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

  MICHAEL STONE

  GANGBUSTERS

  Michael Stone is a veteran journalist who covered the New York scene for New York magazine for more than a decade. He has over a dozen cover stories to his credit, including newsbreaking features on John Gotti, Robert Chambers, and the Central Park Jogger. He lives in New York City.

  For Missy, who taught me how to love

  THIS BOOK could not be written without the cooperation of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. My thanks to Robert Morgenthau, who allowed me full access to the Homicide Investigation Unit and never tried to influence what I wrote, and to Barbara Jones, whose counsel and trust were integral to the conception of this project.

  I’m also indebted to the members, past and present, of the Homicide Investigation Unit and to the many men and women who played a part in the Wild Cowboys case. Virtually all of them spoke to me without hesitation, and were unstinting with their time and their efforts to remember details, some of which were extremely painful. They include, but are not limited to: Jessica DeGrazia, William Hoyt, Ed Stancyzk, Walter Arsenault, Ellen Corcella, the Hon. Fernando Camacho, Dan Brownell, the Hon. Gregory Carro, Deborah Hickey, Luke Rettler, Steve Fitzgerald, Terry Quinn, Steve Michard, Jose Flores, Angel Garcia, Robert Tarwacki, Nixon Fredrick, Garry Dugan, Mark Tebbens, Pat Lafferty, Andrew Rosenzweig, Joe Pernice, Gerry Dimuro, Charles Rorke, Eddie Benitez, Kevin Bryant, Barry Kluger, Ed Freedenthal, Don Hill, Linda Nelson, Lori Grifa, the Hon. Leslie Crocker Snyder, Alex Calabrese, Teresa Matushaj, Rocco DeSantis, the Cruz–Morales family, and the Cargill family, whose wisdom and candor are nearly as great as the loss they suffered at the hands of the Cowboys.

  I am further indebted to Ron Goldstock, Paul Schectman, Warren Murray, Charles Blakey, Arthur Eisenberg, Richard Emery, Gerald Lefcourt, Richard Esposito, William Bratton, John Maple, John Miller, Mike Giulian, and John Timoney for their valuable insight into the legal system and New York’s law enforcement community.

  On a personal note, my thanks to the many friends, family, and colleagues whose generous advice and support over the years led to the writing of this book, among them: Judith Daniels, Clay Felker, Richard Babcock, Peter Foges and Gully Wells, Anna, John Heilperin, Charles Bennett, Virginia White, Irik and Anne Marie Sevin, and the women in my life; my mother and daughters, Billie, Fiona, Sabrina, and Natasha Stone; my wife and love Pamela Balfour; and Elaine Kaufman, Dora Flowers and Alberta Brown.

  Finally, my special thanks to my agent, Mark Reiter, without whose drive this book would still be an idea; to Linda Steinman, who worked tirelessly on the legal aspects of the manuscript; and to my editor, Roger Scholl, whose extraordinary craft and dedication are responsible for whatever good is contained in these pages.

  —Michael Stone

  New York, 2000

  1 Death on the Highway

  2 The Homicide Investigation Unit

  3 The Wild Cowboys

  4 The Search for Platano

  5 Joining Forces

  6 War

  7 Catching a Break

  8 Bumps in the Road

  9 Lenny

  10 Point, Counterpoint

  11 Losing Ground

  12 The Informer

  13 Collared

  14 Dissension

  15 The Blowup

  16 Takedown

  17 Back on Track

  18 Breakthrough

  19 The Trial Begins

  20 The Turning Point

  21 Verdict

  Epilogue

  LIST OF CHARACTERS

  Robert Morgenthau—the District Attorney of New York County (Manhattan).

  Barbara Jones—the Manhattan DA’s First Assistant, she served as Morgenthau’s Chief of Staff.

  Nancy Ryan—the Chief of Trial Division under Morgenthau, she founded the Asian Gang unit and supervised HIU

  Walter Arsenault—Chief of HIU.

  Dan Rather—an Assistant District Attorney in HIU, he was the prosecutor in charge of the Wild Cowboy investigation.

  Dan Brownell—an Assistant District Attorney in HIU, he was the lead prosecutor in the Wild Cowboy trial.

  Terry Quinn—HIU’s Investigative Chief.

  Garry Dugan—an NYPD detective assigned to Manhattan North Homicide, he later joined HIU as a senior investigator.

  Mark Tebbens—an NYPD detective assigned to the 40th Precinct squad, he was the primary police investigator on the Double and Quad cases, and was later posted to HIU.

  Luke Rettler—the Chief of Asian Gang unit, he shared offices with HIU.

  Rob Johnson—the District Attorney of Bronx County.

  Barry Kluger—the Bronx DA’s Executive Assistant, he served as Johnson’s Chief of Staff.

  Ed Freedenthal—the Bronx DA’s Chief of Narcotics Investigations, he was Don Hill’s supervisor.

  Don Hill—an Assistant District Attorney in the Bronx’s Narcotics Investigations unit, he was the prosecutor in charge of the Quad case. Later he represented the Bronx in the joint investigation and prosecution of the Wild Cowboys.

  Linda Nelson—a Bronx prosecutor, she assisted Don Hill in the Wild Cowboy case.

  Lori Grifa—a Brooklyn prosecutor assigned to the Michael Cruz attempted murder case, she represented her office on the Wild Cowboy task force.

  Charles Rorke—an NYPD lieutenant, he commanded the No. 3 HIDTA team.

  Eddie Benitez—an NYPD detective assigned to HIDTA, he was the field officer in charge of the Wild Cowboy narcotics investigation.

  Leslie Crocker Snyder—an Acting NYS Supreme Court Justice, she presided over the Wild Cowboy trial.

  Lenin “Lenny” Sepulveda—the leader of the Wild Cowboys.

  Nelson “the Whack” Sepulveda—Lenny’s brother and second-in-command.

  Wilfredo “Platano” De Los Angeles—the Cowboys’ chief enforcer.

  Jose “Pasqualito” Llaca—a high-ranking Cowboy who at various times served as Lenny’s enforcer and partner.

  Daniel “Fat Danny” Rincon—a high-ranking Cowboy, who, along with Pasqualito, managed the gang’s Orange-Top affiliate.

  Victor Mercedes—Fat Danny’s half brother and partner.

  Stanley Tukes—a Cowboy manager/enforcer and a shooter in the Quad.

  Rennie Harris—a Cowboy manager/enforcer and a shooter in the Quad.

  Linwood Collins—a Cowboy manager/enforcer and a shooter in the Quad.

  Daniel “Shorty” Gonzales—a Cowboy manager/enforcer and a shooter in the Quad.

  Rafael “Tezo” Perez—Lenny’s right-hand man.

  Santiago “Yayo” Polanco—the leader of the Coke Is It and Basedballs organizations, he was the first major crack marketer in Washington Heights and Lenny’s mentor.

  Rafael “Rafi” Martinez—the leader of the Gheri Curls, a major wholesale cocaine gang.

  Jose “El Feo” Reyes—a major drug wholesaler and Lenny’s chief ally and supplier.

  Francisco “Freddy Krueger” Medina—El Feo’s chief enforcer.

  Raymond Polanco—a Brooklyn-based gun trafficker, he was Lenny’s ally and a co-conspirator in the Cargill shooting.

  Franklyn “Gus” Cuevas—former head of the Bad, Bad Boys, he became a major drug dealer. At first closely allied with Lenny, he eventually went to war with the Cowboys.

  Manny Garcia—a Cuevas soldier shot and paralyzed by Freddy Krueger and Platano.

  Gilbert Compusano—a Cuevas soldier, thought to have betrayed his boss.

  Manny Guerrero—a Cuevas soldier s
hot and wounded by Pasqualito.

  Elizabeth Morales—the matriarch of the Cruz–Morales family, and a witness against the Cowboys.

  Michael Cruz—a witness against the Cowboys, shot by Pasqualito and Lenny.

  Iris Cruz—a witness against the Cowboys.

  Joey Morales—a witness against the Cowboys.

  Janice Bruington—a shooting victim in the Quad and a witness against the Cowboys.

  Freddie Sendra—a former Cowboy manager and a witness against the gang.

  Frankie Robles—Pasqualito’s sidekick, he became a cooperator and testified against the Cowboys.

  Louise McBride—a resident of 348 Beekman, she pitched for the Cowboys and let her apartment to them as a stash house. Later she testified against them.

  DEATH ON THE HIGHWAY

  MAY 1991

  NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD David Cargill’s spirits were high in the early morning hours of May 19. Just back from his sophomore year at aeronautical college in Florida, the blond six-footer had gone to a party with several of his Tarrytown friends in nearby Elmsford, a small, blue-collar town thirty minutes north of New York City. Around midnight he called his mother—he always phoned his mother when he was going to be home late—and told her he was going to a club across the river in Nyack. Instead, he went to a bar in Tarrytown, and at about 2 A.M., along with former high school hockey teammates John Raguzzi and Kevin Kryzeminski, drove his Nissan pickup truck into Manhattan to cruise around. Cargill had installed a large new amplifier in the cab that afternoon, and he was eager to try it out on the open road.

  Although Cargill had four older sisters—all working or in college, all married and having children or about to be—David was the star of the family. “I called him my sunshine boy,” his sister Mary Anne would say of him. “He had these beautiful green eyes and he was just this beautiful kid—tall and muscular. He looked like he could have walked off the pages of GQ.” But David’s charm went beyond his looks. A bright, captivating child, he had grown into a strapping teenager, the captain of his hockey team, the most popular among his crowd. He was always having friends over, and they injected a note of mischief and wildness into the frilly precincts of the Cargill household.

  But David was no angel. A gifted student in his early years—he scored a 96 on his math Regents—he had coasted through high school, devoting his energies to sports, socializing, and flying small planes on weekends with his father. More troubling was his taste for daredeviltry. David drove too fast; he drank and roughhoused with his buddies; and he bucked his parents’ efforts to restrain him. A few years back, he nearly traded punches with his father during an argument over a pair of tattered jeans. “He was a tough teenager,” his father, Innes Cargill, would say of him. “He pushed everything to the limit.”

  But during his junior year in high school David seemed to find himself. He became serious about his flying, began to focus on his schoolwork, and that spring got into all the colleges he applied to. He continued to err on the side of adventure—he would always be high-spirited and impulsive—but he wasn’t reckless. He didn’t drink and drive, he didn’t use drugs. And even at his most rebellious stage, he had been good-hearted, respectful to older people, and surprisingly solicitous toward his two-year-old niece. He certainly didn’t deserve to die.

  The amp in the car was still blasting a couple of hours later as Cargill and his friends began the drive back to Tarrytown, a leafy river town about twenty-five miles north, on the West Side Highway. It was a cold, clear night, there was hardly any traffic on the road, and Cargill had his foot down hard against the accelerator. So Raguzzi, perched on the speaker in the back of the cab, was surprised when he saw the headlights gaining on them in the rearview mirror. At first he thought it was the police. But moments later he looked over at the passing lane and saw a beat-up burgundy sedan pull alongside, its passenger window wide open. He sensed something bad about to happen.

  Suddenly he heard popping noises and felt his eyes fill up with liquid—Cargill’s blood, as it turned out. “I went down for about fifteen seconds,” he recalls. “I thought they’d thrown firecrackers at us.” The truck began fishtailing across the road and he heard Kryzeminski say, “Dave, stop fucking around.” He got his eyes cleared and saw Cargill slumped against Kryzeminski’s shoulder, and Kryzeminski trying to get at the brake with his hand. Raguzzi grabbed the wheel and together the boys managed to pull the truck onto the off-ramp at 158th Street. Then, while Kryzeminski ran for help, Raguzzi tried to lift Cargill out of the driver’s seat.

  Raguzzi hadn’t noticed the shattered windows, or the fact that there was blood and flesh smeared on almost every surface of the car. He had seen only the small hole where a bullet had entered the left side of David’s neck. But when he reached behind his friend’s head and felt the gaping exit wound, he realized what had happened. “I’d never seen anyone dead,” he would say later. “But I knew when I flipped him over, that was it.”

  GARRY DUGAN was the kind of detective other detectives would want on the job if a friend or family member were the victim of a crime. Methodical, meticulous, relentless, the twenty-three-year NYPD veteran didn’t solve cases so much as he exhausted them—running down obscure leads, keeping copious files, exhuming old crimes, and sparking new inquiries. At times his deliberate style rankled his bosses, who were charged with clearing cases quickly and cutting down on overtime. But no one was better at extracting statements from recalcitrant suspects or witnesses, wearing them down, as one former partner put it, the way water wears down rock.

  Dugan worked at Manhattan North Homicide, an elite squad of investigators assembled some five years back at the start of the city’s crack epidemic. Ostensibly, its mission was to help harried precinct detectives clear the soaring number of unsolved murder cases in drug-ridden uptown neighborhoods, mainly Harlem and Washington Heights. In fact, the unit was called in whenever a high-profile crime occurred in Manhattan. David Cargill’s shooting qualified on both counts.

  That morning Dugan had been doing his turnaround—consecutive night and day tours—and rather than make the ninety-minute commute to his home upstate, he’d slept over at his old station house in the Three-Four, the clove-shaped precinct that covered Inwood and most of the Heights at the upper end of Manhattan. He’d risen at seven, showered and dressed in the basement locker room, then called his unit to get the day’s schedule. “You better get down to the Three-Oh,” his sometimes partner Maria Bertini told him. “Looks like we’ve got a fresh one.”

  Bertini filled him in on what she knew about the case while Dugan signed in. “Male/white, 19, DOA at Harlem Hospital …” He recorded the details automatically, flagging the one that stood out. What the hell were three white boys doing up in the Heights at that hour? “Any other witnesses?” he asked.

  “Just the two,” Bertini said. She didn’t sound sanguine about the case and he understood why. No leads, no suspects, no known motive.

  “I’ll be right down,” he said.

  The Three-Oh straddled the Heights at its lower end and bordered the Three-Four at 155th Street, about a mile due south from where Dugan had spent the night. He picked up a car from the lot behind the precinct and headed down Broadway, the main shopping thoroughfare in the Heights. It was a brisk spring morning. A low sun ducked in and out of the buildings on his left, producing a jazzy rhythm of light and shade. There weren’t many people in the street, not much traffic. A few businesses were beginning to open—diners, doughnut shops—and the bodega workers were hosing down sidewalks and putting out fresh produce on stalls: mangos, bananas, plantains, bell peppers, and blood-red persimmons. A small crowd had gathered in front of the Three Star diner on 179th Street, waiting for the charter buses from the terminal around the corner to take them to Atlantic City; and a trail of churchgoers, elderly black women in twos and threes, their hair shiny in the sunlight, formed in the direction of Reverend Ike’s United Church, a converted movie palace between 175th and 176th streets.

  Dug
an knew the Heights better than the small rustic village where he lived with his wife and two teenage daughters. He had worked these streets as a uniformed cop for four years before transferring to plainclothes, and even now most of his cases kept him in the neighborhood. It was one of the most violent in the city. He turned west into 177th Street—the bells of Incarnation Church on St. Nick’s sounding low and resonant like a dirge—and drove three blocks over to the Hudson, then south onto the highway where the shooting had occurred. When he got to the river a sharp, brackish smell blew through the musty squad car. On his right the water was like slate and the sun flashed off the windows of the buildings on the far shore. He passed the exit for the Three-Oh and continued to 96th Street, then doubled back, driving slowly, looking for signs of the shooting—tire marks, shattered glass, yellow plastic tape to mark the crime scene. There were none.

  For the second time that morning Dugan felt a twinge of concern. Good investigations, he knew, proceed from good crime scenes. Of course, a drive-by on the highway wasn’t likely to furnish much physical evidence. But the absence of any signs of violence at all—that and the brilliantly unfolding spring day—had taken him by surprise and added to his sense that Cargill’s murder was an aberration, an extraordinary event that would not yield easily to detection.