A bloody dozen years and an arrest
Pursuing the case that tore at Boston's Cape Verdeans
Detective Bob Fratalia hadn't seen Nardo Lopes for 12 years, when Fratalia was a 31-year-old cop in the Boston police gang unit and Lopes was a 17-year-old hell-raiser, running guns and running wild on the streets of Dorchester.
But on the afternoon of April 30, as he stood in a jetway at Baltimore/Washington International Airport, scanning the faces of passengers getting off a flight, Fratalia was sure he'd know his man.
"He has these eyes," Fratalia said. "He doesn't look at you so much as he looks through you. You don't forget eyes like that."
Lopes, scheduled to be arraigned this morning in Suffolk Superior Court in a killing that triggered a decade of bloodletting in Boston's Cape Verdean community, has long been the city's most notorious criminal fugitive whose name isn't Whitey. Yet relatively few, even in law enforcement, knew him by name, and fewer still by sight.
Fratalia was one of them. And so he didn't move when two FBI agents working the airport stakeout with him took off after a young man walking down the jetway toward the terminal. He was sure it wasn't Nardo, who is now 28.
Instead, Fratalia leaned toward a woman getting off the plane and asked, "Excuse me, ma'am. What row were you sitting in?"
When she replied "27," Fratalia knew his quarry, seated five rows behind, was coming soon.
Moments later, Nardo Lopes stepped off American Airlines Flight 1036 and into view.
"Hey," Fratalia said, flashing his detective's gold badge, "Remember me?"
Lopes said nothing. There was no hint of recognition in those piercing brown eyes, Fratalia said, and no resistance as the detective steered him into a waiting police car. It was a decidedly quiet climax to the long and often frustrating law enforcement push to close a bloody chapter in Boston history.
Lopes's girlfriend and traveling companion, Leah Delacy, was less retiring, demanding to know what was going on as Dave Johnson , an FBI agent from Boston, led her away separately
Fratalia, later, filled her in: The man she knew as Michael Eric Hernandez, a Puerto Rican from New York, was actually a Cape Verdean from Boston wanted for murder. Police allege that, in 1995, when he was just 17, Lopes stabbed 23-year-old Bobby Mendes in the heart on Dorchester's Wendover Street.
What at first seemed just another senseless streetfight proved ever so much more than that.
The crime tore through the community, creating a murderous divide between two large Cape Verdean clans. Angry young men took sides, and then took turns, shooting at one another with a ruthless spontaneity that had not been seen in the city since the Irish gang wars of the 1960s, when more than 60 men ended up dead over what essentially was a drunken brawl at a cottage on Salisbury Beach.
The circumstances of the Oct. 10, 1995, fight that left Mendes dead were different, but the savage consequences, fueled by staunchly held if warped notions of honor and loyalty, were remarkably similar.
While Nardo was on the run, the Stonehurst Crew, a gang led by his older brother, Augusto "Gus" Lopes, launched a preemptive war that targeted those related or sympathetic to the Mendes family, including some of those who witnessed the stabbing of Bobby Mendes. While it is impossible to say with certainty how many murders can be linked specifically to the civil war that began the night Bobby Mendes was killed, police blame the feud for roughly two dozen murders and three times as many nonfatal shootings.
"Beyond the tragedy for the Mendes family, this murder touched off retaliatory violence that hurt so many others," said Boston Police Superintendent Paul Joyce, who led the department's Special Investigations Unit during the hunt for Nardo (and has since been reassigned). "You can't blame all the violence in that community on what happened that night, but it influenced many acts of violence."
For much of a decade, the streets of North Dorchester were turned into a virtual shooting gallery, and the mayhem spilled over into Brockton and Providence. Indiscriminate gunfire -- from car sunroofs, from back windows, at a sweet 16 party -- raked the innocent and the not so innocent.
Nardo Lopes, meanwhile, simply vanished. As time went on, his ability to elude arrest, while those left behind killed in his name, made him a legend on the streets, a menace in absentia.
As is the case in many of the larger clans from Cape Verde, a group of islands off the west coast of Africa, the Mendeses and Lopeses were distant cousins. When the Lopeses first moved to Boston in the early 1970s, they lived at Isaura's brother-in-law's house in Roxbury.
"Cape Verdeans are beautiful people," Isaura said recently, sitting on the porch of the three-decker she and her husband have owned since 1978. "We look after each other, take care of each other."
And sometimes kill each other. No one is sure why, but some of the children of these hardworking immigrants became enamored with gun and gang culture. Isaura Mendes calls the generational shift "the disease."
By some accounts, Nardo Lopes had the disease by the time he was a teenager.
Authorities first became aware of the young wannabe gangster in 1994, while investigating a Boston man named Jose Andrade who was later convicted of setting up a lucrative gun-running operation.
Working on a task force targeting gun violence, Fratalia and Tom Crowley, an agent with the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, learned that Andrade, a student at Mississippi's Jackson State University, was buying weapons at gun shows throughout the South and selling them on the streets of Boston at a handsome profit. Fratalia said Nardo learned that Andrade had stashed a suitcase stuffed with 25 handguns under a porch on Fairmount Street and set out to steal them.
Nardo was a skinny 16-year-old, but had a criminal chutzpah that belied his age and unimposing physique. Witnesses told police they saw him struggling to lug a suitcase through a backyard.
"It was so heavy that Nardo needed a buddy of his to help him lift it over the fence," Fratalia recalled.
Soon, it was all over the street that Nardo had stolen the guns, and when police spotted him and gave chase, Nardo allegedly discarded a handgun, which police recovered. He was later arrested, but escaped from a DYS facility while awaiting trial. He was still listed as an escapee when he got into a fight with Larry Andrade , who was not related to the gunrunner, but was Bobby Mendes's cousin. Nardo had accused people in the Mendes faction of ratting him out on the guns.
Police say Nardo was chasing Larry Andrade when Bobby Mendes stepped in. Moments later, Mendes lay mortally wounded, and Nardo had become a phantom, protected by friends and family who saw him not as the aggressor, but as a victim of circumstance.
"From the get-go, Nardo's friends were saying it was self-defense," said Fratalia.
But others saw it differently, and told police, and it soon became obvious that neither Nardo nor those hiding him were confident enough to test the theory of self-defense in court.
The initial assumption was that Lopes had fled to Cape Verde, but police eventually ruled that out: They had learned from Cape Verdean sources that Lopes and his family feared he would be killed if he turned up there.
The US State Department says about 500,000 people of Cape Verdean ancestry live in the United States, most of them in New England. Massachusetts has the largest, and oldest, Cape Verdean population in the nation, one that traces its origins to the early 1800s, when islanders worked in the whaling industry. There are about 30,000 Cape Verdeans in Boston, according to census figures.
According to Joyce, the Cape Verdean community is mostly law-abiding and civic-minded, but few would cooperate with police in the hunt for Lopes out of fear of stepping into this latter-day Hatfield-McCoy crossfire.
Before the Bobby Mendes killing, police had had little reason to scope out the small criminal element within the Cape Verdean community. "To be honest, we were just getting to know the players," said Fratalia.
That gave Nardo and his allies the early upper hand. They were more aggressive, Fratalia said, and they had a charismatic, ruthless leader: Nardo's big brother, Gus.
After he was caught with two 9-millimeter handguns in 2000, Gus Lopes admitted involvement in three murders and more than 20 other attempted murders. He cut a deal for a 10-year sentence and began testifying against his erstwhile friends. On the stand, he explained how he would psych up his band of assassins by saying, "Let's go do dirt." It was kill or be killed, he said.
The Mendes faction, called Wendover, was considered weaker by police.
"They just stayed up on Wendover Street, a captive audience," Fratalia said. "Nardo was able to stay on the run, while the people left behind got rid of the witnesses."
Larry Andrade was the first to go. He was shot dead on May 18, 1996, as he stood outside the Fundonzinho Lounge , a notorious, since-closed bar in Roxbury. Two years later, Luis Carvalho, another Mendes cousin, was ambushed on a Dorchester street; he was shot but survived. Gus Lopes was determined that Big Head Lou, as Carvalho was known, would not escape the next time. Lopes testified that on Feb. 17, 2000, after he and an accomplice punctured Carvalho's car tires, they cornered him in a Newmarket Square repair shop and shot him dead.
Two other men who Gus Lopes said were witnesses to Bobby Mendes's killing, David Andrade and Adielo DaRosa, were also shot but survived.
Even as Bobby's mother, Isaura, became one of the city's most prominent antiviolence advocates, members of the Wendover crew tried to avenge Bobby's death. They shot up the house of a Stonehurst member. In 2000, a week after police raided a home in Brockton, looking for Nardo, a 21-year-old man living there was gunned down.
Fratalia said as police raced from shooting to shooting in the late 1990s, they became convinced that Nardo's fugitive status was contributing to the lawlessness. Young gangbangers taunted them, invoking Nardo's name.
"I hate to call him a legend, but to some people he was," Fratalia said. "We had to get this kid off the street."
Gus Lopes epitomized, in his way, this brazen and incendiary ethic. One of his many tattoos captured his philosophy: "Let them hate, as long as they fear."
A few years ago, inside prison, he added another tattoo: "Only God can judge Nardo."
Nardo was determined and elusive, but Fratalia always assumed he would eventually mess up. "I thought for sure he'd get arrested at some point, we'd get a call and we'd be on a plane," said Fratalia.
But Nardo proved expert at keeping his nose clean, and his fingerprints out of the National Criminal Information Center system, which would have alerted police to his arrest anywhere.
In the meantime, the tips rolled in: Nardo was in Florida. Nardo was in college down south. Nardo had a hearing problem, leading police to try to trace him through doctors in that specialty. Nardo was hitting his old haunts, disguised as a woman.
None checked out.
At "The Base," the Special Investigations Unit nerve center on the second floor at police headquarters, Joyce decided he needed help if they were ever going to succeed. In 2004, he went to Tom Larned, the assistant special agent in charge of the FBI office in Boston.
Larned offered a young, streetwise agent named Dave Johnson. Another FBI agent, Jim Trahan , had already been working on warrants. The US Drug Enforcement Administration was also enlisted in the effort. For the first time anybody could remember, every state, federal, and local law enforcement agency in the metropolitan area was on the same page: They had to find Nardo.
Fratalia and Johnson kept looking, futilely, until one day in April, when they got a tip that Nardo Lopes was living in suburban Maryland. At first, the tip seemed odd.
Why the hell, Fratalia asked himself, would Nardo go to Maryland?
He had no known associates there, no family, no friends. There was no Cape Verdean community there.
But as he stared at an address in a suburb south of Baltimore, Bob Fratalia recalls, he smiled and began nodding. He had just answered his own question: What a perfect place for Nardo to disappear.
Later that year, he moved to Hunting Oaks , a 319-unit apartment complex in suburban Laurel , Md. Public records show that he shared the Laurel apartment with Delacy, a 30-year-old makeup artist.
In September 2005, Delacy bought a three-bedroom brickfront condominium town house for $319,990 in a sprawling development called Seven Oaks , in Odenton, just east of their old place in Laurel. Seven Oaks is home to some 7,500 people, many of them military families from nearby Fort Meade. Lopes and Delacy fit in well in an area that was racially and ethnically mixed.
Area residents say Leah and her boyfriend, whom they knew as "Mike," were friendly, considerate neighbors. He was frequently seen walking their dog, Max, around the well-kept neighborhood. Leah worked at a spa in nearby Columbia, but no one seemed to know what "Mike" did for a living.
"He was very affectionate toward Leah, and their dog. Mike was gentle," said Jackie Pangelinan , 46, a neighbor. "I was looking forward to their having a baby someday, because I thought they'd be great parents. I always assumed they were married, because they treated each other like husband and wife."
If Nardo had any concerns when he found out his next door neighbor, Jan Bryant, worked for the Maryland attorney general's office, he didn't show it. Bryant said Leah and "Mike" were ideal neighbors.
None of the neighbors knew whether Lopes worked, and if so, what he did. When he applied for a US passport in 2001, under his alias, Lopes said he worked as a debt collector. Delacy's mother was listed as his contact person.
It is unclear how much of his past he brought up with Delacy. Nardo's attorney, E. Peter Parker , declined to comment for this article. Police have their suspicions, but have not charged Delacy with harboring a fugitive. Some of their neighbors said they'd be surprised if Lopes had told Delacy about the criminal exploits of his youth. That would be careless for a fugitive, and also out of character for the man they thought they knew.
"I don't think he'd put her in that kind of jeopardy," said Pangelinan. "He really loves her."
Delacy was reluctant to talk when a Globe reporter knocked on her door. She was worried about her privacy.
"I'll have to ask Nardo," she said.
She visited him regularly at the Anne Arundel County Detention Center where he was held after his arrest.
During a June 29 bail hearing in Annapolis, Delacy spoke briefly with Nardo Lopes, making him aware of the Globe reporter in the courtroom. Lopes, with his hair closely cropped, a wispy beard and mustache, and wire-rimmed glasses, did not look like a man who touched off a gang war. He smiled at Delacy and nodded reassuringly.
Lopes's lawyer later said neither would speak for this article.
They had little to go on -- just an address and a first name that someone had told them Nardo was using: Mike. But they were upbeat.
"This was different," Fratalia said of the tip. "Me and Dave were thinking, 'Two weeks, we can get this guy.' "
They picked up an FBI unmarked car, staked out the apartment in Laurel, and roved the area. They ate like monks, living on apples and water, and slept little. But they saw no one who looked like Nardo.
On Sunday, April 29, while staking out one of the several places where they believed Nardo was staying, Fratalia got a call from Adolfo Brito, a Boston police officer who was working the computer banks at the Special Investigations Unit and had come up with a full name for "Mike": Michael Eric Hernandez. A short time later, an FBI agent reported finding US passports issued to three Michael Eric Hernandezes with the same date of birth and Social Security number. It was a case of extreme coincidence or, more likely, evidence of a well-shopped alias.
Minutes later, a more tantalizing tip came from the FBI: One of those Michael Eric Hernandezes had a Maryland driver's license. It was Sunday, and state offices were closed, so Fratalia and Johnson called the Maryland State Police and asked them to dispatch a trooper to an isolated location on the side of a road, about a mile from their surveillance spot, so they could check out the license photo.
Waiting for the trooper, Fratalia and Johnson almost went crazy with impatience. But when, more than an hour later, a laconic, unsmiling state trooper drove up and pulled up the photo on his cruiser's computer screen, Fratalia turned to Johnson and said, "That's Nardo."
Fratalia and Johnson used their cellphones to take a photograph of the computer screen. They later showed the image to someone who knew Nardo as Hernandez. "That's Mike," the guy told them.
Meanwhile, back in Boston, Detective Sergeant Eric Bulman was manning The Base. Other detectives had come in on their days off, as there was an unspoken but growing consensus that the net was closing in on Lopes. Bulman was running license plate numbers on his computer terminal, talking to Joyce on the phone, conferring with Fratalia and Johnson.
Long after midnight, Fratalia and Johnson struggled to get some sleep. The dawn couldn't come fast enough.
On Monday morning, the FBI called, saying the bureau was pretty sure agents had found Nardo. By tracking his passport number, they learned that he had flown to Montego Bay in Jamaica a few days before. He was traveling with Leah Delacy. Further checking showed they had checked into Breezes, a resort on Doctor's Cave Beach.
Fratalia called home.
"Honey," he said, "I'm going to Jamaica."
His wife, Joan, at home with three kids under 10, wasn't amused.
But before they could make plans to fly to Jamaica, they learned that Nardo had already left. And before they could alert US Customs officials in Miami to take him into custody, he was already past the checkpoint. They debated their next move.
"Let him get on the next flight," Fratalia said. "We'll take him in Baltimore."
Shortly after noon, Fratalia called Bulman, who called Joyce, saying, "He should be in custody in two hours."
Joyce looked at his watch and began thinking of how they were going to break the news to Isaura Mendes.
American Airlines Flight 1036 was scheduled to touch down around 2:30 p.m. Fratalia and Johnson briefed the airport police officers who would assist them and FBI agents from the Baltimore office in the arrest.
"The local cops were looking at us funny, saying, 'You're doing all this for one guy who killed one guy?' They have close to 300 homicides a year in Baltimore. We had to explain to them the real significance of the murder, of how important it was that we got this guy."
The plane was parking when an airport police officer signaled Fratalia to enter the jetway by a side door.
Moments later, Nardo Lopes was in handcuffs. But he never lost his cool. Even after he was fingerprinted, Nardo refused to sign a form confirming his identity.
Fratalia called Bulman with the news, but Bulman wanted some reassurance before he called Joyce, their boss.
"You sure it's him?" Bulman asked.
"If it's not Nardo Lopes," Bob Fratalia replied, "I quit."
When Nardo was having his mugshot taken, Fratalia noticed what appeared to be a relatively new tattoo on his right bicep. It says, "Only God can judge me," a line from a Tupac Shakur rap and a curious echo of the tattoo his brother Gus had gotten a few years ago.
That night, as he and Johnson savored their first real meal in four days, the significance of Nardo's tattoo dawned on Fratalia.
"He thought he was home free," Fratalia said. "If you're a fugitive, and you think someone is looking for you, you don't go get a tattoo. You get a tattoo if you think they stopped looking, or if you think you're so smart they'll never find you."
"It was a long haul," Joyce said.
So long, in fact, that of the half dozen homicide detectives who originally investigated Bobby Mendes's murder, only one, Detective Dennis Harris, was still on the force.
The delegation that drove from police headquarters to Isaura Mendes's home underscored the significance of the news they were about to deliver: Mayor Thomas Menino and Police Commissioner Ed Davis joined Joyce and Harris for the ride.
Isaura Mendes said that in the years following Bobby's death, she wondered where Nardo was, why the police couldn't find him, whether they were even looking. But about eight years ago, she said, "I gave up on Nardo."
"People ask me if I hate Nardo," she said. "I don't hate Nardo. Hate eats you up. I let that go."
She had gone for a long drive on that Monday afternoon, and when she came home, there were so many cars parked on Groom Street that she had to park a block away. Some kids ran up and told her that a bunch of cops and the mayor were at her house.
She rushed home. As she surveyed the faces in her living room, she assumed they had come to tell her they had made an arrest in the murder of her 24-year-old son Matthew, who was shot dead on Wendover Street in May 2006, in what some had hoped was the last spasm of the dark forces released on that block some 12 years ago.
"Isaura," Denny Harris said gently, "we got Nardo."
Isaura Mendes slumped to the floor, as the mayor and police commissioner rushed to her side.
After Isaura Mendes assured them she was all right, Paul Joyce stepped out onto the front porch. He looked right and could see Hillsboro Street, and the three-decker where Nardo grew up. He looked left and saw kids, running from corner to corner, spreading the news of Nardo's arrest, just as they had spread word of Bobby's death 12 years before.
"That's what struck me," Joyce said. "The small confines of all this. The news, the word of mouth, the kids running and shouting. Everything had changed, and some things had not changed at all."
Kevin Cullen can be reached at cullen@globe.com 