Pulido's club offered sex, drugs, prosecutors say

Nobody had to worry about police raiding the after-hours club atop the auto body shop on the gritty side street in Hyde Park.

The police helped run the place.

One night a month, federal prosecutors say, about a hundred guests found the blue door and the awning that read ``Destiny Dance Studio," at the side of Extreme Performance Auto Body. Twenty or 40 dollars got them in. Up a stairway, music thumped. There were nude dancers and prostitutes. Drinks and drugs were for sale. In the ``boom-boom room," guests paid up to $100 for sex.

Partying alongside known drug dealers were uniformed officers from the Boston Police Department and other departments, according to an FBI affidavit.

Presiding over the affairs was Roberto ``Kiko" Pulido, 41, a member of the police motorcycle squad who, for $600 a night, ensured that revelers would not be bothered by law enforcement.

He could do that, he said, because he was kicking money up to his superiors on the force. At a party last December, he introduced another police officer as ``a hustler, just like me."

By the time Pulido was arrested late Thursday, federal authorities had accused him of presiding over much more than parties.

For 2 1/2 years, Pulido unwittingly led federal investigators through his rambling criminal enterprise, according to the affidavit. The document, with transcripts of his taped conversations, depicts a man who felt invincible, emboldened by his badge, steroids, and the help of at least two police officer friends. As he raked in the cash, he seemed to grow increasingly boastful, despite occasional blunders, such as the time he accidentally radioed police headquarters during a major drug transaction.

He relished his sometimes brutal sideline, according to the affidavit: He threatened to kill the children of those who crossed him and to chop a guard dog in half; he reveled in a beating he gave a man who stole a stereo from his truck, boasting of ramming his face against the back wheel of his car. ``I had just done a shot of [steroids]," he told an associate. ``I was ready. Boy, I was hyped."

``I love that adrenaline," Pulido told an undercover federal agent earlier this year, after the police officer had provided a protective escort for what he thought was a 40-kilogram cocaine deal, the affidavit said.

A person cooperating with authorities who was involved in a large identity-theft ring led FBI agents to Pulido in late 2003. The person had been selling the police officer half-price gift cards purchased at Lowe's, Home Depot, and Best Buy using credit lines opened in other people's names. Sometimes Pulido used the gift cards himself, buying a plasma television, gifts for his friends, his family, and a girlfriend, and building supplies for his part-time construction business. Sometimes he sold them at a profit.

He also sent a steady supply of stolen identities to the person cooperating with authorities. In conversations with his associates, he was proud of his ability to spot easy marks for identity theft: He ran the license plate numbers of expensive cars he encountered in routine traffic stops through police systems to get to the owners' private information. With the help of a worker at a local bank, he picked off those with the best credit ratings.

``It's easy for me," he said. ``I just run people's plates, you know. I go look for [expletive] fancy cars and [expletive] run 'em."

He sold and used steroids he ordered from a convicted dealer in Greece and delivered ecstasy and OxyContin to the person cooperating with authorities, boasting in one conversation that the way to get drugs into the country easily is to wrap them in photographic paper.

``That [expletive] carbon paper," he said. ``There's nothing that can get an x-ray through that, and dogs can't sniff through that."

The affidavit said Pulido supplied steroids to his friend Carlos A. Pizarro, a South End police officer he had met at the Boston Police Academy, who was also allegedly dealing drugs. While a cadet, Pulido met another officer arrested Thursday, Nelson ``Nelly" Carrasquillo, who had served alongside Pulido in Jamaica Plain.

In 2004, Carrasquillo was honored by the Police Department after he heard shots fired inside the New England Medical Center garage, and helped apprehend three suspects.

At the dance studio, long after the Shaw's Market and the Brooks pharmacy at the top of Factory Street closed for the night, the club would come to life. A neighbor said he was often awakened by the din coming from the club. Souped-up cars would race down the narrow street.

``They used to go to hell over there," said the neighbor, John, 60, who did not want to give his last name for fear of reprisals.

Pulido's wife, Evelyn, ran tap dancing and ballet classes at Destiny Dance Studio during business hours.

In a dispute over the lease of the dance studio in May, a business associate threatened to lock Pulido out. ``Don't let it go personal . . ." Pulido told the associate, the affidavit said. ``After the dog, it will be your wife, then it'll be your mother, then it'll be your brother, then it'll be your unborn child."

In January, undercover agents approached Pulido with what they said was an offer to involve him in a large drug deal. He offered his own auto shop as a venue for the exchange, and protection for the transfer. In meetings in Miami and at the Borgata Hotel in Atlantic City, they agreed on a protection fee of $500 per kilogram of cocaine.

In April, Pulido met the driver of a truck containing the cocaine at a Bickford's on Boston Street in Dorchester, and led him to an auto shop he owned in Jamaica Plain. He met the buyer's vehicle at a McDonald's restaurant on Massachusetts Avenue, and led him there too. Carrasquillo watched for suspicious activity. The undercover agents gave Pulido $5,000, and promised $15,000 more. The agents said the police officer was ``visibly excited," after the deal.

At a meeting with the undercover agents in Atlantic City about a week later, Pulido agreed to provide protection for an even bigger drug deal. But for 500 kilograms of cocaine, he told the undercover agents, he would need six police officers, and he wasn't sure he could get them. He considered using some of his other associates, but told the person cooperating with authorities he felt more comfortable with ``uniforms."

They agreed on a smaller load, since he could recruit only two other officers, Carrasquillo and Pizzaro. Besides, Pulido told the agents, he doesn't trust many other police officers. He said he was concerned that, once they got money in their pockets, they might get ``Christian on me." The next deal might involve more police officers, but Pulido said he wanted to test them, ``get dirty with them . . . to see if they are real dirty," before recruiting them.

On a Thursday afternoon in early June, the three police officers met a truck they thought was carrying 100 kilograms of cocaine at a rest area in Blanford, in Western Massachusetts, and escorted it to Pulido's Jamaica Plain garage. As the undercover agents made the transfer, Pulido, who had been monitoring police communications on his Police Department radio, hit his emergency button by mistake.

The dispatcher broadcast his name and asked if he was in trouble. Pulido told her he had hit the button in error.

Afterward, the undercover agent asked Pulido if he had felt a rush like he had during the first deal, according to the affidavit.

``No," he said. ``The other one was a good rush. This one was a bad rush . . . an out-of-control rush."