02x03 - Gangs of Newburgh

[bunniefuu]

- It is a full-scale
g*ng w*r up in Newburgh.

The Bloods and the Latin Kings
had become entrenched there.

29,000 people,

and we were suffering close
to 20 homicides a year.

Per capita, that made Newburgh

the most violent city
in New York State.

- They were in
Newburgh neighborhoods

that most people
try to avoid,

the places that have
been plagued by violent crime.

- We were not in charge.

We had to get out of
the whack-a-mole scene.

Oh, there's one there.
Boom.

Let's get the--OK, now
another one pops up, boom.

- We have 78 indictments,

60 on the Blood side,
18 on the Latin Kings side.

- OK, here we go.

- Did you ever become a target?

- I'm in my office
and these two agents come in.

Double O's
put a hit out on you.

- In the FBI, we make
a lot of headlines.

Drug busts,

mob stings,

t*rror1st takedowns.

- Get down! Get down!

- We understand why people
want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it.

- Freeze!
- FBI.

- FBI!
- Action!

- But they don't know
the half of it.

What really goes down,

we save that for each other

when we're talking
agent to agent.

This is "FBI True."

- Kristy Kottis is a
24-year veteran of the FBI.

She worked gangs,
crimes against children,

as well as human
and drug trafficking.

Kottis was the supervisor

of the FBI's
threat response squad,

overseeing the Bureau's
response to terrorism threats

in New York City.

- Hi, Jimmy.
- How are you, Kristy?

- Good. It's good to see you.
- Good to see you, too.

- One of my favorite people.
- Aw.

- Um, Jimmy, tell me about your
relationship with Newburgh.

- James Gagliano
supervised SWAT operations,

a hostage rescue team,
and a mission in Afghanistan.

In 2008, he spearheaded
the Hudson Valley

Safe Streets Task Force.

- In the late '60s,

my father just returned
from Vietnam and was stationed

at the United States
Military Academy.

There wasn't enough
housing on post,

and so we found a house to buy
very close to Newburgh.

And then years after that
in 2008,

an incredible opportunity
opened up for me

to assume a position called

the supervisory senior resident
agent of a small office.

And I ended up settling
in Cornwall-on-Hudson,

which is just south
of Newburgh.

I was also doing
some recreational coaching

at St. Mary's Church
for the Newburgh Zion Lions.

I was very interested
in youth coaching,

especially basketball.

Good pass!
Good pass!

Sports had been one of the
things in the United States

that had broken down
all kinds of barriers--

you know,
color barriers especially.

And I think it's
one of the first places

where people learn to work
together for a common goal.

One, two, three.

- Work hard!
- All right.

So I fell in love
with the city,

and I've pretty much had a
love affair with it till now.

- But then something
went wrong in Newburgh.

- There'd always been
neighborhood-based gangs.

But there'd never
been national gangs

like the Bloods
and the Latin Kings,

and they had
become entrenched there.

Throughout the 1990s,
law enforcement

had great success
in clamping down

on the violent criminals
and the g*ng members

in major urban areas.

The result of this was

a proliferation of movement
from the g*ng members

to Upstate
and northern territories,

the suburbs, places like
Newburgh, New York.

The Bloods had more members.
The Latin Kings were smaller.

The major thoroughfare in
Newburgh is known as Broadway.

It separates the North End
from the South End.

The Bloods had their
stronghold north of Broadway,

the Latin Kings owned
everything to the south.

They were very,
very territorial.

And I think there was
a certain belief in Newburgh

that the federal government

would never pay attention
to them.

- They were looking
for ideas that

could help stem the
recent surge of g*ng violence

and m*rder in the city.

- I used to ask them,

"But why did you move
to Newburgh?"

They said, "Because here,
you can have a g*n

"and not get in trouble,

can sell drugs
and not get in trouble."

- Having lived up there
and having been around it,

I knew in 2008 that
the city was hemorrhaging.

It was hemorrhaging lives.

29,000 people,

and we were suffering close to
20 homicides over three years.

Per capita, that made Newburgh

the most violent city
in New York State.

- And there was agreement that
priority one has to be getting

the hardcore criminals
off the streets permanently

in order to remove
the current climate of fear.

- There was a dichotomy,
a distinction,

between where I lived
and where I worked.

The Newburgh case brought those
two things colliding together,

where all of a sudden

where I was policing
was also where I was living.

And then I had
my heart shattered.

There was a young kid
by the name of Jeffrey Zachary,

and he was a pretty good
basketball player.

He went to South Junior
High School,

a kid that made straight As,
young African American kid

that was going to
make it out of Newburgh.

Jeffrey Zachary was
the exact polar opposite

of a Newburgh Blood.

Wanted nothing to do with it.

The Latin Kings,
in an act of retribution,

because the Newburgh Bloods

had shot and k*lled
a Latin King,

decided to go hunting
for a Blood.

Well, Jeffrey Zachary
met the description for them.

He was a young
African American male.

He was shot and k*lled,
and he died

in the emergency room
right across the street

in his mother's arms.

- Jeffrey, or Frizz, as his
friends liked to call him,

was a student at
South Junior High School,

a good basketball player,

and a kid who liked
to make others laugh.

- He was a good young man.
He didn't bother nobody.

He had good marks in school.
He wasn't in the g*ng.

He didn't sell drugs.

- It gets worse.

A few years prior to that,

Jeffrey Zachary's
older brother Trent,

a member
of the Newburgh Bloods,

was also k*lled and died
in the same emergency room

in the same mother's arms.
- Oh, my God. Brutal.

- When I saw that
and I cut the obituary

out of the
"Times Herald-Record"...

- Mm-hmm.
- And I went to go see

Joe D, Joe Demarest,
who was the assistant director

in charge of the
New York office at the time.

Enough was enough.

We had to put a stop
to the k*lling

and the crime
and the intimidation.

- You know this
community intimately.

You have a plan.
What are you thinking?

- We had to have a strategy,

and so we mapped it out
across the three counties,

and we looked at where
the biggest g*ng hotspots were,

and that's where
we focused our resources.

I think a big piece of what
I saw over in Afghanistan

was the surge strategy
employed by people

like General Petraeus
and General McChrystal

in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You're not going to
crush the insurgency

unless you commit
additional resources.

And I'm not comparing law
enforcement to the military,

but we were constantly
playing a reactive game.

We were not in charge.
I wanted to be proactive.

And to do that,

we had to get out of
the whack-a-mole scene, right?

Oh, there's one there.
Boom.

Let's get the--OK,
now another one pops up.

Boom. Let's get the--oh,
let's go over there.

Let's get that one.

The terminology
in the FBI at the time

was disruption
and dismantlement.

We wanted to disrupt the gangs.

That's easy to do, make a few
arrests, it disrupts them.

We wanted to dismantle them.

I wanted to try to
put together a case

where the young soldiers in
the Latin Kings and the Bloods,

the ones that were
selling the dope,

doing the extortions,
doing the assaults,

doing the murders,

that we would be able
to bring this up

to the people at the top.

And the people on the
top of the Bloods was

a guy by the name of
Anthony Double O,

which was his nickname,
Boykin,

and for the Latin Kings
was Wilson "King Gunz" Pagan.

And so that's how it started.

- You know the people,
the players, the landscape.

What's your plan?

How do you go
about bringing down

not just one g*ng, but two?

- Well, I'd spent
part of the early '90s

working on the
Gambino crime squad,

C-16, out in Queens...
- Mm-hmm.

- When the John Gotti
case came down.

And I saw how effective RICO,

the Racketeering Influenced
Corrupt Organization Act,

was at getting to the top.

You can't go after the kingpins

if they're not
doing the shootings,

if they're not
selling the drugs.

They're not putting
their fingerprints on anything.

And yet, they're the ones
that direct it,

they're the ones that
send people out into harm's way

to commit acts of violence.

How do you get to them?

I couldn't get into the gangs

and watch them
commit a homicide,

not that I would allow it
to happen...

- Yes.

- But I couldn't watch that
and collect the evidence

and then prosecute them
for that.

I couldn't get
that type of stuff.

The only way that there
was an opportunity for us

to make inroads into
these violent street gangs

was to buy drugs off them.

- You need more than
just evidence of a crime.

You need evidence
of an organization.

- To make a RICO case,
you need two predicates.

Whether it's a m*rder,
whether it's selling crack,

whether it's assaults,
extortion...

- Shoplifting.

- Prostitution,
whatever it is, you need two.

But you also have
to prove a hierarchy,

and sometimes
that's difficult.

Now in the Latin King case,
they made it easy,

because they put together
a manifesto

every one of them kept
underneath their mattress

and it basically
outlined all the rules,

who was in charge,
who the five crowns were.

- Exactly.

- Blood's a little
bit more dicey,

but we could still get to it.

It required us
to get cooperators.

And to do that, we started
by making simple buys.

Not buy busts, but buys
of crack, and recording them.

But we didn't
arrest people at the time.

We basically started
to determine who we thought

would be our best chances
for cooperation.

- How are you using this
as leverage?

What are you saying
to these guys?

- You're looking at ten years
for this,

because you might have only
sold a few rocks of crack,

but you're part
of a bigger enterprise.

You're part of a bigger
drug distribution network,

and we're going to hang
all of the weight

that has been
sold to the Bloods on you.

In the early parts of
the narcotics conspiracy case,

we had
three cooperating witnesses

that were essential to us.

It changed the game.

One particular night,
where this kind of brought

everything together for me,

where I really looked at it
and my worlds were colliding.

I had basketball practice
that night,

I believe at 7:00 or 7:30,
at the Boys and Girls Club.

At 6:00, we were supposed
to make a buy from--

and this was actually
powder cocaine.

It's going to be
on the same street

where I'm going to be
at the Boys and Girls Club

a few hours later.

And a kid comes out
of the building

that we knew that he was--

the target was going
to be coming from.

But it wasn't the target.

He was a kid who was
working for the target,

a kid who was also a member
of the Newburgh Bloods,

and a kid that I had coached...

- Oh.
- Basketball in Newburgh.

He walks down the street,

and I had my hand over my face
like this.

And I'm like,
"It can't be him."

He gets in the car
with the undercover,

makes the exchange,
gets the money,

gets out,
goes back in the building,

has zero idea he's been made,

has zero idea his life
is now irrevocably changed.

- Jimmy, because of your
familiarity in the community

and their familiarity with you,
what about your safety factor?

Did you ever become a target?

Did they ever start
to hone in on,

hey, Coach Gagliano, he's,
like, you know, a problem?

- I'm at work
and I'm in my office,

and these two agents come in,
male and female agents.

"Double O's
put a hit out on you."

- So next thing you know,

I get a phone call
from Joe Demarest,

the assistant director
in charge

of the New York
office at the time.

And he says to me, "Jimmy,
what the hell's going on?"

I explained what happened.

He goes, "Jimmy, I got
to pull you out of there."

I said,
"What are you talking about?"

He goes,
"Got to pull you out of there."

"You're going to move me,
right?

"You're not going to move me
far away from my family,

"but you're going to move
me to another office.

You're not going to stop me
from coaching in Newburgh."

I said, "So what
you're doing is you're

"taking the g*n off my belt,

"because I go into town
every night,

"I go there every night
that I'm coaching.

"So you're going to take the
g*n off my hip during the day.

"Not going to change anything.

Joe, I'm not putting
my house on the market."

- Right.

- And so as a result of that,
you know,

I have great respect
for Mr. Demarest.

And he said,
"All right, well,

"you're being hardheaded
about this,

"but I understand
your position.

But we are going to take some
precautions at your house."

And I won't go into the
details of what they did,

but they did enough
that it satisfied

the Security Division
that I would be OK where I was.

And I went back to work.

Shortly after Double O
had put this hit out there

and made me a quote-unquote
"marked man,"

we had a bit of fortuitous
events that took place.

I am home one night watching TV
in bed and my phone goes off,

and it's a detective
in Newburgh.

"Hey boss, you'd better
come in as quickly as you can.

We got Double O."

And I said,
"What are you talking about?

We're still building
this case. What happened?"

"Boss, they collared him
with a p*stol."

And I said,
"Game, set, match."

- Yeah.
- Here we go.

And I come in
and he's sitting there.

And I walk in
and he looks at me and smiles.

And I sat down,
and our eyes met.

And I said,
"Wo we finally meet like this."

So I spent a number of hours
speaking with him.

He was a tough nut,
and he wasn't going to

open up too much
or admit to anything.

He thought that he'd be out.

He didn't understand being
arrested with an ill*gal g*n,

it was going to allow us
to have him in jail,

which took the pressure
off of me

from the hit
that had been put out,

because now he's in jail.

Couldn't tell him
what was coming.

- Right.

- Wanted to sit there and say,
"Pal, you have no idea,"

but you know,
the wrath of God is

about to come down upon
the Bloods and the Latin Kings.

- That's right.
Hell will rain down.

- Yes.

- Where are we in the case?
Are we ready to go?

When do you make that decision,

and how do you make
that decision?

- We started this,

we framed this out as
a narcotics conspiracy case.

That was our entrée.

That was our way
to get into the gangs.

- Right.
- To do this,

we were looking
at a total of 78 people.

60 Bloods were part of it,
18 Latin Kings.

Now, you know how
the FBI does it.

If we're going to arrest
one person, we send ten.

We're going to arrest 20,
we send 100.

And there's a reason for that.

We want to remove
that fight or flight mechanism

that people have.

We want them to look
at us and go,

"All right, I'm going to take
my chances in court.

"I'm not going to try
to run away,

and I'm certainly
not going to try to fight you."

- Yeah. Where are you going to
put all these people?

- I had to find a place
to do this in a city

that is a two mile by two
square mile postage stamp.

All the processing would be
done in the Newburgh Armory.

I felt that this could be
a place where I could secrete

the men, women, materiel

that I was going to need
to do this,

to do the intake.

Arresting somebody
is one thing.

Then what are you
going to do with them?

They're all going
to be processed

into the federal system.

So I had to bring
all those people,

the pretrial people,
the AUSAs, the bosses.

It just--it turned out to be
a massive,

massive congregation
or gathering of people,

500 in total.
- Wow.

You're about to bring
in 500 investigators,

law enforcement, support staff,

into the postage stamp
without being seen.

- I knew that I could
bring things in in stages.

So I had this group arrive
at 2:00 in the afternoon.

The next group come in
at 3:30.

The next group come in
at 5:30.

The next group come in
at 7:00.

And we did this
throughout the night.

- They come into the armory.
It's still dark outside.

It's 0-dark-hundred.
What are we doing?

- We call it in the FBI
putting people to bed.

Make sure that they
were in the places

that they were supposed to be.

We knew we weren't going to
have all 78 tucked into bed,

but we had a--
the vast majority of them.

- We have 78 indictments,

60 on the Blood side,
18 on the Latin King side.

We're going to give you
the best addresses.

- The people who had to go
the furthest distance

went out first.

The people that were closer
to the armory went out second.

- The places where
we've got two or three

multiple locations for hits,
we will shut those streets off.

There will be
uniformed personnel

from the city of Newburgh,
state troopers,

to help assist in that.

We'll also have
spotter teams out.

- And when you put together
a team like that,

and it comes together,
I knew the rest of it was now

let's just go get the bad guys.
- Yeah.

- No warning shots.

No sh**ting at vehicles

unless the driver is posing
an imminent threat to you.

- We wanted to make sure

there was a particular time
that we were going to do this,

and I believe these warrants
were to be hit at 0600 hours.

So at 05:59:59,

that's where I gave
the countdown over the radio.

Five...
Five, four...

Three, two...
one, execute.

Execute.
Execute.

On the day of the arrest,

we placed 78 teams out
on the street that day,

one for each of the subjects

we're attempting to locate
and apprehend.

There's no putting
the genie back in the bottle.

- No.
- The genie is out.

- OK, here we go.

- You know, when you're back
in the Ops center,

or you're back in the--
you're sitting there

and you're waiting, and
the waiting is the worst part.

- Team 14 to command post.

Yeah, team 14 has a subject in
custody, uh, without incident.

- 10-4, thank you.

- You're waiting for that
first call from an arrest team.

- Command post from team 2.

- You've got the mobile
command post, go ahead.

- We're transporting our
prisoner to the armory.

I'll give you time and mileage.

- Take me through
the inside of the armory.

As these MOPs start coming in,
how do you have that set up?

- So it was essentially
a nerve center.

I mean, that's
essentially what it was.

We already got all the vans in
from Department of Corrections

and Orange County Jail,
and they've

already started bringing the
subjects in from the streets.

And we had walked it and
game-planned it to figure out

where it made the most sense,
knowing that we were going

to have 500 personnel,
meaning 500 good guys,

in and out of that
during the course of the day.

We ended up using
the basketball court.

Are you going to be the
point of contact on this?

- Sure, why not?
- OK.

So I'm gonna need one
person assigned for them,

and then we're going to sign
them over to the marshals

at the end.

So you'll sign for all
the ones coming in.

Instead of having piecemeal,

we'll just have
one person do it.

- Thanks a million.

- You got it.

- You got it.
You can start processing 'em.

If we have overflow and
we don't have enough teams,

we'll stick them in here just
to hold on to them until then.

We just went from table one
to table two to table three.

- First to the
pedigree station,

then they go
to the fingerprint station,

then they go to the Miranda.

- We brought the marshals
to us.

And as people were
being processed,

they would be shuttled down

to the Metropolitan
Correctional Center

in Lower Manhattan,

which is where they ended up
being housed.

This has been a
long time coming.

Um, the g*ng scourge up
here has just been--it's

been endemic for years
and years and years.

And I'd say probably over
the last four or five years,

you know, Newburgh has just
been--has been a place where,

you know, gunplay and
drug dealing has just become

so rampant that people--it's
just not a safe place to be.

Obviously I wanted 78 for 78,
and that didn't happen.

I want to say that we were
somewhere in the neighborhood

of 60 or something like that.

We think there's about 160,
180 card-carrying Bloods

in the city Newburgh,
so we're effectively

taking out a third
of them today,

including
much of the hierarchy.

And on the Latin King side,
there's probably 35 or 40

folks, and we're taking out
18 of them today.

So you know,
close to half of them.

- They didn't tell you?
Drug charges.

- Drug charges?
- Yeah.

- Drug charges?

- Yeah, drug charges, man,
and federal charges,

so they're the big time, right?

So think about
what you're going to do,

because you're going to have
an opportunity upstairs.

Think about
what you're going do,

because you're looking
at big time.

I'm going to be straight up
honest with you.

Everybody on this indictment's
looking at big time.

- The two operations,
codenamed Blood Drive

and the Black Crown,

are the result of solid
police work by the task force.

Both cases, targeting members
of the Bloods

and the Latin Kings
respectively,

used time-tested techniques
like informants

and undercover drug buys,

to amass evidence
and probable cause.

- Tell me what happened.

You've got Double O,
he's in jail.

What about his counterpart
over at the Latin Kings?

- Sure. Gunz Pagan,
he refused to speak to us,

and held on to the machismo,
I think,

that a lot of, you know,

leaders of violent street gangs
have,

and ended up being arrested.

In Newburgh, the
opportunity was not there.

And the disenfranchisement,
I think,

leads to young men looking
to get their aggressions out

in a different way.

And I'd see them hanging out
on a stoop,

sitting on the steps or
on a street corner,

with some guys
that were convicted felons.

And I remember talking
to a couple of kids,

eight, nine, ten 11,
12 years old and saying,

"I don't want to see
you there on that stoop

around those guys."
- Yeah.

- Until one little kid
said to me,

"But Coach, that's my uncle
and my brother."

Yeah.

- And not realizing
the connection.

- Yeah.

- And, thinking to myself,
"Wow.

"You cannot remove them from
the situation that they're in.

"All you can do is
provide an outlet

for a couple of hours a day."

And that was a way
to put pressure on them

to stay in school
and to stay out of trouble.