HEROES OF THE NY-NJ A-TEAM
Meet the super troopers who hunt nation’s worst fugitive criminals
IT’S a typical late afternoon in Chelsea: Revelers stumble from one trendy bar to the next, sightseers flock to the High Line, gourmands peruse the shelves at Chelsea Market — and four stories above the bustle, members of the New York/New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force are plotting the downfall of a suspected serial killer.
From its nondescript headquarters in one of New York’s hottest neighborhoods, the RFTF’s citybased detachment — a crack squad of US marshals, prosecutors and some of the NYPD’s brightest investigative minds — has closed thousands of cases since its founding in 2002.
They are a team of modern-day minutemen, willing to stop everything when they have a lead on a suspect and pursue their quarry to the farthest ends of the country at the drop of a dime.
The law-enforcement squad’s target on this particular summer afternoon is suspected “DatingApp Strangler” Danueal Drayton, wanted for murdering one woman in Queens and raping another online suitor in Brooklyn in a matter of hours.
After days of sleuthing, they come to the conclusion that Drayton may be hiding out clear across the country, in Hollywood.
“Listen, if your wives will let you, get on the next plane, get on the red-eye,” NYPD Lt. Paul Weeks told his task-force partners.
Within about 3¹/2 hours, members went home and got their bags and were wheels up.
ONE of the lone splashes of character — color, even — in the group’s Chelsea hideaway is a floor-to-ceiling rendering of a windblown American flag, the stars painted along one wall of the main room, the bars curling at a corner onto part of another.
The mural is a constant reminder of both the places the task force is willing to go and the modern patriotic time during which it was founded.
“It was basically after 9/11 [when] the federal government started to say, ‘ We want to start sharing information and we don’t want to have any more of these turf wars,’ ” said US Marshals Service Deputy Cmdr. Edward McMahon, who has been with the RFTF since its inception.
“The goal was [for federal marshals to] . . . start teaming up with your state and local partners . . . to capture the worst of the worst fugitives around the country.’’
That goal has been met — and then some. As of its 15th-anniver- sary report issued last year, the RFTF had arrested more than 69,000 fugitives, including nearly 5,000 gang members, and seized more than 1,500 guns, 8,500 kilograms of narcotics and $16 million in ill-gotten US currency.
With the regional group serving as a blueprint, there are now seven Regional Fugitive Task Forces around the country, with an eighth on the way, McMahon said.
As in any fruitful partnership, the RFTF combines the unique advantages of each level of law enforcement into a sum greater than its parts.
In addition to its national connections and deep-pocketed help from the federal government, each RFTF has been authorized by the US Marshals Service to make arrests in all 50 states, as opposed to just their local jurisdictions.
The local task forces, in turn, provide intimate knowledge of their state’s or city’s particular crime problems, as well as a deep pool of experienced recruits.
For the Chelsea-based city division of the RFTF — a unit whose group also includes members from Westchester County — that means 24 of the most proven warrant investigators the NYPD has to offer, along with 30 feds.
“This efficiency here and cohesion is so good because these guys are a tight-knit group,” said Kenneth Lehr, commanding officer of the NYPD’s Fugitive Enforcement Division and a member of the task force.
SAMANTHA Stewart lived under skies darkened by planes taking off and coming in for landings, in the shadow of people going places.
On a sticky mid-July night, the 29-year-old nurse’s brothers, concerned by hours of unanswered phone calls, found her dead on the bedroom floor of her 145th Road home in Queens, blocks from JFK Airport. Stewart’s teeth, white as the bedsheet in which her body was wrapped, had been knocked from her mouth.
Hours after killing Stewart, Drayton choked unconscious and raped a Tinder date inside a Brooklyn office space, authorities say. The heinous attacks were just the latest in his string of assaults on women from Connecticut to Nassau County and beyond, according to officials.
About a week after Stewart’s murder, the NYPD’s Detective Joseph Condello, Detective Richard Thompson and Sgt. Christopher Castle were three of the local RFTF members taking off from JFK, destination Los Angeles, seeking to arrest Drayton.
“The thing that struck every- body [about Drayton] were the priors,” said Condello, who has 25 of the trio’s collective 68 years of NYPD experience and 3¹/2 years with the NY/NJ RFTF.
The process of tracking down Drayton was a clinic in investigation.
Sleuths in The Bronx’s 50th Precinct identified Drayton as a suspect in Stewart’s murder, found his car parked at JFK and tracked down an airline manifest showing him on a flight to Los Angeles.
NY/NJ RFTF Supervisor Bill Dundon made contact with LA authorities, and investigators on both coasts ran a series of computer checks, eventually tracking Drayton to a Hollywood condo.
Condello, Thompson and Castle booked a last-minute flight using a US Marshals Service credit card, and were staking out the condo in a pickup truck within 20 hours of Drayton being identified as a suspect.
Six seven hours into the stakeout, Drayton walked out of the condo — and right into the view of Castle, who was watching from across the street.
The RFTF team moved in and cuffed Drayton, putting an end to the rampage of a man who allegedly told cops he’d killed at least five women. He also has been charged with the rape of another in LA days before his bust.
When they swept the condo, the men found a woman being held against her will.
Drayton is awaiting extradition back to New York.
THE painstaking police work that went into tracking him down notwithstanding, Drayton made it relatively easy on the RFTF members when he walked out of that Hollywood condo right into their arms.
So, too, did Julio Salcedo, whose Bronx marijuana grow house exploded in September 2016, killing FDNY Chief Michael Fahy.
“We were able to track cedo] down to an address in New Jersey,” said Weeks, one of the longest-tenured NYPD members in the NY/NJ RFTF. “An occupant came to the door and said, ‘The guy youyou’rere looking for is in the back room.’ ”
Salcedo pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Friday.
Doublekiller Anthony Morales opted for the hard way.
“We approached him, he did the sign of the cross and then he pulled out a firearm,” Thompson said.
Four days after fatally shooting a mother and son who lived in the same Stat en Island housing-housing proj project building as he did, Morales again had his gun in hand as he stared down the RFTF in a Hamburg, Pa., parking lot.
“We had guns tactically pointed on [Morales’] car,” said Thompson of the March 2016 run-in. “He took six shots to the chest from anan M4M4 rifle, but he survived.”
Morales — wwho pleaded guilty to the murders in May and was sentenced to 40 years to life — is an example of tthe type of criminalnal the RFTF cacan find iself facing on any given day:ddespe rate, unpredictable predictable and willing to do anything thing to sta you out of jail. “Today I die,” BBloods gangbanger Garland Tyree wrote on social media amamid an hours-long standostandoff with police at his StatenS Island home in August 2015. Less
ththan an hour earlier, a team from the NY/NJ RFTF had been pounding on Tyree’s door.
He responded by setting off a smoke bomb and shooting an FDNY lieutenant who arrived on scene in the leg and buttocks.
“He came out shooting,’’ Castle recalled.
Clutching an assault rifle and wearing a bulletproof vest, Tyree went down in a hail of gunfire.
McMahon credits the US Marshals’ fugitive-apprehension training with helping to keep the members of nationwide RFTFs ready for anything.
“Executing a warrant . . . is one of the most dangerous things to do in law enforcement, and we take this training very seriously,” he said.