Judge’s Bayside house gets shot up

A Queens judge, who as a prosecutor helped jail the “Wild Cowboys,” a Washington Heights drug gang, found his Bayside block had been turned into the Wild West recently, when four shots were fired into his home.
Police say that at 4:09 a.m. on Tuesday, August 12, someone fired a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol at the home of Acting Supreme Court Justice Fernando Camacho and fled, possibly in a black SUV.
Two slugs smashed through windows, lodging in the kitchen and a bedroom wall. Another pierced the siding between a window and the front door; bullet fragments were also found in the front lawn.
Police reportedly have video footage from multiple security cameras showing an SUV fleeing the scene just after the shooting.
Camacho was planning to return that day from a vacation in Montauk with his wife of nine years and their two young children, aged seven and four. They were scheduled to complete the sale of the dormered Cape-style house on 232nd Street in Oakland Gardens later that day. According to reports, detectives were investigating both the possibility that someone involved in one of Camacho’s cases or trials had a grudge, or that the shooter had the wrong house.
Law enforcement officials reportedly said that the attack might have been aimed at a 20-year-old neighbor who was involved in a dispute with another person.
An official also speculated that since the judge had been trying to resolve that dispute, the shooter may have intended to target Camacho.
Camacho, 48, who fled Cuba with his family as a nine-year-old, graduated from Columbia University and Fordham University Law School.
As a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney with the office’s Homicide Investigation Unit from 1985 to 1995, he got convictions numbering hundreds of years for members of gangs with names like the “Wild Cowboys” and the “Gheri Curls,” during the worst of the city’s cocaine-fueled drug wars.
Camacho was first appointed as a judge by then-mayor Rudy Giuliani in 1997. He has served as presiding judge of the Domestic Violence Court in Queens, as a deputy supervising judge of Queens Criminal Court and as president of the Association of Hispanic Judges. Though his nomination to the Court of Claims by Governor David Paterson was confirmed by the Senate in May, he was still hearing domestic violence cases in the Kew Gardens. “Somebody was sending a message,” one judge reportedly speculated.
Though most of his cases have involved domestic violence, Camacho has presided over cases ranging from a parking lot attendant accused of threatening City Councilmember Hiram Monserrate and an aide, to a man accused of counterfeiting adult-sized cartoon character costumes for use in porn films.
Camacho declined to speak with reporters. “Maybe in a couple of days,” he said.