Jheri Curl Gang
Written by Rhakeem Harris
Based
on an article written by Felix Gillette published in the Village Voice.
During the early 90’s there was a gang that was running the streets of
New York. Even though we are talking about the early 90’s and by this
point Jerri Curls were already played out. It was a notorious claim to
fame and form of notoriety. But to make the story even better these guys
were not Moreno (black). They were Dominicans. They terrorized the
streets of New York. The leader of the gang was Rafael Martinez.
For
the time period these dudes was balling driving gold-painted cars. From
a distance you would have thought these guys were straight out of
Compton. However quite the contrary these dudes was killing the N.Y.C
streets with a vengeance. This dude was so wild Martinez’s girlfriend
one time made fun of his limp. And for payback Martinez shot his own
chick, his main squeeze in the knee cap. Now’s that’s how you show
someone you love them. But it also shows you how brutal he could be.
Others
who attempted to cross him were less fortunate. A retired social worker
named Jose Reyes attempted to intervene and tell Martinez how he felt
about him selling drugs out of his building. That was one of the last
courageous things he would do in his life. He got one to the dome.
These
cats were getting it. They were pulling in several millions dollars a
year in cocaine sales. But if you think they was shitting where they eat
that was not the case. They did not live in the heights in Manhattan
where most of their dirt took place. They lived in a posh spread in
Queens NY where they could be viewed as normal law abiding citizens.
One
day making a run from Queens to Manhattan. Martinez’s little brother
Lorenzo got popped. They had a James Bond type of compartment in there
whips. Bust what you had to do to get to the stash. You had to turn the
car lights on. Press the brake pedal. Connect two points under the dash
board with a coin. Then and only then would the compartments unlock on
either side of the back seat. These dudes were way ahead of their time.
Not saying others were not doing it. Because they were. But you must
admit it was ingenious.
But to no avail the cops seemed to
always be a step ahead of them. The cops bagged up $22,500 in cash, a
fully loaded .45-caliber automatic gun,and aloaded .44-caliber revolver,
and 20 or so rounds of ammunition.
Two of the
apartments in that building, like Lorenzo’s ride, had supposedly been
outfitted with all sorts of James Bond trickery, including secret
trapdoors that concealed stashes of guns, drugs, and money. But the
setup protected their business operations from the vicissitudes of the
street. It was a buffer, with an elevator and a lobby.
The
arrangement was much less ideal for the other tenants of the building,
who found themselves surrounded, day and night, by coke-slinging Jheri
Curls. One resident later told reporters: “It was like open house here.
The gang was the doorman of the building.”
At the time, most
of the residents adapted to the Jheri Curls by learning to treat them as
one might treat a doorman—that is, with every outward show of respect,
plus a touch of aloofness. It was a trick that everyone in the building
seemed to learn, except for Jose Reyes.
A retired social
worker who lived on the fifth floor, Reyes didn’t take to cowering in
the face of the Jheri Curls, several survivors of the era recently told
the Voice. In the spring of 1991, a few months before Lorenzo
Martinez’s arrest at the bridge, Reyes confronted several members of the
gang.
Not long after the argument, someone broke into Reyes’s
apartment while he was out. Depending on who is telling the story, the
intruders either left a death threat for Reyes in the form of a letter
or they left a death threat scrawled on the apartment floor in black
paint. Either way, it wasn’t an idle warning.
A few days
later, Reyes went out to run some errands on Broadway. Late in the
afternoon, according to court documents, he walked out of a doughnut
shop and began strolling up Broadway. As he passed a television store, a
thin man in a striped polo shirt approached Reyes from behind and fired
a single shot into the side of his head. Reyes crumpled to the
pavement, dead. In the meantime, the news ricocheted around the
neighborhood, along with the usual murmurs: Don’t meddle.
Pauline Turner watched as the police robot rolled through the long, barren courtyard, approaching her building.
It was the early ’90s, and Turner was living on the second floor of the Jheri Curls’ building at 614 West 157th Street.
From her window, she looked at the robot in disbelief. “There were
ambulances and police cars,” recalled Turner. “Here comes this robot. I
said, ‘What is this?’ I still don’t know. Nobody told us anything. I
find out the next day that there was supposed to be a bomb in the
elevator shaft.”
Some 15 years later, Turner, now 85, widowed,
and retired, still lives in the same apartment she moved into with her
husband in the early ’60s. Back then, Turner explains, most of the
building, like the surrounding neighborhood, was Jewish. Turner and her
husband were one of the first black families to make the building their
home.
Over the next 40 years, Turner watched as whites gave
way to black people, blacks gave way to Dominicans, and Dominicans gave
way to Central Americans. Now the neighborhood is slowly turning white
again.
What was the building like back in the early ’90s when
the Jheri Curls moved in? To hear Turner tell it, living next door to
the drug dealers wasn’t all that much different from living next door to
anybody else. Just another group passing by in the halls. Plus the
occasional bomb-sniffing robot. Plus the occasional shooting.
“They were quiet,” said Turner. “I would be coming up the steps, they would help with my groceries. Very well-dressed people.”
What
annoyed Turner about the occasional outbursts of mayhem was the lack of
communication about it from the police. Exhibit A: the murder in the
lobby of a man thought to be a gang member.
“From
my window, I could see something in the lobby,” recalled Turner. “I
didn’t know what it was until later they told me that the man had been
shot. We never were told who was shot. We never were told who shot him.
Police don’t tell you anything.”
But Jose Reyes wasn’t
tight-lipped. “He was quite talkative and in people’s business and all,”
Turner recalled. “And he did the wrong thing.”
Even
now, in 2006, Turner is reticent to talk about the era of the Jheri
Curls. “You know better than to get into that,” she said. “That’s what
happened to Reyes. He got into that, and you see what happened?”
At
the time of the Jheri Curls’ infestation, Cassandra Lewis was a
schoolteacher in charge of the building’s tenants’ association. Now
retired, she still lives in the building. Like other residents, Lewis
watched her once elegant building descend into disorder. Back in the
’60s, the foyer was well kept and comfortable. Then the furniture
disappeared. Then the rugs. Then the chandelier. By the time the Jheri
Curls moved in, there weren’t even locks on the building’s front door.
Not
that Lewis had a personal problem with her new neighbors. “Many things
went on, but none went on openly in the building,” recalled Lewis. “They
were very polite. Whatever they did was in their apartment. They minded
their business, and you minded yours.”
Except,
of course, for Jose Reyes. Lewis said she tried to convince Reyes not
to confront the gangsters. “Jose was very outspoken,” said Lewis. “He
had his faults, like we all do. You have to be subtle. I would tell him,
‘Something not too nice is going on in this building, but you have to
be subtle.’ ”
By all accounts, subtle wasn’t Reyes’s style.
Lewis said she and Reyes once worked together for the city’s welfare
department. Lewis knew her neighbor and co-worker to be the crusading
type. And it worried her.
“Working as closely as we did, I
knew his personality,” recalled Lewis. “I knew how he would get himself
involved in things and he shouldn’t have—not that he shouldn’t have, but
you learn to see and not see.”
Now retired
from the NYPD, James Gilmore thinks back to the days when the Jheri
Curls cruised up and down West 157th Street in gold-painted Mercedeses
and Jeeps and recalls the death threats they left for him back at the
34th Precinct or the charred corpse that cops found on a nearby rooftop
or the automatic-weapon fire the Jheri Curls sometimes sprayed into the
air. That era makes him think about Hurricane Katrina.
“The
people there were always great people,” said Gilmore of the block’s
residents. “It was more like we, society, had failed them. Sort of like
the way Katrina made you realize things were being neglected.”
That
neglect took myriad forms at the time: run-down housing, bad sanitation
service, flagrant drug dealing, prostitution, and—all too often,
according to Gilmore—poor police work.
“It’s like these
residents didn’t have any value, in the way that the department related
to that area at that time,” said Gilmore.
During the late ’80s
and early ’90s, before their subsequent relocation down the block, the
Jheri Curls were running their operations out of an apartment house at 550 West 157th Street—a
10-story building east of Broadway, just inside the boundaries of
Gilmore’s beat. The gang had set up shop in two of the building’s
apartments.
“People were afraid of them—the other drug dealers
were afraid of them,” recalled Gilmore. “They had a reputation that if
you crossed them, or whatever else, you would be taken out. The
residents in there were petrified about speaking about them.”
Rather
than charging headlong into 550, Gilmore first labored to win over the
trust of the neighbors. He says he helped them with housing problems,
took their kids to ball games, explained how to better navigate the
city’s social services. “You could meet people and address their housing
and youth issues,” said Gilmore, “and then you could deal with the drug
issues later.”
Over time, Gilmore said, he set up a system
for the tenants in 550 to report in secret on the comings and goings of
the Jheri Curls. By the summer of 1990, Gilmore’s efforts were starting
to pay off. In July, according to prosecutors, the police raided an
apartment there and found two guns and more than 12 ounces of cocaine. A
few months later, another raid turned up another four ounces. “At 550,
we had a fighting plan,” recalled Gilmore. “We had ways of reporting
stuff. I had people in the building taking pictures of [the Jheri Curls]
doing different things. They could do it anonymously without the risk
of getting hurt.”
In September 1990, perhaps because of the
mounting pressure, the Jheri Curls began shifting their operations down
the block to the U-shaped apartment building at 614 West 157th. As it happened, the Jheri Curls’ new headquarters fell just outside of Gilmore’s beat, which ended at Broadway.
As a result, the residents of 614 would have to learn to deal with their new curly-haired neighbors all by themselves.
“When
those guys hit up that building, that building hadn’t yet built up the
resistance and different techniques which are necessary when you’re
invaded in that way,” says Gilmore. “I’ll be honest with you, those
things take time, energy, and an investment that’s usually not done by
the police department.”
Thus a shroud of silence fell over 614. According to a 1994 American Spectator article
about the Jheri Curls that followed Reyes’s highly publicized murder,
there was nobody in the building who would talk to the police. And
according to court documents, at that point the majority of the police
work at 614 had moved undercover. The investigation into the Jheri Curls
gang was ongoing, yet it was also a closely held secret. The silence
between the residents and the police was reciprocal and ran deep.
At
the time, Robert Jackall, a sociology professor at Williams College,
was working on a book about the Wild Cowboys, another Dominican street
gang in Washington Heights. During his research, Jackall tagged along
with various police officers as they rolled through the streets of upper
Manhattan. Seeing but not seeing, recalled Jackall, was a strategy not
just for the residents of the Jheri Curls building, but also for the
entire neighborhood.
“Snitches get stitches,”
said Jackall. “That was the maxim. You never stuck your nose in other
people’s business. Ever. And if you found yourself caught there
accidentally, you made sure that other people would not cause any
problems.”
At the time, due to the thriving cocaine trade in
the area, federal agents used to call Washington Heights “Miami on the
Hudson.” Local cops, who struggled to get neighborhood witnesses to talk
about crimes they had seen, had another nickname for the Fort
Washington section of Washington Heights. They called it “Fort ‘Yo No
Sé’ ” —”Fort ‘I Don’t Know.’ ”
During the salad
days of the Jheri Curls gang, Rafael Martinez managed to invest a heap
of savings in the Dominican Republic. The nest egg, prosecutors said,
included three houses, a gas station, and two trucks. But Martinez never
made it back to the Dominican Republic. Instead, in October 1991, five
months after the murder of Jose Reyes, the state of New York threw
Martinez a going-away party of sorts.
They
arrested Martinez along with his brothers and some 20 other members of
the Jheri Curls gang. The indictments, on numerous charges, were based
in large part on the work of James Gilmore and the members of the High
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force—a tag-team effort between the
NYPD and the district attorney’s office.
At a news conference
the day of the arrests, District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau invoked
the murder of Jose Reyes and accused the Jheri Curls of carrying out the
shooting.
During the subsequent trial, the Jheri Curls came
unraveled, testifying against one another. Assistant District Attorney
Fernando Camacho had little trouble convincing the jury of their guilt.
And Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder (who later ran against Morgenthau for
D.A.) had little trouble handing out stiff sentence after stiff
sentence. The murder of Jose Reyes, however, never resulted in a
conviction. Lorenzo Martinez and a Jheri Curls member named Roberto
Gonzalez were eventually acquitted of the crime (but were convicted of
other crimes related to their involvement with the Curls).
Nevertheless,
the rigorous prosecution of the Jheri Curls and later of the Wild
Cowboys andYoung Talented Children gangs, eventually helped snuff out
Dominican gangdom in New York, according to Jackall. In the mid ’90s,
just as reports of Dominican gangs in New York began dwindling, stories
about the arrival of Dominican gangs began popping up in places like
Hartford, Connecticut, said Jackall. In other words, the Dominican gangs
eventually did what countless other aging groups have done in New York
as they grew older, became more established, or just plain got sick of
the hassles of the city: They moved to Connecticut.
Or
like Rafael Martinez, they relocated to jail cells in upstate New York.
A few weeks ago, Martinez returned to the city of his youth. On a
rainy, Tuesday afternoon, in mid May, he strolled into a courtroom in
Lower Manhattan, his hands shackled behind his back. He was dressed in a
gray suit with white pinstripes. His face was clean shaven and his hair
was closely cropped. As a guard escorted him across the room, he smiled
at his friends and family members, including his mom and two of his
teenage sons, who were gathered in the gallery’s wood pews. They smiled
back.
The guard unlocked his handcuffs, and Rafael Martinez,
now 38, took a seat facing the judge. To his left sat his brothers,
Lorenzo, now 33, and Cesar, 39. They, too, were fresh out of handcuffs
and looking well scrubbed: three Martinez brothers, and not a single
jheri curl among them.
All three addressed
the court. At one point, Cesar disputed his convictions and noted that
during his original trial several Jheri Curls had testified against him
only after cutting deals with the prosecutors.
In turn,
Assistant District Attorney Luke Rettler replied that testimony from
fellow conspirators was often the only way to proceed in cases like that
of the Jheri Curls gang, particularly in neighborhoods like Washington
Heights, where witnesses had been intimidated and killed.
“Most people would never, ever testify against these defendants,” said Rettler. “They so terrified the neighborhood.”
Rafael
Martinez’s lawyer, Sara Gurwitch, acknowledged to Judge Eduardo Padro
her client’s long list of convictions stemming from his years with the
Jheri Curls, including murder in the second degree, criminal sale of a
firearm, and multiple counts of criminal sale of a controlled substance.
All told, the convictions add up to 213 years in prison.
But
under the drug-sentencing-reform laws of 2004, Gurwitch argued, Rafael
Martinez deserves to have his time behind bars reduced. Instead of dying
in prison, she argued, Rafael should be allowed to see a parole board
sometime around 2053—about the time of his 85th birthday.
She
then emphasized her client’s stellar behavior in prison as well as his
numerous achievements. During his time behind bars, Rafael has earned a
GED and a bachelor’s degree in theology. He is currently earning a
master of arts degree from Global University. In his spare time, he has
worked as a teacher’s aide, an HIV peer educator, and clerk in the
prison law library. “He’s used his time in prison more productively than
any prisoner I’ve ever seen,” said Gurwitch. “He has become deeply
religious. He now uses his religious convictions to guide him.”
A
few minutes later, Rafael Martinez spoke to the court, denouncing his
years of devilry on 157th Street and asking for leniency. “I regret what
I did,” he told the court. “I am ashamed of my past behavior. I was
selfish, and unconscionable, and irresponsible. . . . . I apologize to
the city of New York.”
Assistant D.A. Rettler proved to be in
no mood to accept the apology. Throughout the hearing, he vigorously
opposed the resentencing requests of all three brothers, arguing
essentially that the drug resentencing laws were set up to benefit
low-level, nonviolent drug offenders.
“That being the case,” said Rettler, “the defendants are as far from that profile as heaven is from hell.”
Rettler
went on to call Rafael’s remorse a sham and to note that there was
nothing he could possibly do in prison to undo his past actions. Not
even if he cured cancer from his jail cell. “Resentencing should be
denied because of the horrendous, horrendous wanton violence they put
out on a neighborhood in Manhattan,” said Rettler.
Judge Padro took the requests for resentencing under advisement and promised a decision soon.
On
West 157th Street these days, a block that was once all curls has now
gone straight. Residents sit out on stoops. Kids ride by on bikes. The
gaudy golden chariots favored by the Jheri Curls have yielded the
streets to Volvos and minivans. New scaffolding creeps up the sides of
old buildings. The corner cocaine markets have given way to a weekend
farmers’ market.
Patches of the Jheri Curls’
former turf have turned upscale in their absence. On the west side,
where the block slopes away from Broadway, many of the lofty pre-war
buildings have gone co-op. As a result, a new minority group—white
people—has started to roll into the neighborhood. A two-bedroom
apartment at the corner of Riverside Drive and 157th Street was recently
listed at $899,000.
Vivian Ducat, a documentary filmmaker who
works for Columbia University, moved in a few years ago. She said she
first considered the area back in the early ’90s, but her husband nixed
the plan. Roughly a decade later, with the Jheri Curls nowhere to be
seen, she and her husband bought an apartment with a butler’s pantry and
river views in a building at the intersection of 157th and Riverside
Drive—a building that, unbeknownst to the Ducats, hangs directly over
the Jheri Curls’ former headquarters.
Despite her proximity to
Jheri Curls history, Ducat said she had never heard of the gang. “I am a
born-and-bred Upper West Sider,” says Ducat. “The neighborhood reminds
me of what the Upper West Side was like in the ’60s and ’70s. I love it
here.”
Others neighbors are still marveling at the
metamorphosis. Kyle Cuordileone, a history professor at the New York
City College of Technology, first moved to West 157th in 1992, when her
then husband began a post-doc at nearby Columbia University Medical
Center. “This area was like the Wild West back then,” said Cuordileone.
“There were shootings all the time. The streets were littered with crack
vials. It was pretty rough. It’s hard to believe that apartments are
now going for a million dollars.”
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