Tales of Beekman Ave.

Cypress Ave. is the heart of the South Bronx. Hillary Clinton will never come here?and if you don't live here, or have business here, you, too, are advised to stay away. You've entered New York City's Appalachia, or its Trenchtown: even given the crime reduction in this part of the Bronx, it's still a district you could walk into, never to emerge.

Two blocks down from Cypress is Beekman Ave., where on the cold, clear night of Dec. 16, 1991, Anthony Green, a skinny 17-year-old black kid, decided to set up shop and sell his three-dollar crack vials. Beekman Ave. was known as the place to get five- and 10-dollar red-topped vials, peddled by a Dominican drug gang that would later be immortalized by the media as the Wild Cowboys. Weirdly and stupidly, Green figured the Cowboy crew needed some healthy free market competition. He got some good business going. Crackheads are wont to look for bargains. Presently, though, four masked shooters rolled up on him and blew him away. Then they opened fire on the street's throng of crackheads. By 10:10?an hour when people in Manhattan are going out to dinner?four corpses lay in the street.

Michael Stone's new book Gangbusters: How a Street-Tough, Elite Homicide Unit Took Down New York's Most Dangerous Gang (Doubleday) portrays in exacting detail the reign of terror that the Wild Cowboys inflicted on Beekman Ave. They held the block hostage for four years. The Police Dept. pretty much gave up trying to deal with them. Finally, a task force of Bronx and Manhattan law enforcement officials teamed up, and using state conspiracy laws?similar to the way the feds use RICO?brought the gang down in 1995, getting them sentences that varied between 20 and 158 years.

It's been estimated that the Wild Cowboys were responsible for 60 murders. Their demise?along with the demise of other crews like Thief David's Crew, the C&C gang, the Nasty Boys, and Sex, Money & Murder?is one of the reasons the Bronx's murder rate has dropped more than 55 percent since 1990.

"I watched [the Wild Cowboys] for over nine months and developed a relationship with them, but they were bad," Rocco DeSantis, a court clerk in Manhattan, told me about his work during the 1995 Wild Cowboy trial. "They had no feelings, and were the coldest people I had ever seen at a trial. They were cold-blooded killers, and to them it didn't matter how many people they killed. It was nothing to them. No emotion. Nothing."

Across the street that the Cowboys used to terrorize is St. Mary's Park, 34.33 acres of greenery. The gangsters once burned a man to death in that park. They used to shoot into the park from Beekman Ave. rooftops, to see how close they could come to people walking by. On an autumn day in 2000, the park is filled with touch-football players and young kids running through the trees. Below, Beekman Ave. is quiet. An old Hispanic man in a security guard's uniform patrols the block's four-story apartment houses. Young kids run past him, ignoring his presence.

I stopped to talk with Solos Avasol, an African gypsy cab driver, about the neighborhood.

"Now it's better here during the daytime," he said. "Not like it used to be. Now every five minutes you'll see a cop car driving by. But I still watch who I pick up down here. They won't pay or they'll break your windows or here?" Avasol opens the back door and shows the rips in the car's upholstery inflicted by passengers.

"Not much respect they show, and that is why at night I would not come down here. No. You say 141st St. and Cypress, I am not taking you there."

I talked with the pastor of St. Luke's Church, on 138th St. With a long sigh, Father Ryan said, "The neighborhood has definitely improved, but it's a little difficult to put your tongue on just how. Improvements in a community like this take place so quietly over so long a time that you miss them. Now there is not as much drug use or selling. Mind you, I'm not claiming there is none, but it isn't as evident as it used to be. There is less friction and racism on the streets now, and the kids seem to feel more comfortable with one another. The schools now seem to be back in control."

Before I left Beekman Ave. I stopped a thirtysomething Hispanic man walking with a baby in his arms.

"At least today I can walk outside holding a child, know what I'm saying? Wasn't like that."

"How about at night?" I asked.

He stared through me and, with a tight grin, rolled his eyes, suggesting that it might be best not to let the sun set on my ass anywhere near Beekman Ave.