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

by Stone, Michael

  The prosecution’s first witness was Salustiano Sanabria, an emergency medical technician who arrived on Beekman Avenue just moments after the Quad. Sanabria described the carnage and chaotic crowd scene, much like the opening shot in a crime film.

  After Tebbens and Benitez testified, Brownell called Freddie Sendra, the former Cowboy manager, to give an insider’s view of the gang. Brownell quizzed him about the gang’s origins and its early years on Beekman Avenue. Sendra, who joined Red-Top as a shift manager in mid-1988 after a two-year-stint in jail for auto theft, identified Platano, Pasqualito, and Fat Danny as charter members and bosses under Lenny and Nelson. Then, prompted by Brownell, he described the way the organization operated from the time Lenny purchased raw cocaine from a wholesaler in upper Manhattan.

  Drugs, money, guns—Brownell debriefed Sendra about the salient features of gang life among the Cowboys. He even grilled the former manager about target practices the gang held on the rooftops overlooking St. Mary’s Park, seeing who could come closest to the pedestrians without hitting them. But Brownell was also interested in getting Sendra to talk about another subject: the children whom the Cowboys employed to help out in the business, and whose participation in the gang’s activities, if proved, would turn their conspiracy into a top felony with penalties equal to that of a murder conviction. “Well, Mr. Sendra, what were the ages of some of the people that were used?” Brownell asked.

  “Ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-olds.”

  “What were they used for?”

  “We used to have them do runs for us, bring over the bundles, and go to the store for us.”

  “Now, you say ‘we.’ Who are you referring to?”

  “Me, Lenny, Nelson, Fat Danny, Platano, Hector …”

  “Did you know the names of all the ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-olds that transported in this manner?”

  “Just one.”

  “And what was the one name that you did know?”

  “Little Louie …”

  “How many other people of the age of ten, eleven, and twelve were used to perform this function?”

  “About six to eight.”

  “And where were those children from?”

  “Right there on Beekman Avenue.”

  “And how are they obtained to do this?”

  “We just used to pay them, you know, buy them things, get them whatever they wanted, you know … Buy them ice cream if they wanted, toys from the store, whatever they wanted …”

  “Was there any particular reason why ten-, eleven-, twelve-year-olds were used rather than people that were the ages of the pitchers or the managers, older people?”

  “Less likely for them to get stopped by a cop.”

  Brownell finished his direct examination of Sendra on the afternoon of November 2, one and a half days after he began. Cross-examination took three times that long, and was relentless. Platano’s lawyer, Robert Soloway, a short, balding bullet of a man with an intense, rapid-fire delivery, took the first shot at Sendra, and not only rehashed his criminal record but targeted his pleas and parole applications—the many lies and broken promises he’d made to judges and other justice officials since Sendra’s introduction to the system, when he was 15 years old.

  Brownell had tried to cover Sendra’s illegal acts in his direct, so Sendra wouldn’t appear to be trying to hide anything from the jury. And Sendra, at times during his testimony, seemed to be too candid, as though he took pleasure in recollecting his past exploits. But Sendra’s lifelong habit of lawlessness made him an easy target for defense lawyers; even when they pursued other lines of questioning, they kept stumbling on instances of criminal conduct.

  Ridiculing Sendra’s attempts at finding legal work, Soloway established that Sendra had quit his job with a sanitation company because he didn’t have a driver’s license. Why, Soloway asked, didn’t you simply “go down to the DMV here on Worth Street a couple of blocks away, [stand] on line for a few hours,” and get one?

  “I would have went to the DMV, I would have gotten rearrested,” Sendra replied.

  “You would have gotten rearrested, and you would have gotten rearrested because you had other … you had a parole warrant out on you at that time?”

  “No, I owe close to thirteen thousand dollars to the DMV.”

  “Okay, you owe thirteen thousand dollars. What’s that for?” Soloway asked, fumbling for a reason.

  “Driving with no license,” Sendra said.

  But Soloway was unable to deliver the knockout blow to Sendra’s credibility he’d been hoping for. Even though he got the former Cowboy to admit he’d fudged the truth in the past in order to obtain a favorable plea bargain, Soloway couldn’t show how Sendra’s current testimony had earned him much benefit. In fact, Sendra had decided to cooperate, after keeping quiet for two years, because he’d felt betrayed by the Cowboys. All that he’d asked from the prosecutors was a letter to the parole board stating that he’d cooperated with the DA’s office and a few dollars for his commissary account. Soloway made as much as he could out of that request, but it was Pasqualito’s lawyer, Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, who inflicted the most damage. “And you have told these ladies and gentlemen that the two considerations and two benefits conferred upon you are letters that would be written to a parole board?” she asked Sendra during cross the following day.

  “Yes.”

  “Sir, isn’t it a fact you were excluded from the indictment that these men [are] on trial for?” Van Leer-Greenberg asked, gesturing at the defendants.

  “Yes.”

  “That these forty people were indicted for?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t it a further fact that they were indicted for conspiracy in the first degree, right?”

  “I don’t know exactly what the charge … how, what the degree it was or anything.”

  “But you are not part of that indictment. You are not being prosecuted, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You are free from the chains of that indictment, are you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that not a benefit, sir, that you are deriving from being here and testifying today, and giving testimony in this trial?”

  Brownell watched stone-faced. The cross had already gone on too long, as one lawyer after another dissected Sendra’s life, and not politely. But there was nothing he could do. Sendra was the first of the former gang members to take the stand, and Brownell knew that the defense would take their best shots at him, and that Snyder would give them more latitude than she would later, when their rap about unscrupulous prosecutors and disingenuous snitches became stale. Meanwhile, he tried to stay cool and not object too strenuously.

  On the morning of November 9, a week after he’d taken the stand, Sendra was finally excused. For three days, the defense had beaten up on him and scored points against him repeatedly. But he’d never once lost his temper, and at times his steadfastly calm demeanor had made the defense seem shrill. Brownell judged that much of his testimony would hold up, and that some of the damaged bits might even be redeemed by corroboration and argument. “The thing about a trial like this,” Brownell would later recall, “is that you start out with all this evidence you’ve got to get in, and it’s like this huge weight on your shoulders. But then as you get through each witness, if they don’t get too banged up, it’s like one more thing you don’t have to think about again. The load just keeps getting lighter, like sand draining out of an hourglass. Freddie was a difficult witness because the defense just savaged him, and there was nothing we could do but sit there and let him take it. But when he held up and it was over, it was a huge relief. He was a big piece of our case, and now we didn’t have to worry about that anymore.”

  THE TURNING POINT

  WINTER 1994–95

  FREDDIE SENDRA’S testimony was one of the trial’s early turning points. The prosecution had led with one of their least sympathetic witnesses, and the defense had come at him with everything they had. Tha
t they failed to break him, despite landing several heavy blows, took some authority away from their later crosses, which at times seemed shrill or tendentious. Even then, the lawyers’ skills were less at issue than their clients’ blatantly violent behavior and the grit and preparedness and last-ditch courage of the witnesses. Typical among them was Janice Bruington, the sole surviving gunshot victim of the Quad.

  Bruington, who followed Sendra in the witness box, was hardly an exemplar of virtue or probity. A fortyish welfare mother of four, she’d been drinking and using hard drugs since she was a teenager, and looked like she had. Her face was haggard and there was a feral gleam in her eyes, like an animal for whom survival is a daily concern.

  But like many of the hard cases along Beekman Avenue, she possessed a well of pluck and humanity not told in the box score of her life. Quizzed by Hill, she sketched her history in Mott Haven—moving with her children to Beekman Avenue from Harlem in 1982, entering a methadone program, and struggling for four years to stay clean before succumbing to crack, bought mainly from the Cowboys. Even then, she said, she worked odd jobs to help support her family, and moved them back to Manhattan in November 1991, when the neighborhood became too dangerous. “When I first moved there, it wasn’t that bad; then it got worse,” she said.

  “And when you say that conditions got worse, how did they get worse?” Hill asked her.

  “They just got worse. You couldn’t sit outside. You had to learn to duck from bullets.”

  But Bruington said she returned to Beekman Avenue on December 16, the night of the Quad, to pick up her son, who was visiting his pregnant girlfriend. She had just turned onto Beekman and was crossing the alley where Yellow-Top sold three-dollar crack, she told the court, when she saw Stanley Tukes shoot Anthony Green. She had known them both as youngsters.

  “After you saw Stanley shoot Anthony Green, what did you do then?” Hill asked.

  “I turned to run.”

  “Did you do or say anything before you—”

  “I screamed. I turned around and I got shot,” Bruington said. She recalled the sting of the bullet as it ripped through her, indicating where it caught her in the back and exited her right shoulder. She then hit the pavement and rolled under a car, she said, pretending to be dead as the shooting continued. From her vantage point, she was able to pick out Platano and Fat Danny, as well as Tukes, running from the alley with guns in their hands.

  Eventually Bruington found her way to Salustiano Sanabria’s ambulance, where she heard the dying Anthony Green tell his brother Chubby that “Stanley shot me.” But Bruington kept her mouth shut. Her travails, she knew, were just beginning.

  A lifelong addict with little education and no employment record, Bruington should have been an easy mark for the defense. Even her proximity to Yellow-Top’s sales location on the night of the Quad added to the doubts about her reliability as a witness. Moreover, for nearly a year after the incident she’d told the police that she couldn’t identify her assailant, much less any of the other shooters; and the circumstances surrounding her eventual cooperation were murky. She told the court she’d been in constant fear for her life and for the lives of her children, that she’d gone into hiding and didn’t want to become involved. It was only when Platano contacted her through her son, and offered to “take care of her” if she agreed not to testify, that she felt she was being set up and applied to the DA for protection. Even then, she’d held back salient details about the shooting from Hill and Tebbens.

  Thanks largely to Tebbens’ assurances, Bruington had eventually filled out her story, including details about Platano that had not been part of the original record; and the defense homed in on the inconsistencies between her earlier and later statements. Platano’s lawyer, Robert Soloway, in particular, questioned Bruington on a deposition she’d given to Don Hill in which she seemed to change her mind about seeing his client among the shooters. “Do you remember there was a break in the stenographic recorded statement that you spoke?” Soloway asked.

  “They stopped for a while and went out,” Bruington said. “I went to the bathroom. I went over there, talked to my son. Me and my son sat down. I talked to my son. Me and my son had to talk.”

  “Did you talk also, in addition to your son, with Detective Tebbens?”

  “Nobody else, no, but my son …”

  “What did you talk about with your son at that time?”

  “My son told me, ‘Mommy, don’t be scared. Tell the truth.’ He said, ‘Be honest,’ you know. ‘You survived, you lived,’ you know. ‘They don’t know where you’re at, so tell the truth.’”

  “Your son told you to tell the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did Assistant District Attorney Hill and Detective Tebbens also tell you to tell the truth?”

  “Yes.”

  “And this was after you had said that you [saw] Platano and Fat Danny, and they did not have weapons that you could see, is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  Soloway had been driving at Bruington for some time, questioning her in a brusque, staccato style; and she’d been holding her own. But now her face had taken on a quizzical expression, at once plaintive and defiant.

  “You then went back into the room and the stenographically recorded statement …,” Soloway started to ask. “Sorry, is there something misstated?”

  Bruington’s face had crumpled. “Because you’re saying, you know—You’re acting the way you’re saying, you know—” she said, her throat constricting. “Okay, like I admit to the first [part], I admit to the whole thing, that I wouldn’t get involved because I didn’t want, you know—

  “But when I sat down, I felt my son said, ‘Mommy, listen, you know, tell the truth.’ Nobody forced me to tell the truth. I’m telling the truth on my own, because I’m tired. I want to get on with my life. I’m scared to go this place, that place. I want to get on with my life. I’ve no life. For so many years. I need a life now.”

  The courtroom was briefly silent. Bruington lowered her head and covered her face with her hands, crying silently, unexpectedly. Soloway had penetrated her street-hardened facade, but instead of finding lies and distortions, he’d hit upon her terror and despair at living almost three years under the threat of death, the fear each time the phone rang or she left her apartment, the fear inspired by the defendants sitting just a few strides from the witness stand. “Mrs. Bruington—” Soloway started again, but Snyder cut him off.

  “This is a good time to break for lunch,” she said, summoning from the jurors, no less than from Bruington herself, an audible sigh of relief.

  AS THE TRIAL entered its third month, it took on a life of its own, subsuming the lives of the participants, binding them to its rhythms of preparation, examination, and analysis. More than his office at HIU, certainly more than the furnished apartment where he holed up for the trial, Snyder’s courtroom had become Brownell’s world. He knew the grain and placement of every piece of furniture; the look and feel of the room at different times and in different weathers, the way the wan north light filtered through the double-height windows over the jury box on November afternoons, paler even than the icy fluorescent trays hanging from the ceiling; and he knew with an unwanted familiarity the quirks and habits of his colleagues. Hill, low-keyed and laconic in the office, had become the team’s pit bull, snarling and snapping at Soloway or Van Leer-Greenberg at sidebars. Grifa possessed excess nervous energy that she funneled through a series of tics—toe tapping, leg pumping, pen clicking. Brownell and Hill would remove any hard implements from her place at the prosecution table before the start of each session.

  Snyder was a huge pain, Brownell recalls. A former trial attorney, she couldn’t stop herself from instructing the lawyers on their presentation; that she was nearly always right only made it worse. She apparently felt Brownell was too mechanical in his examinations, and frequently suggested at sidebar that someone ought to check whether he had a pulse.

  The defendants a
lso made their presence known. Daniel Gonzalez slept through long stretches of testimony, and Stanley Tukes and Platano looked sullen much of the time. But Pasqualito was predictably animated, shaking his head when he disagreed with a statement, and staring down witnesses he didn’t like; and Fat Danny, so meek up at HIU after his arrest, was the rowdiest of the group, acting out in front of his pals and taunting the prosecutors whenever the opportunity arose. He got into it so often with Grifa—calling her a “stupid bitch,” or making some sexual innuendo—that either Brownell or Hill had to interpose himself between them at the prosecutors’ table.

  TO THE DETECTIVES and assistants used to seeing a scruffy teenager in jeans and a tank top, 17-year-old Iris Cruz looked like an angel sitting in the witness box. She had always been a cute kid with pale skin, saucer eyes, and a cascade of straight black hair. But with Lori Grifa’s help, she’d cobbled together an outfit—a white blouse, a knee-length skirt, and the good black shoes she shared with her two older sisters—that transformed her into a demure young lady.

  But the transformation, sudden though it was, was hardly disingenuous. Of the many civilian witnesses who had testified or were scheduled to testify, Little Iris, as she was known, was the one true innocent. She’d been 14 when Pasqualito threatened her and her family at gunpoint and drove them on their two-and-a-half-year odyssey through the city’s shelters and a series of apartment motels upstate. She’d never had a chance to get involved in the drug-infested world that had employed her brothers when they were no more than 10, or many of the older girls in the neighborhood. And thanks to her refugee-like existence and interventions by Tebbens and Dugan, she’d managed to steer clear of drugs and boyfriend trouble since then.