From the issue dated October 10, 1997
A Sociologist Dissects the Mean Streets of New York
Williams College professor rode along with detectives as they struggled to solve the case against the 'Wild Cowboys'
By PETER MONAGHAN
NEW YORK
Incarceration or violent death kept many of the subjects of Robert Jackall's new book from the recent publication party here, at the Williams Club in mid-Manhattan.
From 1993 to 1995, Dr. Jackall followed the investigation and prosecution of the "Wild Cowboys," a criminal ring run by Dominican-Americans and immigrants from the Dominican Republic that had terrorized portions of the city.
Their ruthless, disciplined operation was based in the South Bronx, which had the highest murder rate in the city from 1988 to 1992, and in Washington Heights, at the northern tip of Manhattan, one of the birthplaces of crack cocaine in the mid-'80s.
The ring committed countless murders and robberies while trading in narcotics. They enlisted or coerced the owners of many small business -- such as grocery stores and check-cashing services -- into helping them, and they viciously intimidated witnesses into refusing to talk to police.
After a difficult and dangerous pursuit by New York detectives and prosecutors, the ring was broken. Forty members are in prison, convicted of murder, assault, racketeering, and other crimes. Others fled to the Dominican Republic, where they aren't subject to extradition. Many more are dead, victims of gang wars.
For parts of 1991 and 1992, and almost all of 1993 and 1994, Dr. Jackall, a sociologist at Williams College, was alongside the detectives and police, on the street and in the squad room, a world apart from leafy Williamstown.
At times he risked his life, earning him the respect of detectives, who called him "the Professor." He tells the detectives' story, in cinematic detail, in Wild Cowboys: Urban Marauders and the Forces of Order, just published by Harvard University Press.
At first Dr. Jackall simply studied case files in the detectives' offices. After a while he began participating in their "squad-room chatter," he says. Then he would join them in an unmarked car when they responded to calls. "The detectives saddled up and took me along, and I just went out and went through the whole crime scene with them, did everything, stayed with the case."
For the book, he interviewed more than 200 detectives, scores of police officers, more than 40 prosecutors, and several judges. Because of legal restrictions, he had only limited access to suspects; most of his information on them came from detectives' notes. But he did manage to speak to a few of the "perps" informally, and during their trials he learned that some of the Wild Cowboys' leaders knew of his research -- and were proud that their work had been noticed. "I'll bet there are going to be very brisk sales of this book in prison," he says with a smile.
Research on gang members is an established niche in sociology. Wild Cowboys is different, according to Arthur J. Vidich, a professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research and a former colleague of Dr. Jackall's. Not only does the book focus on the police, he says, but it also analyzes the effect of city politics on police work. It follows detectives from the streets to the courts and into their social world and private lives. "It's a rare study," Dr. Vidich says.
Dr. Jackall is unabashed about his admiration for the men he worked with. "I marvel at guys like these, who keep going -- year in and year out -- on thankless cases, anonymous work," he says. In New York City, he suggests, the police are "a crossroads occupational group," at work where many social issues converge.
"A policeman's lot is not a happy one," he says. "One of the great ironies is that the police, who try to act to thwart violence that everybody else ignores, often get blamed for acting as sometimes they need to act, by people who are utterly insulated from that violence."
The professor does not deny the reality of police corruption -- he has taught courses on it -- but he sees it as far less prevalent than do those who would make political hay from the issue. Detectives must be singular individuals, he argues, able to confront and subdue heavily armed criminals, and at the same time to maintain their faith in the justice system in the midst of social mayhem.
He disdains what he calls "ain't-it-awful hand-wringing" and "the recycling of shopworn social explanations" that confuse sympathy for people living in difficult circumstances with the ennobling of wrongdoers. The Wild Cowboys, he suggests, hardly fit stereotypes of poor immigrants, compelled to do whatever they can to get along. Ambitious, smart, and regimented, "they could have done anything they would want to do," he says.
Gang leaders hired drug addicts as runners and scouts. They persuaded older women -- often the addicts' mothers or grandmothers -- to operate safe houses, where the women provided hot meals and stored weapons, guns, and money, while gang members played video games and fooled around with young women from the neighborhood.
The world of criminals like the Wild Cowboys, he suggests, "in many ways poses a fundamental challenge to the universalistic principles that our justice system presumably rests on."
Even as he says he was sickened by the ring members, he recognizes how captivating some of them were. He cites the intelligence, good looks, and wicked sense of humor of one leader -- "an incredibly virile, authoritative force."
But Dr. Jackall's eye was trained mostly on the police, whose ethos of self-sacrifice in service of the common good, he argues, derives primarily from the department's Irish-Catholic heritage. Almost all of the officers, he found, shared the more ennobling aspects of this ethos.
He came away impressed by the investigators' "ways of knowing." He even began thinking like them. Like the detectives he studied, he came to realize only gradually that there was a pattern underlying dozens of apparently random murders and other crimes in Washington Heights and the South Bronx. The Wild Cowboys, he saw, used murder "as a rational business tool."
"Even as detectives begin trying to home in on a case, they're working analogously with other cases," he says. "Always. They're great comparative thinkers, but it's unlike a comparative frame of reference that, say, academics would use, where it's much more analytically posed.
"Everything in the detective world proceeds through stories."
To capture that world, he says, "I chose to write the book borrowing techniques from fiction and from film. My goal was to recreate the phenomenology of the people I was studying, by presenting the fragmented, often mysterious way in which the case came at them, and to show that the reality of investigative work is precisely entering into a dark room, not knowing where you're going, and beginning to feel around until suddenly you come across objects that feel familiar."
"We made the tough decision to make the book a little tough for the reader," says Susan Wallace Boehmer, Dr. Jackall's editor at the Harvard press. Instead of footnotes, the book offers a complex narrative, with a list of characters and a chronology at the end.
Key detectives in the book credit Dr. Jackall with capturing the fragmented, sporadic quality of investigative work. "He did an excellent job," says Detective Mark Tebbens. "It's hard to follow a case like this and know all the intricate little things that took place." Many of the details, he adds, themselves warrant book-length treatment.
In fact, they'll get it: In his next book, Labyrinths: The World of Police Detectives, also for Harvard, Dr. Jackall will go into the work and reputations of several detectives with cameo roles in Wild Cowboys, such as Austin Francis (Tim) Muldoon III, a third-generation New York detective who is, the professor writes, a "lover of books, poetry, and, to his colleagues' dismay, John Cage's music."
Given Dr. Jackall's own intellectual upbringing, it is perhaps not surprising that his views resonate as they do with those of his subjects. He once intended to become a Jesuit priest. Beginning in 1957, he studied theology, classics, history, philosophy, and sociology at a novitiate in Wernersville, Pa., and at Loyola College of Fordham University. But he dropped out after 10 of the traditional 13 to 15 years of training, and taught Latin for two years at a Roman Catholic high school in Philadelphia and sociology for a year at Georgetown University. In 1976, after earning his doctorate in sociology at the New School, he began teaching at Williams. He lives near Columbia University with his wife and daughter and spends three days a week at Williams.
In his earlier work, he had examined more-mundane occupations: bank clerks, for example, in Workers in a Labyrinth (Allanheld, Osmund, 1978), and corporate managers, in Moral Mazes (Oxford University Press, 1988). In all of his books and essays, though, he has been intent on producing "a set of reflections about the directions of our society," he says. Each time, his focus is on the way the world interacts with and molds peoples' sense of themselves and of morality.
Only when pressed -- and not before denouncing "the self-dramatization that is so much the vogue" -- does he recount those times when his own life was in danger. Once he was with officers in the process of making an arrest when they were confronted by a crowd of angry young men who emerged from an unlicensed social club. "All the cops had their guns drawn, and there were 500 people pressing in closer and closer around us," he says. It was 3 in the morning. The officers waited six minutes for backup to arrive. "I timed it," Dr. Jackall says, still with a nervous laugh.
Of such experiences, he says, "it was something I felt I had to do if I was to understand what the police were being subjected to -- and were subjecting themselves to."
One leader of the Wild Cowboys would taunt police officers on foot patrol by training the red dot of his rifle's laser sight on their hearts. The gang had a game in which they shot from a rooftop at civilians in a Bronx park, giving themselves points for how close they could come. They didn't always miss.
Even after years of research, Dr. Jackall came across stories that shocked him. After several people had died of heroin overdoses in the Bronx, he told one prosecutor how terrible it was.
"The prosecutor replied, 'Well, of course, it was an advertising strategy.'"
The professor was aghast. "You're still working from a different logic," the prosecutor explained. "Whenever you have a pattern of overdoses in the same area, it's an advertising strategy, where you deliberately put out powerful drugs in undiluted form, precisely to kill people in order to advertise the strength of your product. People will flock from hundreds of miles around to buy it."
Copyright © 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
