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

by Stone, Michael

  Dugan let Pasqualito talk. He wasn’t allowed to question the gang leader, in any case, without his lawyer present. However, at one point, he noted that Pasqualito was sporting a tattoo on his forearm, an image of a skull with snakes crawling in and out of its apertures.

  “You like that?” Pasqualito asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I got that the night after I killed Frankie,” Pasqualito blurted out.

  The detectives had barely deplaned when they received news that trumped their extradition of Pasqualito. Bobby Tarwacki, who’d been waiting on the tarmac with a van to transport Pasqualito, told them, “Walter just got a call from the DR. They’ve got Nelson.”

  NELSON SEPULVEDA was neither as large nor as intimidating as his brother. His features had been chiseled with a finer tool, and he seemed distracted much of the time. But the “Whack,” as Nelson was known on the street, was the better athlete of the two, a tough, wiry running back on his high school football team with fast hands and a hair-trigger temper. Nobody fucked with Nelson, though it was Lenny, with his cool, businesslike approach to violence, who headed the gang’s enforcement wing.

  Little of Nelson’s sinew was in evidence upon his return from the Dominican Republic, however. Sitting across from Arsenault in the unit chief’s office in mid-April, he looked like a man about to give it up. After fifteen years of interviewing potential cooperators, Arsenault could sense, even before they spoke, who was going to sign on and who wasn’t. The hard cases like Pasqualito had a defiant glint in their eyes, a bright, steely expression that virtually guaranteed their information would be scant or misleading. Nelson’s eyes were dead. He’d left the business behind when he’d absconded to the Dominican Republic more than two years ago, and now he seemed out of it completely. But he’d known that this day might come, and he’d already decided how he’d deal with it. “I’m going to tell you everything you want to know,” he said to Arsenault. “But I want you to give me back a little piece of my life.”

  Nelson didn’t seem to want to wrangle; he was determined to make a deal. Moreover, he’d formed a bond with Tebbens, who’d flown down to the Dominican Republic with Dugan to bring him back, and he trusted the detective, as much as his lawyer, to look after his interests.

  For his part, Brownell was eager to conclude the negotiations as quickly as possible. Brownell had already decided by then not to use Lenny as a witness. Lenny’s leadership position in the gang, his history of violence, and his cold-blooded murder of Cargill would repulse any jury, and might well taint their case by association. Nelson’s record was not all that much better than his brother’s. In the weeks after his return to the United States, he’d admitted ordering the Quad, though he didn’t participate in the actual shooting; killing Anthony Villerbe, the former Corrections worker who, according to Nelson, had tried to pass counterfeit bills to the gang; and committing a host of lesser crimes. But Nelson, unlike his brother, had never been the driving force behind the Cowboys, had never been its true leader, and it showed in their demeanor. Lenny was a boss. No matter how earnestly he cooperated—and his efforts had been substantial—he couldn’t shake the air of arrogant command that seemed a natural part of his actions. Nelson, on the other hand, seemed softer, if not exactly remorseful; and with his detailed knowledge of the Quad, he’d emerged in Brownell’s plans as a key witness. All that was left was to fix the terms of the sentence. Brownell offered twenty-two years, based on the twenty-five-year sentence they had offered Lenny. The idea was to give both brothers as stiff a penalty as possible, without snuffing out all hope for a life in the future. Arsenault knew there were DAs in the office for whom any plea would be too generous, given Lenny’s and Nelson’s history. But twenty-two years, with no guarantee of parole, was an effective life sentence, tougher than many similar agreements, and a good deal tougher than the deal shortly to be handed by the Feds to Sammy “the Bull” Gravano. Gravano, a mob informant who admitted killing more than twenty people, served five years for his crimes—a pact that still generates delusions of leniency among potential cooperators.

  With Nelson on board, Lenny’s cooperation was assured. Ten days later, he accepted the twenty-five-year plea offer, and on May 16 appeared before Leslie Crocker Snyder to make his allocution. A kind of extended guilty plea in which a defendant formally admits to the particulars of his crimes, an allocution is usually an unremarkable affair. The prosecutor does most of the talking; the defendant merely assents that he did such and such a thing on such and such a date. But Lenny’s hearing was different. An air of expectancy hung over the tense, packed courtroom, which, though closed to the public, was filled with HIU and HIDTA personnel, prosecutors from Brooklyn and the Bronx, and, most prominently, the Cargill family. They had come to see close up the man who had killed their son and brother; to hear him do penance, or at least confess to his crime; and perhaps without knowing it, to test afresh their reactions to an event that had numbed and diminished their own lives.

  After her breakdown and hospitalization in the summer of 1991, Anne Cargill lapsed into a steep, protracted depression. Already abusing pills before her breakdown, she began increasing her dosages and mixing Percodan, Vicodin, Fiorecet, and alcohol. Before long she was hooked, and her life unraveled completely. For years she had done the marketing for her husband’s small business. Now she stopped coming into the office altogether, causing sales to drop off sharply. Worse, she isolated herself from her family when they needed her most. Afraid she was becoming suicidal, Innes and their four daughters organized an intervention in June 1993. Anne was furious—she felt her privacy had been invaded—and per her therapist’s instructions, the family left her alone. Innes moved into the home of one of his daughters, and the family refused to communicate with her. Forced to confront herself, Anne realized she wanted to live, to grow old and get to know her grandchildren. Three days after the intervention, she checked herself into Four Winds, a rehab facility in nearby Katonah.

  Six months later, prodded by his wife, Innes entered AA.

  Both Innes and Anne had been clean for months when Arsenault briefed them on the details of their son’s murder the evening before Lenny’s allocution. Still, seated with two of their daughters in the close atmosphere of HIU’s conference room, the Cargills had difficulty grasping Arsenault’s description of what had happened. “I felt like I was watching a movie, that I was floating above the room, looking down on the action,” Innes Cargill recalled. “It was as close to an out-of-body experience as I’ve ever had. I had to keep reminding myself: This is my son they’re talking about. This is David.”

  Now, flanked by his lawyers and surrounded by a phalanx of security guards, Lenny stood behind the defense table facing the judge. His hands were cuffed in front of him and his voice, at first, was barely audible. Anne Cargill felt a strange swelling inside her chest. She had expected to feel angry, vengeful, repulsed. Instead, she saw a young man, not much older than her son would have been, shackled and bowed before the bench, his life, his free life at any rate, effectively over. What she felt was pity.

  Don Hill led Lenny through his exploits in the Bronx—his activities as the Cowboys’ boss and his role in a series of violent shootings, several of them fatal. In one typical instance, he was charged with ordering the death of a rival dealer, who happened to be sitting in a car at the time with his pregnant wife. “On that date, December 30, 1990, were you present in an automobile in the vicinity of Vyse Avenue and 181st Street in the Bronx?” Hill asked him.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did you ever have a conversation with another individual at that location by the name of Manuel Lugo?”

  “Yes.”

  “During that conversation did you relay to Manuel Lugo that you wished to engage in a business transaction with him?”

  Hill’s formal locutions and Lenny’s terse replies and matter-of-fact tone had the effect of two alien worlds colliding. But it wasn’t until after Hill rested and Brownell elicited the details of David
Cargill’s murder that the true, anarchic dimensions of Lenny’s violence took shape. As Innes Cargill leaned forward in his seat, his face a blur of incomprehension, Brownell questioned Lenny about the night of the shooting. “You were in a car at the time?” Brownell asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What type of car?”

  “A Buick Regal.”

  “Who was driving that car?”

  “Raymond.”

  Two weeks before the Cargill incident, Lenny had bought a dozen Uzi 9 mm automatics from Raymond at $2,500 per—guns he’d been stockpiling in preparation for a war with Yellow-Top, the same guns the Cowboys would later use in the Quad. One had been defective, and he’d given it back to Raymond to repair. Now Raymond was returning it to him outside the Palladium.

  It was 3 A.M. Lenny was wasted. He’d been drinking kamikazes and rum punches, whatever they’d put in front of him, until closing; and he’d been smoking blunts, the cigar-sized joints that were the Cowboys’ drug of choice. Platano and Nelson had been with him, and were waiting for him now in Platano’s BMW to drive to an after-hours club in the Bronx. But he told them to go ahead; he’d follow them in Raymond’s car.

  That was his first mistake. His second was going up the West Side. Normally he would have taken the East River Drive to the Bronx, but Platano wanted to check out the Limelight and some other nightspots, so they drove up Sixth Avenue, then cut over to the highway. Raymond was at the wheel, trying to keep up with Platano, who was threading traffic at speeds up to 70 mph.

  “Can you tell us what kind of vehicle David Cargill was driving that night?” Brownell asked him.

  “A red [pickup],” Lenny answered.

  “And where was the first time that you saw that red [pickup] he was driving that night?”

  “On Fifty-seventh Street.”

  “Fifty-seventh and where?”

  “The West Side Highway.”

  They were heading north on the highway, following Platano onto the ramp leading to the elevated portion of the road. Cargill’s pickup truck was traveling west on 57th Street and had run a red light at the intersection with the highway, cutting Platano’s BMW off on the ramp, nearly forcing him into the divider.

  “That fucking guy’s crazy,” Platano said. Polanco had pulled the Regal abreast of the BMW, and Platano was yelling at Lenny through their open windows. “He almost hit me. Give me the fucking gun, I’m going to light him up.”

  Lenny looked down the stretch of dark highway. He saw the pickup’s taillights winking in the distance, and on his left a few scattered pairs of oncoming headlights, and a single black ribbon of river and night. “I’ll take care of it,” Lenny said.

  “So Platano drives off,” Lenny told the court, “and Raymond passed me the Uzi and said, ‘Go test that out,’ because I was in the transaction of buying an Uzi.”

  “This was an Uzi you wanted to make sure was working?” Snyder asked.

  “Yes.”

  “So you decided to test it out by shooting the guy who almost hit your friend’s car?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do with the Uzi?”

  Lenny had retrieved the gun from a clavo secreted behind the center console in the rear seat, and locked a cartridge into the chamber. Meanwhile, Polanco had gunned the Buick and had almost pulled even with the pickup. “Light him up, light him up,” he yelled at Lenny, nudging the car forward.

  Lenny aimed at Cargill’s door, just below the driver-side window, and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened.

  “So I told him, ‘This gun is no good,’ and then he took it back and I held the steering wheel as he slowed down, and then he did something to it. I don’t know what he did to it, and he passed it back to me. He took back the steering wheel and he drove up to it again, and it misfired, and so we tried it again, the same procedure.”

  The second time the gun jammed, Lenny cursed Polanco. What if this happened in a shoot-out? He’d be dead. Polanco took the Uzi from Lenny, ejected the jammed cartridge and slid another one into the chamber, while Lenny guided the wheel. Then he handed the gun back to Lenny, and floored the accelerator.

  The car lurched forward, pinning Lenny briefly to the back of his seat. Then Polanco whipped the Buick into the left lane, hugging the guardrail through a lazy curve. The speedometer was topping 100 when they let out onto a long straight stretch of road. Lenny saw the loops of vibrating lights atop the George Washington Bridge, the BMW’s taillights dancing a hundred yards ahead in the far right lane, and closer in, like a slow-moving target in the middle of the road, the boxy silhouette of Cargill’s pickup. “Now, try it now,” he heard Polanco’s hoarse voice urging him above the noise of the engine and the wind gusting through the open window.

  The gun exploded to life, the magazine emptying out in one drunken gasp. Lenny saw the plumelike pattern of bullet holes in the door of the pickup as the Uzi’s recoil drove the short barrel upward. The last few bullets crashed through the pickup’s window, and Lenny saw the profile of his victim for the first time, a young white male slumped over at the neck. It was over in a second or two. The Buick picked up speed, and behind it, the pickup slowed precipitously, lurching left and right, before heading off onto the exit grid at 158th Street.

  The courtroom was silent after Lenny finished his testimony—a hushed, stunned silence like a ringing in the ear. Then Judge Snyder, tight-lipped, unable to hide her anger or disgust, reviewed the salient terms of Lenny’s cooperation agreement, before retreating abruptly to her chambers.

  Back at the unit a half hour later, the prosecutors were still barely speaking to each other. There were no words to characterize what they’d just heard; even irony, the gallows humor that coated their stomachs against the acid reality of the streets, failed to mitigate the horror of David Cargill’s murder. Finally Brownell called Hill and Grifa into his office and began going over the schedule for the rest of the afternoon. There was, he knew, no time to mull over, much less digest, the meaning of what was already past. They had a trial coming up—eight defendants, all killers like Lenny—and just three months left to prepare.

  THE TRIAL BEGINS

  FALL 1994

  THE COWBOY conspiracy trial, which began on September 20, 1994, promised to be a prolonged, raucous affair. There were nine defendants in all, Platano, Pasqualito, and Fat Danny among them. They would wait until later to try or plead out the others who weren’t facing murder charges. Just the logistics—coordinating them, their lawyers, their special needs and objections—were daunting. Actually laying out their individual cases for a jury, defining their roles within the gang and their relationship to one another, seemed at times like an impossible task. But the prosecution’s case was so large and unwieldy—at one time there were nearly 200 candidates on their witness list, many of them in jail or in hiding—both Arsenault and Brownell felt they had only one shot at a trial, and they wanted to include all the defendants indicted for murder.

  Arsenault and Brownell were also keenly aware of the stakes of the trial. They needed a total victory to ensure that none of the Cowboys’ violent enforcers returned to the streets, where they could retaliate against the witnesses. Moreover, seeing their mates get stiff sentences would help persuade the remaining gang members to accept reasonable plea bargains. Most important, though, was the effect the outcome would have on future cases. “The credibility of the unit was at risk,” Arsenault recalls. “We’d built up a reputation over the years with Hoyt and Ellen Corcella, with the Spanglers and the Gheri Curls and all the other gangs we’d done. We were pretty well known on the street, and I knew that if we got beaten by the Cowboys, that would be well known too. Plus our professional and ethical reputations were on the line. In big conspiracy cases like the Cowboys, the defense always tries to attack the integrity of the cops and prosecutors at trial. It’s the only way they can refute the evidence we present. Finally, there was the additional burden of having three offices try the case. That kind of cooperative effort was unprece
dented in my experience, and it was important to show that it could work.”

  Arsenault was also feeling pressure from inside his own office. As his rift with Nancy Ryan deepened, Arsenault relied increasingly on Barbara Jones, Morgenthau’s chief assistant, to act as his liaison with the eighth floor. In fact, the unit had taken some steps toward autonomy. In the spring, Jones had replaced James McVeety and a handful of detectives thought to be allied with Ryan, and installed Quinn as chief investigator. And Arsenault, having decided to stay with HIU, had withdrawn his offer to the Boston U.S. Attorney’s office. But he still felt he was one mistake away from a debacle.

  Arsenault’s suspicions were confirmed to him in an incident that occurred as the trial got under way. A few days into jury selection, Morgenthau’s public affairs officer asked Arsenault to talk to a local reporter on background about the Cowboys. Ethically, government prosecutors are enjoined from commenting publicly about ongoing investigations. In fact, DAs routinely grant “for background only” interviews to the media in high-profile cases, if only to counter the spin of media-cozy defense counsels. In this instance, however, the reporter not only twisted Arsenault’s general comments about gangs to make it sound like he was talking specifically about the Cowboys, but attributed off-the-record quotes to the unit chief. Not surprisingly, the article triggered vigorous protests from the Cowboys’ defense lawyers. According to Arsenault and other knowledgeable sources, it also prompted a visit from Nancy Ryan to the judge, censuring Arsenault for his indiscretion, a meeting Ryan denies. Arsenault, who was called before Snyder that same morning and formally reprimanded, accepted his fate with equanimity; it was, he felt, the cost of doing business. But when he learned that his own supervisor not only had failed to make clear the true circumstances behind his actions but had actually criticized him, he snapped. It was clear to him now that Ryan would take every opportunity to attack the unit. By noon, he’d tendered his resignation.