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

by Stone, Michael

  “You were the shooter. It wasn’t anybody else. It was you.

  “Look, you can’t do this halfway,” Quinn went on. “It’s all gotta be out on the table. Lying’s like being pregnant. You can’t be a little bit. You either are or you’re not. It can’t be a little of this or a little of that. That’s not the way it works. You got to do the whole thing, get the whole truth out, or it’s the same as nothing at all. You nullify all the good stuff you told me. Now we’re back to square one.”

  Lenny was hunkered low at the table, his legs jumping up and down. “Look at you, you can’t hardly contain yourself,” Quinn said. “It’s time to get this off your chest, make a clean breast of this, so we can move on.”

  “Naw, it wasn’t like that,” Lenny said. “It’s not the way you’re making it out to be.”

  “Well, then you tell me the way it happened, so I get the truth. ’Cause other people are putting out their stories. You don’t want their versions to be the only ones we’re hearing.”

  Lenny stopped rocking, stopped shaking his leg. Quinn knew at that moment that he had him, that Lenny wanted to talk, that he was just looking for an out; Quinn decided to give him one. “I know you’re not proud of this, that it’s the one shooting you didn’t have to do, that had nothing to do with business,” Quinn said. “I know this didn’t start out being an intentional thing. You’d been drinking, you were fucked up. You didn’t use judgment. Maybe you were just trying to shoot the car a little. The road was wavy. You were bouncing up and down.”

  Lenny leaned in toward Quinn, close enough for the detective to put a hand on his arm. The gang leader had been preparing for this moment for over a month, ever since Gould had visited him in jail after the takedown and laid out the indictment against him. He’d known then, as he knew now, that his only chance of seeing the streets again was to cooperate. But admitting this, a murder without reason, was harder than even he’d imagined. He took a breath and began to speak.

  BREAKTHROUGH

  WINTER-SPRING 1994

  WALTER ARSENAULT was struck dumb when Quinn stuck his head out of the cafeteria and told Arsenault that Lenny had just given up Cargill. He’d seen Quinn do some fairly amazing things before, but this was beyond his wildest expectations. Quinn had cracked a two-and-a-half-year-old case that many in the office thought would never be solved. What’s more, Arsenault reasoned, if Lenny was willing to admit to Cargill, he was likely to give up the “whole boatload”—Raymond Polanco, El Feo, the mysterious and lethal Freddy Krueger, the people at the Quad, and every gang-sanctioned assault, shooting, and murder dating back to 1986. “Lenny was the Rosetta stone,” Arsenault would later say.

  But Arsenault had some reservations about Lenny’s cooperation. For one thing, he wasn’t sure he could sell a plea bargain to Snyder or Bronx DA Rob Johnson, even if he could get Lenny to accept the serious jail time that would be part of any agreement. Moreover, he knew if he signed Lenny up, he’d be violating one of the unit’s cardinal rules. In the past, HIU had always flipped a gang’s mostly nonviolent underlings against its leaders, the heavyweights who ordered and committed the murders. Making a deal with Lenny was reversing that process. But Arsenault realized that in the case of the Cowboys, many of the underlings were violent as well.

  THE NEW YEAR began well for the investigation. After Lenny’s December visit, the first members of the gang in the indictment to cooperate trickled in. They were mostly lower-level workers, often as much victims of the gang’s capricious violence as perpetrators. Juan Abarca, a transporter for the gang, flipped in January. One of Pasqualito’s recruits, he was so thickheaded and guileless that no juror, Brownell reasoned, would believe him capable of making up the events he described. Israel Rios and Martha Molina, the crackhead who had been beaten into a coma by her manager, were typical among those who pitched for the Cowboys to support their habit. Molina’s brain had been damaged by the beating, her vision blurry, her speech slurred; she’d spent years in jail, and Social Services had taken away her kids. Ordinarily, she would have made a terrible witness, but Brownell wanted the jury to see firsthand the soul-destroying effects of the drug that had made the Cowboys rich.

  Starting in the early spring, Cowboy workers George Santiago and Frankie Robles regularly visited the unit from jail. They had both grown up in the lap of the gang, having resided as children in the Beech Terrace tenement where Nelson and Lenny first started selling Red-Top. Santiago was candid and articulate, and could recite the history of the gang since they moved into the area, as could Robles, who’d been Pasqualito’s sidekick and had worked at almost every level of the organization. Together, along with the others who cooperated, they provided investigators with a rich, detailed picture of gang life on Beekman Avenue and the violent events that punctuated the day-today workings of the crack trade.

  But once Brownell and the prosecutors started prepping the witnesses in earnest, a host of problems emerged. “There was a lot of trouble with their statements,” Brownell recalls. “These were people who were never particularly interested in accuracy in their everyday lives. When they were telling a story, they’d mix in hearsay, and they couldn’t remember what they’d actually seen and what someone else had told them. Or they’d just see bits and pieces of something—like the Quad or the Double—and they’d make up the missing parts according to what they thought you wanted to hear, or what they thought must have happened, which was usually wrong.”

  Language was another complicating factor. They were poor communicators, and in some instances even worse listeners, unable to follow instructions or read simple diagrams. The prosecutors spent long hours with nearly all the witnesses. In addition to the scores of police officers and detectives who needed to be debriefed, Brownell made it a rule to bring in at least one civilian witness a day. He and Hill and Grifa worked through whole mornings and afternoons with the Cruz-Morales kids, Abarca, Molina, and Santiago, going over their testimony, slowing their stories down frame by frame, teasing out the particles of information they had imagined or fabricated. Then, in April, Don Hill had the office build a scale model of the neighborhood, complete with cars and figures representing the gang and their victims. “You can’t imagine how a simple little idea like that changed things,” Brownell recalls. “There were parts of the Double and the Quad I’d never understood before, or that had seemed flat and sterile when they’d been described to me. Now those crimes just snapped to life for me. It was like watching children relive their memories by playing with dolls.”

  But the prosecutors could only do so much. They could not, for example, edit out the trail of written statements dating back to the Bronx grand jury in the Quad case in which many of their main witnesses contradicted not only each other but their own later testimony as well. Armed with those statements, any seasoned defense lawyer, Brownell knew, should be able to unhinge even the cleverest, most confident witnesses. And HIU’s witnesses were far from ideal. In fact, they were scared at the prospect of simply appearing in a courtroom, much less jousting with attorneys. Brownell had to train them not only to defend their stories against cross-examination but to explain why they varied, sometimes widely, from earlier versions. “There were days when I panicked, when I felt there was no way I can do this,” Brownell recalls. “When I read the record, I’d get depressed. But then we’d have a couple of good sessions in a row, and I’d start to think things weren’t so bad. There was one rule I learned from running cross-country: When you run uphill, you always look at your feet. I tried not to look too far ahead. I knew I’d go crazy if I worried about things I couldn’t control, like whether we were going to be ready in time. What saved me in the end was knowing that every day we did something productive.”

  ALL THE DETECTIVES were working overtime that winter. Transporting, guarding, and debriefing witnesses and informants took up the brunt of their days. But they were also tracking down fugitives and helping the Feds build parallel cases against Raymond Polanco, El Feo, and El Feo’s notorious
henchman, Freddy Krueger. Over the years, and especially during the Arsenault–Quinn era, HIU had acquired a macho reputation in the DA’s office. Unlike the Trial Division, which was about 50 percent female, the unit was almost exclusively male. Moreover, HIU’s prosecutors targeted the city’s deadliest killers, worked hand in hand with veteran detectives and undercovers, and cultivated sources among the very gangs they were investigating. Yet because the unit operated so close to the street, they developed a connection to their “clients” that even their colleagues at the defense bar didn’t achieve. At times during his Jamaican campaign, Arsenault functioned almost as much like a social worker as he did a prosecutor—walking informants and cooperators through VD clinics, GED programs, job interviews; listening to their troubles day and night; and maintaining avuncular relationships with witnesses long after they’d outlived their usefulness to the unit.

  After a rocky start, Tebbens and Dugan had developed a good relationship with Lenny, whom they met with every week or two in preparation for his plea agreement. Convinced that Lenny had ordered the Quad from prison, Tebbens had disbelieved Lenny’s steadfast denials, until new information confirmed the gang leader’s version of events.

  Dugan was also against Lenny at first. Already miffed at Quinn for questioning Lenny about Cargill without him—after all, Dugan had been the principal investigator in the case—Dugan was furious when he learned that Lenny had claimed he hadn’t intended to kill Cargill when he shot into the Nissan pickup truck, and that Quinn had let him get away with it. “What the hell did you do that for?” Dugan said to Quinn outside the interview room. “That’s the last thing you should have done.”

  “Well, that’s how I got him to fucking come on board,” Quinn said. “What the hell difference does it make as long as he admits he’s the shooter?” Quinn had a point; Lenny was guilty of murder no matter what he was thinking when he pulled the trigger.

  “In my opinion, that’s not enough,” Dugan said in the low, clipped voice he used when he was angry. “This guy intended to kill him, and he should admit it.”

  “All right,” Quinn said. “You go in and try it.”

  Dugan spent the rest of the afternoon, and much of their next session, painstakingly extracting every detail of the night of the shooting. In the end, Dugan had not only Lenny’s full confession but his grudging respect.

  DURING THAT same time, Tebbens and Dugan, along with HIDTA’s Eddie Benitez, continued to investigate Pasqualito’s whereabouts. They haunted the fugitive’s known hangouts—the tenement where his mother still lived on West 171st Street, his girlfriend’s luxury apartment in Riverdale, the gang’s old headquarters on Cypress Avenue. Despite persistent rumors that he’d fled to the Dominican Republic, all three detectives had heard reports of sightings in town, and because Pasqualito had been born in the States and was a U.S. citizen, they felt that if he were living in the Dominican Republic, they might still arrest him and bring him back. Then, in early March, Blue Eyes—the informant Dugan had cultivated in Pasqualito’s old neighborhood—tipped him that the gang leader’s mother was planning a trip to the Dominican Republic.

  Dugan and Joe Flores, a veteran NYPD detective who’d recently joined HIU, staked out Anna Llaca’s apartment, and in the early morning hours of March 7, the day of her scheduled flight, followed her out to La Guardia. When the detectives got to the airport, Flores noted that Llaca’s bags at the curbside check-in had been ticketed for San Juan. If Pasqualito were meeting his mother in Puerto Rico, there would be no extradition problems. With no time to check with Quinn, Dugan and Flores decided to board the flight.

  The detectives managed to follow Llaca to a modest house that belonged to Pasqualito’s wife and daughter in Las Tejas—a rural village in the center of the island—where they set up surveillance. Pasqualito failed to show up. Then, five days later, on the afternoon they were scheduled to return home, the detectives got a call from Tebbens in New York. Thanks to a tip, Tebbens heard that Stacey Scroggins, Pasqualito’s girlfriend and the mother of another of his children, was flying down to the Dominican Republic, and HIDTA had alerted Kevin O’Brien, a DEA agent posted to Santo Domingo, that Pasqualito was coming to the airport to meet her that afternoon.

  Late that afternoon, five members of the special airport security force in Santo Domingo confronted Pasqualito in the main terminal building. Despite the police’s overwhelming numbers, Pasqualito reached for his gun. Almost anywhere else the agents would have shot Pasqualito dead. But the airport was crowded, so they rushed him instead and wrestled him to the ground before he could get off any shots. Pasqualito was now in police custody in Santo Domingo.

  Quinn got on the line. “Take the next flight over there,” he told them, “and see what you can do about getting him back.”

  O’BRIEN MET Dugan and Flores at the airport in Santo Domingo, and introduced them to Julio Cesar Beyonett, a general in charge of the Dominican Republic’s security forces. Heavyset with a moon face and straight black hair, the general greeted the visitors from behind a large, clean desk in his office at police headquarters. Like many island officials, whose power derives more from their rank than the law, he exuded an insidious air of courtliness and utter command. His index finger seemed connected by an invisible string to an aide sitting at a small desk at the far end of the room. Whenever Beyonett wanted something—coffee, paperwork—he merely flicked his finger backward and the officer snapped to attention.

  After exchanging pleasantries, the general asked the detectives about their business. Dugan explained through Flores—the general didn’t speak English—who Pasqualito was, how dangerous he was, and how many men he had killed. Then they submitted documents proving Pasqualito’s U.S. citizenship. Finally, Flores announced that while some of Pasqualito’s victims were of Dominican descent, all were, like him, American-born. Dugan knew that if Beyonett thought that just one of the deceased was a Dominican national, he would order Pasqualito tried on the spot.

  Beyonett listened intently to the detectives, glanced through the files they handed him, then fixed Dugan with a decisive look. “Okay,” he said. “I don’t want this piece of dirt. He’s not a nacional, you can have him.”

  Dugan was stunned. But O’Brien had already warned him: “They’ll say yes, even when they mean no. You won’t really know you have him until the plane is off the ground.” Dugan sat quietly while Beyonett ordered his aide to start the extradition process.

  “This will take a few days,” he told the detectives. Then he stood to accept their thanks. The meeting was over.

  The next day, Dugan and Flores were back in the general’s office. They wanted to know if they could get hold of the gun that Pasqualito was arrested with; he might have used it in one of his murders. Accustomed to observing a strict chain of continuity in handling evidence, Dugan was surprised when Beyonett reached into his desk drawer and pulled out the revolver. He handed it to Flores, then flicked his finger and spoke rapidly over his shoulder to his aide, now standing rigidly behind his desk. The police have already distributed the bullets among their troops, he explained to the detectives. His aide would retrieve them. Was there anything else he could do?

  There was, Flores said, after thanking the general profusely for his help. A second U.S. fugitive was residing in their country, he said, a Nelson Sepulveda, whose case was similar to Pasqualito’s. At that point, the aide, begging the general’s pardon, interrupted. He said the police knew of this man, Sepulveda, and the detectives would be advised to speak to the colonel in charge of the sector where Sepulveda was living. The aide said he would arrange a meeting.

  The next day, however, someone had leaked the story of Pasqualito’s capture to the press, and the country was in an uproar; politicians and pundits were weighing in against extradition to the United States in any form. After a few minutes of panic, Dugan and Flores decided to proceed as though everything were normal. That morning they met with the colonel who was overseeing Nelson’s case—he said he was going f
orward and counseled patience—and then drove to the airport to pick up Quinn and Tebbens, who’d flown down to help with Pasqualito’s release. Then they waited.

  Finally on March 31, O’Brien phoned the investigators and told them to meet him at the airport. Beyonett had decided to go ahead with the extradition. At noon, they met with the security force that had captured Pasqualito and presented them with gifts: HIU T-shirts and caps, embossed coffee mugs, and gold-plated DEA pins. A half hour later Pasqualito emerged. He was chained around the arms and legs and surrounded by four Dominican soldiers pointing machine guns at him. When the prisoner spotted Dugan and Tebbens among his captors, he smiled broadly. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys,” he said.

  HIU’S INVESTIGATORS could not help liking Pasqualito. Although a psychopath, the most precipitously violent of the Cowboys, he had a directness and stand-up quality that was appealing. He was invariably jovial in his encounters with the detectives, and though he’d openly taunted Tebbens, Dugan, and Benitez in the past, he tipped his hat to them now. It was business, as far as he was concerned; he had a job to do, and so did they.

  Whatever their feelings toward Pasqualito, the detectives weren’t taking any chances with him. They kept him in irons during the plane ride and refused to let him eat or drink. They didn’t want him going to the bathroom until after they landed. The gang leader took it in stride. Sandwiched between Dugan and Tebbens, he entertained them with tales about the Dominican corrections system. The last five days he’d been locked in an eight-by-eight cell with a hole dug in the center for a toilet. There was no bed, just a little straw in one corner of the cell, and no food. In the Dominican Republic, a prisoner’s relatives provide the food; Pasqualito had none on the island. He hadn’t eaten for five days, and he’d been afraid to drink the polluted water. Another few hours, he said, wouldn’t make a difference. “I can’t wait to get back to Rikers and have me a steak,” he told Dugan.