In a heavily guarded Manhattan courtroom, eight members of the Wild Cowboys, one of the largest and most violent drug gangs brought to trial in New York City, were convicted yesterday of carrying out a series of murders to maintain their control over a cocaine business that flourished in three boroughs.
A ninth gang member who was convicted of conspiracy avoided conviction on a murder charge because the jury of nine women and three men was unable to reach a decision. Still, all nine members convicted yesterday face 25 years to life in prison. Twenty-four of the 42 members of the Wild Cowboys, including its two top leaders, had already pleaded guilty, and nine lower-level members still face trial.
The convictions represented a major victory for the Homicide Investigation Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office, which has concentrated in the last several years on taking down whole drug organizations rather than isolated sellers or individual leaders. The unit has won convictions against major drug gangs like the Gheri Curls and the Spangler Posse, and is in the process of prosecuting others, like La Compania and the Young City Boys.
One of the largest and most violent drug rings in the city, the Wild Cowboys did a $16 million-a-year business selling crack cocaine.
By using intimidation, violence and murder, the gang expanded from its base in Washington Heights in upper Manhattan into the South Bronx and Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. Evolving into a sophisticated operation that processed and distributed crack, the ring often used children as young as 12 to package and carry the drugs and act as lookouts. And it developed a reputation as being quick to kill rival gang members, witnesses, bystanders and even its own members suspected of disloyalty.
The jurors, who deliberated 14 days, looked weary as the verdicts were read, and one female juror appeared to be wiping away tears as the clerk took the verdict. Several defense lawyers said the trial had been a complicated one because of the number of defendants, something they said could form the basis for an appeal.
The jury returned guilty verdicts on 36 counts of the 43-count indictment, but was unable to reach a decision on 7 counts. The jury could not reach a verdict on the murder charge against the defendant Linwood Collins in the shooting of Oscar Alvarez on a rooftop in May 1991, and prosecutors said they would seek to retry those counts.
The gang members, depicted as high-level dealers and enforcers, were convicted in nine murders in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn, including a brazen quadruple homicide in 1991 in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx in which three bystanders and a rival gang member were shot.
But the gang has also been linked by investigators to 20 other killings, including the death in May 1991 of a college student, David Cargill, who had the misfortune of cutting off an automobile carrying some Wild Cowboys from a party and was shot to death through the window of his pickup truck as he drove on the West Side Highway.
One of the leaders of the gang, Lenin Sepulveda, pleaded guilty to that murder last year. He was not on trial in the latest case.
Mr. Sepulveda and his younger brother, Nelson, founded the gang in 1986. It had started out as a group of classmates at George Washington High School, where a gym teacher once called them "a bunch of Wild Cowboys." They adopted the name and soon graduated from stealing cars across the George Washington Bridge in the shopping malls of Bergen County to dealing in drugs in their neighborhood.
They started with marijuana, but after crack appeared on the streets in the mid-1980's, they trafficked in that and soon, like other gangs flourishing at the time, were arming themselves with automatic weapons to protect their turf. Their signature consisted of a red and orange plastic stopper on the crack vials that sold for $5 each under the street names "Red Top Crack" and "Orange Top Crack."
Children age 12 and 13 were used to load bundles of crack -- 100 vials of crack to a bundle -- and deliver them to stash houses and sales locations, testimony showed.
One defense lawyer, Sol Schwartzberg, said the defendants could appeal the verdicts on the basis they were "deprived of due process."
He said they could not get a fair trial because there were too many defendants, which could color the case against each individual.