“Freddy.”
“Who is Freddy?”
“They call him Freddy Krueger; he’s a hit man.”
Nelson said that he also spoke to Reuben Perez, a marijuana dealer allied to the gang, and got him to provide a car—a white Cadillac—for the hit. First, however, he had Stanley Tukes and Platano deliver a message to Yellow-Top to stop selling.
“What is it you had them do?” Brownell asked.
“I had them go over there and beat up their workers, stick them up.”
“Is this something that you actually saw?”
“No.”
“Then how is it you know that this is what they did?”
“I used to ask Stanley, ‘What did you do?’ He say, ‘Yo, I took their money.’”
Nelson then said he visited his brother in prison to talk about the problem. But Brownell didn’t ask him, and Nelson didn’t divulge, the substance of their conversation. In fact, Lenny had counseled Nelson to hold off taking action, he would tend to the problem when he got out in the spring. But Nelson ignored his advice.
“Did there come a time when you took definite actions against Yellow-Top?” Brownell asked.
“Yes.”
“What is it you did?”
“I put a hit on them,” Nelson said.
Nelson then described his preparations on December 16: having Fat Danny drive Perez’ white Cadillac to the Bronx that day; parking his own blue Monte Carlo near the basketball courts on Cypress, a safe distance away from the alley where Yellow-Top conducted their sales; and transporting a knapsack full of guns from his home to Brenda’s, an apartment the gang used as a stash house on the fourth floor of 352 Beekman. “Where had you gotten those handguns from?” Brownell asked him.
“From the kid.”
“What’s his name?”
“Raymond [Polanco],” Nelson said.
Later, Nelson said, he cased the neighborhood with Freddy Krueger, Platano, and Tezo, then met with still more gang members—including Stanley Tukes and Rennie Harris—on the roof overlooking Yellow-Top’s alleyway. “What were you doing, Mr. Sepulveda?” Brownell asked.
“You, personally,” Snyder cautioned him.
“I was looking down, looking for Gerard [Heard, Yellow-Top’s owner], and talking to Platano and Freddy.”
“When you say you were looking for Gerard, where exactly were you looking at that time?”
“Looking down to the street.”
“Did you see anyone in the street?”
“Yes.”
“Who did you see?”
“I saw Amp there on the street.”
“Who’s Amp?”
“The manager. The fellow that was downstairs.”
“I’m sorry, manager of—”
“Of Yellow-Top.”
“Where exactly was Amp when you saw him at that time?” Brownell asked.
“In front of the alleyway.”
“Did you see anyone else on the street at that particular time?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“I saw Gerard talking to him.”
“And was this the same Gerard that you had been looking for earlier in the evening, or someone else?”
“Same one,” Nelson said.
“You said you were talking to Platano and Freddy. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“And what was the conversation about at that time?”
“I was talking to them about how I wanted to do it.”
“What were you telling them about it?”
“I was telling them that I wanted a couple of guys from the back, a couple of guys from the front.”
“When you say in the back and in the front, what are you referring to?”
“Guys on the street in front of the alleyway and behind the alleyway.”
“And was there any response by either Freddy or Platano or both at that time?”
“Yes.”
“What was the response?”
“Freddy told me we couldn’t do it like that.”
“Who said that?”
“Freddy.”
“You said you had some guns in a knapsack. Is that correct?” Brownell asked.
“Yes.”
“Were they with you at that particular time?”
“Yes,” Nelson said.
“Where were they?”
“On me. On my shoulder.”
“Did there come a time when you left the roof?”
“Yes.”
“About how long had you been up on the roof before you left?”
“About twenty, twenty-five minutes.”
“And was there any particular reason why you left the roof at that time?”
“Yes.”
“Was that because someone had seen the police?”
“Yes.”
Nelson said he went back to Brenda’s with Freddy and Platano, and waited about twenty minutes before returning to the roof. This time Fat Danny and Daniel Gonzalez had joined the group. “And was there any conversation when you were up on the roof the second time?” Brownell asked.
“Yes.”
“What was the conversation about?”
“Freddy told me to leave it up to him, for him to do the job,” Nelson said.
“How long were you on the roof the second time?”
“A good twenty minutes—twenty, fifteen minutes.”
“Did there come a time when you left?”
“Yes.”
“Did you leave with someone else or by yourself?”
“By myself.”
“Were you the first to leave of the group that was up there the second time?”
“Yes.”
“Where were the guns when you left?”
“I handed them over to Platano,” Nelson said.
“And were the guns still in the knapsack or in some other fashion?”
“In the knapsack.”
“When you gave the guns to Platano, describe exactly what you did.”
“I just said, ‘Platano, I leave it in your hands. I call you tomorrow. Here, here’s the guns.’”
Nelson returned to Brenda’s building across the rooftops and exited down the stairs, stopping on the first-floor landing to transfer the day’s receipts from his jacket to his pants pockets. “And after you stuffed the money in the pockets of your clothes, what else, if anything, did you do?” Brownell asked.
“Started rolling a blunt.”
“When you say a blunt, what do you mean?”
“A marijuana cigarette,” Nelson said.
“And where did you do that?”
“In the building.”
“And which building are you referring to?”
“Brenda’s building.”
“Did there come a time when you actually heard shots?” Brownell asked.
“Yes.”
“How long, how much time has passed between when you left the guns with Platano on the roof and when you heard shots?”
Nelson estimated a half hour. “Where were you when you actually heard shots?” Brownell asked him.
“In the basement.”
“When you say the basement, what are you referring to?”
“The basement of the last building toward St. Mary’s.”
“Is that the same building you have been referring to as Brenda’s building?”
“Yes.”
“Then, when you heard the shots, can you describe for us exactly what you heard?”
“I heard a lot of shots.”
“Were you able to count them?”
“No.”
“Did you see anybody shooting that particular night?”
“No.”
“What, if anything, did you do when you heard the shots?”
“I proceeded across the park to go to my car.”
“Where was your car at that particular time?”
“On Cypress.”
“How was it you still happened to be on Beekman Avenue
, the end of Beekman Avenue, when the shots were heard?” Brownell asked.
“I wanted to hear the shots.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to be sure that the job was done.”
“And once the job was done, and you walked across to your car, what did you do?”
“I went home.”
Nelson’s examination continued for another hour. He related how he kidded Platano the next day that he’d made the front page of the papers, how they’d disposed of the used guns in the Hudson, tossing them off the jogger’s track on the George Washington Bridge. And he told the jury how a few weeks later he and Stanley Tukes had summarily executed a customer—a former Corrections officer named Anthony Villerbe—whom Nelson suspected of paying with counterfeit bills. But once he’d described his actions on the night of the Quad—coolly surveying his targets from the rooftop overlooking the alleyway; smoking a blunt in the basement of Brenda’s building and listening for the first sounds of slaughter—the rest of Nelson’s testimony smacked of anticlimax.
THE LAST MONTH of the trial was the toughest, an exercise in endurance. Don Hill picked up a flu bug that laid him up for a week and persisted through March. Grifa managed to struggle through the days all right, but returned home most nights too tired to eat, falling asleep on the couch with her clothes on. At least she slept. Brownell barely slept or ate in the weeks before his summation. He developed dark half-dollar-sized circles under his eyes, and he looked haggard and emaciated. Grifa joked that she could fit three fingers in the space between his neck and his shirt collar, but it came out sounding like a simple statement of fact, no stranger or more remarkable than the facts the prosecutors were eliciting daily in court.
After Nelson, they called Martha Molina, a 23-year-old poster girl for the evils of crack. With a confirmed IQ of 75, and the voice and manner of a child, Molina recited the sad poetry of her life on Beekman Avenue. Born fatherless, she began smoking marijuana when she was eight, graduated to crack at 11, and sold drugs and then her body to pay for her habit. The Cowboys weren’t responsible for her condition, of course, but they showed no sympathy for her deficits and exploited her at every turn. They sold her a steady supply of crack, hired her as a pitcher and a lookout, and generally mocked her as the village idiot. Once, when her manager mistakenly thought she’d shorted him on the count—cheated him on the receipts—he slammed a brick in her face. A few weeks later, at the age of 20, she suffered a stroke and lapsed into a monthlong coma, waking with blurred eyesight and chunks of her memory missing. However, she did remember being on the roof with Oscar Alvarez the night that Linwood Collins shot him—Collins told her before he left, “The only reason I don’t kill you is I know your brother”—and she recalled being in Yellow-Top’s spot when the Cowboys opened fire the night of the Quad. She escaped through a tear in the chain-link fence at the rear of the alley.
The prosecutors also presented two more murders, Pasqualito’s public executions of Papito, the Brooklyn dealer who’d impeded the Cowboys’ start-up operation in Brighton Beach, and of Frankie Cuevas. Among the eyewitnesses who testified was Manny Guerrero, the bodyguard whom Pasqualito shot in the stomach after he killed Cuevas. The stare the two old enemies exchanged, while Snyder fielded a phone call, spoke more eloquently about their violent history than anything Guerrero said on the stand.
But nothing seemed to shock the jury anymore. Perhaps the sheer volume of evidence had desensitized them. It had certainly fatigued them. Mercifully, the defense produced few witnesses, preferring to make their case through rebuttal and summation. It was time to close.
The defense summed up over five days in mid-April. Faced with a surfeit of damning testimony, they cited the lack of objective evidence—murder weapons, car registrations, telephone logs—linking their clients to the violent acts charged in the indictment. Then they went after the witnesses, attacking their character, drug use, mental competence, and, especially, their motives. All nine lawyers highlighted the benefits the prosecution’s witnesses received for fingering the defendants: reduced sentences, early paroles, cash, and relocation expenses.
Brownell addressed these points at the start of his summation, using the arguments he’d first broached during jury selection. Yes, many prosecution witnesses were less than upstanding citizens; but one would hardly expect to find upstanding citizens hanging out with drug dealers, much less in a position to witness their crack deals and murders. Yes, many witnesses received benefits; but one could hardly expect them to risk their lives testifying without some inducement, if only the promise of protection. Moreover, Brownell pointed out, cooperation agreements were structured so that the surest way for witnesses to lose their benefits was to perjure themselves.
But the main weakness in the defense’s contentions, Brownell asserted, was their common assumption of a vast counterconspiracy, an almost unimaginably cynical plan by the many DAs, detectives, and police officers involved in the case to thwart and manipulate testimony. How else could so many witnesses—civilian and police—corroborate each other on so many vital points? Either they had to be telling the truth or a substantial portion of New York law enforcement was part of an intricate scheme to orchestrate their lies.
How intricate? Brownell spent the next day and a half analyzing the prosecution’s case for the jury. It was, by any measure, a tour de force. The trial had run nearly six months (not including hearings and jury selection), featured more than sixty witnesses, and generated over 25,000 pages of transcript. An inveterate list maker, Brownell had outlined all 25,000-plus pages of testimony. Then he’d broken down the indictment’s various charges into their provable elements, and cross-referenced them with the witnesses’ statements. Now, as he ranged over the Cowboys’ major crimes, piecing together bits of testimony from different witnesses, he built strikingly coherent pictures of each act, each defendant’s record.
Taming so much material had required a daunting mastery of detail; communicating the results cost a debilitating physical effort. By the second day, Brownell’s voice had petered to a reed-thin whisper. At times he seemed light on his feet, grasping the jury-box railing for support, letting the dense accumulations of evidence serve as his ballast. One could impeach the credibility of almost any witness, Brownell had conceded earlier. But when he superimposed the recollections of Michael and Little Iris Cruz onto Nelson’s testimony about the Quad, and then added the observations of Janice Bruington and other eyewitnesses with no connection to each other—well, it was impossible to ignore the uncanny way their stories dovetailed and overlapped.
AT 5 P.M. on May 15, the jury-room buzzer sounded in Snyder’s court, as it had every working day for the past two weeks, a signal of frustration, a grating on the nerves. Brownell stood up from his perch in the jury box and began gathering his papers. It was quitting time. Another day shot. All around him lawyers were making similar leave-taking gestures. Only Lori Grifa kept still in her seat. Something about the way the buzzer had sounded—longer, more emphatic. She reached out with a staying hand to Brownell. “We have a verdict,” she said.
Brownell gave her an annoyed look. The jury had been deliberating for fifteen days—longer than any jury in any of the prosecutors’ memories—and had given no sign they were close to a resolution. In fact, they’d recently asked if they could render a partial verdict, just one of the many troubling notes they’d sent to the judge. In another, a juror asked: “If the children under 16, Little Iris, Joey Morales, etc., were used in any capacity in the drug organization, and their parents knew what they were doing and did not object, call the police, protest, etc., can the defendants be held accountable under conspiracy one?” (Snyder answered with a resounding yes.)
Trying to divine a jury’s mind-set from their requests for materials or guidance is like trying to read the future in tea leaves. Predictions are invariably subjective, more a reflection of those making them than the evidence at hand. Brownell and Hill, prudent by nature, felt that the length of the delibe
rations and the tenor of the notes indicated that some jurors were looking for reasons to acquit. Grifa saw the glass as half full. In her view, the jury knew they were about to send the defendants to prison for the rest of their lives and wanted to cross their t’s. But few at HIU shared Grifa’s optimism. They knew it took only one recalcitrant juror to block a verdict, and it didn’t help anyone’s state of mind when, a few days earlier, Snyder asked Brownell if he was prepared to retry the Quad independently in the event of a hung jury.
It didn’t help either that Snyder insisted the lawyers wait in the courtroom during deliberations. She didn’t want to have to round up twelve attorneys when the jury did reach a verdict, and she also wanted them present to help her respond to the jury’s questions. So Brownell and his fellow litigants haunted the gallery and jury box like die-hard fans during a rain delay. They read newspapers, worked at crossword puzzles, and when Snyder repaired to her chambers, catnapped or played poker at the defense table. At other times they perused the trial transcripts, trying to anticipate questions from the jury, succeeding more often in raising questions of their own.
“We have a verdict.” For a moment Brownell continued shuffling papers, unable to digest the meaning of the remark. Then he stopped. This time the speaker had been Rocco DeSantis, Snyder’s clerk, who’d just returned from the jury room. Brownell sat down. All he could think was: It’s finally over.
It was still another hour before the jurors filed into the courtroom. It had taken that long to assemble security, bring in the prisoners, alert the press. Meanwhile the pews filled up, jammed to capacity with reporters, cameramen, family and friends of the defendants, and personnel from HIDTA and HIU—Eddie Benitez, Tebbens, Dugan, Arsenault, Quinn. Then, shortly after 4:30 P.M., Snyder brought in the jury; the jury foreperson, a small Hispanic woman dressed in a business suit, stood facing the bench; and DeSantis read the first charge. “How say you to the first count under Indictment 10614 of 1993 charging the defendant Daniel Rincon with the crime of conspiracy in the first degree, guilty or not guilty?” he asked.
“Guilty,” the foreperson said.
“How say you as to the thirteenth count under Indictment 10614 of 1993 charging the defendant Daniel Rincon with the crime of murder in the second degree, guilty or not guilty?”
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