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

by Stone, Michael

  It was as if a great weight had been lifted at HIU. “I didn’t appreciate how big a cloud we’d been working under all summer until Dan took over,” Grifa recalls. Don Hill began to look forward to coming in to the office for the first time since his flare-up with Rather in June. Even Arsenault seemed to recover some of his old jollity. “I remember one afternoon I took Dan, Don, and Lori out to lunch,” Arsenault recalls. “It was nothing special—just some neighborhood Thai place—and I couldn’t even tell you the conversation. But we laughed for two hours straight, and I remember thinking: ‘This is how it should be. This is how it used to be.’”

  But things were not as they had been. The schism between Arsenault and Ryan had deepened in the wake of Rather’s departure, and despite positive changes in the Cowboy investigation, Arsenault worried about the future of the unit, as well as his own future. Ryan was a formidable enemy, both personally and institutionally. Arguably the most powerful administrator in the office after Morgenthau, she had, in Arsenault’s view, the power to make or break a prosecutor’s career. Of course, Arsenault was no ordinary assistant, but he’d seen Ryan reward Rather with a promotion to unit chief, and he wasn’t about to wait for the other shoe to drop. “The day I took over the case, Walter stopped by my office to congratulate me,” Brownell recalls. “It was a good news–bad news kind of thing. He said he was thrilled we’d be working together and offered to help me any way he could. Then he told me he was planning to leave the office.”

  Arsenault had been running the case in the wake of Rather’s departure. During the past three weeks, he’d rallied Hill and Grifa, reconvened the grand jury, and represented the case as an A-1 conspiracy, increasing the number of defendants and adding another homicide as a substantive act. It had been an invigorating time for him, and he enjoyed working directly with Hill and Grifa. But he knew it was temporary.

  Even when running smoothly, the unit now required close supervision. Camacho had initiated several large investigations, and he was just one of six prosecutors; and Arsenault was negotiating pleas on two Jamaican homicides left over from the Spangler case, in addition to his lecture work and intelligence-gathering activities. But these days the unit was not running smoothly. Even before the Cowboy case, it had been plagued by factionalism, with rival camps of investigators barely speaking to each other, much less sharing CIs and information. Some old-timers who’d joined HIU under Bill Hoyt resented the new regime, and particularly objected to Quinn’s rising profile and take-charge personality. Others clashed as a matter of style. Investigative work is highly subjective, and differences in approach tend to be sharpened by competition and big egos. Most good lawmen have them.

  In the past, the rivalries among detectives had been manageable, at times even healthy. HIU had been small during Hoyt’s tenure, and Hoyt ruled over his domain with iron resolve. Then, when the unit expanded after his departure, Ryan installed James McVeety, who had worked with her on the Jade Squad, as chief investigator. Moreover, Ryan and Arsenault had presented a solid front against the forum-shopping and backbiting that flared up from time to time. But once Ryan and Arsenault began to snipe at each other, conditions deteriorated, with investigators choosing sides. Worse, McVeety, whose administrative role already triggered bitter feelings among some detectives—Quinn in particular—was now viewed by Arsenault’s allies as Ryan’s conduit and spy.

  But Arsenault’s feud with Ryan had far more troubling implications for the unit. As HIU’s champion, Ryan had been a strong wind at Arsenault’s back. If he needed more resources or personnel, or if he wanted a case that was mired in one of the trial bureaus, Ryan made it happen. No request was too large or small for her consideration—from installing a shower-changing room in the unit to recruiting the office’s best new talent. Now the opposite seemed true. Suddenly, he recalls, cars became unavailable. A request for a $200 easel to present charts in court went unapproved. A promising young assistant, whom Ryan had encouraged to join HIU before the summer, would later be told that a transfer to the unit would damage his career. And every miscue, however innocent, seemed game for reprimand. Camacho, who could do no wrong in the aftermath of the Gheri Curl trial, was called on the carpet several times over procedural issues. McVeety discovered improprieties—albeit minuscule ones—in the unit’s fiscal reporting.

  Arsenault fell into a funk, recovered, then slipped again. His weight fluctuated wildly, and he began to sleep fitfully. Some afternoons he’d wander into Brownell’s office and slump onto the ratty couch, too tired or upset to speak. Brownell would prop him up, counsel patience—“This will all blow over. You can’t quit now, you can’t let them win”—and Arsenault would march back to his office recharged. But then he’d hear rumors being circulated that he’d stolen Rather’s case, that the unit was out of control, that he and Quinn engaged in practices that were unethical, if not outright illegal, and it would deflate him. He’d try not to take things personally, but it was not his nature to turn the other cheek. Worse, he saw no way of fighting back. In palmier days, Ryan had shielded him from eighth-floor politics, and at the time he’d been grateful for her protection. Now he just felt isolated.

  Arsenault did have a formidable ally in Barbara Jones, Morgenthau’s chief assistant. The 46-year-old Jones had been a fixture in local law enforcement since the early 1970s. Originally from California, she’d grown up partly in Egypt—her father, an airlines radio operator, flew the Bombay–Dar-es Salaam–Cairo route—and studied law at Temple in Philadelphia. Prompted by an uncle who was a federal agent, she entered a Justice Department honors program, and was assigned in 1973 to the Organized Crime Strike Force in the U.S. Attorney’s office for New York’s Southern District.

  The only woman on the force, Jones landed in the white-hot center of U.S. law enforcement. The Organized Crime Strike Force—with a dozen or so units across the United States—was part of a program developed under the Justice Department to focus federal resources in law enforcement’s war against the Mafia; and Manhattan was home base for the Mafia’s top crime families. Louis Freeh, the future FBI chief, was a young agent working on Jones’s cases. (The two of them helped put together the so-called Pizza Connection case, which effectively busted the Mafia’s main narcotics operation.) Then, in 1983, Rudolph Giuliani took command of the office.

  Jones thrived in the atmosphere of pressure and close teamwork. She was made chief of the unit in 1984—the first woman to head a strike force—and by the time she left the office in 1987, it had carried out groundbreaking prosecutions against the Mafia, locking up the heads of four of the five New York families. Jones had personally prosecuted cases against Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, Russell Bufalino, and Frank “Funzi” Tieri, top boss of the Genovese family.

  In 1987, Jones accepted an offer from Morgenthau to become his first assistant and run the Manhattan DA’s office as his chief of staff. A perfect foil for the famously private Morgenthau, Jones had a warm, outgoing manner and a dedication to public service that eclipsed her personal ambition. Almost unknown outside law enforcement, Jones was the consummate insider. She had dated Al D’Amato in the 1980s; Louis Freeh was her confidant; her best friends were Mary Jo White, the current U.S. Attorney for New York’s Southern District, and Venia Mucha, the future governor George Pataki’s chief spokesperson.

  New York was then entering a golden age of law enforcement. With Giuliani as mayor-elect and William Bratton poised to take over as his Police Commissioner, the city’s crime rate would plummet over the next five years and cops would become the heroes of the 1990s. Operating behind the scenes, Jones would play a pivotal role in the process, using her numerous contacts to align Morgenthau’s office with the Feds and the police, build bridges to City Hall, and reduce tensions among the fractious elements within the DA’s office itself. HIU had been a special project of hers, a reminder of the days when she ran her own task force. She had helped them get federal grant money, and she was especially fond of Arsenault and Quinn. But Jones was a fa
cilitator, not a fighter, still relatively new to the office, still defining her role as the nominal second-in-command. She was not about to confront Ryan over HIU, and Morgenthau was well known for not getting involved in personnel disputes.

  Unfortunately, Arsenault made things worse rather than better. Given the raw state of his emotions, he tended to cast any effort at supervision by Ryan in a political light, and he made no attempt to alleviate the tensions between them. That fall, when Ryan visited Arsenault to clear the air, Arsenault ignored her, refusing to respond to her overtures. Too much had passed between them, and Arsenault, never good at disguising his feelings, didn’t do so now. Perhaps if Ryan had merely taken the Cowboy case away from Arsenault, he could have reached an understanding with her. But allowing Rather to leave the case and then rewarding him with a promotion was, in Arsenault’s view, unpardonable. Since his days in Bergen County, Arsenault had one cardinal rule: Never give up. Short of leaving the office, you always took a prosecution to term, through trial if necessary, even if the odds were stacked heavily against you. In fact, it was more of a personal credo. Just as when as a youngster he competed in karate, he never backed down, never gave up without a fight. After a while no one had wanted to spar with him, because even if he lost he always hurt his opponent. That’s the ethic and the image he tried to impress upon the unit, that HIU was relentless, that it never stopped coming until it had locked you up. He couldn’t forgive Rather for quitting, however adverse the circumstances seemed, or Ryan for condoning his action.

  After the takedown, he asked friends in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston if they would be interested in his setting up an HIU-style gang unit for them. They indicated they would be and promised to get back to him.

  AS THE CASE ground on, Brownell was left with little time to worry over the politics of the unit. As a result of Judge Snyder’s busy calendar, he had nearly a year to prepare for the trial—in all likelihood the first of several multidefendant trials—scheduled to begin the day after Labor Day the following September. But given the number of potential defendants and the complexity of the case, that was not a lot of time, even if Brownell had had some familiarity with the Cowboys. Despite his personnel problems, Rather had run a skilled investigation, and his prosecution memo had given Brownell a broad overview of the gang—some of their history, their key players, their most violent crimes. But when Brownell started to break down the case into its provable elements, he became lost in a welter of facts, hearsay, and half-truths. The sheer magnitude of information that he needed to learn—there were nearly 60 felonies, 45 defendants, over 100 witnesses—was overwhelming. Even more troubling, he had no way of weighing the reliability of informants or the culpability of defendants. He had not participated in HIU’s eighteen-month investigation; had not acquired a hands-on feel for the gang; had not sat down with their leaders, managers, pitchers, clients, and victims; had not viewed hundreds of hours of surveillance tape; and, perhaps most important, had not developed a real-time appreciation for the cumulative rhythms of their operation: the grind of sales at the Hole, their protracted war with Cuevas, and the periodic violence by which they disciplined their workers and intimidated suspected cooperators.

  Brownell read through the thousands of pages of grand jury minutes; debriefed hundreds of informants, cops, and detectives; and watched a year’s worth of videotaped drug buys in the Hole and at other Cowboy locations. Then he had Quinn and Arsenault run photos of the defendants by him in the manner of flash cards and quiz him on their roles in the gang, their criminal histories, and personal quirks. “That’s typical of Dan,” Arsenault says. “He could have just summoned Garry and Mark and said, ‘Bring me up to speed.’ Instead he decided to bring himself up to speed.”

  Brownell quickly realized that he needed to streamline the case. Through their arms and drug suppliers, and their shifting alliances with crews like the Cuevas organization, the Cowboys were connected to broad swaths of the city’s criminal activity; and HIU’s detectives had reached that obsessive stage of the investigation where every facet seemed to open onto a new cast of characters and a new string of murders—bringing with them a level of complexity and detail that no prosecutor, much less a juror, could possibly appreciate or even remember.

  Brownell was ruthless. He vetoed new cases, chopped off investigative tendrils, and routinely threw Quinn or Dugan and Tebbens out of his office when his eyes began to glaze over. Earlier that summer, the Feds had expressed an interest in El Feo, and Arsenault had turned over the results of their investigation to Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agents working with prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s office. Now Brownell severed Raymond Polanco from the case, and instructed Dugan to share his voluminous findings about the Brooklyn gun runner with another group of ATF agents.

  Brownell figured he already had enough charges to send most of the Cowboy defendants to prison for several lifetimes. And he had plenty of witnesses to help him prove those charges—dozens of cops and detectives who had bought drugs undercover from the gang or investigated past shootings and assaults; victims like Janice Bruington, the woman Stanley Tukes had shot in the back during the Quad; and former gang members like Freddie Sendra, the Cruz-Morales family, and Louise McBride, the Cowboy worker whose apartment was used by the gang as a stash house until HIDTA raided it the previous fall. What Brownell didn’t have were current gang members, witnesses with up-to-date knowledge of the Cowboys’ operations. None of the gang members corralled in the takedown had approached Brownell about cooperating. Clearly, no one wanted to testify against the gang, and it troubled the prosecutor.

  Then, out of nowhere, Brownell and the case got an unbelievable break. Lenny’s lawyer, Franklyn Gould, phoned Arsenault in early December to inquire about the possibility of a plea bargain, suggesting that Lenny come up for a Queen-for-a-Day—a free-ranging, off-the-record conversation that allows defendants to tell their stories to prosecutors without fear of self-incrimination. Investigators usually like this format, even if it doesn’t lead to a deal, because it enables them to probe a defendant’s knowledge of their case; and without a single high-ranking gang member on board, Lenny’s cooperation was an enticing prospect. But Arsenault and Quinn were both chary of the gang leader’s request. A cagey subject can turn the tables on an unsuspecting interviewer, using his questions to gauge how much he knows and who else is cooperating. Rafi Martinez, the leader of the Gheri Curls, had tried that; and neither Arsenault nor Quinn trusted Lenny’s intentions. Arsenault considered turning down Lenny’s offer, but decided in the end that it would be unfair to deny him a hearing. Instead he recused himself from the meeting and let Quinn handle the debriefing.

  The conference took place just after noon on December 11. Quinn picked up Lenny at the “bridge”—the passageway that links the Tombs with the Criminal Courts building—and escorted him to HIU in an elevator that connected directly with the unit. None of the other prisoners or even the guards knew about his visit. Once at HIU, Quinn took Lenny to the “cafeteria,” where they were joined by Brownell and Gould. The lawyers rehashed the ground rules; nothing Lenny said could be used against him, except to impeach his testimony, should he choose later on to take the stand. Then they excused themselves, leaving the detective and the gang leader alone.

  Lenny was dressed in jeans and a form-fitting T-shirt. He was bulked up from working out, and his skin—sallow from his ten months in jail—lent his eyes an inward, brooding intensity. Quinn started off by exploring Lenny’s history, his early exploits under Yayo and his entry onto Beekman Avenue. The questions were designed to put Lenny at ease and get him talking about himself. In Quinn’s experience, subjects were almost always willing to admit nonviolent felonies. It was their chance to show good faith without implicating themselves in anything too serious, and Quinn had expected Lenny to be frank. But Lenny was not only forthcoming; he seemed to genuinely enjoy talking about his trade, glad for once to have a knowledgeable audience. “This guy wants to make a de
al,” Quinn thought.

  Quinn listened intently, prompting Lenny now and then with questions about this or that incident, reminding him that he already knew much of what Lenny was telling him. But he didn’t press Lenny about the violence, letting him author his own biography the first time around. A half hour into the interview, however, Quinn decided to test Lenny’s candor. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but now we gotta talk about it,” Quinn said. “You know, the thing with the truck on the highway.”

  The request clearly stung Lenny. Cargill’s murder wasn’t in the indictment—there wasn’t enough evidence to prove it—and Quinn knew it was the kind of act, aberrant and unjustifiable, that the gang leader wouldn’t want to admit to. Lenny lowered his head and began jiggling his leg. “Naw,” he said. “A lot of people are saying we did that, but I had nothing to do with that.”

  Quinn could see from his body language that he was lying, and he told him so. He was done playing around. Cargill was the linchpin of any plea bargain, and he wanted Lenny to know that. “It ain’t just people been saying that,” Quinn told him. “You’ve been saying that—first you talked about it on 171st Street, then your brother was talking about it. We know what happened. What do you think people talk about when they come in here? What do you think Platano said when he was in New Jersey?”

  “Platano said that?” Lenny was dumbfounded.

  “Do you think we picked you out of a fucking haystack? You made statements. People pick up on it. If I’m guessing—Look, we talked about all these other things. Did I tell you what you did? Why would I make this up?”

  Lenny shook his head.