Billy White was wearing bulletproof Kevlar, a jacket with the word "POLICE" printed on the back, and jeans. His piece was a Glock, a nine-millimeter pistol—New Haven Police Department standard issue. Around him, in the cavernous room, hundreds of other men sported similar attire: bulletproof vests, jackets marked FBI, DEA, or ATF, and police-issued weapons. Some were patrolmen, wearing police uniforms, while others were undercover. Around him, White recognized state troopers, special agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), deputies from the U.S. Marshal's office, FBI special agents, and other police detectives like himself. There were anti-narcotics case agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and intelligence officers from the West Haven, East Haven, Hamden, and New Haven police departments. White looked around. These were his people, his soldiers, the ones who would be by his side on the front lines. This was the New Haven Drug Gang Task Force, and Lieutenant Billy White was in charge of it.
It was 3 a.m. on September 28, 1995, and most of the men had been up since the morning before. But none of them would sleep that night either. They had a big day ahead of them. Hours earlier, White had been in his office, writing out paperwork and preparing warrants. Meanwhile, Tweed-New Haven Airport had quietly filled with federal agents, flying in from New York and Washington, DC. They had then rendezvoused at the southwestern corner of the city to talk strategy. The team's field headquarters that night would be Coxe Cage, a warehouse of a building conveniently tucked away in Yale's athletic fields on the very edge of town. The 300-man coalition of feds, state police, and local police had gathered to discuss the next step in the war on drugs.
White listened as his friend Kevin Kline, an FBI special agent and one of the original members of the task force, delivered a rallying speech to the law enforcement army that had assembled. Kline laid out the battle plan for the morning's drug bust: the agents were to organize themselves into tactical squads, forming arrest teams and back-up crews. The teams assigned to carry out raids received arrest packets containing the names, addresses, and photographs of each suspect, as well as search warrants authorized in federal court. At 5:30 a.m., the teams were to split up, each reporting to their designated arrest sites in New Haven, East Haven, West Haven, North Haven, and Branford to prepare for the final phase of the operation: making the arrests.
As he listened, White asked himself the same question that everyone else in the room must have been thinking. Could the team could pull off a successful bust? Born and raised in New Haven, White still remembered a time when New Haven was considered a peaceful town. "This used to be a great city," says White. In 1960, only six murders, four rapes, and 16 robberies were reported. But soon, the drug gangs set up shop, and the turf wars began. With the gangs came gang violence: drive-by shootings, innocent victims killed, murders in broad daylight. By 1990, there were 31 murders, 168 rapes, and 1,784 robberies. In 1991, a gang member shot and killed Christian Prince, a Yale student, as he was leaving a campus church. Gangs sprayed bullets at schoolbuses; they would later kill a six-year-old girl, mistaking her parents' car for that of a rival gang. In 1991, half of the homicides reported in the city were the result of gang violence. In the early 1990s, White was a patrol sergeant. "Back then it was hell," he recalls. "I thought, 'What are we doing?'"
The situation seemed hopeless for New Haven, and it didn't look as if help was on the way. In Washington, DC, the White House was losing its own war on drugs. Despite the Republican administration's intensifying counterattacks, the government's efforts failed to make a dent in the supply on the streets. Law enforcement agencies tried everything: they deployed military forces equipped with superior hardware, increased federal drug seizures tenfold, and began to exert diplomatic pressure on drug-supplying countries to curtail drug production. Border controls were tightened. But none of this seemed to have an effect on the tide of drugs flowing in. The supply of drugs kept increasing, and drug seizures that had always been measured in grams and pounds were now measured in tons. By the early 1990s, the physical proliferation of street drugs was so endemic that random laboratory tests showed that almost every U.S. bill in circulation bore trace amounts of cocaine.
In New Haven, residents feared for their lives. Gangs were terrorizing the city, but at the time, the police chief would not acknowledge that gangs even existed in New Haven. Says White, "Maybe he didn't know we had a gang problem. I knew we had a gang problem." The transactional crime-fighting techniques used by the local police were not working. Sting operations where police bought drugs or guns on the street and then arrested members low in the gang hierarchy had little impact because small-time dealers did not have much control of the market. Street level dealerships were easy to replace, requiring little money, influence, and firepower, so arresting street runners merely created vacancies for eager new dealers to move in. "They were in, they were out, they were back on the streets," recalls White. "We were banging our heads against the wall."
The New Haven Police Department (NHPD) did the only thing it could do: it asked for help. Past attempts to coordinate federal and local authorities had failed as inter-agency cooperation degenerated into clashing egos and competition over who was in charge; but now, the federal agencies responded. A meeting was called between federal law enforcement agencies and the NHPD. The New Haven Drug Gang Task Force was born.
Task force members soon realized that involving federal agencies in the anti-gang offensive had distinct advantages. The feds were much better equipped to finance large-scale operations and invest the necessary time and expertise to achieve the "takedown" of the drug gangs. Members of the task force knew that to shut down the gang leadership, federal prosecutors needed powerful laws, since many gang bosses seemed above the law. Some had never actually pulled the trigger or sold drugs on the streets themselves, choosing instead to control their operations by sending orders down and waiting for money to flow up. The task force began to target drug gangs systematically, beginning in 1992 with a narcotics street gang known as the Jungle Boys, which had been identified as the most violent gang in the area. To dismantle the leadership of the Jungle Boys and other criminal networks, federal investigators in New Haven rapidly became experts at going after racketeering indictments using a set of federal statutes known as the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Originally enacted in 1970 to fight the Mafia, RICO empowered New Haven law enforcement agents to prosecute the Jungle Boys as part of a "continuing criminal enterprise." For example, if prosecutors can show that a Jungle Boys kingpin gave the order for a murder, the leader can be charged even though he may never have left his living room. "We take down the hierarchy as part of the general conspiracy," explains Robert Grispino, a supervisory special agent with the FBI in New Haven. "John Gotti ordered the hit. He didn't pull the trigger, but the guy's still dead. John Gotti now has a murder count as part of his conspiracy."
Under the RICO statutes, law enforcement agents gained an arsenal of powerful tools against organized crime. In the anti-gang initiative, detectives had access to investigative grand jury subpoenas, obtaining court-authorized wiretaps—or Title IIIs—to build evidence without alerting the suspects. With permission to use government surveillance to eavesdrop on a suspect's phone line, criminals were damned by their own words, says Merrill Parks, the special agent in charge of the FBI Post of Duty in New Haven. "It's amazing how some of these people can come to court and talk like complete altar boys," says Parks. "But on the street they're saying, 'Kill the motherfucker!'"
Besides wiretaps, evidence was gathered through informants (witnesses who give tips but choose not to testify in court) and cooperating witnesses (civilians who go undercover and use marked government money to buy drugs, then later appear in court with an audio tape of the transaction). To keep career criminals behind bars, federal sentences are much more severe than those in state courts. Once prosecutors demonstrated that violent crimes were committed in aid of racketeering, convictions that might have meant a suspended sentence in state courts often carried decades-long terms. The Jungle Boys, and later, the Island Brothers, the Wild Wild West, the 'Ville, the Latin Kings, and Los Solidos all faced RICO charges. Federal prisons have enough space to guarantee that most of the life sentences are served in full. When the Jungle Boys were arrested, "they thought it was the same old stuff again," recalls White. "They were saying, 'Ah, we'll be out in an hour, call the bondsman.'" Then the marshal arrived and explained their situation. "They realized they weren't going to state court, they were going to federal court," says White. "That took a little wind out of their sails." The Jungle Boys pleaded guilty and are now serving life sentences.
Federal statutes provide powerful methods both for convicting violent criminals and for making sure that they are permanently removed from society. But federal agents could not perform their duty without the intelligence and contacts provided by local police. Local authorities carry out the bulk of field investigations—walking the beats, patrolling neighborhoods in police cruisers, maintaining contact with informants on the street, and gathering intelligence. Typically, New Haven cops were the ones who identified gang members to be targeted by the task force. And White was one of the best cops in the city. A 29-year veteran of the police force, White had participated in hundreds of drug busts. He was the kind of cop that other police officers looked to for leadership. He looks like the kind of guy you don't want to see if you're a drug dealer. With classic tough-guy elegance, his hair combed back into a pony tail, sporting jeans and a wry smile, he talks in a slangy, streetwise way about "goin' after the bad guys." On the force, White had a reputation for being one of the most dedicated police detectives the town had ever seen, the kind of cop who was "out there" all the time, tracking suspects, orchestrating photographed buys, often putting in 24-hour days.
Based on his experience, White knew that in an operation as complex as a drug raid, timing is everything. That means knowing exactly when to stop gathering evidence and start making arrests. If authorities strike too soon, U.S. attorneys may not have enough evidence to convict, and years of undercover work go to waste. If they wait too long, the chances increase that their cover will be blown. Once a date for a raid has been set, timing becomes even more critical. Agents have to stay out of sight. If they reveal themselves too soon, suspects have the chance to hide in their homes, to flee, or worse, to arm themselves. The participating agencies try to choreograph their efforts so that every suspect gets a knock on the door at the same time. Delays between arrests allow suspects time to tip each other off by phone, and that means arresting agents arrive at empty houses. Even a perfectly synchronized raid can end in disaster. Drug gangs in New Haven have been known to carry Mac-10s, M-16s, and AK-47 automatic assault rifles. As a result, the most common incident is the plain, old-fashioned shoot-out. To date, no New Haven officers have been killed in raids, but in 1994 an officer was badly wounded. The task force was carrying out a drug raid on an after-hours club when someone inside opened fire, hitting Officer Reginald Sutton in the chest. He owes his life to his bulletproof vest.
As Sutton could testify, New Haven's criminals were well-armed. And while the legal arsenal provided by federal racketeering laws made it easier to hold defendants in jail without bail once they had been arrested, many of them were still on the street. Merrill Parks, of the New Haven FBI, believes that members of violent narcotics gangs are past the point of no return. Gang members today, he says, grow up with a system of values that rewards violence. Parks recalls a gang member in Washington, DC, who had killed 19 people by the time he was 20 years old. One of his victims was an elderly woman who had bumped into him crossing the street. He shot her in the head with a nine-millimeter pistol. Says Parks, "These people are growing up with the cultural values of a predator."
This point was driven home for White one day in 1994. Billy White's oldest son, Tyler, was 22. He had graduated from Wilbur Cross University, where he played football, and was working as an orderly at a hospital. On the night of May 13, 1994, he met up with a young man named Arosmo "Ra Ra" Diaz, and the two went to a bar in New Haven. They left the bar some time later to go to a party in Bridgeport. Early the next morning, Tyler's body was found in his car with two gunshot wounds to the head. Near the car was the bullet-ridden body of Diaz. Police believe that Diaz was suspected by the Latin Kings of being a police informant—a snitch. A godfather of the gang had ordered his death. Arosmo was the intended target, and Tyler was killed because he was in the car with him. Presumably, the murderers didn't want to leave a living witness. Three members of the Latin Kings were charged with racketeering and murder.
White attended their trial in Bridgeport and listened as recordings were played of a conversation between two of the defendants, obtained from government surveillance. One particularly incriminating conversation probably clinched the guilty verdict when it was played in court: "Yo, we fucked up." "Why?" "Yo, now I know the man was a snitch." "How do you know?" "You know the one that was with them? He was a cop's son." All three defendants were convicted and are now serving life sentences in federal prison without the possibility of parole. They will be in prison until the day they die.
After the death of his son, White continued to head the Drug Gang Task Force. The task force took the criminal enterprise strategy one step further. Just as the RICO statute allowed police to dismantle the chain of command within the hierarchy of a drug gang, the task force now sought to take down the next level in the drug gang pyramid. The Latin Kings and the Jungle Boys were low-level distributors, that is, street dealers. The street dealers were getting their drugs from somewhere, and when police intelligence suggested that the source was local, the NHPD decided that cutting off the lifeblood of the New Haven gangs might prevent them from coming back. The thinking behind this move was the same as the strategy for waging the war on drugs everywhere, from inner-city street gangs to international cartels. Drugs don't go directly from the farms in South America into a drug user's vein: they make stops along the way. At each of these stops, the drugs change hands, going through smaller and smaller suppliers until they reach street distribution networks in U.S. cities. This is what police mean when they talk about different "levels" of dealership. The higher a dealer is on the drug distribution ladder, the more valuable the arrest is to the police. This principle holds true all the way up to the Colombian drug lords, such as the multibillionaire kingpins of the notorious Cali cocaine cartel, whose drug empire supplies 85 percent of drugs in America, and grosses about $7 billion per year in U.S. profits alone.
In 1993, NHPD already knew about a local crack dealer named Sal Bova. Rather than arresting Bova right away, police waited to see who his supplier was. They watched him sell drugs to a cocaine-runner from Queens, then arrested them both. The supplier, it turned out, was Diego Alexander Holguin—a Colombian national. When the police searched him, they turned up three items of interest: eight ounces of cocaine, $12,000 in cash, and a scrap of paper. The scrap of paper had a telephone number scribbled on it. Police traced the number, eventually netting a goldmine of incriminating material: an address book of dealers and suppliers. Police stepped up surveillance, using court-authorized wiretaps to tap the phone lines of suspected suppliers. Things proceeded without too many surprises until police traced calls to Cali, Colombia's cocaine capital.
FBI Special Agent Robert Grispino explains, "As the New Haven case developed, they identified Colombians—actual real live guys from Colombia, part of the cartel, who were distributing cocaine to the different areas." According to DEA head Thomas Constantine, the Cali cartel is "bigger than the Mafia in the U.S. ever was." In his words, the Cali cartel is "the biggest organized-crime syndicate there has ever been." Realizing that they had stumbled onto one of history's largest crime syndicates right in their own town, the task force turned up the heat, sending officers in to pose as drug buyers. Using marked government money, undercover agents bought cocaine and heroin. It became clear the Fair Haven ring was a big supplier, probably supplying to many local gangs. Over the summer, the task force had secretly indicted 32 people, and now it was finally time to act on the warrants.
At exactly 6 a.m., the task force executed a coordinated sweep, simultaneously arresting 29 out of the 32 people indicted. The arrests in the New Haven area all proceeded without incident. Afterwards, FBI special agent Robert Grispino was struck by the intensity of the emotion displayed. "It was quite a sight," he told reporters. "With some of the New Haven cops, there were tears in their eyes." Billy White, of course, was among them. "We got some big fish, too, guys that handled multi, multi, multi kilos," says White. "That was the biggest one we've ever done." Of the 29 arrested, about 13 were Colombian citizens. The task force had successfully apprehended many of the importers and distributors that had connections with source companies. "The core organization that they arrested here in New Haven had direct connections with Miami, San Juan, and Cali," says Grispino. "And that's proven."
Meanwhile, the entire Cali cartel leadership has been apprehended by an elite Colombian police squad. In the past year, eight of the top nine Cali drug lords have given themselves up to Colombian authorities or been killed in gunfights with police. Today, New Haven residents are once again venturing out into the streets. The neighborhoods feel safer. In fact, the task force's operations have proven to be so successful that they have attracted national attention. DEA Director Thomas Constantine touts New Haven as an example of the good that the war on drugs is doing on a community level by helping to "clean up the streets." In a recent White House news conference, Attorney General Janet Reno talked about the success of the war on drugs, citing the pilot program in New Haven, and pledging to "repeat New Haven's success across the nation." As for Billy White and his team, they continue to do what they have always done. "I think eventually we can win the war on drugs," says White. "I'll probably be gone by then. But I think someday, we'll work our way out of a job, and there won't be any more gangs left in this city."