, on orders from El Feo, hit Frankie in retaliation for his aborted drive-by on 167th and Amsterdam, as well as to take over his spot on Watson and Manor. Krueger had brought Platano along for the ride, and since Platano was Lenny’s man, Frankie would have reasoned that Lenny was behind the shooting. But as they all knew, logic was hardly necessary. In their tinderbox world of threat and counterthreat, the smallest spark of suspicion was enough to ignite a conflagration. And once started, the fire was nearly impossible to contain, much less extinguish.
LENNY SLOWED as he turned onto Manor, timing the light so he’d hit the intersection when it was green. He knew if he had to stop, he risked getting made. Frankie’s crew were likely to spot him anyway, given the unfamiliar car and tinted windows. Tezo huddled in the passenger seat, adjusting his bandanna; Freddy Krueger, behind Tezo in the backseat of the Taurus, tinkered with the Uzi in his lap. A fourth Cowboy soldier, seated next to Freddy, had a Glock .45. Halfway down the block, Lenny began checking for snipers, straining to see over the low rooftops. Nothing moved. No one stirred.
Lenny and Pasqualito had hammered out a deal that first night of his release from prison. Fat Danny would take 138th Street, Pasqualito would take 141st and the Hole. They’d manage the spots, take care of the workers; Lenny would handle the supplies, and they’d split the money three ways.
Freddy had prodded him since he got out of jail to hit Frankie’s. Lenny didn’t much see the point. He knew he’d never catch Cuevas exposed at his own spot. All through the spring, Pasqualito and Fat Danny had been shooting Frankie’s workers, without much effect on Frankie’s operation. Still, Lenny knew that some gesture was expected of him, if only a symbolic one.
The jagged rows of tenements narrowed ahead, converged onto a corridor of light where Watson crossed Manor. The signal turned green, and Lenny feathered the accelerator. They swept past the corner, crowded despite the late hour.
“There’s Cubita,” Lenny said. Frankie’s short, stocky enforcer was standing thirty yards from the corner, shirtless in the warm weather.
Lenny continued down Manor, then circled back to Watson, heading once more for Frankie’s spot. He was completely concentrated now, looking for police, ticking off escape routes to the nearest highways—the Bruckner, the Cross Bronx—maintaining a steady interval between him and the car in front of him. His chief concern was not getting boxed in. Hit a highway and be out, he thought. He could lose any cop on a clear road. Even in a Taurus. The first turn, a cop will be thinking about his wife and kids. Lenny’d be having fun. Getting away was his rush.
The spot loomed up, a hundred yards on his right. He saw Cubita standing in front of the corner store, and his workers talking to some guys parked in a brown sedan, a Grand National or Buick Regal, he wasn’t sure. He’d pull alongside the sedan, he told the others. They’d get them too. He shifted into low gear. Around him he heard the action of guns cocking, the whir of electric windows sliding down. He felt a chill in his stomach, an animal sense of trespass.
Lenny didn’t enjoy killing the way Freddy or Platano did. He had to psych himself up for it, screw up his mind like a tightly wound propeller, then let it go, pull the trigger while it was still a red blur of anger. Not that he felt a lot of sympathy or guilt for his victims. The truth was, he tried not to feel much of anything at all, outside of the anger and adrenaline. The rules were very clear: Do it to them before they did it to you.
And then you got the hell out of there. You didn’t look back at the damage, you never saw the damage. When the anger was gone, you didn’t feel anything, and you tried not to think about it anymore. You just moved on.
“Get ready,” he said. Then he lurched forward, braking beside the brown sedan.
The next few seconds were filled with the sound of gunfire and explosions. Lenny barely noticed the shattering glass, scrambling bodies, punctured flesh. Once he saw that Frankie’s crew weren’t firing back, he checked the mirrors for police, the street ahead for traffic, waited about five seconds for a lull in the firing, then gunned the engine.
“Damn, we should have got out of the car,” Freddy said, moments later. They were sharking down Bruckner Boulevard in the shadowy lee of the expressway. Lenny started to laugh. The last thing you wanted to do on a drive-by was show your face.
“We should have got out and made sure we done Cubita,” Freddy said. Lenny accelerated up the ramp to the expressway. Ahead, the lights of upper Manhattan sparkled against the starless night. Lenny didn’t want to make sure. He didn’t even want to know. Later he’d hear that Cubita had taken a bullet in his buttocks. He would never find out that they’d shot six people that night, or that one of them, a 19-year-old local kid named Kevin Nazario, would not live to see the morning.
POINT, COUNTERPOINT
SUMMER 1992
THE SUMMER of 1992 would prove to be among the most violent in the history of upper Manhattan. Despite HIU’s success against the Jamaicans, the murder rate was inching back up to record levels; drug dealers ruled the streets; and there were riots in the Heights. Yet even against this background, the Cowboys stood out. “Once we started doing the intelligence, the case just kept getting bigger and bigger,” Arsenault recalls. “It seemed like every time we turned over a rock, there would be the Cowboys.”
Gangbusters: How a Street-Tough Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New York’s Most Dangerous Gang Page 15
