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from the New York Times
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...ts_nyt/inthefaceofdeathanundercoverlifeofguns
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...ts_nyt/inthefaceofdeathanundercoverlifeofguns
In the Face of Death, an Undercover Life of Guns
Sun Oct 5, 2:56 PM ET
By SHAILA K. DEWAN The New York Times
If Capt. Vincent Di Donato were standing up, he would be pacing. But instead, he and his agitation are folded into the front seat of a dark S.U.V., in a parking lot in Brooklyn, listening on his cellphone as one of his undercover officers waits to buy a gun several blocks away. The sodium haze of the lights casts his ruddy face in gray.
The undercover has already been to the location once, but at the captain's insistence he left when the gun did not materialize. The seller is the worst kind: young, which makes him dangerously unpredictable. Tonight, he meets the undercover, stalls, changes his story, has a drink, changes his story again. The gun, he says, is with a friend, a relative, in a hiding place, on its way.
"I don't want us sitting there like ducks on a pond," says Captain Di Donato, the commander of the New York Police Department's Firearms Investigation Unit.
The night is not going according to plan. But in a gun buy, the few things that can be counted on are not comforting: the undercover called the "uncle" always carries hundreds of dollars and wears no bulletproof vest, and there is always a moment when he faces a criminal holding a loaded gun. Tonight, the seller could be stalling merely because he is disorganized. Or it could be a setup.
To make matters worse, the "ghosts" backup undercovers are stuck on the block, unable to come and go without attracting suspicion. Captain Di Donato curses, picks up the two-way radio, zips up the fear and impatience in his voice, and requests an update on the gun. The voice of Lt. Matty Davis, in another backup car, comes back: "He says it's coming. Along with Christmas, the Easter Bunny and the tooth fairy."
The humor is reflexive, a thin sheet of emotional Kevlar. It has been barely six months since two undercovers in the unit, Rodney J. Andrews, known as Jay, and James V. Nemorin, were shot to death making a buy on Staten Island. Two young men said they were taking the detectives to get a gun. Instead, in what many in the unit believe was a botched robbery, they shot the officers in the head and shoved them out of the car. Captain Di Donato was there that night. He was the first to see their bodies.
While there are other units that deal with gun trafficking, the Firearms Investigation Unit is the only group whose sole focus is taking guns directly off the streets, said Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. To spend a month with the group of 53 detectives and 13 supervisors, in dark S.U.V.'s and cinder block squad rooms, is to see men and women who pose as criminals and deal with criminals, who have no playbook but their own instincts and experience, and who keep what they do a secret, sometimes even from their families.
It is also to feel the aftershocks of that indelible night when they lost two men how the monthly number of gun buys plummeted nearly to zero, how the unit's members wept in group counseling sessions and second-guessed the methods that led up to the killings, and how they have developed new safety measures in hopes that such a thing never happens again.
In the unit's Staten Island office, Jay-and-James, their names forever linked, are still on the attendance roll. Their photos flank the door. The people who were on the team on March 10 Detective Gloria Medina, who almost played the supporting role instead of Detective Andrews; Detective Mike DiForte, the lead investigator on the case; B.H., the undercover who ghosted the car until one of the suspects noticed him are still buying guns.
Back in the far corner of that parking lot in Brooklyn, more than three hours after the operation began, the supervisors give up and pull the undercover out. Despite this setback, it has been a good week: six semiautomatic pistols, four revolvers, one assault weapon and a sawed-off shotgun. But the captain is still wound up, tense with misgivings. "What's so hard is, we know we've got a gun out there," he says. "This is a moral issue."
A Tiny Unit, Deeply Disguised
When word went around last October that the Firearms Investigation Unit was hiring, 50 undercovers from other units applied for seven spots. Some reconsidered after going through the confrontational interview. One felt compelled to swear he would buy anything, even a nuclear bomb.
The unit itself was not very old it began in March 2000 as a cadre of nearly 30 detectives in an office in upper Manhattan, and has since grown to 66. Until Detectives Nemorin and Andrews were killed, many of the 37,000 officers in the department did not know it existed.
Last year, the tiny unit's take was 486 guns, out of a total of 4,068 guns confiscated by the department.
The unit has seven teams. Each has investigators, who build cases by tracing criminal backgrounds and relationships, debriefing prisoners and cultivating informants. And most have undercovers, who build relationships with gun dealers and make the buys, usually paying $500 to $1,200 apiece. It is the relationship of actor to producer the undercover goes on the set; the investigators listen in on the wires.
After most buys, the officers let the seller walk, preferring to build cases over time in hopes of figuring out the source of the guns or making new contacts. In one deep undercover operation, over three months at the Kingsborough housing project in Brooklyn, the unit bought 61 guns and ended up arresting 36 people.
The undercovers are almost all black or Latino, a fact about which they are pragmatic. "I'm not going to come at you like this Farrakhan or this Chicken John brother, but as an African American who's proud," says M.W., an undercover who "flipped" from investigator after the shooting. "If you look at where crack is being sold, it's in the black neighborhoods."
With their tattoos and swagger, braids and gold chains, baseball shirts and cellphones that play 50 Cent riffs when they ring, it is hard to believe that these detectives began their careers in uniform, on patrol duty. There are women among them, but Captain Di Donato prefers not to draw too much attention to them. "They're kind of like my secret weapon," he says.
The most important asset for an undercover is "the gift of the gab," according to L.S., one of the most experienced members of the unit. "You have to be humble," he says. "Tough guys get beaten up or killed."
One team member recalls how a man refused to let Detective Nemorin buy a gun, claiming he sold only to friends. Detective Nemorin put out his hand and said, "Hi, I'm so-and-so, now we're friends." The man shook, and then sold.
The undercovers' social world can easily shrink down to the co-workers they see every day. They cannot be publicly honored for their work. They cannot tell friends and neighbors what they do; some shield the details even from their wives. In reporting this article, The New York Times agreed not to reveal the undercovers' full names or to publish identifying details about any continuing operations.
"You often feel like people other than those you work with just won't understand," says Detective Arty Marquez, one of the unit's top undercovers until his left hand was ruined in a shootout two years ago. "And it's not always true but you just can't tell them."
Still, to a particular kind of person, buying a gun is an adrenaline rush without equal. The usual undercover assignment is three years, but the uncles in the unit have done two or three times that. Most of them began in narcotics, but gun buys up the ante in every way there is danger, yes, but getting a gun off the street can mean preventing a murder, a rape, or a child shot by accident.
The undercover officer has discretion over much of what happens during a buy. In theory, the officer can call it off at any time but undercovers can get what they call tunnel vision, when the gun eclipses all other concerns. "Every buy you don't get done, it's like a miniature defeat," Detective Marquez says. "So you don't listen to the danger signs."
Some admit that Detective Nemorin and Detective Andrews may have made some bad choices that March night they let two men into the back of their car; they agreed to go to a second location when the men claimed the gun was not at the first. But the detectives are reluctant to second-guess. They themselves have ventured into the stairwells of the projects, or have driven with dangerous men from Coney Island all the way to Harlem, or have gone into apartments and heard five locks click shut behind them.
"I've put myself in bad situations time and time again," Detective Marquez says. "A really good undercover will stretch their neck onto the chopping block over and over and over to get the buy done."
After the two detectives were killed, every member of the firearms unit was given the chance to transfer. The fact that no one did is a point of pride.
After all, they say, the risk of death has always been there. The radio transmitters that failed have always been unreliable even when they are working perfectly, a slamming door can sound like a gunshot. The uncles often go where the backups cannot follow. A time comes in every buy when they are on their own.
"Let's say you and I are in this room, and you are going to sell me a gun," Captain Di Donato says. "And let's say the whole police department is outside aviation, E.S.U., the mounted police, everyone. And they can hear us, O.K., they can every word we're saying. Here's the gun, here's the money, and puk!" he pulls an imaginary trigger "you shoot me. What are they going to do for me then?" He looks up, waiting for an answer to this rhetorical question. "For my undercover cops, there really is no backup. It's like, mop-up."
A Gun Buy Goes Bad
James Nemorin had March 10 off, but when he got a call from a source wanting to sell him a Tech 9, he reported to work.
"These guys will be at home, they'll be at parties, they'll be at christenings, and they'll have to leave to go buy a gun," said Sgt. Richard Abbate, the leader of Detective Nemorin's team. "If we don't buy it, someone else is going to buy it."
Because the seller had brought along friends on a previous encounter, it was decided that Detective Nemorin should bring a partner perhaps a female undercover posing as his girlfriend, to soften the mood. In the end, the captain chose Detective Andrews, who had himself bought three pistols and a revolver that morning in Brooklyn. He would play a brother-in-law.
The two complemented each other: Detective Nemorin was an impeccable dresser who sometimes posed as the owner of a fleet of livery cabs who wanted his drivers to have protection. Detective Andrews, on the other hand, with his do-rag and slouchy clothes, looked so much the part of the street thug that one of his colleagues was shocked when Detective Andrews put on a CD his first day on the job and Led Zeppelin came out of the speakers.
The two detectives drove a Nissan Maxima to make the buy. With four backup cars following, the Maxima picked up two men and drove them to a building on Victory Boulevard to pick up the gun.
The deal was supposed to take place right there, but instead the Maxima drove off again. The team leaders called the uncles on their cellphones to find out what was going on, but just then, the signal was lost the Maxima had entered a dead zone and slipped away. Worried, the team started a block-by-block search. As Sergeant Abbate, Detective DiForte and Captain Di Donato drove down Saint Pauls Avenue in the command car, the call came over the radio: shots fired.
"My initial thought was, `Damn, I'm going to be here all night because Jay shot these two guys,' " Sergeant Abbate says. "I was 100 percent convinced that those were the bad guys, and the next call I got would be, 'It's us, we're back in the office, we had to shoot the two guys.' "
Instead, they found the bodies of the two detectives in the street.
The captain screamed into his radio, "Officers down!" Detective DiForte, thinking he saw a glimmer of life, performed C.P.R. on Detective Andrews, pumping and pumping until another detective pulled him off. The men tried to lift Detective Nemorin into an ambulance, but his 240-pound frame was slippery with blood.
New Strategies, Same Purpose
In each of the unit's offices, boards tiled with Polaroid photos of guns hang like hunting trophies: action-movie assault rifles, Desert Eagles, robotic Mac-10s, neatly arranged with their "food," or bullets, and the name of the team that nabbed them Cobra, Emerald, Magnum.
But after Jay-and-James, the boards seemed like a reproach. Had there been too much emphasis on the numbers? Did a desire to rack up points push the detectives into danger?
"We actually wanted to take that board and throw it out the window," Detective DiForte says. "Because some people thought it was like a competition, and it encouraged the idea of `got to get the gun no matter what.' "
The shooting's effect on the unit can be told in the numbers meticulously tallied on a dry-erase board in the Manhattan office. In December, the group took 65 guns. In January and February, 43 and 73. In March, the take dropped to 10, in April to 3. It remained in the single digits until July. "There really wasn't anything to do, except sit and stare at each other," Detective DiForte says.
The official line in the unit is that all the ducks were in a row that night, that no one screwed up except the guy who fired the gun. But that did not stop the private anguish and sleepless nights, the retracing of steps, the anger of those who were not on duty, who told themselves they could have changed the outcome. Detective DiForte has agonized over the fact that they lost the car in a neighborhood he knew well, near his grade school. B.H., the undercover who ghosted that night, still has trouble sleeping.
In all, six men were arrested in the shooting and have yet to go to trial. The Staten Island district attorney has charged that the man accused of being the gunman, Ronell Wilson, knew the undercovers were police officers, a possibility that officers in the unit vigorously dispute a possibility that attacks the very nature of what they do.
B.H. went out on the first real buy since the killings, in June. Another undercover, R.T., went second. "Sitting in the office wasn't helping," he says, but the buy was nerve-racking. R.T. kept his gun cocked, between his legs. He thought about what Detective Andrews used to say before a buy: "Let's go do God's work."
The unit has mapped out a new safety strategy. At the tactical meeting before each buy, the team is now briefed on the route to the nearest hospital. There are more backups, and some wear uniforms so they can break up a buy without the suspect thinking he is being robbed. New equipment has trickled in. Some uncles have made it a rule not to go out alone. They take things more slowly now.
At the funerals, the undercovers, many with children of their own, saw the five children of the two slain men, some too young to understand what had happened. "Since that time, though, you think, is this really worth it?" says R.M., an undercover on one of the Manhattan teams. "Nothing is worth me not going back to my kids. But I don't know what else I would do."
He could "flip" to investigator, he says, but that would mean sending someone else into danger when he could go himself.
Slowly, the team has regained its form. September was a record month 96 guns were brought in. And the Polaroids are still on display. "We realized," Detective DiForte says, "listen, this is to show us that what we're doing is working."'
