Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders & the Forces of Order [Hardcover]

Robert Jackall (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 21, 1997

Four bullet-torn bodies in a drug-ridden South Bronx alley. A college boy shot in the head on the West Side Highway. A wild shootout on the streets of Washington Heights, home of New York City's immigrant Dominican community and hub of the eastern seaboard's drug trade. All seemingly separate acts of violence. But investigators discover a pattern to the mayhem, with links to scores of assaults and murders throughout the city.

In this bloody urban saga, Robert Jackall recounts how street cops, detectives, and prosecutors pieced together a puzzle-like story of narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and murders for hire, all centered on a vicious gang of Dominican youths known as the Wild Cowboys. These boyhood friends, operators of a lucrative crack business in the Bronx, routinely pistol-whipped their workers, murdered rivals, shot or slashed witnesses to their crimes, and eventually turned on one another in a deadly civil war. Jackall chronicles the crime-scene investigations, frantic car chases, street arrests at gunpoint, interviews with informants, and knuckle-breaking plea bargaining that culminated in prison terms for more than forty gang members.

But he also tells a cautionary tale--one of a society with irreconcilable differences, fraught with self-doubt and moral ambivalence, where the institutional logics of law and bureaucracy often have perverse outcomes. A society where the forces of order battle not just violent criminals but elites seemingly aligned with forces of disorder: community activists who grab any pretext to further narrow causes; intellectuals who romanticize criminals; judges who refuse to lock up dangerous men; federal prosecutors who relish nailing cops more than crooks; and politicians who pander to the worst of our society behind rhetorics of social justice and moral probity. In such an up-for-grabs world, whose order will prevail?

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

Despite a few years of research and the promise of his own marauder-like name, Jackall has written an unremittingly wooden tale of drug-related mayhem. Jackall (Williams College; Moral Mazes, 1988) spent a few years with the NYPD, following a trail of murders across precincts in Manhattan, the Bronx, and the West Side Highway connecting the two boroughs. The detectives gradually uncover a single gang operating out of a heavily Dominican neighborhood in Manhattan's Washington Heights. The Red Top crew--enamored of Scarface and clavos, secret compartments for guns that line their fancy cars- -moves in and takes over the corner drug trade after murdering the local dealers. Jackall is on the scene as the worst offenders are themselves murdered or rounded up for trial, accused of murdering others, from competing dealers to an innocent college grad who made the mistake of passing a gang member on the highway. But this dramatic story is not well served by Jackall's dry style (it's clear why the police referred to him as ``the Professor''). He is ill at ease with police lingo, and his use of terms like ``pross,'' ``dissing,'' and ``two in the head'' can be grating. Clearly, Jackall has an intimate understanding of the complicated case against the Red Top gang, yet it is confused by the book's poor organization. A short speech by the sentencing judge crackles with the only real fury here about how thoroughly the gang has ruined the lives of everyone it touched. An academic, labyrinthine look at the terror gangs inflict on their neighbors and society. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

Wild Cowboys has a great deal to tell about the formation and operation of emerging "criminal enterprises." Moreover, and perhaps more important, this book is a fly-on-the-wall look at how the "forces of order" think and go about eradicating the opposition...Mr. Jackall is at his best when he fleshes out how police detectives single-mindedly overcame dead-end leads, sidestepped or neutralized competing units within the ranks of the police bureaucracy and parlayed fragments of accurate information to solve several particularly vicious pieces of Wild Cowboy handiwork...Anyone interested in the techniques of criminal investigation could not find a more comprehensive and readable primer than this book. (Alan Mass New York Law Journal )

This book is a hard-driving, factual account of the Dominican drug trade and the havoc it wreaked in New York City, particularly in Washington Heights and the Bronx, along with the frustrated efforts of law enforcement officials to deal with it. (Bill Franz The Register )

Jackall isn't afraid to draw conclusions and his story has an air of authenticity. This book makes a brutal and, for most readers, extremely foreign world seem discomfitingly close. (Publishers Weekly )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (September 21, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067495310X
• ISBN-13: 978-0674953109
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #946,107 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Urban gunplay under the microscope, March 27, 2000

By 

Julian P Killingley - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders & the Forces of Order (Hardcover)

This is not an easy book to classify. The reviews from NYT and Kirkus are not flattering but I feel those reviewers lost the plot a little. Just calling this book an "unremittingly wooden tale" suggests that it was intended as entertainment rather than as piece of scholarly research.

Robert Jackall focuses his sociologist's eye on a localized crime wave amongst Dominicans living in Washington Heights. He begins with the brutal acts of wanton murder that lie at the center of the book. From there he casts his net ever wider until the reader slowly grasps the big picture.

To someone such as me, living in Britain, this is a very alien landscape. The casual acts of extreme violence, the industrial scale drug dealing, and the regular open gunplay on the streets of the Big Apple read almost like something from a Hollywood script rejected for lack of authenticity. The title, Wild Cowboys, is well chosen both for the gang that adopted the name and for its portrayal of urban mayhem.

By the end of the book the reader has a good grasp of the complex social relationships on the block, the reasons for all the extravagant machismo, and the extraordinary difficulty facing police officers investigating such crimes. Jackall does an excellent job of tracking relationships - even if he does let his unalloyed admiration for NYPD officers shine through rather often. But, hey - those guys need all the help they can get after their recent regular bad press.

I did struggle a little in the middle of the book when I thought I was going to be overwhelmed by names of new characters constantly joining the tale. However, ends are brought together well at the conclusion when Jackall traces how a wall of criminal solidarity cracks wide open to resolve itself in a series of guilty pleas.

If the cast list of War and Peace put you off reading Tolstoy - give this one a miss!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WILD COWBOYS , URBAN MARAUDERS AND THE FORCES OF ORDER, April 5, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders & the Forces of Order (Hardcover)

In WILD COWBOYS mr. Jackall has captured a very accurate portrait of the world I work in every day. As a law enforcement officer working in New York City I can confirm that based on my own experiance, the confusing list of actors and aliases that some editorial reviewers have complained of are, in fact,common in complex criminal conspiracies and I feel that Mr Jackall has done a fair job of trying to present a clear picture of the Red Top crew. His portrayal of a world where lethal violence is commonplace and telling someone your real name is the highest form of trust is unequalled.A reader who wants a picture of the difficulties involved in the investigation of an actual complex criminal conspiracy rather than the neat melodramas wrapped up in an hour of television would do well to to read Wild Cowboys.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars WASHINGTON HEIGHTS WARS, December 1, 2003

By 

Abe Vigoda "part-time inventor" (Vermont, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders & the Forces of Order (Hardcover)

This book tells the story in full detail and in murder after excruciating murder of how one gang of Dominicans in New York's Washington heights section brought primal fear and lawlessness to the northern tip of Manhattan back in the bad old days.