Feature

Crack Down

Lawyers representing the defendants say that the prosecution has built its case on the troubled history of the building. "It falls woefully short of being a conspiracy," argues Alberto Ebanks, Jose Celpa's attorney. "It is, at best, a case of renegades in these buildings acting independently." Martin Schmuckler, former attorney for Gloria Valdez, concurs, arguing that "the prosecution is creating the false impression that these defendants commandeered a piece of Manhattan real estate. If the word conspiracy didn't exist, my client wouldn't be guilty of anything except motherhood."

Building a conspiracy case requires "really good old-fashioned police work," says O'Reilly, and she and her fellow officers spent many cold nights crouching on adjoining roofs with camcorders taping "members who said they didn't know each other shaking hands or the lookout posted on a milk crate outside 16-18 Old Broadway using his clicker to alert the dealers inside whenever we were near."

That summer, O'Reilly got the breaks she needed. On July 10, a search warrant executed at 16-18 Old Broadway yielded automatic weapons, $3,000 in cash, and 699 vials of Black Top crack. On August 4, Hernandez's motorcycle accident finally gave O'Reilly a solid connection between Angel Celpa and one of the gang's couriers.

Four days later, Angel Celpa and alleged Black Top members Juan Tavares and Miguel Valdez were stopped on 125th Street because one of the headlights on the car they were in was broken. When the officer who stopped the vehicle began writing up a ticket, Tavares bolted from the backseat holding a brown paper bag he dumped into an incinerator in the nearby Manhattanville projects. Another man, who was never apprehended, tried to remove a paper bag from the backseat, but in his panic, he spilled its contents: 100 vials of Black Top crack. "It was amazing how things came together," O'Reilly says.

Together, those incidents gave police the evidence they needed to present a conspiracy case to a grand jury in October. More than 60 witnesses testified during the four weeks of hearings, but since grand-jury proceedings are sealed, O'Reilly says she was "as clueless about what would happen as anybody else." But by the end of the month, the NYPD had been granted fourteen search warrants and twelve arrest warrants -- a chance to "take down the organization from the top to bottom all at once."

"By the time we would get into the building, the dealer would be gone. If we don't see him run into an apartment, there's nothing we can do."

Once takedown day was set for November 2, O'Reilly began leading reconnaissance missions to both the building and the neighboring projects. "I had to get every bit of information I possibly could," O'Reilly says. "Looking into one of the apartments from an adjoining roof, I noticed that there was a huge Rottweiler in the apartment. If I hadn't seen that, one of my officers might have been attacked."

As November 2 approached, O'Reilly rehearsed the upcoming operation in her mind, sleeping no more than two or three hours a night while she obsessed about narrowly averted disasters during previous takedowns.

"We chose 6 a.m. because Black Top would take a break from dealing from about five to eight in the morning," O'Reilly says. "We figured that they'd be at home resting or asleep. They'd be a lot less likely to be guarding the door with a gun."

At approximately 5 a.m. on November 2, nearly 140 officers convened at the precinct house. "We had supervisors, prisoner-transport officers, K-9 units, EMS units standing by at several locations, and Intel units coming in with heat sensors to figure out where there were 'traps' -- areas to secrete drugs," says O'Reilly.

Just before six, the operation began with the arrest of a lookout who was finishing his shift. "We had officers posted by the building who said, 'Individual X has just left the building; he got into a taxicab and he's going eastbound on 125th Street,' " O'Reilly remembers. "And we had a team posted at his residence waiting."

The next step was positioning officers around the building. "Prior to the troops going in, so to speak, we want to make sure that if someone starts throwing stuff out of windows, I have people in place to see who threw what," O'Reilly says. Sure enough, during the operation a few hundred dollars in cash wrapped in a rubber band nearly landed on the head of an officer stationed behind the building.

As dramatic as the Black Top gang's reign had been, it ended with barely a whimper. At around 6:30 a.m., "we executed the warrants simultaneously without incident," O'Reilly says with typical understatement. "No civilians, not one member of law enforcement was injured." The results of the raid were more dramatic: 4,100 vials of crack, thousands of dollars in cash, four guns, money-counting machines, bulletproof vests, electronic-alert systems, and 24 arrests -- many on A felonies. Two defendants escaped, including Angel Celpa, who remains at large.

The next day, a bleary-eyed O'Reilly joined police commissioner Bernard Kerik, special narcotics prosecutor Brennan, and HPD head Jerilyn Perine at the special narcotics prosecutor's office on Centre Street for an early-morning press conference to announce the results of the raid. "I looked at the video," O'Reilly jokes, "and it looks like I was being held up by Scotch tape."

On an unseasonably chilly spring morning, several members of the Black Top gang are led into the courtroom at 100 Centre Street in handcuffs to resounding cheers from family and friends. "This has been going on all morning," growls a bailiff. "Quiet down or leave the courtroom." The bailiff's warning mutes the jovial atmosphere somewhat: Some whisper and point quietly; others leave the courtroom to chat in the hallway, including Jose Celpa's slim and pretty fiancée, Caira Torres. "He's the nicest person you'll ever meet," Torres says. "Everyone in the neighborhood misses him."

Two members of the gang have pleaded guilty and the rest, including Celpa, face trial on charges ranging from conspiracy to criminal possession and sale of a controlled substance. For months after the takedown, the NYPD blocked off Old Broadway with police barricades and kept the building under round-the-clock surveillance. "What would the purpose be if we took this organization down and a new organization moves in?" O'Reilly asks. "The customer base is still there." Indeed, although crime in the 26th Precinct dropped by 43 percent compared with the previous year in the 60 days after the arrests, one resident received death threats after being interviewed for a short New York Times piece about the gang.

In an effort to stop this kind of sophisticated drug operation in other neighborhoods, in January Kerik named O'Reilly the head of a new "conspiracy" unit. "What happened at 16-18 Old Broadway will be a model for this unit," says Inspector Barry of the Central Harlem Initiative. So far it has: Three months later, O'Reilly used the same techniques to take down the Watson gang, a crack-dealing crew that controlled 2 West 129th Street for over a decade.

"I guarantee each precinct has a spot like that," O'Reilly says, "a place where guys have been dealing drugs for years, and keep getting arrested -- but the drug sales keep going on." She thinks her conspiracy unit will give the NYPD an edge that will be difficult for dealers to counter. "Even if people find out we're doing this, it doesn't matter," she says. "They can't change history."