Book Description

In the bestselling tradition of Nicholas Pileggi, Joseph Wambaugh, and Robert Daley's Prince of the City, a thoroughly enthralling story of how the seasoned veterans of New York's elite Homicide Investigation Unit took down the city's most dangerous drug gang, and in the process rewrote the book on tackling gang crime. Gangbusters is a riveting narrative about the secretive, elite Homicide Investigation Unit and its successful investigation and prosecution of the notorious upper Manhattan Wild Cowboys, one of the bloodiest and most violent drug gangs in New York's long history. For two years, veteran reporter Michael Stone was granted exclusive access to the inner workings of HIU, its brilliant and iconoclastic chief, Walter Arsenault, and the seasoned, street-smart detectives and prosecutors who helped to put the Wild Cowboys behind bars. The book opens with the shocking and senseless execution of a Tarrytown college boy on the West Side Highway. Over time, the case leads detectives to the Wild Cowboys, a drug gang whose size and penchant for violence and intimidation have terrorized the South Bronx and upper Manhattan for years. HIU's attempts to bring down the Wild Cowboys' ruthless leader, Lenny, and feared enforcers, Platano and Pasqualito, triggermen for scores of the gang's murders, posed challenges that would test the unit's very survival. But HIU's dedicated collaboration of prosecutors and detectives and the strategies Arsenault employed in the unit's investigation have since become a model for gang enforcement in cities around the world. In the end, the Wild Cowboys and their allies were responsible for more than sixty murders. A rich roller-coaster ride of anarrative with a colorful and, at times, heroic cast of characters, Gangbusters is true crime at its page-turning best.