The
Gang That Couldn't Wear Its Hair Straight
The Jheri Curls of Washington Heights, and how they made
everybody else's hair curl
Sometime in the past 15 years, Rafael
Martinez chopped off his jheri curl.
Perhaps that's not too surprising for a guy who is doing time at an upstate
prison. Few hairstyles require more maintenance, and the average prison
commissary isn't likely to stock rearranging cream and curl rods.
Then again, to anyone who has spent time flipping through his rap
sheet, Martinez's current lack of a jheri curl is notable. After all, back in
the early '90s, when Martinez was arrested, he was no run-of-the-mill criminal.
Rather, he was the ringleader of the so-calledJheri Curls, one of the earliest, most violent, and best
branded of the Dominican gangs of Nueva York.
During their reign over the cocaine trade in upper Manhattan in
the early '90s, the Jheri Curls drove gold-painted cars and wore their hair in
a uniform style: long, loose, and greasy. From the safe distance of history,
that may sound quaint—a gang of dudes looking like a mid-'80s version of Michael Jackson. But the
Jheri Curls were no joke.
One time, a girlfriend made fun of gang leader Rafael Martinez's
limp. He responded, she later told authorities, by shooting her in the kneecap.
Others who crossed paths with the gang weren't even that lucky. A
retired social worker named Jose Reyes objected
to the Jheri Curls' selling drugs out of his building. He wasn't afraid to tell
them. He got a bullet in the head.
Fifteen years later, Martinez has come down to Manhattan for a
resentencing hearing on drug charges related to his heady days at the helm of
the Jheri Curls. It's a differentWashington Heights these days, but Martinez and the Jheri Curls have not been
entirely forgotten—not by the detective, now retired, who helped put them
behind bars, and not by some of the longtime residents who recall the story
behind the murder of Jose Reyes.
As it turns out, the legacy of the Jheri Curls gang has remained
remarkably well preserved, despite the fact that the flow of real estate money
has gradually replaced the flow of drug money. A new set of concerns has
surfaced on the tree-lined streets of this neighborhood, said David Dubnau, a research scientist who has lived in the area
since the '60s. "Sure, the crime rate has gone down," he says.
"But that's a global phenomenon with many complex causes. Is the
neighborhood better now than it was then? It depends on who you are."
Since the '80s, Dubnau and his wife have been working with RENA,
the Riverside
Edgecombe Neighborhood Association, in part, to help tenants
negotiate with negligent landlords. As real estate values have gone up, said
Dubnau, so has the pressure on tenants.
"There's a tremendous amount of harassment of
tenants—particularly elderly residents," said Dubnau. Landlords are
constantly trying to turn the apartments over and get much higher rates.
Tenants are terrified because of the gentrification pressure."
It wasn't long ago that tenants on West 157th Streetwere terrified
of someone much more volatile than venal landlords. They were terrified of
their neighbors, the ones with the long, loose, and greasy curls.
On a hot summer day in 1991, Rafael Martinez's little brother
Lorenzo set out for Queens to fetch some money, according to prosecutors from
the New York County district attorney's office. It was two days shy of the
Fourth of July, and life was good for the Jheri Curls. They were pulling in
several million dollars a year in cocaine sales, and the Martinez brothers were
living in a comfy house in Queens, a safe distance from the cesspool of their
workplace.
After picking up the cash from his house, Lorenzo headed back to
Manhattan. At theTriborough Bridge, the
police pulled him over and searched his car.
To get access to his car's secret compartment, according to
prosecutors, you had to proceed through an elaborate ritual: Turn on the car
lights. Press the brake pedal. Connect two points under the dashboard with a
coin. Only then would the chambers unlock on either side of the backseat.
But somehow the police seemed to know his car's secrets. They
confiscated $22,500 in cash, a loaded .45-caliber automatic gun, a loaded
.44-caliber revolver, and 20 or so rounds of ammunition.
That day, if Lorenzo hadn't been busted, he might have ended up
back at one of the Jheri Curls' business headquarters, a six-story apartment
building located at 614 West 157th Street. From the sidewalk, near the
intersection with Riverside Drive, a long, barren courtyard led to the
building's lobby. On either side of the courtyard, the building's near
symmetrical wings rose up six stories, giving the overall layout a U-shaped
appearance.
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.
The leader: Rafael Martinez
|
"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 Gilmorethinks
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."
