The Wild Cowboys of Washington Heights: NYC's Most Dangerous Crack-era Gang
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May 19th, 1991. Early morning hours. David Cargill's just finished his sophomore year at a college in Florida. He's from the suburbs north of New York City, and that night he's getting hammered with his boys. I mean, you know how it is when you just come back from college for the summer. Not a care in the world.

They go to some house parties, a bar or two, and then they decide to cruise into the city that night to show off their new stereo system. Or so they say at first. Turns out they were actually looking for hookers on the west side, but there were too many cops and they decide to head home, just cruising down the west side highway. They're flying, blasting the speakers, when all of a sudden a beat up red sedan catches up next to them gaining speed.

These kids are on top of the world. Their whole lives are in front of them. But their paths are about to cross with one of the most brutal drug-dealing crews of New York City's crack era. I mean, this is New York City in the early 90s, like a war zone. Over 2,000 murders a year, five times the number it has now. Five, six bodies dropping a day. The crack wars are in full effect. As warring crews go to battle over million-dollar corners and desperate addicts try to get money any way they can.

And nobody goes to war quite like the Wild Cowboys, a Washington Heights-based gang that ran a number of spots in the South Bronx. Led by Lenny and Nelson Sepulveda, they brought in upwards of $16 million a year and wouldn't hesitate to publicly execute anyone who crossed them.

See, in the 1980s, it was the Jamaican posses bringing over outrageous levels of gunplay honed in the streets of Kingston during the 1970s political battles. The Spanglers, the Shower Posse, and all them. But in recent years, the Dominican crews from the Heights have started eclipsing them. The Dominicans took over from the Cubans in the early 80s as the wholesalers for the Colombian cartels shipping product into the U.S. But it took them a little bit longer to get into the retail side of the drug trade. Once they figured that out,

They took over corners all over uptown Manhattan, the South Bronx, Brooklyn, and Washington Heights, the capital of Dominican New York, is home to all sorts of kingpins. That night, a number of these kingpins decide they're going to a party at one of the clubs downtown.

It wasn't nothing for them to ride their souped-up beamers to the Palladium or the tunnel and drop thousands on Champagne. And on this night, Lenny is taking some of his top spot managers to the infamous Manhattan club, Limelight. Shout out to Peter Gajan and Chris Paciello. We'll do an episode on you guys soon. One of his main enforcers, Lones Platano, is there separately. So is a big-time gun dealer named Polanco.

Polanco had sold a bunch of Uzis to Lenny. One was defective, so Lenny returned it to be fixed. They're all wasted outside the club, and Polanco returns the Uzi right as the guys decide to leave Limelight and head to an after-hour spot in the Bronx. Right around 57th Street, though, one of their cars is cut off by Cargill and his friends.

What happens next is the first domino in a chain of events that would lead to the dismantling of one of the most violent crews to ever operate in New York City. Suspected of at least 30 and up to 60 murders and countless other acts of violence. This is the Underworld Podcast. ♪

Welcome back to the podcast where we learn together that sometimes, even if Jehovah witnessed, he'll never testify. I am your host, Danny Gold, and I'm here as always with Sean Williams. He's English, I'm American, and we are two journalists who every week bring you a different story about organized and sometimes very disorganized crime.

Little housekeeping as always. We're on the look for advertisers, stories, anyone with like a high profile, high follower guest who's willing to write a script because we are tired. I mean, I don't know, Sean, what's, what's the point? Is there a point? Life? None. Absolutely none. Um, but we might be doing a big magazine story together, which is pretty cool. Can we talk about that right now? I don't think we can actually. All right. We're going to be those dickhead journalists that say it. Yeah. All right. But yeah, that's going to be cool. So we get to do some proper reporting, but, um, life? No, it's horrible. All

I wouldn't wish it on anyone. No, no, yeah. Also, it is Super Bowl Sunday, and it's unfortunate you guys won't hear this until after because I have some guaranteed winning bets. We are talking six-lead parlays and all that. Really getting into gambling these days now that it's legal in New York, which reminds me, patreon.com slash theunderworldpodcast where you can support us and give us a little money to keep this going. Bonus episodes are up there, scripts, sources, all for a low, low price that will help me pay off my gambling debts and

And keep all of my fingers. Yeah. Which I did. The latest episode, the latest episode, the interview that I did was with a guy whose dad's finger was cut off by a Guatemalan kidnapping crew. So that's pretty good timing. But yeah, there's some cool stuff on there. Like we've got loads of interviews coming up. We're going to have like,

I don't know, all kinds of really cool people coming on the show. Anyway, give us money. Yeah. Anyway, this is another episode from the gritty New York City era that I love to talk about. 70s, 80s, 90s New York. Of your favorite movies back when it was a tough, tough town, especially in the early 90s.

That's actually when New York hit its most violent years ever. I think 1991 and 1992, I believe. And yeah, we will eventually get to the posses mentioned because it's a fantastic multi-episode story arc. But I need Desus to come on to bump these numbers up. You know what I'm saying. I do not know what you're saying, but I was talking about Scorpion kicks last week. So I guess we can call it even. Yeah. Yeah.

But yeah, it was the worst of times and it was the worst of times. Late 80s, early 90s, crack war in full effect, New York is a war zone, squeegee men, broad day shootouts. The richest precincts in Manhattan had the same amount of murders as the poorest neighborhoods do now. And the entire criminal justice system from the courts to the jails is just overrun.

overwhelmed. I mean, this is the days of airmail, which is when cops will roll up to a neighborhood and just get bricks dropped on them from the roofs. And if there's one thing that grizzled old crime reporters like to reference when you're on a story with them, it is airmail. Let me tell you. I mean, those guys, man. Yeah. I hear that New York is more expensive today than it used to be, right? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It definitely is. That's true. 100% true. Cool. Cool.

I should also say a lot of this episode is based off the book Gangbusters by Michael Stone, which actually it

It details the police and prosecutors' efforts to bring down the wild cowboys in painstaking detail, which isn't really great for an episode unless we really want the backstories of all the cops involved and the inter-office politics of various DAs or why the fact that most of their murders were done in the Bronx and a Manhattan office is bringing the charges. Whatever. We'll make it work. There's another book I think that's similar from the law enforcement point of view, which is by Robert Jekyll, and it's called Wild Cowboys.

But yeah, Washington Heights, it's on the uppermost northern tip of Manhattan, like 60 blocks north of where anyone who comes to New York as a tourist has gone. In the first half of the 20th century, it saw a big influx of Jewish immigrants and Irish immigrants, which is like every single other neighborhood in New York. But interestingly, as the Nazis rose to power, Catholic groups like the Christian Front had pro-Nazi rallies and Irish gangs attacked Jews in the streets there, which I did not know and found, you know, interesting to learn about.

And as the 1960s hit, Cubans and Puerto Ricans started flocking there. But eventually by the 1980s, Dominicans were the most dominant group, especially in the wake of the fallout of the Dominican Civil War that ended in the mid-60s. I might be wrong, but this is where this is also where the American Nazi Party was based around there. I think I might be wrong about that. I mean, it's where Columbia Uni is, right? And that's pretty much all I know about it.

Yeah. And there's like, it's not, it's not. Okay. No, no. Columbia university is like 60 blocks South. I mean, that's, that's like a proper West side. Where this is, this is, this is a bit, bit North of there. These days, everyone in New York knows Washington Heights, like the Dominican capital of New York city. It's a popular food spot. Well known for strip of hookah bars, restaurants, and nightlife spots on Dykeman Ave. Back in the eighties. And I think we talked about this in the David Ortiz shooting episode where I went there for my reporting trip and

The Dominican Republic becomes a major transshipment point for cocaine coming into the U.S. from Colombia. And of course, the big-time Dominicans back in the island, they get a taste of that, and they use their contacts in New York City and Miami, even Philly, to move it up to the States. And that cocaine, in turn, starts flooding the streets as well as generating tons of cash.

A lot of that cash actually, you know, ends up in the neighborhood then, helps open up all these shops, bodegas, you know, beeper stores, a lot of which were fronts or just wash the money. And of course, when people are getting money in the underworld, violence is going to come with it. And when I tell you the violence shot up, the precinct that includes Washington Heights had one murder total in 1965, according to Stone. In 1980, there were 35 murders. By 1991, there were 119 murders there, which is like...

I mean, that's more than I think each individual borough had in 2017, 2018. So like more than Brooklyn, more than the Bronx. I'm not positive on those numbers, but it was definitely close, right? Because there was, I think, less than 300 murders total in New York in those years. But yeah, that should give you some insight into how absolutely insane New York City was back then. Yeah, like the size, something the size of basically a village and someone's getting popped every two, three days.

Jesus, that is mad. Even smaller maybe, you know, because the blocks are so dense. And Stone goes into it more. Murder had gone up 50% in six years by 1992. And here's a quote.

But numbers told only part of the story. More troubling was the quality of crimes being committed. Wanton, senseless acts of which Cargill and the Quad were only the leading examples. What lawmen found so chilling was the casualness of the violence. The spate of shootings fueled neither by rage nor by any persuasive emotion.

All over town, young men, some as young as 12, were spraying the streets with gunfire, resolving the slightest disputes with deadly finality. He also talks about how nothing contributed to this more than the way the drug trade expanded in the late 70s into the 80s. And he brings up an interesting point, which is that around then is when the mob no longer had complete control over the market, especially the importation. So you had a lot of other groups all fighting each other.

And when the street crews popped out to do the retail, everyone's in competition. There's no set thing like before. There's no overall group overseeing it, right? So it's just chaos. It kind of reminds me of, at least on a much smaller scale, is Mexico now, right, where you have the fragmented cartels. And what I'm saying is let the mob be in charge of drugs again. Put down a T-shirt. Yeah. And then, of course, comes crack.

See, getting into the heroin market back then was tougher, right? You had to have good contacts, and a kilo could cost $200,000, which is a lot if you have to front the money. Crack was much cheaper, and it was much easier to get a supply of cocaine.

I mean, I'm totally showing my ass here, but what is actually like the chemical difference with crack and cocaine powder? Is it just, is it only the way that folks are taking it or is it some kind of like material difference in it? You know, it's, it's a, it's a material difference, right? The cocaine goes through a process they call the cooking to turn it into crack. You know, where you're involving baking soda and you're, and you're,

You're doing something to it. I don't know like the chemical composition of it. You know, I'm sure someone could just Google that easily. We probably could have before this episode. Yeah. But, you know, we do we do things on the fly. So, yeah, I mean, you can freeboat based cocaine, right? You can smoke cocaine, which is which is not the same, but it's a lot more expensive than just smoking crack. Yeah. I've got a story to tell about that, but maybe maybe not on a podcast where my girlfriend's colleagues are listening. So, yeah, maybe another time.

Yeah, probably leave that one out for now. But let's back up just for a minute, right? Dominicans take over the cocaine importation racket from the Cubans in the late 70s and early 80s. But it takes them a minute to move into the retail side, right? The hand-to-hand sales, all that. Washington Heights at the time had gangs, which were called like, you know, the Playboys, the Ball Busters, and Fat Frankie Cuevas' crew, the Bad Bad Boys. Frankie will be back, so remember that name. But

But these were like little street gangs. You know, they fought, they stole cars, they sold weed. Maybe they did some stick ups. It was nothing too crazy. But then cocaine hits and things get crazier.

In 1982, two members of the Bad Bad Boys decide to start hustling cocaine retail side close to the George Washington Bridge, which is a bridge that connects New Jersey to upper Manhattan, New York City. It just sees a ton of commuters, you know, so many people coming in and out of the city. And these commuters have money and they're going back into Jersey after their work is done in the city. So you can imagine, you know, they start selling grams and half grams. They call their operation Coke It Is, which is catchy to the point branding.

And they were, as they say, putting it in traffic. I mean, it's like really PT Barnum oldie worldie. Like I remember when I saw that name, I thought it was cool. And now that you're saying it, I think it's way cooler. It's such a good gang name. You get a logo, you put it like an exclamation point at the end. You know, the name kind of sells itself. And the two people who ran Coke It Is were nicknamed appropriately Yayo and Kapo. Around 1985, things get set in motion that are going to change everything.

That's when a lot of people attribute the arrival of crack in New York City. And they say it originated from Yale, right? There's different working theories to how he discovered it. Some say the Jamaican posse crews he sometimes worked with introduced him. Others, the Medellin cartel.

Still others say he accidentally created himself while on vacation. Whatever the case, crack comes onto the scene. Yayo starts marketing it, you know, giving out testers, setting up shit in the South Bronx, which is notoriously the poorest and most dangerous area of New York City. And Yayo calls his new organization, Pumping Crack, base the balls. As in baseball.

Yeah, I mean, Dominicans love baseball. That's a pretty well-established fact. I do like a gangster that enjoys a pun as well. I'm going to stand these guys. They're cool. And then, of course, you know, base, like moving the base, base is how you refer to product as well. So it kind of has like multiple connotations. Yeah.

And they are pissed. Yayo, I mean, he also sets it up like a corporation, right? Like a machine to be efficient. We're talking New Jack City style. It's cooked, cut up, stockpiled, as is the money, all in different apartments in the same complex. It's protected like a fortress. He's also bringing in dudes from rural villages in the DR with no US records to serve as a shooters. The guy is a visionary. He connects with a big time Dominican pusher back home who works directly with the cartels. He

He also uses all the cash exchanges in the Bronx and Manhattan to launder his money. He starts making so much money he can barely count it. I mean, in this era of Washington Heights, it's basically an open-air drug market. Yeo eventually steps back from the day-to-day operations and spends more time in the DR, furthering his whole corporation motif by putting nine middle managers to play, you know, into nine different spots to manage all his crack.

At this point, the mid-80s, Lennon Cipolletta is a student at George Washington High School in the Heights. And yes, he was named after that Lennon. His parents had immigrated from the DR and had him in New York City shortly after. He also had an older brother, Nelson, who ends up being his second-in-command. Lenny's dad repairs radios and TVs, and his mom works in a factory. But his dad didn't really adjust too well to life in the States. He started drinking too much, and his parents separated when he was three.

Lenny went with his mom and he ends up kind of hating his dad because he was an alcoholic who didn't really give his mom any child support. And there's this scene kind of where he sees his dad out in the streets at night or I think during the day. His dad's all drunk and like bummy. Lenny's with his friends and he just pretends that he doesn't know the guy. It's just another problem, right? Yeah. Lenny's a smart kid. He's tough. He plays baseball, which is obviously a big shocker for a Dominican teenager in New York.

He joins the Playboys gang at 15, but like I said, gangs back then, they're not the same. They're kind of about status, not really getting money. They had their little shootouts, but it wasn't like it's going to be. Eventually, though, Lenny decides he's going to form his own breakaway faction, the Young Playboys, who are more intense on getting money. And right before this, 2K2K,

Two playboys had stuck up one of Yayo's dealers. So Yayo, Capo, and a bunch of their guys, they show up to the high school where all these guys hang out, all the little gangs, and they just beat the crap out of these guys. And Lenny decides right then and there he wants to work for them. Oh, yeah. They sound like role models we can all get behind. Cool.

I mean, look, this is like a common story, right? And we talked about it too with the Chinatown gangs. You have these older guys who are going to show up flashing money, you know, driving beamers, jewelry with girls on their arms and nice cars. Like high school, like literally outside high schools. And it's going to have a certain effect on 14, 15, 16 year olds, of course, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

At this time, it's right around the emergence of what would come to be known as the Wild Cowboys. At the start, it's Lenny, his brother Nelson, a couple shooters known as Pascalito, Freddy Krueger, and Platano, and a few other guys. They generally meet on the handball courts near school, where they play a game of football.

George Washington High, and they start stealing cars in Manhattan. Eventually, they start going all over the tri-state area, which is New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, sometimes stealing three or four cars a day. Then they start selling weed, sometimes out of an arcade. Remember arcades? Dale, can you put the Seinfeld bass on that? Yeah.

Can we put that on and get away with it and not get taken down? All right. Because if so, I want to use that sound all the time. Anytime you make a joke, basically, we're going to use the Seinfeld line. Oh, shit. We're going to be on the hook for millions and millions in copyright if I do that. So each of the guys in the crew, they have a weed spot. They would go down to Texas once every two weeks, buy 80 pounds at $250 a pound, and then flip it for $1,000 in Washington Heights.

Meanwhile, baseballs and Yale, they're kind of looking for young upstarts, you know, like Crack Dealer, LinkedIn, and all that. And Lenny has a good resume. So he goes to work for them. And unlike most of his fellow apprentices, right, he shows up to work on time. He's tough. He does what's asked for him. And, you know, I kind of feel like the bar is set low in that situation for that sort of stuff, you know? Eventually, he's made a manager of a location at 166 in Amsterdam, which is uptown, and

Lenny starts picking up as much as he can from Yale, but his spots drop their revenue and Yale fires him, which like, I don't know. I kind of feel like there's gotta be more to that story. You know, like you don't just fire, fire a guy,

When you're in that industry and that's like it. So that's one of the unsolved mysteries we'll have to have for this episode. Nelson had actually been doing the same thing. And together they opened up their own crack spot in 1985, 1986. You know, the timeline's a little hazy here, but it all is around that same era. And right now it's just two crazy young entrepreneurs setting up their own shop following their dreams.

The thing is, Nelson sucks at it. He's kind of lazy. He's unfocused. He's buying the crack prepackaged already into individual sale baggies, which, you know, for anything that cuts tremendously into the profit. And he's just not good at running a business.

So eventually, little brother Lenny takes over and starts running the show. And Lenny, Lenny is good at what he does. He gets his product wholesale. He learns the process of cooking and chopping. He starts selling his own stuff, making money. Remember, he was working for Yale and kind of taking notes in his head about how all this stuff ran. And Yale was a visionary.

This is when their little crew becomes known as Red Top or Lenny's Boys, which is actually how they refer to themselves. And Lenny is killing it. So, of course, his old friends from the gang and the neighborhood show up and he starts hiring them as dealers and enforcers. Yeah, I'm going to guess it's not going to be Lenny who brings this operation down in the end. Actually, it's a good. I don't really know how you blame that, like who you blame in this situation, but we'll see. We'll get there.

And by the way, they never called themselves the wild cowboys, right? The name allegedly comes from an investigator who's talking to a high school teacher and he tells them that the guys act like a bunch of wild cowboys. And then the investigator, I think it was a copper or one of the DAs starts calling them the wild cowboys. And that's, you know, the media sticks with it. Fucking media's fault. It's always the media. But as far as the old guys come back from the neighborhood, right? Take Freddy Krueger, who I mentioned earlier, who would go on to become a feared hitman, obviously from that nickname, you can kind of tell.

He had done a two-year sentence for stealing cars as a teenager, and he's working as a doorman, trying to stay on the straight and narrow. But the gang life is just too much fun. All his friends are getting coke on consignment and just making a ton of money. He quits after Platano takes him to see the spot where Lenny is moving crack, which is Beach Terrace and Beekman in the Bronx. Everyone is just bringing in money. You know, they're brawling with other crews, going out to clubs like the Tunnel and the Palladium. They're also all about cars and bikes. They would buy cars...

spend nine, $10,000 fixing them up, race the car on Saturday night, crash it, and then do it all over again the next week. And they're getting kind of out of control, right? Because there's no consequences. They're doing things like having target practice off the roof of their buildings. And it's just, you know, it's building. You can kind of see where things are going to go. By 1987, they're doing 15,000 a week in sales, but competition is getting fierce and the guns are always out. Says Lenny, and this is a quote from Gangbusters,

That's a cool quote. I want to read this book.

Sounds great. Yeah, it's very good. But it's also, you know, one of the things I always find weird with these books is there's a lot of recreated conversations sometimes, right? With like scenes that no one was at these scenes besides the people involved. And I don't think they give, they're not giving straight up rundowns of the conversations, right? Maybe they're giving testimony at times and you can play stuff back. But it's also like, unless you have a wire on them, which they didn't, like how do you actually know what was said? So I think-

It's interesting with these true crime books, sort of the liberties that get taken in a way, you know? Yeah, yeah. I'll take as many as you want to give me. Actually, no, I won't. No, I won't. I'd never do such a thing. Yeah. His boys, like Lenny's boys, they go through this metamorphosis too, right? Everyone gets vicious. Platano was working as an auto mechanic when he got hired in 87 to drive the drugs around. Basically, he has like a low-level transporter. And he's actually a small guy, but he gets a gun and soon turns into this ruthless killer.

Same with Pascalito, who Lenny always saw as a mama's boy. Pascalito gains a rep as a killer after shooting a corrections officer that was robbing Red Top. And that's actually – that's another thing too, right? There's a couple instances – I mean there were rumors that the Wild Cowboys had a cop on the payroll. Other crews during that time had cops on the payroll or corrections officers or things like that. There's a story of a bunch of corrections officers guarding, I think, a stash house for these guys. So it was just a crazy time. Yes. Anyway –

Pascalito gets arrested, but after five months when the case fails because no witnesses are willing to testify, I mean, this becomes a common theme too with the Wild Cowboys, he comes back and he starts putting pressure on Lenny to get his own spots. In the summer of 89, Lenny allows it, but Pascalito has to buy his shit from Lenny and give him most of the profit, and he can't serve too close to Lenny's spots, and he's got to call his own product Orange Top.

Fast Gluto, of course, says, fuck that. He gets his own supplier, but then things get tense and Lenny applies the pressure and they agree to the deal. And this is like a constant thing we're going to see moving forward, right? These friends who came up together, they start turning on each other, testing each other, sometimes even going to war with each other, sometimes telling the police on each other after they get bagged up, right? There's very little loyalty when it actually comes down to it. And it's kind of ironic, you know, they're threatening and killing witnesses, but they end up

snitching on themselves a lot too. I mean, they sound like absolute psychopaths, these guys. What is going on? No, they were. The Cowboys' main spot to sell out of a place is called Beach Terrace, but it gets destroyed, so they moved into an alley they call The Hole in the late 80s. Remember, they were in Washington Heights, that's the northern tip of Manhattan, and just across the super narrow Harlem River is the Bronx, the South Bronx, and that's where they did the majority of their selling and shooting.

It's probably the most notorious area in New York City. I don't know if you've ever seen stuff about the 70s there. There's documentaries and books. It was known for buildings being burned down. It looked like a bombed-out war zone. There's crazy footage you can see on YouTube. It was also known for gangs, all those old-school gangs with the leather jackets and the cut sleeves and all that. Escape from New York. Warriors or whatever.

Right. It's also known for being one of the poorest areas, if not, I think, the poorest area in America. Still, still is one of the poorest areas in America. And soon enough, it's known for crack. It's like, wasn't that where the first hip hop guys came out as well? They were like hooking up boxes to like the fucked up...

and stuff like this. Pretty interesting. They're getting customers from Bergen County, New Jersey, which is right across the river and like a nice suburb, the North Bronx, Westchester, all over. And they're doing 30K a day between 1988 and 1991. From a New York Times article during the trial, quote, Nelson told of a network of spots in the streets of the South Bronx and upper Manhattan controlled by the gang. One,

One particular spot brought in as much as $100,000 a week. Of just that $100,000, Mr. Cipolletta said, he personally took in $8,000 a week. His brother, $13,000. And his crew of managers, those who oversee the spots, $800 a week. The drug itself, he referred to as the work. I mean, I don't know, dude. $800 a week...

To be a manager, I mean, it's tax-free, right? So it's more like $1,300, $1,400 a week, but even so, that's not the best way to earn a living. Learn how to code. Learn how to code, guys. You'll make a lot more. You'll make that in a day.

Just put in a couple months. Figure it out. I want to start the crack dealer to coding pipeline. Oh, man. Get these guys paid. Yeah, you've just found your charity. Yeah, in the South Bronx, they're fighting for territory with bats, knives, just broad day public shootings. And they really kind of make their presence known in 1989 when they publicly execute two dealers thought to have killed one of their friends. The killing gained so much notoriety in the neighborhood, it becomes known as the Double.

348 Beekman Ave, it becomes their headquarters. And then it becomes the straight up zombie land, right? The address becomes infamous. They move in, they give tenants money to set up stash houses, chop shit up, sell it to various tenants' apartments, and they beat or kill tenants that said no.

They would discipline workers by smashing their knuckles with a brick and they'd send like 10, 11, 12 year olds there to move the bundles. And there's just public beatings being given out on the daily. Yeah. I mean, I'm not doing this for 800 quid a week. That's, this doesn't sound anything like worth that money.

Yeah, it's – I mean it's pretty wild. If you guys haven't seen New Jack City, I think – obviously it's a movie, right? But it really goes into detail about how some of these organizations operated and the way they did this sort of stuff. I mean where are the cops? Where are the cops? Like is there no police? What the –

Dude, it was a different time. You know, like it was just like New York was insanely violent. You know, it wasn't like now where maybe you get one or two murders a day. There were crews all... It was still wild, wild era. And of course, you have other things, right? There weren't cameras, right? There weren't cell phones. So people call 911 easily. It was just a really tough time to, I think, shut stuff down. Giuliani, man. And there's just...

There's just, there's lots of gratuitous violence, even against their own workers if they stole or dropped the ball. Out of the dozens of drug whores operating at that time, I think there were 60 alone in Manhattan, they had the rep of being among the most violent. Quote, usually gangs employ one or two enforcers, but rarely more than a handful, said a detective. But with them, they were all shooters. Platano is the one who gains the rep of being just like, you know, the real shooter, the real killer. And people are terrified of him.

Jeez.

So he kind of misses the boat on Coke and crack and was basically an old man at that point in the game, even though he had been a street legend before. But Lenny links him up, starts fronting him kilos to run his own little thing. And fat Frankie Cuevas does well. They make good partners for the most part. The whole time, though, you know, they're both expanding, making bank, doling out violence. You can kind of see where it's going to go. Yeah, I mean, I always feel sorry for the gangsters getting fat shamed, too, you know? Like, what if Frankie starts lifting or running 10Ks? I mean, give the guy a break.

That was his nickname. Things change. Maybe he was like that. I'm just calling him what everyone else called him. You know, it's not me shaming him. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

By 1991, the violence is just in overdrive. Sometimes it's business. Sometimes it's just senseless acts of violence like tossing a low-level worker off a roof or setting one on fire. In May of 1991, that's when the Cargill murder from the intro happens. And Lenny and the guys, they're getting the fixed gun from the guy named Polanco when all of it goes down. And he kind of runs with them sometimes. They call him Crazy Ray, and he sold guns and grenades to gangs all over the city.

He was also just known as a killer, but he was from Brooklyn, said to run the Gowanus Projects. That's in Brooklyn, close to where I am actually, where now it's a lot of fancy tech companies are moving and like fencing and rock climbing gyms and all that. Yeah, it's like super fancy. I reported on an urban farm on the roof of one of those things a couple of years back. It's a cool view. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the projects are still there though, and I'm sure they're still a little rough. Polanco is said to have pulled the strings behind dozens of homicides. He's been shot a bunch too, so much so that he has a colostomy bag. So,

So they're all partying together. Cargo and his friends cut them off. They catch up, and Polanco tells Lenny it's time to test out the fixed gun. He rolls the window down, pulls the trigger once, and it jams. This is Lenny pulling the trigger, by the way. Pulls it again, jams a second time. He actually passes the gun back to Polanco, who does something to it, like fixes it, hands it back quickly, and then Lenny sprays bullets into the car, killing Cargo.

It's one of these completely insane old New York murders that just doesn't make any sense. A seemingly random act of violence. I mean, college students getting gunned down on the highway. It's insane. And it looks completely unsolvable until the detectives on the case start piecing it together and get clued onto the wild cowboys. Of course, that always starts with an informant.

Meanwhile, though, the violence just continues. In September of 91, there's this wild shootout with a guy named George Calderon, who is some insane gangster in the Bronx. Well, not with him, but with his shooters. And the book refers to him as a, quote, self-styled drug czar who exacted a toll from the street dealers throughout the South Bronx. Like,

Who is this guy? It's literally just one line about him in the book. And I mean, come on. Like, I need to know more. It also says the shootout had so many rounds. It sounded like Beirut. I mean, he sounds like Omar, this guy. Sounds great. Like character wise. Well, I don't I don't think he would. I don't think he was robbing them. I think he was taxing them. Right. So that's a that's a major difference.

At this point, Lenny, he's just stressed out, right? There's too much violence, too much chaos, and he just cops a plea to a gum charge he's facing to serve a year in jail. It's almost like, you know, he sees it almost as a vacation, right? He's going to go there, get his mind right, and come back. And he leaves Nelson in charge. In December, though, just days before Christmas, things are going to get even worse.

There's this 17-year-old dealer, Anthony Green. He's working for a separate crew called the Yellow Top Crew, and he's selling his crack for $3, which is undercutting the $5 red top spot. And he's told to sell elsewhere, but he doesn't listen. Nelson calls the hit out, and the red top crew shows up in two cars. You know, some places say there's two shooters, some say four shooters, some say eight. But they shoot Anthony six times and kill him.

And then just start shooting anyone near him. Customers, bystanders, other workers. When it's all over, four people are dead, including a mother of three. Jesus Christ, this is awful. God.

Yeah, I mean, this is like front of the newspaper. Like a quadruple homicide is not that common. Even back then. Remember, Lenny's still locked up, right? And things are going a little south. And Fat Frankie, he decides he's going to take advantage of this. And he starts trying to take over some of the red top crew, you know, Lenny's territory. Frankie and Lenny had been friends. Lenny even fronted him keys. Frankie's even there the night Lenny shoots the cargo kid. But that doesn't stop him from trying to take over the spots immediately.

And Lenny's crew even send Freddy Krueger over to kill Frankie, which he fails to do. So, you know, a war breaks out and drug crews in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Uptown back then. I mean, they're always getting into these sort of wars. What's crazy though, is how many of these guys know each other, grew up with each other, got money together in the beginning.

You know, actually, just stop right now. Dale, I don't even think we can do this because of fair use or Spotify shutting us down or whatever. But go put on Jay-Z's The Evils right now. It's off his first album. Just, like, take a break. Listen to that. Listen to the lyrics. And it's just so... I mean, it's just friends turning on friends. And what he says... What's the line? We used to fight for building blocks. Now we fight for blocks with buildings that make a killing. The closest of friends when we first started but grew apart as the money grew and soon grew black-hearted. I mean, that...

You know, one of the best songs of all time. I think it was a reasonable, yeah, reasonable doubt, like 94, 95, just so many lines in that song. I never prayed to God. I prayed to Gotti. Like they just don't, they don't make it like that anymore. You know? Yeah. They just don't, they don't, it's not the same. But when I saw this, I genuinely thought you were going to wrap it. And I was so excited.

nah dude i mean i'm embarrassing but i'm not that embarrassing you know you gotta you gotta i'm already like a like a late 30s already a late 30s white guy quoting jay-z in a podcast you know what i'm saying like you can't that's like that's already you you you need to listen to the other 60 fucking shows that we've done then

Yeah, that's already pretty questionable. But if I started wrapping it too, I mean, that's just yikes, you know? Anyway, where were we, right? Oh yeah, war is going on. The walls are closing in. The police at this point, they do have everyone under surveillance and they're just, they're watching.

Platano gets arrested in Jersey in January. He's got drugs in the car. He gets interrogated. He actually gives up Lenny right away when the highway shooting comes up. But you can't build a case off just the word of Platano. So he soon gets let go and is back on the street. And also, I mean, this book...

it really teaches you how much is needed to bring like a mass or at least back then a massive drug case, because there really is like so much stuff happening and they know so much that's going on, but they can't bring the case cause they don't have the evidence right there. So it's kind of, it's really interesting to see that. Right.

In March, Fat Frankie's with two of his bodyguards, but they're caught slipping. He gets shot up, but, you know, somehow survives. And it sets off a new wave of just shootings all over. They're shooting up nightclubs, shooting their own workers. They burn down Fat Frankie's restaurant. Platano gets gunned down in April, and he should have died, but he pulls through. And again, he tells cops that Frankie did it. So Platano's just snitching on everyone, right?

Then in June, Lenny gets released from the tombs, which is the jail in Manhattan, after the gun charge finishes out. And he walks just right into a shitstorm. Business is down. The quad shooting made that spot too hot. The war with Frankie is going on, and he's just got to pick up the pieces. Anyway, also in 1992, for context, and it's wild that I didn't really know about this. July 3rd, Washington Heights. You know, it's been hot forever with clashes between gangs and police. There's a story of this cop who's like 24 getting gunned down earlier. It was a big deal.

So July 3rd, a cop goes to stop and frisk a local drug dealer. He refuses. They wrestle. The cop shoots him and kills him, and it becomes this flashpoint. And I think at first the guy is portrayed as like a regular citizen. Activists seize on it. Honestly, not saying you should gun down drug dealers, but you know what I'm saying. And there's just like three days of rioting and chaos in Washington Heights. And I know my New York City history. I know about all the stuff here. Did not know there was a riot in Washington Heights in 1992, which is maybe on me, but—

So yeah, it's just like chaos in the streets, right?

I should also add this whole time, the cops are still building the case. There's real serious investigations, dozens of people involved, and the gang knows they're under surveillance. They just don't seem to care. They think they're untouchable, and they even expanded, opening up a spot all the way out in Brighton Beach selling crack. A local dealer actually fought them, but they come back and they kill him again in broad daylight. So when they eventually go on trial, one of the headlines was all about how this crew had committed murders in three different boroughs. I mean...

Is Brighton Beach as weird a spot as it seems to me? It's miles away from the Bronx. And like, given the Brighton Beach Russian guys are basically murderous psychos, maybe they do a little market research before moving in or maybe that's the point.

I don't know. From the stories we did on the Russians, that's what, 40 episodes back? They never really got involved in the crack game. I don't think it was a thing for them. And there are housing projects down there, so maybe it was like different – there's definitely Puerto Ricans and Dominicans down there. So maybe it was like they moved into that sort of community and the Russians came out of it. But that's a really interesting question to understand. Yeah.

why there wasn't clashes, or at least they weren't. They're not out there yet. But yeah, they're getting pursued heavy and somehow getting away with it. And one time, Lenny even slips out of the cuffs, dodges an arrest by jumping off a 15-foot platform and just runs away. At one point, that shooter, Pascalito, he gets arrested for being involved in a witness shooting, as well as a suspect in four other homicides, and he gets let go for a $25,000 bail. I mean, what? Sounds like it's Philadelphia. You know, you call that getting Krasnered. Who that?

He's the current DA for Philadelphia. And I have a story about that that I will tell after the shoot that I'm kind of phone producing gets done in the next couple of weeks. Because anyway, we'll get to that eventually. By the fall of 92, the investigation is nearly done. Wiretaps, informants coming through, including some shooters who had just had various petty grievances. Like one guy who's locked up and never gets visited, so he talks. And this case is coming together. You know, there are some failed raids.

But they're doing buy and bust. They're setting everything up. Another wild cowboy comes to the precinct. He starts giving up info saying he was cheated. He gives up a stash house and they raid that and they arrest a few of the red top guys. And it's kind of wild, like I said, how much info these guys actually give up on each other despite the loyalty they're supposed to have. And it's all nonsense, man. All that stuff is not. There's no code, right? All this stuff is nonsense. Yeah.

In the winter of that year, this is the weirdest thing. Lenny's been dodging the cops for months, and he actually shows up to a court case about a gun charge or something relatively minor. The cops get tipped off. You know, they're literally in the courtroom just, like, looking at him as this thing is playing itself out. They think maybe the lawyer told him some bad info that he could show up and it would be fine. There's literally a chase through the courthouse, and they eventually collar him.

Platano, by the way, had also been locked up after he got shot up. And Nelson is on the run of the Dominican Republic. And the midst of all this, you know, Lenny being locked up, that other shooter, Pascalito, he does a drive-by and finally kills Frankie Cuevas. I mean, I know this is all like really dark, but it's getting kind of comical the way they're just hitting each other nonstop every day. It's madness.

Yeah, I mean, it is pretty crazy. I think the comical thing is the chase through the courthouse, even though it's a brutal killer. You kind of put some... What's that music? You know, the chase music? The old school chase music? The Benny Hill music. Yeah, you put the Benny Hill in that. But no, it's not funny. They're bad people. Anyway...

Throughout 93, the cops continue to pick off members of the Wild Cowboys, doing raids, arresting, going through mounds of evidence. They end up zeroing in on 60 felonies. There's 45 defendants and over 100 witnesses. Pascalito and Nelson were the only top dogs still free, and both are in the DR. They eventually get caught, both of them, and since they're both American-born, aka citizens, they're

The Dominican authorities, they make the extraditions go pretty smoothly. Is there like direct connections with the gangs down in DR itself with these guys? I don't think with gangs down there. I mean, yeah, there were some connections, right? They imported guys to serve as shooters and they were working through, I think they were working through contacts that were in the Dominican Republic that were like, you know, the, um,

What do you call it? The go-betweens. What's the word for it? God, I can't think of anything right now. The brokers. The brokers, yeah. The brokers were in the DR. But yeah, they didn't go into specifics about that, but I think it's an interesting question.

The trial ends up starting in 1994, though a lot of the guys plead out. There's a ton of security, and there's rumors there were hits put out on the lawyers and cops from the jail. What's crazy is that both Lenny and Nelson caught pleas in exchange for their testimony. I mean, their pleas are 25 to life, but still, you know, it's kind of weird that both of the leaders take plea deals to testify against their lower-ranked soldiers. I don't know. I mean, I guess they're helping put more people in prison, but it just struck me as strange. I mean, they both...

even take the stand. Yeah, that is weird. Here's a Times article from around then, quoting, "...with his former workers watching him passively from a bank of defense tables to his right, Mr. Sepulveda, a slim-faced man in blue jeans and a multicolored sweater, spoke during the morning of the mundane daily workings of the organization that he and his brother Lennon, 27, better known as Lenny, had founded in 1986."

I mean, I guess you could say that Lenin was the Red Square of the gang, right? He didn't get so bullshit?

That's two Soviet puns, that's enough. We weren't going to make it through the whole episode without you trying something like that. But I appreciate you waiting till the end. Yeah, I must go now. Not to scare off the listeners before the ads ran. That shows sacrifice and maturing on your part. Here's a sentence from a UPI write-up.

Quote, one defendant wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with a large white skull during Tuesday's proceedings and made obscene gestures at the assistant district attorney.

Which like, it doesn't, I don't know. I wouldn't do that if I was on trial. It doesn't, it's not, it's not helpful in general, you know? It doesn't seem like it gives too much of a shit, but yeah. No, definitely, definitely not. But there's actually, there's a bunch of interesting cases going on right now. There was a campaign. One of the guys arrested for the quad shooting is saying that he actually wasn't involved and, and a couple of, you know, little things like that. But yeah, at the height of,

The wild cowboys brought in $60 million a year, had between 40 to 60 members, and were connected to anywhere between 30 and 60 murders. So pretty wild stuff. But it's also interesting. We know about this gang because there was a book written about them, right? I'm sure there were other big crews during this time. And you kind of wonder, were they this – did they deserve these superlatives? Were they this –

super functioning well-known gang there were so many other gangs during the crack era that were bringing in a ton of money sometimes you wonder do they only have this sort of like craziest you know most violent whatever else it is because they were the ones that like um you know got the got the the book treatment yeah i mean i just thought it's i want to say before we close out this episode that if people do sign up to the top patreon tier danny will wrap the whole of the blueprint on one of our episodes

Um, I don't think that's a good, that's a good idea. And I also, great idea. I wouldn't wrap. If I was going to wrap a Jay-Z album, it wouldn't be the blueprint. It would be reasonable doubt or volume one. I mean, I was just, I was just coming up with the only Jay-Z album I can think of. Cause I'm really cool. I mean, you can pick your, you can pick your album. You can pick your album. Anyway. Uh,

Patreon.com. I want to thank the people who have helped us out and are our top two members like we do at the end of every episode. Noah Brandon,

John Simon, Patrick Rowland, Tanner McCleave, Sam Ramsey, Juan Ponce, P. Thomas, Michael Rich, William Wintercross, Trey Nance, Matthew Cutler, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, and Doug Prindable. Thank you guys so much for your support. Without you guys, we would probably stop doing this. But yeah, until next week.