Outside The Impact Zone
Fausto Lachapel spent most of his 27 years in Washington Heights, and that's where he was when he was shot in the torso, and where he died before an ambulance arrived. The police assumed he was a drug dealer, and the press gave the incident a collective yawn; after all, that same week, a beautiful white actress died in her boyfriend's arms following a mugging-gone-bad on the hipper-than-thou Lower East Side.
At 6 a.m., his youngest brother had been called into the station to identify a corpse. A half hour later, neighbors, friends and passersby gathered at the dark steps of the apartment building at 162nd Street and Fort Washington Avenue where Lachapel had once lived, barely two blocks from where he was shot down.
Most of the neighborhood was asleep, bundled against the cold when I chanced upon the sidewalk wake. Otherwise, I would have never known that Fausto Lachapel had been shot dead the previous night, less than two blocks from my front door.
Taped to the sidewalk was a photograph of a young man wearing a Miami Heat basketball jersey. Surrounding the photo were St. Mary of Guadalupe candles and an epitaph written in white chalk on black paint: We Miss You. The next day, the murder accounted for a paragraph each in the Post and the News. Since then, it's warranted a three-sentence follow-up in the Post, and a passing mention in the Voice.
The Hammer is a brusque, white beat cop in his mid-thirties who declined to be identified by his real name and who resembles a minor Hammett or Himes character. Prodded about the nickname, he says, "That's what people around here call me because I put the nail in the coffin." I ask him about Lachapel, and he says, "Information has a price, you know."
When I demur, he looks me up and down and then looks back to my eyes before dispensing a fortune-cookie threat: "If you're young and blond and female and walking around at 4 a.m., something's probably going to happen to you. That might not be the case at 4 p.m. It's not about probabilities-it's about common sense."
This philosophy goes against the methodical approach Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says is working in Washington Heights and throughout the city. Kelly likes to say that numbers speak for themselves, and homicides in Washington Heights are dramatically down. Ten years ago, homicides in the 33rd Precinct peaked at 120; in 2004, there was but one murder, and this year thus far there have been six. In 1987, the New York Times dubbed Washington Heights, then nicknamed Crack City, "the city's murder capital." Now the paper's real estate section calls the neighborhood a "destination all its own."
Still, you won't find Washington Heights-where more than a quarter million people, mostly Dominican, are crammed into the single square mile that makes up the 33 Precinct-on the taxi map, which cuts off at 125th Street. The neighborhood is best known among those who follow city politics for the mini-riot that broke out after a cop shot a drug runner named Kiko Garcia, whom Mayor Dinkins immediately visited in the hospital and whose body the city later paid to have returned to the Dominican Republic.
While the Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital on Broadway has brought a middle-class work force to the neighborhood and its cheap rents have began attracting gentrifiers, census data compiled by Verizon shows that most households in Washington Heights take in no more than $15,000 a year and pay as little as $395 a month in rent; it's still a rough-and-tumble place to live.
In January 2004, the New York City Police Department launched Operation Impact in Washington Heights, bulking up patrols in high-crime corners, housing projects and single blocks, denoting special attention to so-called impact zones. Officers in the zones were there to disrupt drug commerce, but they also went after smaller crimes, arresting petty thieves, trespassers and even loiterers.
Lachapel was shot one block outside of the impact zone.
Two weeks later, another shooting took place in Washington Heights, again one block outside of the impact zone.
The cops found Lachapel, already dead, when they arrived at 38 Fort Washington, as the fortress is better known, some 45 minutes after receiving an anonymous 911 call reporting shots were fired.
By 1 a.m., the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witness across the street would have been long abandoned; the Jaya candy store next door closed. The sunken courtyard, graffiti strewn and piss-perfumed, is out of the way of pedestrian traffic or the perusing headlights of a police car, making it the perfect place for a drug sale, or an execution.
The police opened and closed the case in three days. Captain Philip Wishnia of the 33rd Precinct told me that Lachapel was notorious for selling PMA, a cheap ecstasy knockoff. Wishnia, the Hammer and several other officers at the precinct imply that the case is a cut-and-dry drug deal gone awry, even though Lachapel had no criminal convictions, and no drugs were found at the scene. ÿ
The alleged gunman, Luis O. Eugenio of Sugar Hill, the neighborhood immediately south of Washington Heights, was nabbed three days later. In court, he claimed that Lachapel and three of his friends lured him into the alley behind the Chateau D'Armes to rob him. When he saw the glint of Lachapel's gun, his attorney told the judge, Eugenio didn't hesitate to shoot.
The three men Eugenio alleged were there with Lachapel-Juan Perez, Edwin Rosario and Lucas Soriano-all lived within two blocks of the murder site. They have been charged with attempted robbery and breaking and entering.
According to Stanislov Germain, Soriano's attorney, his client willingly visited the 33rd Precinct three times expecting to view a line-up. Germain attests that Detective Herman Hernandez "clearly made representations" that Soriano would receive immunity in exchange for his participation. But before Soriano could point a finger, he received his own set of charges.
Detective Hernandez works the night shift, the street-crime beat. He tells me he has connected the Lachapel case to seven others but would not elaborate. "Mr. Soriano's allegations are a lie," he said. "He was fully informed about how to go about getting immunity. Prior to him making any kinds of statements, he was informed of his rights."
Germain concedes that these are muddy waters: "What's odd about this case is that on a certain level, it's a victimless crime. Hypothetically Eugenio is there to buy drugs, and Lachapel and his friends are there to sell drugs. Who's the victim? All along I've had an intellectual problem with this case-I don't think anybody can be characterized as innocent."
A month after the murder, Captain Wishnia attributed the death to recent changes in the building: "There's been a change of management. We're looking into it." But the fortress had long since lost its formidability.
38 Fort Washington and its neighboring twin, 46 Fort Washington, were built in 1913 by the prolific architectural firm of Schwartz & Gross, which erected high steel gates enclosing the brick and limestone buildings. The two buildings consume the whole block.
"When a building goes down the rat trap, it's not uncommon for the problems to be passed around. And when 38 Fort Washington was allowed to go the way it started to go 10 years ago, the cycle of blame and dismissal will go on forever," says Steve Trynosky, management agent for buildings in two of the more notorious neighborhoods in New York, Washington Heights and Highbridge in the South Bronx. He is sitting at his desk in the basement of The Letchworth, adjacent to 38 Fort Washington, a building where the elevator functions, the floors are clean and no one has been gunned down since 1999.
He's a white guy who once lived and still works in Washington Heights, and he acts tough. As if to prove his point, he casually displays a coke bottle filled with about 100 cartridge cases that he has collected from the backyards of his properties.
"I have a theory of management that I've been preaching for 30 years: You protect your building as your own house. If a window breaks, fix it. You close the roofs, you paint over the graffiti. You don't let people get away with even the smallest things. You treat drug dealing like a business. You say, I understand what you do but it's my job to make sure you don't do it here. You don't ask a super to do it, to risk his life and go to the police when he lives with his family in the same building as the drug dealers or the killers."
The fortress, though, was allowed to decay. When Maurice Stahl, the building's original owner, passed away in 1976, he endowed it to his sons, who in 1993 became embroiled in a legal struggle over ownership that left the building neglected. The roof no longer kept out rain, the walls were beginning to cave in, unlocked doors allowed the outside in and the window frames were missing glass and housing jagged edges. During litigation an architect testified the building "looked precariously weak."
As the brothers fought each other in court for 12 years, Paul Klein, a managing agent, took over the building, which, he recalls, "was not in terribly good condition because of rent strikes, some justified, some completely political." Klein suspects that one of the brothers had been "cooking, I think, the books" to incite the tenants to strike; the other brother thought the same. The result was, no one was willing to sink money into the building, which further deteriorated at the hands of the disgruntled tenants. "Mattresses were burned in the stairwells; we had to replace the lock on the front door two to three times a week," Klein tells me.
The suit was resolved this February, but little had changed when I visited the building this summer.
Inside the entryway, a bullet had left a jagged hole. Lachapel was reportedly shot inside, so it couldn't have been his. The intercom was busted, as is the door. I stepped into the acrid smell of a lobby left to waste. Graffiti climbed the walls and garbage lay on the tile floor and in piles in the stairwell. The only elevator was broken, and the windows were cracked and dirty. Despite appearances, 38 Fort Washington is not part of an impact zone. So much for Broken Windows.
Asking residents about the Lachapel murder didn't spur any response. Most claimed they hadn't been around, or had never heard about it.
Miguel Brand, a tenant who has lived at 38 Fort Washington for nearly 20 years, doubts much has changed since: "This building is a total wreck. I couldn't tell you who the landlord is, there's no service; this elevator's been down since I came here." That men with guns had traipsed through the front lobby did not surprise Brand, who shrugged and replied, "Everybody comes into this building." A teenager nonchalantly separated the stems and the seeds from a dime bag, listening on as Mr. Brand talked.
Behind the building, I passed the staircase under which Lachapel's body had lain for nearly an hour before paramedics arrived, according to a resident who refused to tell me his name. He did, though, lead me to a heavy unmarked door, feet from where Lachapel had lain dead. I knocked for too long before Waskar Perez, a haggard man with blood-shot eyes, appeared and opened the door. Perez claims he was out of town when the shooting took place, and that his brother, who works as the super when he's gone, was asleep. "You've got to understand," he tells me, "Worse things happen in better neighborhoods. And anyway, it's not the super's fault-we're just here to do maintenance."
When I asked about Wishnia's claim, Perez flatly tells me, "No, no more cops have come by here." Numerous calls to the police department asking for comment on the super's statement were not returned.
Meanwhile, the boy who identified his brother's corpse now wears Fausto's Heat jersey, too long on him. Lachapel's girlfriend and their baby have moved into his mother's apartment on 162nd Street. The dead man's mother keeps the apartment clean, waits to hear from the district attorney and refuses to talk much about her eldest son.
The Hammer suspects, or at least tells me he suspects, there's more to this case than meets the eye, but his answers to my questions are opaque, indirect and repetitive. He dismisses the impact zone as "a new name for the same shit" and seems to blame the community for the crime rate with one of his many ambiguous one-liners: "You have to be willing to get your own head chopped off to save some other heads."
Whatever shadowy conspiracy may exist, it seems to me that The Hammer speaks, however unofficially, for the department and the city at large when he dismisses Fausto Lachapel as "just some punk kid slinging dope who got whacked."