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

by Stone, Michael

  “We were working forward and backward, asking ourselves: Who are these guys? What was their relationship to each other? What was their past? It was incredibly fertile ground. We kept uncovering old crimes, and new crimes were happening all the time. We were working on all levels.

  “The worst investigation is a dead one, one where you’re not getting any information. But this was very different. Almost everywhere you looked there were significant things. Someone would get shot and we would be trying to figure out why. Who was the victim? Who was he aligned with? Why was he shot? Who’s going to replace him?”

  Rather hoped that Sendra would help provide some of the answers.

  Framed in the doorway of Rather’s office, Freddie Sendra was tall and big-chested with a gruff, handsome face, hulking shoulders, and a fighter’s big, soft hands. Rather had figured him for a hard case. Sendra had drawn down on police during a drug bust, taken a stiff plea, and kept his mouth shut. Rather was prepared to negotiate with him for his cooperation, but Sendra’s first words preempted him: “I’ve thought about what you want,” he said, “and I’ve decided to tell you everything.”

  Thus began one of the more remarkable episodes of the investigation for Rather. Freddie Sendra had been stewing in prison for nearly three years—his former mates had visited him just once during that time, and then only to ask him to whack another inmate, Victor Mercedes—and he was eager to talk. He told Rather he didn’t even want a deal, just a letter to his parole board saying he’d cooperated.

  Rather could scarcely believe his good fortune. Until his arrest, Sendra had spent nearly every day with the gang from the time he was a student at George Washington High School, where the gang coalesced, until well after they’d formed Red-Top and moved their operation to the Hole. The story Sendra told Rather during the late fall months of 1992 was the story of the gang’s origins, and it provided Rather with the foundation for what had been, until then, an utterly confusing and fragmented investigation.

  “At first there was Lenny, Nelson, Platano, Maximo, Victor Mercedes, Pasqualito, Frankie V,” Sendra began. “We’d meet at the handball court behind school. We started stealing cars in Manhattan—then Riverdale, Whitestone, La Guardia, Kennedy, and over to New Jersey: Englewood, Englewood Cliffs, Tenafly and Teaneck. Three or four cars a day. Everybody learned to drive on stolen cars.

  “My first car was a Toyota Celica with MD [doctor’s] plates. Crashed it. I got caught with Max in New Jersey, two times with Frank in New Jersey and New York. Got ROR [released on own recognizance] and never went back [to court]. The third time, they sentenced me to seven years. Charged me with thirty-two cars. They had surveillance up [at the lot]. I did two years four months. I was sixteen or seventeen.”

  Sendra was candid, detailed, and articulate. His father owned his own store; his mother was straitlaced, religious. But they couldn’t shield him from the street, any more than he could protect himself. At times, he’d tried to straighten out—to study or get a job—but the excitement, the camaraderie, the swagger and notoriety of gang life always lured him back. Every day was a day off—pickup football games that were an excuse for mayhem; midnight motorcycle races down the West Side Highway; scams to make money. After stealing cars, Sendra and his crew turned to marijuana sales.

  “Joe schooled us in marijuana,” he said. “He had a game arcade over on Audubon. We’d hang out, buy weed from him. When we started selling, he called us all in, told us, ‘This is how you do it.’

  “We were finished with cars by then. Everybody had his own little spot. Hector had a connection down in Texas. What cost a thousand dollars in Washington Heights cost two-fifty to three hundred in Texas. They needed someone to go down, they picked me. Paid for eighty pounds, they gave me ninety-eight pounds. I skimmed the extra off the top.

  “They’d pack it in Saran Wrap and fabric softener in a duffel bag. Went once every two weeks with Elvis. He got arrested. We used to stop in Midland-Odessa—real small airport—drive back to Dallas or Love. Immigration pulled him off a bus with two big bags full. They thought he was Mexican, an illegal alien. Hector put up his bail. He’s still running.”

  By then, Sendra said, crack was making its appearance in the Heights, and their friends were offering them coke on consignment. Sendra had been out of the business, working as a doorman at 163rd between Broadway and Amsterdam, when Platano took him out to a spot he’d said he’d found on Beech Terrace, a curved drive at the north end of Beekman Avenue in the Bronx. Sendra quit his job the next day.

  “Lenny was running the show,” Sendra recalls. “He was the strong-arm. Nelson was the bookkeeper. Everybody had their own personalities. Pasqualito and Platano were always bragging. Victor Mercedes also. Platano was the clown. He liked big cars, Caddies. He liked cracking them up. A guy we called Capone was the GQ of the group, the ladies’ man, the dresser.

  “During the week, we’d be hooking up a car, then racing Saturday night at Hunts Point. We’d go to clubs too—Roseland, Palladium, Tunnel, Gotham. And Highbridge Pool. We fought there with the 145th Street guys over turf. We’d get high, race cars. Cops? We used to slow down for cops, sit on their tails. They wouldn’t do nothing.”

  Within a year or two, the money was rolling in faster than they could spend it. Lenny, Sendra said, was the nominal leader, the one who was always there, who understood the business, who told you what to do. But the Cowboys were a conspiracy of equals, according to Sendra. Any one of the top-ranking members, Sendra claimed, could go to the company safe and take as much as he wanted. (Rather doubted this.) If one Cowboy bought a cycle, they all bought the same cycle; and every week they set up their cars for the Saturday night races, spending eight or nine thousand dollars to install a nitro bottle and reseal the engine. Then they would crash them and start all over again.

  “We never thought it would end,” he said. “Figured we’ll think of something. We can always make more money.”

  By the time he’d finished, Sendra had described a freewheeling, beeper-quick, totally self-indulgent existence—a group of violent young men who ran roughshod through the streets, careening from one lucrative racket to another, and literally thumbing their noses at the police. Nothing was denied them. Nobody said no. The schools they barely attended promoted them without prejudice. Parents turned a blind eye to their exploits, as did the law. They turned the roof of 352 Beekman into a firing range and took target practice, shooting at or near the legs of strollers in St. Mary’s Park. (Tebbens had investigated more than twenty incidents traced to sniper fire from the gang’s headquarters.) Anyone who got in their way—or merely brushed against them, as Cargill did—was beaten or killed, and because they rarely suffered any consequences for their actions, they felt invincible. “When I saw the cops coming, there was no fear or hesitation,” Sendra told Rather, trying to explain the shoot-out with police that landed him in prison. “I thought, ‘All right, let’s do it.’ All I can say is it’s Washington Heights, the way we were brought up.”

  WHILE QUINN and Rather were debriefing potential witnesses, HIDTA was figuring out the gangs’ drug operations, making buy-and-bust arrests, and providing HIU with new cooperators. But the process started slowly. Benitez focused first on Cuevas’ spot on Watson and Manor, identifying his workers and on September 10 raiding one of his stash pads. But the raid was disappointing—Cuevas had moved his drugs to another apartment a few days before—and it soon became evident that there was no overlap between Cuevas’ crew and the Cowboys on Beekman Avenue.

  HIDTA had even less luck in Washington Heights. Working with HIU investigators, Benitez set up an observation post on West 171st Street, the block where Lenny, Nelson, Pasqualito, Fat Danny, and Victor Mercedes grew up and their families still lived. But the detectives were unable to connect the Cowboys with any local drug activity, and stakeouts of Reuben Perez’ spot on 174th Street and Audubon Avenue were equally unproductive. Not only was Perez’ operation limited to marijuana sales, but his main customers seemed to b
e the Cowboys themselves, many of whom rolled up two and three times daily to buy the pot-stuffed cigars they called blunts. (Though none of the high-ranking Cowboys used their own product, virtually all of them got high on weed all of the time.)

  But when Benitez turned his attention to Beekman Avenue, his efforts started to pay off. On September 21 he was finally able to secure an apartment—a small flat in the rear of 353 Cypress Avenue—with a clear view into the Hole. The next day he installed a twenty-four-hour time-lapse camera, and shortly after that his team began making buys from Red-Top’s workers. But HIDTA’s biggest coup came as the result of a windfall. On September 23 a disgruntled Cowboy worker turned up at the Four-Oh saying that the gang had cheated him and offering detectives information on the whereabouts of Red-Top’s stash apartment. By luck, Benitez was in the precinct at the time and overheard the informant mention Beekman Avenue. Benitez debriefed him on the spot, got a search warrant from Judge Snyder overnight, and on September 24 HIDTA detectives and Bronx police converged on Louise McBride’s fourth-floor apartment at 348 Beekman Avenue.

  THIRTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Louise McBride’s door seemed to explode off its hinges, as the police battering ram crashed through the doorway and the eight-man police team positioned outside charged in. Suddenly she found herself facedown on the floor, something sharp—Benitez’ knee, it turned out—pressing into her back, and there was the feel of metal around her wrists. Then she was right side up, a long, bony face an inch away, and yelling, “You-gotta-fucking-problem-lady-you’re-going-to-jail-for-life.” It didn’t help she was high as a kite.

  Nor did it help that McBride had a record dating back to 1975, or that earlier that fall, Benitez, masquerading as a building inspector, had observed her in the Hole selling Red-Top crack. But most devastating for McBride was that Benitez had timed the raid to the start of the 4 P.M.-to-midnight shift, so that there was a full stash of crack on the living-room table. To McBride, her arrest seemed just one more piece of hard luck in what had been a harrowing life. But McBride’s misfortune was HIDTA’s gain. After sweeping the apartment, police recovered 500 vials of crack cocaine, a .30-.06 rifle with a telescopic sight, an 11 mm Cobrey machine gun, a beeper, and $795 in cash. They also collared two mid-level Red-Top managers, David Polanco and Frank Blair, in the kitchen. With prior convictions for assault, weapon possession, and drug sales, McBride was facing serious jail time; Benitez was confident he’d delivered to Rather and Quinn the inside cooperator they’d been clamoring for.

  Meanwhile HIDTA scored a second coup, though it would be some time before they recognized its significance. On October 13, Detectives Cesar Ortiz and John Scaccia were doing auto surveillance on West 171st Street when they observed a van with two unknown Hispanic men and a woman pull up in front of No. 641, where a group of Cowboys, including Pasqualito and Fat Danny, were hanging out. Normally laid-back, the gang members made such a fuss over one of the van’s occupants, a stocky young man in a wheelchair, that Ortiz and Scaccia were convinced they’d stumbled onto one of the Heights’ Mr. Bigs, perhaps the Cowboys’ supplier. After conferring with Pasqualito and Fat Danny for several minutes, the man in the wheelchair and his two associates drove off. The detectives followed them to a motel in nearby Montvale, New Jersey. The next day they got the New Jersey police to do a car stop on the van. Ortiz and Scaccia already knew the name of the van’s driver from the motel registry. But it was the second man they were interested in. He told the police that he’d been paralyzed in a shooting the year before, and identified himself as Jose Reyes—the gang leader whom Quinn would later identify as El Feo, Lenny’s main ally and Freddy Krueger’s boss.

  JUST AS HIDTA’s investigation began to pick up speed, the Bronx’s Quad case hit a bumpy patch. Throughout the fall, in a series of hearings, Don Hill sparred with defense lawyers over what evidence he’d be allowed to introduce at trial. A normal part of criminal procedure, such hearings aim to shield defendants from attacks by the prosecution that are irrelevant, capricious, unduly prejudicial, or based on information illegally obtained. What’s more, the Quad being a big, complex case, Hill expected to be strenuously challenged, and having argued several times before Ira Globerman, the presiding judge, he anticipated at least some “defense-friendly” rulings. But by year’s end, Hill was chafing under strictures he felt had been unreasonably placed on his prosecution.

  Indicative of the way things were headed was Globerman’s decision late that fall to bar one of Hill’s witnesses, a jailhouse informant named Ramon Rodriguez (a pseudonym). In prison for a 1987 homicide, Rodriguez had advised the Bronx DA’s office in early September that he had information about several Cowboy murders and that he wanted to cooperate in exchange for help with his sentence. On October 22 Garry Dugan and Mark Tebbens drove up to Attica State Prison, where they debriefed Rodriguez for nearly five hours. Among other tidbits, Rodriguez informed the detectives that he’d been incarcerated at Rikers Island earlier in the year, and while there had run into Platano, who’d told him about his involvement in the Quad. A few weeks later, HIU arranged for Rodriguez to be brought into their offices for further interviews, and he was transferred once more to Rikers Island, where he was accidently thrown together again with Platano and his associates, generating further statements about their illegal activities.

  Hill wanted to call Rodriguez as a witness to testify about these statements, but the defense objected, claiming that once the authorities had made a deal with Rodriguez, he’d become their de facto agent, and under terms of the so-called Massiah law, should not have been speaking to their clients without disclosing his status. Hill argued that no deal had been offered Rodriguez, much less struck, and that Rodriguez had talked to the defendants on his own initiative. Globerman ruled in favor of the defense.

  In fact, Rodriguez, a convicted murderer whose interests were clearly served by implicating the Cowboys, was never going to be a strong witness. Far more troubling to Hill were pending defense objections aimed at the heart of his case. Hill wanted to introduce testimony that tied the defendants to the Red-Top drug operation, as a way of explaining why they shot their victims. Their lawyers argued that Hill didn’t need to show motive to get a conviction, that the defendants were not being tried for drug or gang-related crimes, and that making them out to be members of a drug gang would unduly prejudice jurors against them. By the end of the year, Globerman still hadn’t ruled on the issue, but Hill got the impression that he would disallow any reference at trial to Red-Top’s activities.

  Nevertheless, Hill was willing to take his chances in court. He wasn’t daunted by the legal aspects of the case. If Globerman continued to rule against him, he even had contingency plans to reindict the case on conspiracy charges, a strategy that would allow him to introduce evidence pertaining not only to the Cowboys’ drug operation but to other crimes as well. Rather, it was events taking place outside the courtroom that were eating at Hill.

  BY NOVEMBER, more than six months had passed since the Cruz-Morales family had vacated their Beekman Avenue home in the dead of night and entered the city’s shelter system. A lot had happened since then, not much of it good. The children, uprooted from their schools, had fallen behind in their studies and lost what little sense of structure and discipline they’d known before their exile. And the entire family was cut off from the network of friends and relatives centered in the neighborhood where they’d spent all their lives. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s closest brother suffered a fatal heart attack, brought on, she was convinced, by their travails at the hands of the Cowboys. And then, of course, Michael had been shot and nearly killed.

  No less troubling to Elizabeth was the disintegration of family life. Never easy to control, her brood seemed to be spinning off in separate directions. Tebbens recalls an occasion when he brought them take-out for dinner. Each of the children grabbed a portion and skulked to a different part of the apartment to eat. The idea of sharing a meal didn’t seem to occur to them.

  Tebbens tried to check
the family’s dissolution. He visited them as often as he could, worked tirelessly to normalize their living conditions, and counseled the children in everything from grooming and etiquette to life skills and safe sex. But the constant moving, the anomie and isolation, and the ever-present fear of reprisal militated against his efforts.

  Then, on November 9, while shopping at a supermarket near the Newburgh motel where she was hiding out with her family, Elizabeth Morales was accosted by two Dominican men. Approaching her from the rear, they told her not to look back, and one man put a knife to her throat and walked her out of the store to a patch of woods by the roadside. Morales was convinced she was going to die. Yet she kept her eyes forward and made no effort to struggle against her captors. The whole foolish enterprise—running from the Cowboys, informing on them—had been useless. When they were out of sight of the road, the men told her to stop, and one of them, reaching around her, shoved a series of photographs in front of her. It was nearly dusk, and a thin, wintry light filtered through the bare branches of the trees; still she could make out the worn, familiar images of her family, photographs that had been stolen from her Brooklyn apartment a few months ago. “We know what your children look like,” the man was saying. “If you talk to the police, we will kill them all.”

  The men let Morales go, but the incident left her badly shaken. Coming on top of Michael Cruz’s shooting and Raymond Jimenez’ slashing, it convinced Hill he didn’t have the manpower to guarantee the safety of his witnesses. Even Tebbens, frustrated by the DA’s squad’s lack of interest in his investigation, had transferred back to the Four-Oh and begun catching other cases.