The 1985 War That Let Dominican Dealers Take Over Washington Heights from the Italians – HT

 

 

 

It’s the spring of 1985 in East Harlem and a man named Fat Tony Salerno is running one of the most lucrative criminal empires in American history from a social club on Pleasant Avenue. The Genovese crime family boss oversees a heroin distribution network that has dominated New York City for decades stretching back to the legendary French Connection pipeline.

The Italian mafia controls everything from the docks where the product arrives to the cut houses where women process the powder in stifling back rooms naked from the heat weighing it into small plastic bags. On Pleasant Avenue residents don’t lock their doors. They don’t need to. This six-block stretch is so protected by the MOB that crime simply doesn’t happen here.

Local shops like Eddie the Butcher’s meat market haven’t sold a single piece of legitimate meat in 40 years. Charlie Ding-Dong’s candy store transforms into a casino every night. And the money flows upward to the five families who have controlled organized crime in New York for over half a century. But something is about to change.

And it will happen so fast that within five years Pleasant Avenue will be a ghost town and a neighborhood called Washington Heights just a few miles north will become what the New York Times calls the crack capital of America. We’d like to take a moment to ask you to subscribe if you’re enjoying this content.

We cover organized crime and gang history every week. And your subscription helps us keep making these videos. Now back to the story. To understand how the Dominican drug dealers took Washington Heights from the Italians you have to understand what happened on February 25th 1985. That morning federal prosecutors indicted nine of the most powerful mafia leaders in New York on charges of narcotics trafficking, loan sharking, gambling and labor racketeering.

This wasn’t some minor case. Prosecutors aimed to strike at all the crime families at once using their involvement in the commission the governing body of the American mafia. The case became known as the mafia commission trial and it would effectively decapitate Italian organized crime in New York. By the time the dust settled the bosses of three of the five families received sentences of 100 years each.

 Fat Tony Salerno himself got 70 years. And that December while the commission defendants awaited their fate Gambino family boss Paul Castellano was gunned down outside Sparks Steak House in Midtown Manhattan on orders from John Gotti. The Italian mafia was eating itself alive. [snorts] However, the commission trial was only part of what destroyed Italian dominance in the drug trade.

Running simultaneously was the Pizza Connection case which exposed how Sicilian and American mafiosi had smuggled over 1.65 billion dollars worth of heroin into the United States from 1979 to 1984. They had used a network of pizzerias [music] as fronts for distribution. And when the FBI finally moved in they arrested nearly 30 mafia members in a single coordinated round up.

 The trial lasted 16 grueling months. It became the longest criminal jury trial in United States history at that point. And by the time verdicts came down in March 1987 the entire infrastructure of Italian heroin distribution had been exposed [music] and dismantled. Now here’s where the Dominicans enter the picture. Washington Heights sits at the northern tip of Manhattan connected to New Jersey by the George Washington Bridge and fed by three major highways.

 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s it had been home to a mix of Jewish, Irish and Greek immigrants. But that changed dramatically in 1961 when Rafael Trujillo the brutal dictator who had ruled the Dominican Republic for 31 years was assassinated. The political upheaval that followed combined with the repressive 12-year presidency of Joaquin Balaguer sent thousands of Dominicans fleeing to America.

By the mid-1980s over 40,000 Dominicans had settled in Washington Heights, Hamilton Heights and Inwood. Many faced a desperate economic situation. The manufacturing jobs they had once occupied were disappearing rapidly throughout the 1970s and 1980s. By 1990 over 36% of Dominican New Yorkers lived in households below the poverty line more than double the citywide rate.

They were poor. They were hungry. And they were willing to do whatever it took to survive. Meanwhile in Colombia Pablo Escobar and the Medellín cartel were looking for new distribution partners in New York. The Colombians had been shipping coke and up through South Florida. But increased law enforcement pressure was forcing them to find alternative routes.

They needed middlemen who could handle wholesale distribution without drawing the kind of heat that the Italians had attracted. The Dominicans were perfect. They shared a language with the Colombian suppliers. They had a desperate population willing to take risks. And Washington Heights with its bridges and highways offered easy access not just to the rest of New York City but to New Jersey, Westchester and Connecticut as well.

There was one more factor that would transform everything. In June 1985 just months after the commission trial indictments a new drug hit the streets of New York. Crack cocaine. A Dominican dealer named Santiago Luis Polanco Rodriguez known on the streets as Yayo is credited by the DEA as being the first mass marketer of crack cocaine in the United States.

Operating from a corner at Audubon Avenue and West 174th Street in Washington Heights Yayo called his product [music] based balls and sold them in heat sealed glassine envelopes. His sellers offered discounts on weekends and distributed business cards inscribed with the phrase [music] cop and go. If you’re finding this content valuable make sure to hit that like button.

 It really helps [music] with the algorithm and lets more people discover these stories. Yayo’s operation was sophisticated in a way [music] the Italian heroin networks had never been. He organized Dominican, Jamaican and American street dealers into what prosecutors would later call a marketing empire. His hit squad was responsible for at least five slayings though there was never enough evidence to indict.

And his enterprise was a family affair. His half-brother Chicky ran operations when Yayo was in the Dominican Republic. His brother Elvis delivered stashes to street locations. Another brother Santiaguito served as a cash courier. His sister and mother counted the cash and maintained the apartments where crack was kept and produced.

 Yayo laundered his profits [music] through a wire transfer storefront in Washington Heights along with a pharmacy, a nightclub and a finance company. He hired elderly women to hand carry cash back to Santo Domingo. The DEA would later say he was perhaps the richest Dominican drug kingpin in the United States but Yayo was [music] just the beginning.

By the late 1980s a new crew had emerged that would take Dominican drug dealing to unprecedented levels of violence. They called themselves the Wild Cowboys and they formed from a group of friends who had attended George Washington High School together in Washington Heights. Most were immigrants or descendants from the Dominican Republic and they were about to become the most notorious drug dealing gang in New York City history.

The Wild Cowboys were led by the Sepulveda brothers, Lenny and Nelson. They called their product Red Top, named after the color of the caps on their crack vials and their rise [music] was meteoric. Eventually, the Wild Cowboys controlled entire blocks in Washington Heights >> [music] >> and the South Bronx. They virtually owned buildings near St.

Ann’s Park in the Bronx and throughout the West 170s between Broadway and Amsterdam, what had become the epicenter of cocaine distribution for the entire Eastern Seaboard. The Wild Cowboys generated an estimated $16 million annually through sales in the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. But what set them apart from even the most violent Italian mobsters was their willingness to use extreme force against anyone who opposed them.

The gang routinely pistol-whipped their own workers. They murdered rivals without hesitation. They shot or slashed witnesses to their crimes. When someone owed them money or crossed them in any way, the response was swift and brutal. On December the 16th, 1991, in an incident that became known as the Quad Murders, Nelson Sepulveda and three others rolled up on Beekman Avenue in the Bronx with semi-automatic weapons.

They indiscriminately sprayed 60 bullets into an alleyway controlled by a rival gang called Yellow Top, killing four people and wounding one. At one time, you couldn’t walk down a street in Washington Heights or the South Bronx without feeling the Wild Cowboys’ impact. Not even the cops were safe at their headquarters on the corner of West 174th and Audubon Avenue.

The body count in Washington Heights during this era is staggering. In 1990, the 34th Precinct, the sole police department covering the area, reported a total of 10,027 crimes in just over 3 square miles of land. 103 of those crimes were murders. 1,130 were felony assaults. 1,919 were robberies. [music] 2,647 were burglaries.

On October 18, 1988, a 24-year-old officer named Michael Buczek was shot in the chest while chasing three Dominican drug dealers he and his partner had approached on 161st Street. He died leaving behind a wife. The suspects fled to the Dominican Republic and weren’t captured for years. The police were stretched impossibly thin.

 The 34th Precinct covered too much territory with too few officers and the Dominican dealers knew it. They sold crack openly on street corners meeting customers in apartment building lobbies while children tried to get to school. The neighborhood became so crime-ridden that parents wouldn’t let their kids play in their own hallways. Then came July 3rd, 1992.

A plainclothes officer named Michael O’Keefe, known for being aggressive with neighborhood drug dealers, shot and killed a 23-year-old named Jose Kiko Garcia in the lobby of an apartment building on West 162nd Street. O’Keefe said Garcia had a gun. The neighborhood exploded. What followed were some of the worst riots New York City had seen in years.

 Cars were overturned. Stores were looted. Fires were started throughout Washington Heights. The police from the 34th Precinct stood by on orders not to intervene watching the chaos unfold. The tension between the predominantly Hispanic community and American cops had reached a breaking point. By this time, the Italian Mafia’s presence in Upper Manhattan was effectively gone.

Pleasant Avenue, once the untouchable heart of Italian organized crime, had become a shadow of its former self. The old mobsters were in prison or dead. Their heroin networks had been dismantled and a new generation of Dominican drug dealers had filled the vacuum with a product that was even more addictive and even more profitable.

Subscribe to the channel if you want to see more content like this. We’ve got plenty more gang and Mafia stories coming your way. In 1993, 35 Wild Cowboys members were indicted on charges including 10 murders, drug conspiracy, and witness tampering. The investigation had taken years as detectives single-mindedly pursued dead-end leads, side-stepped competing units within the police bureaucracy, and parlayed fragments of accurate information to piece together the gangs’ activities.

By 1995, after an 8-month trial with testimony from 76 witnesses including a key turncoat gang member, nine leaders were convicted. Lenny Sepulveda received a sentence that would keep him behind bars for decades. Over 40 members were ultimately imprisoned. The Wild Cowboys were effectively dismantled. But the damage had already been done.

Washington Heights had been transformed from a quiet immigrant neighborhood into the wholesale drug market for the entire Northeast. Other Dominican gangs immediately filled the void left by the Wild Cowboys. The Jerry Curls operated a major cocaine trafficking operation out of an apartment complex on West 157th Street.

Trinitarios and Dominicans Don’t Play emerged as the next generation of Dominican organized crime. In 1994, after years of advocacy from residents who had watched their neighborhood descend into chaos, the NYPD finally split the overwhelmed 34th Precinct to create the 33rd Precinct for Washington Heights south of 179th Street.

Within just 1 year of the new precinct’s creation, the number of crimes dropped to under 60% of what it had been 5 years prior. By 1998, neighbors were finally taking the plunge by striking up conversations with strangers next door, something that would have been unthinkable just years earlier. Children were finally learning to ride bikes in the streets.

But the scars remained. Hundreds of people in Washington Heights were still recovering from some trauma of the [music] drug war era. Some still heard the screams of victims in their nightmares. Others remembered running for cover as friends were gunned down by rival dealers. Today, Washington Heights has transformed dramatically.

The 33rd and 34th Precincts reported just 2,090 total crimes in 2010 with only eight murders compared to the 103 reported two decades earlier. The drug wars are more or less over for the neighborhood. However, the Dominican organized crime networks that emerged during the 1985 power shift continue to operate. Not just in New York, but across the United States and beyond.

In 54 Eastern US cities, authorities report Dominican gang activities. Trinitarios are now the largest Dominican gang with DDP close behind. Both groups trace their roots directly back to the crack [music] era takeover of Washington Heights. The 1985 war wasn’t really a war in the traditional sense. There was no direct conflict between Italian and Dominican gangs fighting over territory.

Instead, it was a transfer of power created by a perfect storm of circumstances. The federal government decapitated Italian organized crime leadership through the Commission Trial  and Pizza Connection prosecutions. Colombian cartels found willing partners in desperate Dominican immigrants.

 And crack cocaine created a drug market so lucrative and so chaotic that traditional organized crime structures couldn’t compete. The Italians had built their empire on heroin, controlled distribution, and connections with corrupt officials that took decades to establish. The Dominicans built theirs on crack, street-level warfare, and a willingness to use violence that shocked  even hardened mobsters.

Fat [snorts] Tony Salerno died in prison in 1992, never seeing the streets of Pleasant Avenue again. The social club, where he once ran his empire, is long gone. But the corner of West 174th and Audubon Avenue, where Yayo first sold his based balls and the Wild Cowboys later built their drug empire, remains one of the most significant locations in the history of American organized crime.

It’s where the old guard finally lost control, and where a new era of street-level warfare began. If you made it this far, you’re clearly invested in these stories. Make sure to subscribe and hit the notification bell, so you don’t miss our next video on organized crime history.