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

by Stone, Michael

Still, Iris had seen plenty in her short, turbulent life. The Cowboys had been a constant presence in the building where she lived, congregating in the stairwell and on the stoop, operating the Hole twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, since as far back as she could remember. Most of her family, at one time or another, had worked for the gang. Michael, her closest sibling, used to leave the apartment at 8 P.M. and stay out all night in his capacity first as a lookout, then as a pitcher. Her neighbors—Fat Iris, Louise McBride, the hapless Baker sisters—looked out for her after a fashion, cautioning her to stay in school. But they did so handling drugs and guns for Red-Top in front of her. Fat Iris once even enlisted her to help tap vials, for which she paid her $300. Little Iris was 12 at the time.

  Lenny, Nelson, and Platano had keys to Iris’ apartment. They used to pay her mother $50 to cook for them, and they used her living room like a clubhouse, kicking back after work, openly discussing their business, and bragging about their exploits with women. Iris’ introduction to the mysteries of sex consisted of the “trains”—serial intercourse—that the gang members pulled on the “club women” they brought back to the neighborhood, or on customers desperate for crack. Iris remembers one they locked in the basement for two days, remembers hearing her screams at night and seeing the blood in the hallway the morning after she disappeared.

  When she was a little older, Platano used to pin Iris against the wall when she passed him in the stairwell and tell her he was going to make her his girlfriend. “There can’t be no virgins on the block,” he’d say to her. Iris’ first boyfriend was a Cowboy lookout and pitcher named Manny. She used to cut school and hang out with him on the roof, help him watch for cops. But after just a few weeks, she saw him having sex with his boss, Myra, an older woman addicted to crack. (Myra later died of AIDS; Manny disappeared from the neighborhood.)

  But what stood out most was the violence. At times it seemed that everyone along Beekman—workers, crackheads, small-time hustlers—were scamming each other, and Cowboy enforcers administered public beatings on what seemed a daily basis. Not that Iris had a great deal of sympathy for the skells whom Red-Top brought to the neighborhood. She’d lost count of the times she’d been mugged in St. Mary’s Park, including the day that Louise McBride’s son shot and killed Fat Iris’ husband in the elevator of Iris’ building. Even worse were the shootings and deadly assaults. Iris had been too young to remember the Double, but she’d had a ringside seat for the Quad, and of course she’d watched while Pasqualito had pistol-whipped her brother Tito into unconsciousness, then threatened to kill her and her family.

  Clearly the ghosts of those visions still haunted her. When she entered the courtroom and looked at the defendants, even before she could be sworn in, she broke down in tears. But she regained her composure quickly, and once on the stand, seemed to gain courage, even gazing at her onetime tormentors with frank indignation. For all her shyness and apparent fragility, she possessed the tensile strength of a survivor.

  Grifa spent the first few hours roughing out the contours of Iris’ childhood among the Cowboys—their imperial hold over the neighborhood, their insidious influence on her siblings, and their ruthless persecution of her family. Then Grifa took Iris back to the night of December 16, 1991. Almost at once her confidence began to falter, and she started to shake.

  Iris told the court that she’d gone to the corner store with her sister Ita at about 10 P.M. to buy candy. She remembered seeing Daniel Gonzalez talking to a stranger, and Weeky, the owner; but she’d talked to no one, and left shortly after with Ita. On the way home, she passed Anthony Green in the alleyway behind the candy store; the skinny 17-year-old was selling crack to a woman in a green jacket, and Iris noted the exchange. She knew Green from school—they were classmates—and she said “hi and bye” to him, then hurried off to catch up with Ita.

  “What was it like that night? What was the weather like?” Grifa asked her.

  “It was cold, quiet,” Iris said. “It was the quietest on Beekman I ever knew.”

  Back home, Iris and Ita stopped on the second floor, which let out onto the Hole, to look for their brother Michael. He was supposed to be pitching that evening. But when the elevator doors opened, Iris said, she was startled by what she saw. “I saw a gun, you know. That’s the first thing I saw. A gun. So when I saw—I’m shaking,” she said.

  “Relax,” Grifa told her. “What color was the gun?”

  “Black.”

  “What shape was it? Show us with your hands.”

  Iris indicated twelve to eighteen inches.

  “When you saw it, where was it?” Snyder asked her.

  “It was like Platano was holding it like that.”

  “Platano had the gun in his hand?”

  “Yes.”

  Little by little, always focusing on the details, Grifa had Iris describe the scene she’d stumbled into on the second-floor landing. There were at least a half dozen men there, all of them armed, all of them checking or loading their guns. Platano was attaching a banana-shaped clip that also served as a handle onto his piece, and Stanley Tukes was locking a straight clip onto his. Iris also remembered a tall, burly Hispanic whom HIU detectives were certain was Freddy Krueger, and whom she called X-Man because he was wearing a Malcolm X jacket with a big white X on the back. Iris said she’d asked Platano where her brother was. He told her he was upstairs, and she and Ita went back to their apartment.

  Moments later Iris heard the first volley of shots. “There was like fireworks going off, a whole bunch of them,” she said. “But it was like one of them was going ta-ta-ta real fast. Some of them were going slower.”

  “How did the slower one sound?” Grifa asked.

  “Like pow-pow-pow. I ran to the living-room window. I don’t remember where I was at. But I wasn’t in the living room, so I was running to the living room. You know, because there’s a gate in my window, I have to put my hand—I had to stick my body out. When I stuck my bo dy out, the first thing I saw: a black car, four-door, tinted windows.”

  “Where was the black car?”

  “In front of the building.”

  Grifa asked her to fill in some details, then wanted to know what she saw next. “I saw a white car, four-door, tinted windows.”

  “How far down the block was the white car?”

  “Right in front of the alleyway.”

  “Is that the same alley where you talked to Anthony?”

  “Yes.”

  Grifa backtracked a bit. She wanted to know whether during the time Iris ran from inside her house to the living-room window the noises from the shots had stopped.

  “No, they didn’t,” Iris said. “They were still going on.”

  “When you stuck your head out of the window and saw the black car, did you still hear the noises?”

  “Yes, and then you saw spots, like white flashes. When I was looking toward the car, you saw white flashes.”

  “Is that the car on the left?”

  “Yes.”

  “By the alley?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the next thing that you saw?”

  “I saw Platano and Stanley, they were shooting like toward the alleyway.”

  Grifa then asked some questions about their precise position with respect to each other, the alleyway, and Anthony Green. “Who was [Anthony] closer to? Platano or Stanley?”

  “Platano.”

  “Platano. What did you see happen to Anthony?”

  “He was jumping, like when you’re shaking, like if you have an asthma attack and you’re just shaking.” Iris stood up at Grifa’s request and made a trembling motion with her body to demonstrate what she saw.

  “Was his whole body moving like that?” Grifa asked.

  “Yes.”

  “In addition to shaking like that, was he moving in any direction?”

  “He was more … he was not so close to the building, he just kept on moving back.”

  “And then what happened?” />
  “So the building was like holding him up. So he just like hanged with the building while they’re shooting.”

  “Did he put his arms out?”

  “Yes. He had his arms straight out, and he’s shaking.”

  “Then what happened to him? Did you see?”

  “He was just shaking, and then I saw a lady. She fell.”

  “And you saw a lady fall. I want to talk about Anthony for one more minute. What happened to Anthony after the shooting stopped?”

  “He fell to the floor.”

  Grifa drew Iris out on some more details—the lighting conditions, the names and positions of other shooters. Iris was able to identify defendants Daniel Gonzalez, Fat Danny, and Rennie Harris, as well as the X-Man. She said they’d all had guns, and the guns had “lights coming out of them.”

  After the shooting stopped, Iris ran down to the street. “Did you take the elevator or the stairs?” Grifa asked.

  “The stairs,” Iris said.

  “Where did you go?”

  “To the alleyway.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I saw Anthony on the floor. He was still alive. He was bleeding. So I put my arm around his neck to carry—”

  “You held his head?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else did you do?”

  “[I held] his hand. He was saying, ‘Don’t let me die.’ He kept on repeating it. I was there, and then I looked to see if the girl was alive. And she wasn’t. She was just there, and she had this—a red—sorry, a yellow thing in her hand, a top, like Yellow-Top. And I was looking to see if she was alive or saying something. She wasn’t.

  “So the next thing they pushed me away.”

  “Who?”

  “This black guy.”

  “What did he do to Anthony, if anything?” Grifa asked.

  “He was holding him, shaking, you know.”

  “Where did you go after you were pushed away by the black guy?”

  “Across the street,” Iris said.

  “Now, did you see the black guy doing anything with Anthony?”

  “Yes, he was crying.”

  Iris ended her direct testimony on November 30, a day and a half after she’d begun. Her recollections about the gang and her clear evocation of the Quad had significantly advanced HIU’s case, even though she’d broken little new ground. By the time she testified, Janice Bruington had already supplied the jury with a close-up view of the Quad; Chubby Green had recounted his brother’s dying moments, his brother’s repeated statements that Stanley Tukes, his old boyhood pal, had shot him; and Fat Iris, who followed Green on the stand, had offered a far more detailed picture of the Cowboys’ Beekman Avenue operation than Little Iris.

  But there was an unavoidable sense—at least among the prosecutors—that these other witnesses had conspired in their fates. Bruington was a crack addict who’d been a regular customer of both Red-Top and Yellow-Top. Chubby Green had been a dealer himself, and was currently serving time in prison for crack sales. Fat Iris had worked for the Cowboys, and her common-law husband, English, had been a Red-Top manager before he was shot and killed. Little Iris, however, was neither a user nor a dealer, and her story of growing up among the Cowboys revealed the true nature of the gang’s impact on the people of Beekman Avenue. From a purely legal viewpoint, she was just another corroborating witness. But the subtext of her testimony—the virtual slaughter of her childhood—left a sickening feeling in its wake.

  As the evidence mounted, the defense’s options began to shrink. Most of the Cowboys’ lawyers had conceded that their clients sold drugs, but strenuously denied that they had been part of an organized conspiracy, or any of the violent acts attributed to the conspiracy. At bottom the lawyers had two lines of attack. One approach focused on the confusing conditions at the crime scenes. The Quad, in particular, had been chaotic. The lighting had been spotty at best; most of the participants had worn hoods and/or masks; and the action had been frenzied, with a number of different incidents occurring simultaneously.

  All the defense lawyers scored points bringing to light the eyewitnesses’ uncertainties and inconsistencies in describing not only the Quad but also the Double and other violent acts. They also had some success impeaching the credibility of the witnesses, especially cooperators like Freddie Sendra. But this ad hominem strategy, attacking the witnesses’ character, was proving less effective than questioning their testimony, and in some instances—as with Janice Bruington—was actually hurting the defense’s cause. The reasons why were several. Clearly, the thousands of hours the prosecution had spent preparing the witnesses, making sure they testified only to what they saw or knew to be fact, were paying off. Clearly, too, most witnesses were testifying out of conviction; once they got over their initial fears, their demeanor conveyed their anger and the sadness of their lives. The Cowboys’ reign had been so brutal and arrogant that many of the cooperators who’d served the gang had at some level been victimized. No one—not the canniest litigator—could bait or bully them more than the defendants already had.

  Nevertheless, some of the defense lawyers continued to try. Valerie Van Leer-Greenberg, Pasqualito’s lawyer, was a passionate advocate who seemed genuinely fond of her client. In her opening statement, she noted that Pasqualito’s nickname translated to Little Christmas, an image so at odds with his reputation in the street that Brownell had to literally clench his teeth to keep from laughing. Conversely, any witness who impugned her client was subject to Van Leer-Greenberg’s wrath on cross; and those attacks, couched in a shrill voice and sanctimonious manner, provided the trial with several ludicrous moments. During her cross of Little Iris, for example, Van Leer-Greenberg tried to poke holes in her description of the incident in which Pasqualito came to her home with Frankie Robles and threatened to kill her family. “The day that [Pasqualito] came into the apartment with your grandmother and [your niece] Daisy in the hallway—remember testifying to that?” Van Leer-Greenberg asked her.

  “Yes,” Iris answered.

  “Is that the day after your brother-in-law purchased—bought cribs?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s his name? Edwin or—”

  “Edgar.”

  “Did he bring the cribs to your home?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Daisy is three years old, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you testified that [Pasqualito] knocked on the door, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your mother knew it was [Pasqualito] before she let him in, right?”

  “Yes.”

  Having established that Iris’ brother-in-law had bought cribs with the drug money he’d stolen from Pasqualito, and brought them to the apartment, Van Leer-Greenberg was now ready to spring her trap. “And no one bothered to take the three-year-old—this three-year-old is standing in front of you or behind you?”

  “In front of me,” Iris replied as Grifa objected.

  “I can’t believe you’re asking this question,” Snyder said to Van Leer-Greenberg. “In other words, we’re now asking her if they were stupid enough to leave a three-year-old in the hall?”

  “I’m asking her: Isn’t it a fact that you left a three-year-old child—I would never denigrate anyone—in the hallway, when you had four bedrooms with cribs in them that the child could have been placed in, out of any type of danger?”

  Grifa objected again.

  “Sustained,” Snyder said.

  “We couldn’t,” Iris answered anyway.

  “Did you move the child at all out of the hallway?” Van Leer-Greenberg persisted.

  “No.”

  Grifa objected a third time.

  Snyder had had enough. “Just one minute,” she said to Van Leer-Greenberg. “In other words, your question basically is that the child would never have been in danger if someone had the foresight to move the child into another room, because the person coming in might threaten the child with death—is that your ques
tion? Are you serious about that question?”

  “Absolutely serious.”

  “Sustained,” Snyder said.

  “And isn’t it a further fact,” Van Leer-Greenberg continued, her voice rising, “that [Pasqualito] never touched your grandmother, never harmed her, never insulted her, never said anything to her?”

  “Miss Van Leer-Greenberg, don’t yell,” Snyder interrupted. “You’re speaking to a seventeen-year-old witness. You can have vigorous cross. I don’t want a witness yelled at or denigrated.”

  Van Leer-Greenberg apologized and continued in a quieter tone, but she’d already reduced Iris to tears, and in what must have seemed to them one of the more bizarre cases of blaming-the-victim, raised snickers from her co-counsel at the defense table.

  IRIS WAS FOLLOWED on the stand by her brothers Joey and Michael. Small, cross-eyed, with a widow’s peak of short black hair, 16-year-old Joey Morales bore an uncanny resemblance to the TV character Eddie Munster. Neither cute nor clever, he nevertheless offered a worm’s-eye view of the gang, having toiled in the lower ranks of the organization since he was 12. Moreover, he’d witnessed the Double and the Quad, and because he was a minor throughout his tenure at Red-Top, he was able to implicate nearly all the defendants in an A-1 conspiracy.

  But Michael provided the drama. His knowledge of the gang was far more extensive than Joey’s, and of course he knew what it was like to be caught in the Cowboys’ crosshairs. A whippet-thin, smart-alecky street kid when Tebbens first met him in a Brooklyn shelter in the spring of 1992, Michael had matured into a bright, personable 19-year-old. He hadn’t lost his cocky manner, but he’d gone back to school—he was in his senior year—and the previous summer he’d worked for the Department of Transportation as a rail cleaner. More important, he’d steered clear of drugs.

  That had not always been the case, Brownell quickly pointed out. In fact, Michael’s extensive knowledge of the Cowboys was directly related to his extensive experience as a Red-Top worker. He’d even been arrested—once for assaulting a vagrant crack dealer with a golf club, on orders from Stanley Tukes; and a second time when undercover police raided the Hole in February 1992. Platano bailed him out on the latter occasion, then offered to let him keep the bail money—$1,500—in exchange for his silence.