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.