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

by Stone, Michael

  Fortunately for Cruz, Agosto spotted the Cowboys just before he and Cruz reached their destination, and they doubled back to Brooklyn at high speed. When they got to the shelter on Chauncy Street, Michael was shaking. He was pretty sure they’d eluded their pursuers, but it had been a close call. Agosto parked the car in front of the tenement where they lived, while Michael searched under his seat for a tape; he wanted to listen to music and calm down before he went upstairs. Suddenly he heard Agosto’s voice nudging him: “Look who’s here.” Michael straightened up in time to see Pasqualito and Lenny getting out of a car beside them, guns drawn. He ducked as five or six shots rang out. He heard the thwack of bullets—glass shattering, plastic splitting—then it was over. Michael looked up and saw Pasqualito’s and Lenny’s retreating figures and, closer in, blood splattered on the windshield and dashboard. He asked Agosto if he was hit.

  “It’s not my blood,” Agosto said to him. Cruz saw Agosto looking at him strangely, and reached up to the spot on his cheek that Agosto was staring at. There was a hole there—wet, tender. A wave of fear and nausea passed through him, and the numbness began to subside, and pain flooded in its place. He took his hand away. It was covered with blood. Then he sank back in his seat and waited to die.

  LOSING GROUND

  AUGUST 1992

  MIRACULOUSLY, the bullet that hit Michael Cruz, tearing through his head and exiting behind his right ear, was not fatal. But the incident had a lasting impact on the course of the Cowboy case.

  At the time of the shooting, the investigation was just a jumble of loosely related initiatives, each with its own objectives, timetable, and tactical approach. Investigators from the Three-Oh, Three-Four, Four-Oh, Four-Six, Manhattan North Homicide, HIU, HIDTA, and the Bronx DA’s Narcotics Investigations Division were all looking at pieces of the Cowboys operation, many of which overlapped, but no one as yet had taken charge of the various inquiries or developed a rational battle plan. As recently as August 12, just two days before Michael Cruz’s shooting, HIDTA had tried to do something about it. Caught between the Manhattan and Bronx DAs’ competing agendas, they invited principals from the two offices to sit down with them and work out a common strategy.

  The main obstacles dividing the two camps were institutional, the very questions that always seem to crop up whenever law enforcement agencies try to work together: Who’s going to have control? Who’s going to contribute what? Who’s going to get the credit? But there were also differences over strategy. HIU, in line with their basic philosophy, wanted to take out the gang as a unit, and they felt that they alone had the resources and expertise to do it. All they lacked were the cases. Except for the Cargill shooting, virtually all the Cowboy-linked homicides had taken place in the Bronx. The Bronx DA’s office, however, was not prepared to undertake a broad, long-term investigation.

  Quinn and Rather both felt that the Bronx DA’s conventional, case-by-case approach was misguided. Focusing just on the Quad murders would not effectively shut down the gang. Quinn’s concerns were mainly tactical—protecting witnesses and not scaring off the leaders. Rather, on the other hand, thought that Hill’s upcoming Quad trial was unwinnable. He wanted the Bronx DA to abandon the case and throw in his lot with Manhattan and HIU in bringing down the entire Cowboy gang.

  Hill, however, had no intention of letting go of the Quad. Although he didn’t particularly look forward to trying it, it was a Bronx case and he felt duty-bound to see it through. He wanted to make sure that those responsible for the four Bronx deaths got the maximum punishment. Although Hill welcomed HIU’s support, he wasn’t at all sure that their aims coincided with his. He felt that Manhattan’s priority was the Cargill homicide—a big press case with headlines written all over it—and that HIU wouldn’t hesitate to compromise the Quad prosecution if it helped them gain convictions against Cargill’s killers.

  Hill had particular reason to be chary of HIU’s overtures. His colleagues had been burned a number of times in joint investigations with outside agencies who used their influence and superior resources to gain control over the cases, then relegated the Bronx assistants to bit roles in the courtroom and the press. Morgenthau’s office bestrode its neighboring DA’s offices in the other New York City boroughs like a colossus. Morgenthau himself was an outsized figure, easily the most powerful official in New York law enforcement. Endorsed by all the state’s major parties, with acolytes in the press and virtually every county prosecutor’s office, he had a reputation as a shrewd horse trader with a habit of muscling his way into plum cases outside Manhattan’s bailiwick. Hill, on the other hand, was the least political of prosecutors. He made it a point to leave the turf building and credit grabbing to others. Yet even he understood that working with Manhattan meant working for Manhattan.

  So far none of these concerns had developed into a problem. In fact, Hill and Rather maintained cordial relations. They exchanged information on a timely basis, mainly through Detectives Tebbens and Dugan, and Rather had even trekked up to the Bronx to interview the Cruz-Morales family himself. But the lack of closer ties had begun to impede both their inquiries. Tebbens, who had transferred to the Bronx DA’s squad so he could work full-time on the Cowboys, had been frustrated by Hill’s narrow focus on the Quad case. Now, sensing an opportunity to rally additional troops to Beekman Avenue, the detective had begun to press HIDTA to begin making “buy-and-bust” arrests of Red-Top’s workers so he could flip them against the gang’s hierarchy.

  But HIDTA, taking HIU’s lead, was looking at other operations besides Red-Top’s—Cuevas’ spot on Watson and Manor avenues and suspected Cowboy outlets in Washington Heights. More important, Benitez was reluctant to do “buy-and-busts” on Beekman Avenue. Even before the meeting, Hill had told him that he couldn’t guarantee that the dealers Benitez’ men arrested would get jail time. Bronx judges were extremely liberal, and its jury pool, tainted by police prejudice, was unpredictable. Benitez, already troubled by safety conditions in the Hole, refused to send in undercovers unless he was sure of a payoff.

  There was a solution, however. Manhattan’s Special Narcotics Court, created in the mid-1980s to hear the city’s increasingly complex, volatile drug cases, operated under the purview of Leslie Crocker Snyder, a no-nonsense jurist who understood the dynamics of violent street gangs and did not hesitate to remand their workers. Manhattan’s administrative judge had assigned all of HIU’s cases to Snyder, and Benitez, who knew her from the Gheri Curls case, wanted HIU to arrange to have his arrest subjects transferred from the Bronx to her court. Unfortunately, neither Arsenault nor Rather wanted to alienate the Bronx by poaching minor drug cases in its backyard. They planned to incorporate the Quad and other Bronx homicides into their conspiracy indictment—regardless of whether or not Hill tried them separately—and they knew that they would need Hill’s cooperation down the road.

  All these different agendas were at play when investigators crowded into a cubicle at HIDTA’s downtown Manhattan headquarters on August 12. Among those at the meeting were Dan Rather and Terry Quinn from HIU; Mark Tebbens, assistant DA Don Hill, and Hill’s supervisor, Ed Freedenthal, from the Bronx; and Eddie Benitez and his CO, Charles Rorke, from HIDTA. The meeting ran smoothly, at least at first. Hill and Freedenthal had come prepared to cooperate with Manhattan, and they agreed to cede jurisdiction over HIDTA’s drug busts as long as Rather was willing to share information and include them in any cases that developed later on. When Rather assured them he was, the parties quickly hammered out a three-pronged strategy: HIU would carry on investigating Cargill and other homicides linked to the Cowboys; HIDTA would step up their probe into the gang’s drug operations; and Hill would prosecute the Quad with support from HIU and HIDTA.

  It was a viable plan, a good first step toward a more formal arrangement later on, and the meeting might well have ended then. But Quinn, who had taken charge of the discussion, was already racing ahead to the endgame, proposing investigative lines that would topple the Cowboys and net th
e gang’s elusive leaders. “Terry was trying out different strategies, and he decided to float a trial balloon,” Hill recalls. “But Terry doesn’t float balloons, he lobs grenades—and this one blew up in his face.”

  As the self-appointed moderator, Quinn went around the room, querying each party about their specific plans, probing the limits of their cooperation. Tebbens, seeing Quinn in action for the first time, was impressed. He wanted nothing more than to expand and accelerate the investigation, and he recognized in Quinn a kindred spirit, someone who would step up and get everyone working together.

  But Hill’s impression was less benign. Troubled by Quinn’s dismissive attitude toward the Quad, Hill saw him as a stereotypical Irish cop: hard-charging, hardheaded, blunt, and supremely sure of himself. He understood that Quinn’s agenda was different from his, that his agenda was a Manhattan agenda—solve Cargill; get Lenny, Cargill’s presumptive killer. And he’d worked with enough men like Quinn as both a cop and a prosecutor to know that on some level he was being tested, that Quinn would not stop pushing him until Hill made it clear where he stood.

  For a while, the two men sparred—Quinn nudging the investigators to focus on the conspiracy aspects of the case, and Hill reiterating that the Bronx was all for rooting out the Cowboys and locking up Lenny but that their priority was the Quad, the Quad must be tried first. Then Quinn decided to force the issue: “We should flip Platano against Lenny,” he told the group. “Or if that doesn’t work, we should indict him and then flip him.”

  Although Hill was in many ways the opposite of Quinn, deliberate, taciturn, at times aloof, he also had a nasty temper; as a prosecutor, he had learned that it could be an effective tool, especially in contrast to his normally placid demeanor. But Quinn’s statement genuinely shocked Hill. Platano was the linchpin of the Quad, Hill’s No. 1 defendant. Making a deal with Platano in order to get to Lenny was tantamount to scuttling the case. “Are you implying that one white kid in Manhattan is worth more than four lives in the Bronx?” Hill asked Quinn.

  “No, and you know I don’t mean that,” Quinn replied. “But sometimes you’ve got to make choices. Not all homicides are equal, you know what I mean? Those victims in the Quad were either dealing or using. I’m not saying they deserved to die, but Cargill was just a nice kid who got popped for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That could have been my kid. Hell, it could have been yours. How would you have felt then?”

  “That’s bullshit,” Hill said. “Platano’s a stone-cold killer. For all you know he’s murdered twelve, maybe more than twelve, and that’s not including the Quad. You’re asking me to make a deal with someone like that?”

  “Hey, I’ve had Jamaicans testify for me who’ve killed more than a hundred people.”

  “Well, good,” Hill said. “But they didn’t murder a hundred people on my turf.”

  The meeting broke up moments later. Rather, as a peace offering, invited Hill for drinks at a nearby bar. It turned out to be an odd, pleasant interlude in the case. Hill had already formed a good opinion of Rather as a prosecutor; he seemed serious and competent. But Hill had not been prepared to like him personally. Hill knew he was being courted for his cases, that however tactfully Rather smoothed over Quinn’s blunder, he still harbored the same agenda as his outspoken investigator. Nor did Rather’s celebrity aura add any appeal for Hill—if anything, it put him on guard against any sense of entitlement Rather might have. But as the two men traded biographies over beers, Hill found himself disarmed by Rather. They discovered they’d both attended universities in D.C., Hill as a congressional worker for conservative causes while at American University, Rather at Georgetown. Rather talked about his fishbowl existence at Georgetown in a folksy, self-effacing manner that both surprised and beguiled Hill. The prosecutors reaffirmed their commitment to the case, their shared concerns over the witnesses and cleaning up the battered Bronx neighborhood still controlled by the Cowboys. An hour later Hill exited into the late afternoon sunshine much reassured. Nonetheless, he understood that he and his Manhattan counterpart were traveling along separate, perhaps even divergent tracks.

  Those divergent paths, however, began to converge with the shooting of Michael Cruz. The attempted assassination not only injected a new sense of urgency into HIU’s investigation—within weeks of the failed execution Quinn’s detectives were staking out Cowboy hangouts in the Heights—but broadened the scope of the Quad case. In the aftermath of the shooting, Hill realized that he could no longer focus exclusively on his case and his defendants and ignore the rest of the Cowboy gang, without jeopardizing the safety of his witnesses. Now everyone—Rather, Quinn, Hill, Tebbens, Benitez—agreed that their first priority must be getting Lenny and Pasqualito off the street.

  ON AUGUST 18, four days after Michael Cruz’s shooting, Mark Tebbens and HIDTA detectives John Scaccia and Cesar Ortiz were searching the Four-Oh for Lenny and Pasqualito when their radio crackled. Eddie Benitez was calling from HIDTA’s Cypress Avenue observation post. He’d spotted Lenny and Pasqualito across the street, hanging out with two young male Hispanics in front of the gang’s headquarters at No. 354. Moments later, the detectives parked around the corner from Cypress and proceeded on foot.

  As soon as Benitez saw Tebbens with his men, Benitez freaked. Tebbens’ size made him stand out at a distance, and both Lenny and Pasqualito knew him from past encounters. But it was too late to change plans. Pasqualito had just ducked into a playground between Cypress and Beekman. Benitez radioed the information to the detectives, but they let him go. Tebbens had spotted Lenny not more than thirty feet ahead of him. The gang leader was standing in front of the stoop of No. 354, flanked by two kids from the neighborhood. He was dressed casually—jeans, sneakers, a white T-shirt, and a black windbreaker—and his hair was cropped close to his head, shorter than Tebbens remembered. But there was no mistaking Lenny—the coiled posture, the muscular air of command. For a second or two their eyes locked, then Lenny turned abruptly and jogged up the steps to No. 354, followed by his two young acolytes.

  Tebbens charged after him, unholstering his gun as he ran; he bounded up the stairs three at a time. At the rear of the entrance hall he came to a corridor that traversed the building and led on his left to a walkway overlooking a vacant lot. Lenny’s companions were standing near the door to the bridge. Tebbens lined them up against the wall as Scaccia arrived, panting from the run. Behind Scaccia, he spied Lenny.

  Tebbens realized Lenny must have darted into an apartment, reemerging after the detective passed him in the hallway. He trained his gun on the gang leader, and motioned him against the wall next to the others. Then he holstered the gun out of Lenny’s sight and, pulling Lenny’s right arm behind his back, started to cuff his wrist. In the same instant, Lenny pushed off the wall with his left arm, momentarily freeing himself and sending the cuffs flying. Tebbens recovered and tackled Lenny from behind as he tried to escape, driving his face into the floor. But when Tebbens reached behind him for the cuffs, Lenny broke free again, and made for the door to the bridge.

  Tebbens was taken aback by Lenny’s strength. He knew from experience that a subject who didn’t fight, who focused his energy on getting away, had an advantage over his pursuer, no matter how small or frail he was, and Lenny was neither. Tebbens also knew it was extremely difficult to cuff someone who was actively resisting. Still, given his size and conditioning, Tebbens was used to overpowering his prey.

  As Lenny lurched toward the exit, Tebbens managed to trip him up and grab on to his jacket collar. But as they wrestled for a second time, Lenny slipped out of his windbreaker and away from Tebbens. Scaccia, a former football player, broke away from the two teenagers he’d been guarding and grabbed at Lenny. But Lenny bulled past him and out onto the walkway.

  Tebbens knew where Lenny was heading. The ground underneath the bridge sloped away from the street at a sharp angle. It was a twelve-to-fifteen-foot drop from the walkway to the lot below, a rutted, rocky patch of ground betwee
n buildings. If Lenny jumped, there was no way Tebbens could follow him down. He lunged at Lenny as Lenny hoisted himself up the metal retaining wall, and grabbed at the tail of his T-shirt. But the shirt just ripped, and Lenny dove headfirst over railing. Tebbens helplessly watched him fall. The Cowboy gang leader landed on his right side and rolled over; clutching at his knee, he limped behind the building and out of sight.

  Tebbens, joined by a dozen cops now, canvassed the neighborhood and staked out the area, but Lenny, having ducked into one of the connecting buildings, was holed up somewhere, probably in a friend’s apartment. At nightfall, Tebbens’ supervisors, concerned about safety and overtime, had to call off the operation.

  Lenny’s escape was a devastating blow to the investigation. Not only had Tebbens let him literally slip through his fingers, but he’d scared him into hiding, making it unlikely the detectives would get a second chance to apprehend him soon. For weeks afterward, Tebbens replayed the chase and capture in his mind. He realized he’d acted precipitously, that he should have called in backup and surrounded the building before going after Lenny. In fact, he probably shouldn’t have gone after him at all. But the prospect of personally putting the cuffs on the man he’d been pursuing for nearly three years had dulled his judgment. He swore to himself he wouldn’t let that happen again.