Pubdate: Sun, 24 Jun 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Douglas Martin

ERIN O'REILLY, 41, SERGEANT WHO BROKE UP GANGS, DIES

Erin O'Reilly, a New York City police sergeant who helped orchestrate 
the downfall of two entrenched Harlem drug gangs by using a new legal 
approach, died last Sunday at a Long Island hospital. She was 41 and 
lived in North Babylon, N.Y.

The Suffolk County medical examiner's office did not release the 
cause of death, but a New York City Police Department spokesman said 
it was nothing suspicious. Sergeant O'Reilly had a history of high 
blood pressure.

In January, Police Commissioner Bernard B. Kerik named Sergeant 
O'Reilly head of a new conspiracy unit in recognition of her 
leadership in making arrests on a novel legal premise: that local 
gangs operate shrewdly managed, almost corporate operations to sell 
drugs in thousands of transactions so small that individually they 
constitute only minor felonies, but that taken together they amount 
to a criminal conspiracy.

She and the officers and prosecutors working with her combined 
extensive research from official records, interviews and other 
sources to bring charges against gang kingpins who had proved 
invulnerable to the standard tactic of arresting street dealers and 
persuading them to betray their bosses, and so on up the ladder.

These more sophisticated drug operations were conducted indoors, not 
on street corners, and the thousands of street dealers making small 
sales were deliberately given no information to trade for lighter 
sentences. "You'd just keep arresting them forever," said Bridget G. 
Brennan, the city's special narcotics prosecutor.

In an interview in the June 11 issue of New York magazine, Sergeant 
O'Reilly said: "They knew the law as well as we knew the law. They 
were not greedy. We like people to get greedy, because greedy people 
make mistakes. And that's one of the things with this group: They 
don't make mistakes."

But the dealers made the mistake of offending Sergeant O'Reilly. She 
told The Daily News in April: "They'd taunt us, they'd smirk, they 
would think they were untouchable. But I'm stubborn."

In June 1998, after earlier success in dismantling a drug operation 
at the Castle Hotel at 106th Street and Central Park West, she was 
assigned to take on the Black Top gang, named for the color of the 
caps on their crack vials.

Black Top worked out of two connected apartment houses at 12-14 and 
16-18 Old Broadway, which is between 125th and 126th Streets. The 
gang effectively sealed the building from the police by dead-bolting 
entrances and posting lookouts. The building overlooked the precinct 
house, which further aided the criminals.

Inside, dealers on the higher floors sat on milk crates selling 
crack. During police raids, they disappeared into apartments they had 
either rented or commandeered.

After aborted raids and other stops and starts, last July Sergeant 
O'Reilly called together a group that included members of several 
police units and prosecutors from the Manhattan district attorney's 
office. The group decided to take the novel step of applying 
conspiracy laws previously used mainly against the Mafia.

In the drug operations, Sergeant O'Reilly saw what clearly seemed a 
structured business.

"They had shifts, there was a set scale of who got paid what whenever 
you were a lookout, whether you were an actual dealer that handed 
drugs to people, whether you were a runner, whether you were a 
cooker," she said in the New York interview.

Last Nov. 2, nearly 140 officers converged on the Black Top 
stronghold, making 24 arrests. Using the same strategy, Sergeant 
O'Reilly dismantled another organization, the Watson Gang, which had 
overrun two buildings on West 129th Street. Two charged as leaders 
and 21 said to be underlings were arrested. Those cases have not yet 
gone to trial.

Commissioner Kerik, who named Sergeant O'Reilly to head the new 
conspiracy unit in January, said in a statement after her death, 
"Fighting drug traffickers demands courage, dedication and tenacity, 
and in Sgt. Erin O'Reilly, you had all three qualities."

Erin O'Reilly was born on Feb. 27, 1960, in the Bronx and was raised 
in Bergen County, N.J. Her father, John J. O'Reilly Sr., was a New 
York State highway patrolman who did "everything to keep me from 
becoming a police officer," Sergeant O'Reilly recalled, adding, "I'm 
sure he saw his share of things he didn't want his daughter to see."

But she said she wanted to make a difference, and joined the force. 
Her first assignment was in Washington Heights, at the height of the 
crack epidemic. "New York was the O.K. Corral," she said. But she 
loved being a police officer, and liked to pepper her speech with 
expressions from the television show "Dragnet." Ms. Brennan said she 
sometimes worked 36 hours straight.

Ms. O'Reilly is survived by her father, who lives in Jackson, Miss.; 
her brother, John J. O'Reilly Jr., of Mahwah, N.J.; and her 
companion, Andrea Abruzzo.
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