- It is a full-scale gang war up in Newburgh.
The Bloods and the Latin Kings had become entrenched there.
29,000 people,
and we were suffering close to 20 homicides a year.
Per capita, that made Newburgh
the most violent city in New York State.
- They were in Newburgh neighborhoods
that most people try to avoid,
the places that have been plagued by violent crime.
- We were not in charge.
We had to get out of the whack-a-mole scene.
Oh, there's one there. Boom.
Let's get the--OK, now another one pops up, boom.
- We have 78 indictments,
60 on the Blood side, 18 on the Latin Kings side.
- OK, here we go.
[dramatic music]
- Did you ever become a target?
- I'm in my office and these two agents come in.
Double O's put a hit out on you.
[dramatic music]
- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪
Drug busts,
mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
- Get down! Get down!
- We understand why people want to tell stories about us.
- Mark it.
- Freeze! - FBI.
- FBI! - Action!
- But they don't know the half of it.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down,
we save that for each other
when we're talking agent to agent.
♪
This is "FBI True."
[tense music]
♪
- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked gangs, crimes against children,
as well as human and drug trafficking.
Kottis was the supervisor
of the FBI's threat response squad,
overseeing the Bureau's response to terrorism threats
in New York City.
♪
- Hi, Jimmy. - How are you, Kristy?
- Good. It's good to see you. - Good to see you, too.
- One of my favorite people. - Aw.
- Um, Jimmy, tell me about your relationship with Newburgh.
- James Gagliano supervised SWAT operations,
a hostage rescue team, and a mission in Afghanistan.
In 2008, he spearheaded the Hudson Valley
Safe Streets Task Force.
- In the late '60s,
my father just returned from Vietnam and was stationed
at the United States Military Academy.
There wasn't enough housing on post,
and so we found a house to buy very close to Newburgh.
And then years after that in 2008,
an incredible opportunity opened up for me
to assume a position called
the supervisory senior resident agent of a small office.
[electronic beeping]
And I ended up settling in Cornwall-on-Hudson,
which is just south of Newburgh.
I was also doing some recreational coaching
at St. Mary's Church for the Newburgh Zion Lions.
I was very interested in youth coaching,
especially basketball.
Good pass! Good pass!
Sports had been one of the things in the United States
that had broken down all kinds of barriers--
you know, color barriers especially.
And I think it's one of the first places
where people learn to work together for a common goal.
One, two, three.
- Work hard! - All right.
So I fell in love with the city,
and I've pretty much had a love affair with it till now.
♪
- But then something went wrong in Newburgh.
- There'd always been neighborhood-based gangs.
But there'd never been national gangs
like the Bloods and the Latin Kings,
and they had become entrenched there.
Throughout the 1990s, law enforcement
had great success in clamping down
on the violent criminals and the gang members
in major urban areas.
The result of this was
a proliferation of movement from the gang members
to Upstate and northern territories,
the suburbs, places like Newburgh, New York.
The Bloods had more members. The Latin Kings were smaller.
The major thoroughfare in Newburgh is known as Broadway.
It separates the North End from the South End.
The Bloods had their stronghold north of Broadway,
the Latin Kings owned everything to the south.
They were very, very territorial.
And I think there was a certain belief in Newburgh
that the federal government
would never pay attention to them.
- They were looking for ideas that
could help stem the recent surge of gang violence
and murder in the city.
- I used to ask them,
"But why did you move to Newburgh?"
They said, "Because here, you can have a gun
"and not get in trouble,
can sell drugs and not get in trouble."
- Having lived up there and having been around it,
I knew in 2008 that the city was hemorrhaging.
It was hemorrhaging lives.
29,000 people,
and we were suffering close to 20 homicides over three years.
Per capita, that made Newburgh
the most violent city in New York State.
- And there was agreement that priority one has to be getting
the hardcore criminals off the streets permanently
in order to remove the current climate of fear.
- There was a dichotomy, a distinction,
between where I lived and where I worked.
The Newburgh case brought those two things colliding together,
where all of a sudden
where I was policing was also where I was living.
And then I had my heart shattered.
There was a young kid by the name of Jeffrey Zachary,
and he was a pretty good basketball player.
He went to South Junior High School,
a kid that made straight As, young African American kid
that was going to make it out of Newburgh.
Jeffrey Zachary was the exact polar opposite
of a Newburgh Blood.
Wanted nothing to do with it.
The Latin Kings, in an act of retribution,
because the Newburgh Bloods
had shot and killed a Latin King,
decided to go hunting for a Blood.
Well, Jeffrey Zachary met the description for them.
He was a young African American male.
He was shot and killed, and he died
in the emergency room right across the street
in his mother's arms.
- Jeffrey, or Frizz, as his friends liked to call him,
was a student at South Junior High School,
a good basketball player,
and a kid who liked to make others laugh.
- He was a good young man. He didn't bother nobody.
He had good marks in school. He wasn't in the gang.
He didn't sell drugs.
- It gets worse.
A few years prior to that,
Jeffrey Zachary's older brother Trent,
a member of the Newburgh Bloods,
was also killed and died in the same emergency room
in the same mother's arms. - Oh, my God. Brutal.
- When I saw that and I cut the obituary
out of the "Times Herald-Record"...
- Mm-hmm. - And I went to go see
Joe D, Joe Demarest, who was the assistant director
in charge of the New York office at the time.
Enough was enough.
We had to put a stop to the killing
and the crime and the intimidation.
- You know this community intimately.
You have a plan. What are you thinking?
- We had to have a strategy,
and so we mapped it out across the three counties,
and we looked at where the biggest gang hotspots were,
and that's where we focused our resources.
I think a big piece of what I saw over in Afghanistan
was the surge strategy employed by people
like General Petraeus and General McChrystal
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You're not going to crush the insurgency
unless you commit additional resources.
And I'm not comparing law enforcement to the military,
but we were constantly playing a reactive game.
We were not in charge. I wanted to be proactive.
And to do that,
we had to get out of the whack-a-mole scene, right?
Oh, there's one there. Boom.
Let's get the--OK, now another one pops up.
Boom. Let's get the--oh, let's go over there.
Let's get that one.
The terminology in the FBI at the time
was disruption and dismantlement.
We wanted to disrupt the gangs.
That's easy to do, make a few arrests, it disrupts them.
We wanted to dismantle them.
I wanted to try to put together a case
where the young soldiers in the Latin Kings and the Bloods,
the ones that were selling the dope,
doing the extortions, doing the assaults,
doing the murders,
that we would be able to bring this up
to the people at the top.
And the people on the top of the Bloods was
a guy by the name of Anthony Double O,
which was his nickname, Boykin,
and for the Latin Kings was Wilson "King Gunz" Pagan.
And so that's how it started.
- You know the people, the players, the landscape.
What's your plan?
How do you go about bringing down
not just one gang, but two?
- Well, I'd spent part of the early '90s
working on the Gambino crime squad,
C-16, out in Queens... - Mm-hmm.
- When the John Gotti case came down.
And I saw how effective RICO,
the Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organization Act,
was at getting to the top.
You can't go after the kingpins
if they're not doing the shootings,
if they're not selling the drugs.
They're not putting their fingerprints on anything.
And yet, they're the ones that direct it,
they're the ones that send people out into harm's way
to commit acts of violence.
How do you get to them?
♪
I couldn't get into the gangs
and watch them commit a homicide,
not that I would allow it to happen...
- Yes.
- But I couldn't watch that and collect the evidence
and then prosecute them for that.
I couldn't get that type of stuff.
The only way that there was an opportunity for us
to make inroads into these violent street gangs
was to buy drugs off them.
- You need more than just evidence of a crime.
You need evidence of an organization.
- To make a RICO case, you need two predicates.
Whether it's a murder, whether it's selling crack,
whether it's assaults, extortion...
- Shoplifting.
- Prostitution, whatever it is, you need two.
But you also have to prove a hierarchy,
and sometimes that's difficult.
Now in the Latin King case, they made it easy,
because they put together a manifesto
every one of them kept underneath their mattress
and it basically outlined all the rules,
who was in charge, who the five crowns were.
- Exactly.
- Blood's a little bit more dicey,
but we could still get to it.
It required us to get cooperators.
And to do that, we started by making simple buys.
Not buy busts, but buys of crack, and recording them.
But we didn't arrest people at the time.
We basically started to determine who we thought
would be our best chances for cooperation.
- How are you using this as leverage?
What are you saying to these guys?
- You're looking at ten years for this,
because you might have only sold a few rocks of crack,
but you're part of a bigger enterprise.
You're part of a bigger drug distribution network,
and we're going to hang all of the weight
that has been sold to the Bloods on you.
In the early parts of the narcotics conspiracy case,
we had three cooperating witnesses
that were essential to us.
It changed the game.
♪
One particular night, where this kind of brought
everything together for me,
where I really looked at it and my worlds were colliding.
I had basketball practice that night,
I believe at 7:00 or 7:30, at the Boys and Girls Club.
At 6:00, we were supposed to make a buy from--
and this was actually powder cocaine.
It's going to be on the same street
where I'm going to be at the Boys and Girls Club
a few hours later.
And a kid comes out of the building
that we knew that he was--
the target was going to be coming from.
But it wasn't the target.
He was a kid who was working for the target,
a kid who was also a member of the Newburgh Bloods,
and a kid that I had coached...
- Oh. - Basketball in Newburgh.
♪
He walks down the street,
and I had my hand over my face like this.
And I'm like, "It can't be him."
He gets in the car with the undercover,
makes the exchange, gets the money,
gets out, goes back in the building,
has zero idea he's been made,
has zero idea his life is now irrevocably changed.
♪
- Jimmy, because of your familiarity in the community
and their familiarity with you, what about your safety factor?
Did you ever become a target?
Did they ever start to hone in on,
hey, Coach Gagliano, he's, like, you know, a problem?
- I'm at work and I'm in my office,
and these two agents come in, male and female agents.
"Double O's put a hit out on you."
- So next thing you know,
I get a phone call from Joe Demarest,
the assistant director in charge
of the New York office at the time.
And he says to me, "Jimmy, what the hell's going on?"
I explained what happened.
He goes, "Jimmy, I got to pull you out of there."
I said, "What are you talking about?"
He goes, "Got to pull you out of there."
"You're going to move me, right?
"You're not going to move me far away from my family,
"but you're going to move me to another office.
You're not going to stop me from coaching in Newburgh."
I said, "So what you're doing is you're
"taking the gun off my belt,
"because I go into town every night,
"I go there every night that I'm coaching.
"So you're going to take the gun off my hip during the day.
"Not going to change anything.
Joe, I'm not putting my house on the market."
- Right.
- And so as a result of that, you know,
I have great respect for Mr. Demarest.
And he said, "All right, well,
"you're being hardheaded about this,
"but I understand your position.
But we are going to take some precautions at your house."
And I won't go into the details of what they did,
but they did enough that it satisfied
the Security Division that I would be OK where I was.
And I went back to work.
[tense music]
♪
Shortly after Double O had put this hit out there
and made me a quote-unquote "marked man,"
we had a bit of fortuitous events that took place.
I am home one night watching TV in bed and my phone goes off,
and it's a detective in Newburgh.
"Hey boss, you'd better come in as quickly as you can.
We got Double O."
And I said, "What are you talking about?
We're still building this case. What happened?"
"Boss, they collared him with a pistol."
And I said, "Game, set, match."
- Yeah. - Here we go.
And I come in and he's sitting there.
And I walk in and he looks at me and smiles.
And I sat down, and our eyes met.
And I said, "Wo we finally meet like this."
So I spent a number of hours speaking with him.
He was a tough nut, and he wasn't going to
open up too much or admit to anything.
He thought that he'd be out.
He didn't understand being arrested with an illegal gun,
it was going to allow us to have him in jail,
which took the pressure off of me
from the hit that had been put out,
because now he's in jail.
Couldn't tell him what was coming.
- Right.
- Wanted to sit there and say, "Pal, you have no idea,"
but you know, the wrath of God is
about to come down upon the Bloods and the Latin Kings.
- That's right. Hell will rain down.
- Yes.
♪
- Where are we in the case? Are we ready to go?
When do you make that decision,
and how do you make that decision?
- We started this,
we framed this out as a narcotics conspiracy case.
That was our entrée.
That was our way to get into the gangs.
- Right. - To do this,
we were looking at a total of 78 people.
60 Bloods were part of it, 18 Latin Kings.
Now, you know how the FBI does it.
If we're going to arrest one person, we send ten.
We're going to arrest 20, we send 100.
And there's a reason for that.
We want to remove that fight or flight mechanism
that people have.
We want them to look at us and go,
"All right, I'm going to take my chances in court.
"I'm not going to try to run away,
and I'm certainly not going to try to fight you."
- Yeah. Where are you going to put all these people?
- I had to find a place to do this in a city
that is a two mile by two square mile postage stamp.
♪
All the processing would be done in the Newburgh Armory.
I felt that this could be a place where I could secrete
the men, women, materiel
that I was going to need to do this,
to do the intake.
Arresting somebody is one thing.
Then what are you going to do with them?
They're all going to be processed
into the federal system.
So I had to bring all those people,
the pretrial people, the AUSAs, the bosses.
It just--it turned out to be a massive,
massive congregation or gathering of people,
500 in total. - Wow.
You're about to bring in 500 investigators,
law enforcement, support staff,
into the postage stamp without being seen.
- I knew that I could bring things in in stages.
So I had this group arrive at 2:00 in the afternoon.
The next group come in at 3:30.
The next group come in at 5:30.
The next group come in at 7:00.
And we did this throughout the night.
♪
- They come into the armory. It's still dark outside.
It's 0-dark-hundred. What are we doing?
- We call it in the FBI putting people to bed.
Make sure that they were in the places
that they were supposed to be.
We knew we weren't going to have all 78 tucked into bed,
but we had a-- the vast majority of them.
- We have 78 indictments,
60 on the Blood side, 18 on the Latin King side.
We're going to give you the best addresses.
- The people who had to go the furthest distance
went out first.
The people that were closer to the armory went out second.
- The places where we've got two or three
multiple locations for hits, we will shut those streets off.
There will be uniformed personnel
from the city of Newburgh, state troopers,
to help assist in that.
We'll also have spotter teams out.
- And when you put together a team like that,
and it comes together, I knew the rest of it was now
let's just go get the bad guys. - Yeah.
- No warning shots.
No shooting at vehicles
unless the driver is posing an imminent threat to you.
- We wanted to make sure
there was a particular time that we were going to do this,
and I believe these warrants were to be hit at 0600 hours.
So at 05:59:59,
that's where I gave the countdown over the radio.
Five... Five, four...
Three, two... one, execute.
Execute. Execute.
On the day of the arrest,
we placed 78 teams out on the street that day,
one for each of the subjects
we're attempting to locate and apprehend.
There's no putting the genie back in the bottle.
- No. - The genie is out.
[dramatic music]
♪
- OK, here we go.
- You know, when you're back in the Ops center,
or you're back in the-- you're sitting there
and you're waiting, and the waiting is the worst part.
[indistinct chatter]
- Team 14 to command post.
[indistinct radio chatter]
Yeah, team 14 has a subject in custody, uh, without incident.
- 10-4, thank you.
- You're waiting for that first call from an arrest team.
[tense music]
♪
- Command post from team 2.
- You've got the mobile command post, go ahead.
- We're transporting our prisoner to the armory.
I'll give you time and mileage.
♪
- Take me through the inside of the armory.
As these MOPs start coming in, how do you have that set up?
- So it was essentially a nerve center.
I mean, that's essentially what it was.
We already got all the vans in from Department of Corrections
and Orange County Jail, and they've
already started bringing the subjects in from the streets.
And we had walked it and game-planned it to figure out
where it made the most sense, knowing that we were going
to have 500 personnel, meaning 500 good guys,
in and out of that during the course of the day.
We ended up using the basketball court.
Are you going to be the point of contact on this?
- Sure, why not? - OK.
So I'm gonna need one person assigned for them,
and then we're going to sign them over to the marshals
at the end.
So you'll sign for all the ones coming in.
Instead of having piecemeal,
we'll just have one person do it.
- Thanks a million.
- You got it.
You can start processing 'em.
If we have overflow and we don't have enough teams,
we'll stick them in here just to hold on to them until then.
We just went from table one to table two to table three.
- First to the pedigree station,
then they go to the fingerprint station,
then they go to the Miranda.
- We brought the marshals to us.
And as people were being processed,
they would be shuttled down
to the Metropolitan Correctional Center
in Lower Manhattan,
which is where they ended up being housed.
This has been a long time coming.
Um, the gang scourge up here has just been--it's
been endemic for years and years and years.
And I'd say probably over the last four or five years,
you know, Newburgh has just been--has been a place where,
you know, gunplay and drug dealing has just become
so rampant that people--it's just not a safe place to be.
Obviously I wanted 78 for 78, and that didn't happen.
I want to say that we were somewhere in the neighborhood
of 60 or something like that.
We think there's about 160, 180 card-carrying Bloods
in the city Newburgh, so we're effectively
taking out a third of them today,
including much of the hierarchy.
And on the Latin King side, there's probably 35 or 40
folks, and we're taking out 18 of them today.
So you know, close to half of them.
- They didn't tell you? Drug charges.
- Drug charges? - Yeah.
- Drug charges?
- Yeah, drug charges, man, and federal charges,
so they're the big time, right?
So think about what you're going to do,
because you're going to have an opportunity upstairs.
Think about what you're going do,
because you're looking at big time.
I'm going to be straight up honest with you.
Everybody on this indictment's looking at big time.
- The two operations, codenamed Blood Drive
and the Black Crown,
are the result of solid police work by the task force.
Both cases, targeting members of the Bloods
and the Latin Kings respectively,
used time-tested techniques like informants
and undercover drug buys,
to amass evidence and probable cause.
- Tell me what happened.
You've got Double O, he's in jail.
What about his counterpart over at the Latin Kings?
- Sure. Gunz Pagan, he refused to speak to us,
and held on to the machismo, I think,
that a lot of, you know,
leaders of violent street gangs have,
and ended up being arrested.
♪
[soft dramatic music]
♪
In Newburgh, the opportunity was not there.
And the disenfranchisement, I think,
leads to young men looking to get their aggressions out
in a different way.
And I'd see them hanging out on a stoop,
sitting on the steps or on a street corner,
with some guys that were convicted felons.
And I remember talking to a couple of kids,
eight, nine, ten 11, 12 years old and saying,
"I don't want to see you there on that stoop
around those guys." - Yeah.
- Until one little kid said to me,
"But Coach, that's my uncle and my brother."
- [laughing] Yeah.
- And not realizing the connection.
- Yeah.
- And, thinking to myself, "Wow.
"You cannot remove them from the situation that they're in.
"All you can do is provide an outlet
for a couple of hours a day."
And that was a way to put pressure on them
to stay in school and to stay out of trouble.