Elite cops track Boston’s most wanted fugitives Bad boys, whatcha gonna do?

Elite cops track Boston’s most wanted fugitives
Bad boys, whatcha gonna do?
By O’Ryan Johnson  |   Friday, November 26, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage

Sgt. Detective Brian Albert, right, leads the Fugitive Apprehension Team, which has taken down some of Boston’s most notorious and dangerous fugitives.
Photo by Mark Garfinkel

These Hub cops have tracked down and slapped cuffs on the city’s most notorious fugitives, including the Craigslist Killer and Edward Corliss, the man accused of killing Jamaica Plain clerk Surendra Dangol. Their latest collars? The two men charged in the Mattapan massacre.

“I would like criminals to know if you commit a crime, the police are going to be looking for you,” said Sgt. Detective Brian Albert. “It doesn’t matter if you go out of the city, out of the state or out of the country. You’re better off turning yourself in to face the music.”

Albert commands the Fugitive Apprehension Team, a 12-member joint squad of Boston cops and U.S. Marshals that has been to at least 14 states, as well as Trinidad and Canada, in pursuit of wanted men and women, using some of the most advanced technology available to capture suspects on the run for murder, rapes and shootings in Boston. The team was formed in 2007, handpicked by Albert largely from BPD’s gang unit.

During the round-the-clock hunt for the suspects in the Sept. 28 Mattapan murders, cops zeroed in on Kimani Washington’s Manchester, N.H., hideout. The team got the floor plan to the apartment building, cleared out the units beside Washington’s and had local SWAT teams with eyes on the apartment before they hit the door.

They declined to discuss the arrest of murder suspect Dwayne Moore, saying it remains a grand jury investigation, but they described the kind of rigorous preparation they use in each case to keep cops safe and put crooks behind bars.

After a tip pointed to a possible Roxbury hideout earlier this week, officer Steve Ridge keyed in the license plates of cars around the building.

“We know who owns the house, how much they pay in taxes, how they vote — Democrat. We know the square footage. We should have the whole layout of the place before we go in,” Ridge said, eyeing his laptop screen. That house turned out to be a dead end.

That’s not always the case.

Last March, a tight huddle of plainclothes cops stood in a Dorchester parking lot at dawn, passing around photos of Schuyler Oppenheimer, 19, a convicted drug dealer — each showing a different hairstyle. Oppenheimer was wanted for a shooting in Cambridge.

Team members pulled up to the home — already under surveillance by U.S. Marshals John Bianci and Joseph Norton — and formed up to go in while other officers took up well-rehearsed positions around the house. Boston police officer Eddie Hernandez and transit police Detective Charles Collins moved to the back.

A woman reluctantly let a group of officers in the front door. Moments later, there was a commotion at the back, and a disheveled Oppenheimer was escorted out by Hernandez and Collins.

It is one of hundreds of arrests the team has made this year. Boston police Commissioner Edward Davis credits them with helping to drive down overall crime numbers — though murders are up sharply for the year — by quickly nabbing “impact” players.

“They’re so effective and so fast at finding people,” Davis said. “The great thing about the fugitive unit is that they have connections outside the criminal justice world that help them do their job, They’ve had really good luck with running down people in other countries. We rely on them.”

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