Gangbusters: How a Street Tough, Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New York's Most Dangerous Gang [Hardcover]

Michael Stone (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 5, 2000

In the bestselling tradition of Nicholas Pileggi, Joseph Wambaugh, and Robert Daley's Prince of the City, a thoroughly enthralling story of how the seasoned veterans of New York's elite Homicide Investigation Unit took down the city's most dangerous drug gang, and in the process rewrote the book on tackling gang crime.

Gangbusters is a riveting narrative about the secretive, elite Homicide Investigation Unit and its successful investigation and prosecution of the notorious upper Manhattan Wild Cowboys, one of the bloodiest and most violent drug gangs in New York's long history. For two years, veteran reporter Michael Stone was granted exclusive access to the inner workings of HIU, its brilliant and iconoclastic chief, Walter Arsenault, and the seasoned, street-smart detectives and prosecutors who helped to put the Wild Cowboys behind bars.

The book opens with the shocking and senseless execution of a Tarrytown college boy on the West Side Highway. Over time, the case leads detectives
to the Wild Cowboys, a drug gang whose size and penchant for violence and intimidation have terrorized the South Bronx and upper Manhattan for years. HIU's attempts to bring down the Wild Cowboys' ruthless leader, Lenny, and feared enforcers, Platano and Pasqualito, triggermen for scores of the gang's murders, posed challenges that would test the unit's very survival. But HIU's dedicated collaboration of prosecutors and detectives and the strategies

Arsenault employed in the unit's investigation have since become a model for gang enforcement in cities around the world. In the end, the Wild Cowboys and their allies were responsible for more than sixty murders.  A rich roller-coaster ride of a narrative with a colorful and, at times, heroic cast of characters, Gangbusters is true crime at its page-turning best.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

How do you rid a city of a brutal crack-trafficking gang whose members have held a seven-year reign of terror and murdered at least 60 people, many of them in public, without threatening the lives of your witnesses? Pull them up by the roots. In the early 1990s in New York City, a 19-year-old college student was shot to death while driving down a highway when the leader of the Red-Tops (also known as the Wild Cowboys) decided to test fire his new Uzi. What began as one policeman's search for an answer to this senseless murder eventually turned into an investigation into a vast conspiracy of crime, an investigation that involved police from Manhattan and the South Bronx and New York's only dedicated drug gang unit, the Homicide Investigations Unit (HIU). It turned out to be the biggest and one of the longest investigations ever conducted by the HIU (four years to bring the gang's leaders to prosecution, six months of trial), and was unusual in that it involved so many agencies.

Michael Stone details their investigation almost moment by moment. In the process, he reveals both the layered conspiracies in the world of the illicit drug trade and the twin issues of turf and credit that lead to fiefdoms and strife in law enforcement circles. His portrayal of the drug trade infrastructure--with its layers of managers, enforcers, runners, pitchers, and lookouts--and its tinderbox world of threats and counterthreats is eye opening and frightening. The same is true for the inner workings of the halls of justice. While there are certainly heroes in this story (a number of cops and attorneys literally dedicated their lives to bringing down the Cowboys), it becomes clear why the law is often unsuccessful in defeating gangs. Resistance to working with other offices, lack of communication, strong personalities, and intense possessiveness are but a few factors. At times the story is almost too complex to follow, with a huge cast of characters and a horrifying trail of crimes. But hang on: the trial near the end of the book ties it all together. --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly

Stone, a contributor to New York magazine, offers an efficient, intimate look back at the urban crack wars, recounting the bloody reign and difficult takedown of a vicious Dominican drug gang operating in upper Manhattan and the Bronx. He realistically evokes a time when NYC homicide investigators were swamped with murder cases. To target gang leaders, rather than making street-level arrests (which created good statistics but had little lasting effect on crime), Manhattan's Homicide Investigation Unit was formed. The unit became aware of "Lenny's Boys" (a gang also known as the Wild Cowboys or Red-Top) committing such atrocities as the machine-gunning of a suburban kid driving on the West Side Highway and the brutal killing of four customers and dealers at a rival crack spot. The investigation, which Stone traces in detail (he was given special access to the HIU), took years, revealing a battered urban neighborhood enslaved by arrogant, trigger-happy dealers who had created byzantine gang structures and assembly-line distribution methods meant to foil efforts at prosecution. Ultimately, however, eight defendants received lengthy sentences; many collaborators (including the gang's leaders, Lenny and Nelson Sepulveda) testified for plea bargains. Stone has a good grasp of the urban milieu and he captures the human qualities of dedicated cops as well as remorseless thugs. Robert Jackall's 1997 Wild Cowboys offers a more thoughtful if scholarly take than does Stone's account, with its movie-ready excitement and fuller character portraits. But overall, Stone presents a solid retelling of a frightening, significant era in New York's recent history.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (September 5, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385489722
• ISBN-13: 978-0385489720
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,518,920 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Story but with Loose Ends, September 24, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Gangbusters: How a Street Tough, Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New York's Most Dangerous Gang (Hardcover)

I thought this book was a "good read" but not a "great read." What keeps me from giving the five star endorsement are a number of factors:

1. no pictures -- I didn't want to see any gory crime scene photographs, just pictures of the good and bad guys. Seeing faces tends to bring things to life.

2. confusing -- There are hundreds of crimes and characters in the narrative. As a result, it got very confusing at times. I think the author should have thrown in some of the diagrams of the gangs and how they interacted with each other (like the way the prosecution explained things to the jury at the trial).

3. a bit wordy -- I think the author could have trimmed twenty pages from his narrative by weeding out overly long biographical sketches of peripheral players and by eliminating the office politics story.

4. dubious triumph -- I guess the elimination of the Wild Cowboys (aka "Red Top") is a definite triumph. A bunch of killers were locked up. Crime in the area they operated in has gone down. But I feel a little queasy over the fact that two of the gang's leaders were allowed to plead out to non-life sentences for orchestrating crimes and street terrorism that merit, in my view, the death penalty.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars good book, very true to life in NY, January 4, 2001

By 

KAT (Long Island, NY USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gangbusters: How a Street Tough, Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New York's Most Dangerous Gang (Hardcover)

If you live in suburbia and want to get a good picture of life in the inner city this is the book to read. I have to admit the book was a little unnerving knowing that ive hung out on a few of the corners where some murders happened, imagine my surprise when reading this book! What would have made it better is if we had a more round about picture on the victims, and the perps. As many inner city kids know when your raised seeing one way of life from first sight sometimes you dont know anything else... its not an excuse but maybe we shouldn't only look at the criminal/punishment aspect but a reform aspect. Some kids grow up seeing from first sight there parents smoking crack//shooting dope, or making there family income off of a spot, they're not told go to school and do good, theyre told quit school get a job, pay half the rent, and if you want a couch buy one cause i traded ours for $30 of dope. imagine growing up with this message, which is as strong as the messages for you to suceed were when you were growing up. how hard is it to do good when all you know is societies "bad" and thats normal to you. its probabally just as hard as a "normal" person being bad instead of "good."

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Story But Confusing at Times, September 21, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Gangbusters: How a Street Tough, Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New York's Most Dangerous Gang (Hardcover)

I'm in the process of reading this book. While I agree with most of the sentiments of the reviewers that gave it unstintingly glowing reviews, I'm finding it a little bit difficult to keep track of the dozens of players (cops, crooks, DAs etc). The author helpfully provides a list of characters at the beginning, but I think that he should throw into the paperback edition a diagram of the Wild Cowboys organization (with the names, aliases, and "jobs" written in) as well as a chronology of events. It's hard to keep things straight without them, and I'm almost tempted to start reading it again and take notes so I completely understand what is happening.