Robert Jackall Wild Cowboys

Annotation

Bullet-torn bodies in a South Bronx alley, a college boy shot in the head on the West Side Highway and a wild shootout in the streets of Washington Heights, home of New York's immigrant Dominican community and hub of the eastern seaboard's drug trade. All seemingly separate acts of violence. But investigators discover a pattern to the mayhem. In this bloody urban saga, Jackall recounts how street cops, detectives and prosecutors pieced together a puzzle-like story of narcotics trafficking, money laundering and murders, all centered on a gang of Dominican youths known as the Wild Cowboys. These boyhood friends ran a crack business and routinely shot rivals and shot or slashed witnesses to their crimes, eventually turning on one another. Jackall chronicles the crime-scene investigators, car chases, arrests, interviews, plea bargaining and sentences, but also tells of a society with irreconcilable differences and fraught with moral ambivalence. He looks at a society where the forces of order fight not only criminals, but also community activists furthering narrow causes, intellectuals who romanticize criminals, judges who refuse to lock up dangerous men, federal prosecutors more interested in nailing the police than the criminals and politicians who pander to the worst of the society.