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

by Stone, Michael

  Law enforcement seemed powerless against them. Operating out of the Three-Four in Manhattan, Dugan had yet to put together enough evidence to arrest any major players; and the precinct detectives who caught Cowboy-related cases were faring even worse. Tebbens in the Bronx was also frustrated. He’d transferred out of the Four-Oh to the Bronx DA’s detective squad in order to devote more time to the Cowboys. But with evidentiary hearings scheduled to begin in September, Don Hill was focused exclusively on the upcoming Quad trial; and Tebbens’ new bosses—busy with their own cases—weren’t interested in helping him expand his investigation.

  Of the several Cowboy inquiries, HIU’s nascent conspiracy case was the most ambitious, targeting the entire gang and their full range of activities. But it was also the least evolved—a patchwork of evidence and intelligence culled mainly from outside sources—and it showed few signs of stirring itself. Throughout the summer, Rather continued to connect the dots between Dugan’s and Tebbens’ findings; and by August, Terry Quinn, heading up the investigative side of the case, had begun plotting strategy in earnest—reaching out to his police contacts, combing the jails for disaffected gang members, and peppering Arsenault with reports and recommendations. But Arsenault was busy helping Camacho prepare for the Gheri Curls trial in September, as were most of HIU’s investigators. That left HIDTA to advance HIU’s case against the Cowboys, and they were running into problems of their own.

  TOWARD THE END of June, HIDTA’s Charles Rorke sent a 32-year-old detective named Eddie Benitez to the Four-Oh to talk to Mark Tebbens and check out the case that Quinn and Arsenault had been trying to sell HIDTA since April. Benitez already knew about the Cowboys. He’d worked on the Gheri Curls investigation with HIU and had been hearing scuttlebutt for months about Lenny, Platano, and company. Tebbens had been trying to get Narcotics to investigate the gang’s crack operation on Beekman Avenue even before the Quad, and he presented Benitez with a chilling picture of the gang, backed by flow charts, maps, rap sheets, crime scene photos, and old case files. But it wasn’t until Benitez and his partner, Al Nieves, drove out for a tour of the gang’s turf that Benitez realized just how ruthless the Cowboys were.

  Using an undercover vehicle disguised to look like a gang-banger’s car, the two detectives trolled the long square block bordered on opposite sides by Beekman and Cypress avenues. Benitez got a couple of good looks at the alley adjacent to 348 Beekman, the daunting concrete corridor that the Cowboys called the Hole, and at the ground-floor apartment of 354 Cypress, the gang’s informal headquarters. It was a warm summer afternoon, and a group of Cowboys were sitting out on the stoop in front of the building. Driving past them, Benitez saw five or six pairs of hard eyes follow him down the block, then several crew members charge inside, almost certainly to arm themselves. The second time the detectives rode past, the gang rose as one, and a barrel-chested young man, whom Benitez recognized as Pasqualito, strode out into the street, gun drawn, and challenged them. Benitez had never seen anything like it. He felt a thrill of fear, a sense that if Nieves, who was driving, idled a moment longer, shots would come raining down on them. Nieves felt it too and peeled off. Later, back at the precinct, barely able to contain himself, Benitez called his sergeant at HIDTA. “We have got to get these guys,” he said.

  Getting the Cowboys, however, was not going to be easy. Benitez, the primary on the case, and his eight-man team were all experienced narcotics investigators, but the Cowboys’ drug operation was as cleverly designed as any Benitez had seen, the Hole practically invincible. A frontal assault was out of the question. His men would be detected long before they got to the entrance of the alley, much less the walkway where the sales were actually conducted. He could try “buy and busts”—have a plainclothes officer make a routine purchase, then arrest the seller after he exited the Hole—but that would only net him low-level workers on minor charges.

  He could also send in undercovers to “buy up the ladder”—incrementally increase the amount of their purchases, thus triggering the participation of high-ranking managers. In the Gheri Curls case, HIDTA agents had made “hand-to-hand” buys from most of the leaders, locking them into the gang’s drug conspiracy. But this approach would be tricky with an outfit like Red-Top that specialized in small retail sales. What’s more, the Cowboys’ record for violence and rip-offs militated against extensive undercover work.

  To confiscate drugs in any quantity, Benitez realized, he’d have to raid one of the gang’s stash apartments; but first he’d have to locate it. The Cowboys moved their stores around, and he couldn’t get a warrant for the entire building. He’d need an informant to direct his efforts, and no one seemed eager to play that role.

  One thing Benitez decided to do was to compile an exhaustive video surveillance of the sales spots, then use it in combination with at least some tape-recorded undercover buys to show a jury how the Cowboys operated. But as soon as he began searching for a discreet site with a clear view of the Hole, he ran into difficulties. Nearby rooftops and vans were out of the question; the Cowboys had their own rooftop lookouts, and neighbors were not to be trusted. He thought of setting up cameras on lampposts, disguised as air pollution meters, but his tech people nixed the idea; they were too easily detected, and in any case wouldn’t deliver clear pictures of what was going on inside the alleyway. Benitez did manage to secure an apartment overlooking the gang’s Cypress Avenue clubhouse, but he couldn’t find a venue from which to film the Hole.

  Benitez also had larger, strategic issues to deal with. For starters, there was confusion over what HIDTA should include in their surveillance. Tebbens and Don Hill felt that the Hole, and to a lesser extent the neighboring Orange-Top locations at 138th and 141st streets, were the key to the Cowboys’ drug operation. But Manhattan, casting a wider net, also wanted HIDTA to set up observation posts overlooking Cuevas’ spot on Watson and Manor, as well as suspected Cowboy outlets in Washington Heights. Benitez followed HIU’s surveillance recommendations, but balked at their requests to increase the number and volume of buys his team made from Red-Top workers. Benitez had a bad feeling about the Hole. When he and Nieves, pretending to be building inspectors, toured the place, they noted that the alley walls were pocked with bullet holes. What’s more, without an observation post, Benitez couldn’t provide appropriate backup for his undercovers. Finally, and perhaps most important, Benitez and Rorke were under mounting pressure from their bosses in the Department not to stick their necks out.

  Tensions between the police and the city’s minority neighborhoods were running high that summer, and nowhere more than in Washington Heights, which was becoming a war zone. The year before, the Three-Four had led all other precincts in homicides, and was on track to repeat. But those numbers, as troubling as they were, didn’t begin to convey the daily, potentially deadly, skirmishing between the police and the gangs for control of the streets. Dealers double-and triple-parked on narrow streets, effectively barricading their sales spots against radio cars, and dropped bricks on beat cops who ventured onto their turf. The police, for their part, rousted gang workers, beat up resisters, and extorted money and drugs from traffickers.

  On the night of July 3, long-simmering tensions ignited into a full-scale conflagration. Shortly after midnight, Michael O’Keefe, a Three-Four street crimes officer, had attempted to stop and frisk a local drug dealer named “Kiko” Garcia. Garcia resisted, and O’Keefe ended up shooting and killing him. Though O’Keefe was later exonerated by an exhaustive, DA-led investigation—Garcia had been trying to wrestle away O’Keefe’s gun when he was fatally wounded—the incident quickly turned into a referendum over police policy in the Heights. Blithely ignoring the facts of the case, community activists depicted Garcia as a hardworking father of two, the victim of excessive police force.

  The debate touched off a firestorm of publicity and sparked three days of rioting, much, if not most of which was orchestrated by area drug dealers. As always in these situations, the police looked to City
Hall for leadership, a signal by which to measure their own response. They didn’t have to wait long to get it. Within twenty-four hours of the shooting, Mayor David Dinkins, who was heavily beholden to the Latino community for his 1989 election, visited Garcia’s family to offer condolences and promise justice—a gesture he’d failed to make to the family of a Three-Four officer killed on the job during Dinkins’ tenure as Manhattan borough president, just several years before.

  Dinkins, who ordered the city to pick up the tab for Garcia’s funeral in the Dominican Republic, was not the only notable to sympathize with the drug dealer. A host of local officials and TV and newspaper reporters had also prejudged O’Keefe’s actions; to his credit, Dinkins did try to make amends to the officer and his colleagues when the facts of the DA’s investigation emerged. But it was too late. The Department, ever sensitive to the prevailing political winds, had learned that aggressive policing in the Heights, even when wholly justified, was not to be encouraged.

  THE COWBOYS knew they were under investigation. Dugan’s interviews with Platano and Lenny, Tebbens’ Quad arrests, the surveillance cameras and increased police presence on Beekman Avenue had made them wary—but little more. All their lives the gang had literally gotten away with murder. Pasqualito beat two homicides, one of them in front of dozens of eyewitnesses; Platano killed more than a dozen people before he was even arrested; and virtually all the gang’s hierarchy had been committing crimes on a daily basis for years without legal consequences. What little time any of them had spent in jail they considered to be the cost of doing business, and so far it had been a small cost to pay. Most recently, Fat Danny, charged with four counts of homicide in connection with the Quad, had been released on bail and was back on the street doing drive-bys. His trial was months away—a lifetime to a dealer—and neither Danny nor his associates thought that he, or any of the other Cowboys arrested for the Quad, would ever be convicted.

  In fact, many gang members, far from retrenching, regarded the increased police attention as an occasion for sport. When Benitez and his men tried to follow the Cowboys from Beekman Avenue to Manhattan, the Cowboys picked up on the tails and toyed with their pursuers, eluding them at will. Most transporters for the gang used motorbikes, which they routinely drove onto the sidewalk or the wrong way down one-way streets. “They were playing with us,” Benitez said. He began looking for other ways to keep tabs on his quarry.

  In other respects, too, the gang seemed to be acting bolder. In June, after taking a few precautionary measures—switching the trademark color of their crack vials from red to black, diverting some customers to their other outlets—the Cowboys resumed selling full-time at the Hole. In July, they opened a new spot in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, sending two scouts—Rafael Perez, the high-ranking manager known as Tezo, and his sidekick Ramon Madrigal—to recruit local workers and sell discounted samples to prospective customers. And throughout the summer the gang stepped up their “enforcement” activities, unleashing a spate of violence in support of operations new and old.

  On July 14, the Cowboys announced their arrival in Brooklyn with the murder of a local competitor, known on the street as Papito. Four days earlier, Papito, unaware of the gang’s ruthless reputation, had assaulted Tezo with a tire iron and ratted out Madrigal to the cops. Tezo returned to Brighton Beach in a car with Lenny, Pasqualito, and Rennie Harris, a Cowboy enforcer. Tezo and Pasqualito, wearing ski masks, got out of the car and walked up to Papito in the middle of the street. “Remember me?” Tezo asked him, lifting his mask. Before he could answer, Pasqualito drew a gun and shot him three times in the chest.

  A week later, Gilbert Compusano, Cuevas’ battered ex-bodyguard, back in Manhattan after six months of rehabilitation in Florida, was attacked on a Harlem street corner in the middle of the afternoon, probably by the same people who had shot him in Cuevas’ apartment four months before. A black sedan pulled alongside Compusano as he was walking along, and one of the passengers offered him a lift. Compusano gladly accepted, and the sedan drove him to a neighboring precinct. But when Compusano exited the car, the passenger called him back and shot him six times in the chest and stomach. Compusano kept walking several blocks before a passing bus driver stopped at the sight of Compusano’s bloody shirt, and asked him what happened.

  “I think my friends shot me,” he answered, a bewildered look on his face. Then he collapsed and died.

  Two weeks later Dugan was in the Three-Four squad room when a call for backup came over the radio. A street-crime unit was in pursuit of a black Ford Taurus with tinted windows, the subject of an attempted car stop. It sounded to Dugan like the Cowboys. He hopped in a squad car with another detective and joined the chase—a wild ten-minute ride through the streets of Washington Heights—arriving at the West Side Highway moments after Anti-Crime had forced the suspects over on the roadside. The cops already had the car’s occupants handcuffed against the car. Dugan counted three young Hispanic men. One of them, he realized with a start, was Lenny.

  Back at the precinct, police booked the trio for reckless endangerment, resisting arrest, and criminal possession of a weapon—the cops had seen them tossing guns out the passenger-side window during the chase. Dugan gave Lenny a wide berth—the gang leader’s lawyer had enjoined Dugan from talking to his client after his Ogdensburg interview. And the detective was only mildly interested in the second suspect, a typical street tough named Manny Crespo, who claimed he had been hitchhiking and had no idea who his companions were. But Dugan was eager to talk to the third subject, who turned out to be Jose Llaca, a.k.a. Pasqualito.

  The burly enforcer was built like a torpedo—five feet seven or eight, 200 pounds, with a round shaved head, narrow setback eyes, and thick sensual lips. Sitting calmly across from Dugan in one of the Three-Four interview rooms, he seemed serene, almost Buddha-like, until he began talking. Then his expression became animated, and he turned cocky, loquacious, even jovial, but he made it clear that he had no intention of cooperating. He said he hadn’t been aware that the police were chasing them. He didn’t see anyone throwing guns out of the window. He couldn’t remember who was driving. At one point he asked Dugan how much money he made in a month.

  “Enough to get by,” Dugan replied amiably.

  “Five thousand dollars?” Pasqualito asked. “I make that much in a week. So don’t waste your time asking me all these questions.”

  Still, as Pasqualito rambled on, he couldn’t help divulging information. He’d just bought a new Pontiac for his girlfriend and had been on his way to show it to her in a lot on Broadway and 177th Street. (Dugan later located the car and traced the plates to an address in nearby Riverdale, a luxury apartment building where Pasqualito holed up with his girlfriend.) And Pasqualito admitted that the black Taurus belonged to Nicholas Bohan, “a guy from my block who loaned it to me.”

  Dugan decided to pay Bohan a visit.

  One of the few Irish-Italian families still residing in the Heights, the Bohans—Nicholas, his parents, grandmother, and four brothers and sisters—lived in a dilapidated three-bedroom apartment at 620 West 171st Street, directly across from Pasqualito’s home. They seemed to have no visible means of support. Nicholas’ father, Steven, was a recovering addict; his mother, Jude Anne, was unemployed. Nicholas himself turned out to be 14.

  When Dugan arrived the morning after the arrests, Jude Anne answered the door. A large, harried, unkempt woman in her forties, she was dressed in dungarees and a loose-fitting blouse. Behind her lay the wreckage of an overcrowded, undertended apartment—walls caked with dirt, piles of unwashed dishes, a clutter of toys, ashtrays, newspapers, and knickknacks on every surface. A pungent dog odor wafted out into the hallway.

  After Dugan identified himself, Jude Anne became nervous. Nicholas, she told him, was out. When he told her that her son’s car was the subject of a criminal investigation, her anxiety deepened. Her son didn’t own a car, she insisted; the car belonged to Pasqualito. He’d registered it in Nicholas’
name against her express orders, though she couldn’t explain why Pasqualito had chosen her son. Dugan suspected that her relationship to the gang leader was more complicated than she was letting on, and resolved to find out what other services she was providing Pasqualito. In her eagerness to exculpate her son, Jude Anne told Dugan that Pasqualito and Lenny had been calling the block since their arrest, bragging that the police had failed to find several guns hidden in the Taurus’ clavo—a secret compartment built into the car’s dashboard.

  Later that day, after checking with Rather, Dugan had another go at Pasqualito’s Taurus. Prying open the clavo, he found the guns. What’s more, Ballistics was able to match fingerprints found on bullets in an ammunition case to Pasqualito’s. The evidence, the investigators felt, should have compounded the case and kept the defendants in jail—at least Lenny, who was on parole from a previous gun conviction. But that gun case was never indicted. According to Dugan, Rather had failed to obtain a warrant before Dugan searched Pasqualito’s car, making the search potentially improper under New York’s strict laws. Rather states that “there was no mistake on my part or Detective Dugan’s regarding the warrantless search.” However, Dugan says that Rather had beeped him to advise him he needed a warrant shortly after conferring with him the day of the search, though by the time Dugan received the message, he’d already uncovered the guns. In any case, after their arraignment the following day, the gang members easily made bail.

  With Lenny and Pasqualito back on the street, Dugan had a more pressing concern, however. Why had the two gang leaders been driving around the Heights with a mini-arsenal in their car?

  He was about to find out.

  MARK TEBBENS had repeatedly warned Michael Cruz, the 16-year-old son of Elizabeth Morales, not to venture back to Beekman Avenue. The price the Cowboys had put on his head made it risky to confide his whereabouts to even his closest friends. But the cocky teenager had ignored Tebbens’ admonitions, slipping in and out of the neighborhood all summer to visit his girlfriend. On August 14 someone tipped off Pasqualito and Lenny that Cruz was on the block, and intended to drive to Queens later that evening with his brother-in-law, Edgar Agosto, to call on Agosto’s mother. The two gang leaders got hold of the address in Queens and headed over with Manny Crespo to wait for them.