Chapter One
Opening Salvo
January 2012
Hempstead, Long Island
New York
Somebody going to come out on top. Ain’t no ties in this here game.
—Flex
As he watches a car full of rival drug dealers drive down Linden Avenue, Gary “Flex” Butler adjusts the Glock nine-millimeter in his waistband, exhales a long stream of marijuana smoke, and shakes his head in disgust.
“Those boys don’t learn,” Butler, eighteen, says of the baby-faced men in the beige, late-model Lincoln Town Car, which turns slowly down Linden Place before disappearing into the night. “They hit us, we hit them. They don’t stop coming.”
The “boys” he speaks of are rival drug dealers—Bloods gang members who had ventured off their turf on nearby Martin Luther King Jr. Drive to send a message to Butler and his friends in the local Crips crew. They want it known that an ongoing war between their groups would continue, Butler says, despite the recent rumors that a truce had been called.
“Ain’t no peace,” he says. “Nothing of the sort.”
Four young men in Butler’s crew pile into a cranberry-colored Cadillac and drive east, past their rival set’s hangout half a mile way. He watches them go, declaring that another shooting could happen anytime.
“That’s how it is,” says Butler. “Almost every night now.”
An hour later, on MLK Drive, a Bloods dealing crew is huddled in a doorway of the project building that serves as their unofficial headquarters. There are seven in the crew and another six patrolling their territory in a black SUV. The gangsters in the doorway pass blunts of weed laced with coke to one another, nodding their heads to the Lil Wayne song—“Enemy Turf”—blasting from the radio at their feet.
One of the Bloods, Arthur “Doc” Reed, twenty-five, runs his hand along the bandage wrapped around his stomach. He’d been shot in his right abdomen a week earlier; the nine-millimeter bullet narrowly missed an artery. Released from the hospital just a few hours ago, Doc’s still wearing the blue intensive-care bracelet on his thin, tattooed wrist.
“Niggas need to pay, you feel me?” Doc says.
He’s addressing one of the crew’s top-ranking members, a twenty-six-year-old Los Angeles native named Joe “Steed” Wallace. Steed, a longtime West Coast Blood, is credited with helping turn the Hempstead set into a regional force. He nods his head and spits into the street, fingering the scar on his chin the way he does sometimes when he’s angry. He’d been touching it as a reminder to himself ever since a car full of Crips drove by an hour earlier, slowing to a crawl as they passed while eyeballing Steed and his crew.
“I feel you, but we going to do this shit on our terms,” Steed tells Doc and the others. “Aight?”
“Hell yeah,” says Doc. “So, like, how?”
“Wait for my word,” Steed says, going at the scar again. So they wait.
Police, residents, and the gang members themselves refer to the neighborhood both crews call home as a “war zone.” They’re not exaggerating. Mike Clary, a Hempstead native and marine who came home in 2010 after serving three tours in the Iraq War, said he “felt right at home when I came back, because there were just as many bullets and screams here as there were some days over there.
“I was in Fallujah when it was a shit show, at its absolute worse. And this reminds me of those bad months over there. The kids screaming. The gunshots at all hours. The fear you feel just walking down to the corner store. Those are the same experiences you have in Iraq.”
Except this war on Clary’s street is all about drug territory, and a gang rivalry with forty-five years of bitter history.
Hempstead Crips control the market for marijuana and cocaine in the area surrounding Linden Avenue and Linden Place—a blighted, impoverished area known as the Linden Triangle, or simply the Triangle—on the north side of West Graham Avenue. South of Graham, on MLK Drive, the local Bloods set controls a smaller drug market in and around the housing projects lining the street. Both crews want to take over each other’s drug markets. As for strategies, they seem to have settled on a war of attrition, aiming to kill or maim as many of their enemies as possible until one side can no longer fight.
For a village of roughly 55,000 people, even one whose residents are long accustomed to living among violence, the amount of bloodshed here is remarkable. Between 2007 and 2011, 186 people were shot in the village—about half of them in connection with feuds involving the Bloods and Crips.
And the violence only grows worse in the new year. During the first weeks of the 2012 gang war, a sixteen-year-old boy partially loses his sight when an errant nine-millimeter bullet grazes his right eye. Another child loses an ear. A third has two fingers blown off when a stray round blows through his bedroom window and strikes him as he reads The Cat in the Hat in bed.
And that’s just in January.
The gangs have two things going for them that make both unwilling to accept defeat. First, each is able to buy top-quality cocaine directly from major traffickers at wholesale prices, as little as $17,000 per kilo compared with the average going price of about $23,000. The second is that they’re far better armed and willing to use violence than the smaller neighborhood cliques scattered throughout Nassau County. Authorities say the Crips and Bloods can compete successfully on price and purity on their corners throughout Long Island, making huge profits even while splitting their primary market in Hempstead. They’re also able to keep out other competitors through use of brute force.
Then there’s the matter of battlefield geography. The Triangle, as its name suggests, contains three angles, meaning whichever gang controls it has unobstructed views of every vehicle and person approaching or leaving a corner. Such terrain is ideal for drug dealers, since it steals the element of surprise from police as well as enemy gangs. As a result, the Bloods want to conquer it as badly as the Crips want to hold it.
“Somebody going to come out on top,” Flex Butler says of the conflict. “Ain’t no ties in this here game.”
A tie is exactly what Reverend Kirk Lyons is praying for, a truce that will bring peace to his old neighborhood. The fifty-one-year-old Hempstead native, who everyone simply calls The Reverend, had recently finished a successful outreach campaign with gang members in Newark, New Jersey, when some of his old friends called with disturbing news: A war between the Bloods and Crips was laying waste to his hometown, and his help was urgently needed.
Lyons, who has dedicated his life to stopping young black men from needlessly killing each other, agreed to intervene. He decided to employ a novel strategy: midnight prayer marches in which a small group of male, middle-aged Hempstead residents-turned-activists walk through the village’s war-torn drug markets, looking for gang members and addicts with whom to pray.
Many of the marchers Lyons rounds up for his mission are former junkies or gang members themselves, having once sowed mayhem on the same streets they now find themselves trying to clean up. For some, the marches serve as a form of penance, a way of showing contrition for the pain they caused their families, friends, and neighbors in their youth. Others sign up to march out of anger or grief, fed up with the shootings and retaliatory strikes; the seemingly endless funeral processions; and the twin plagues of easy-to-buy guns and plentiful crack engulfing their hometown.
The sinister plots hatched by one gang against the other don’t stop. But neither do Reverend Kirk Lyons (at center) and his prayer marchers. They return to the Triangle every Friday just before midnight to pray with gang members, always with the goal of preventing retaliatory attacks.
Steve Pfost
Despite their best intentions, things don’t begin well for the men. On the first night they march, a group of Crips goes on war footing when they see them approaching the corner of Linden Avenue and Linden Place—the heart of the Triangle, and a busy spot where the gang sells coke and weed. The Crips form a human wall, a “battle formation,” as Lyons calls it, and aggressively march toward the older men. Lyons doesn’t know why the dealers have been provoked so quickly, until he looks down and sees his shirt is red, as are those of several other marchers.
“Stop,” he tells his men. “They think we’re Bloods.”
But it’s too late. The gangsters meet them in the middle of the street, chests stuck out, eyes wide with anger. It doesn’t take much more than wearing the wrong color to get shot in the Triangle, the marchers know.
Lyons quickly explains they’re here to pray, not fight.
“It was a mistake,” he tells the Crips.
The young men look skeptical. A few of their hands slide down to their waistbands, lifting shirts to reveal flashes of chrome. Lyons, who’s seen plenty of guns in his day, keeps his cool. He introduces his marchers one by one, and each man in turn reaches out and shakes hands with each of the gang members. The marchers are all either balding or have beer bellies. Most wear what one marcher calls “dad jeans,” in stark contrast to the ultra-baggy, low-riding pants worn by the Crips. The gang members seem to notice the difference. Realizing the men pose no threat, they relax.
“No red next time,” one of the Crips says. “This the only pass you going to get.”
“No red,” Lyons says.
The gangsters return to their corner to sell drugs while the marchers continue on. Despite the shaky start, they return every Friday shortly before midnight, meeting outside the All Saints Temple Church of God in Christ on Laurel Avenue and walking through both crews’ territories during peak business hours. Some weeks, they march down blocks where a gun battle would almost certainly break out if not for their presence.
“In that way alone, we feel we’re making a difference,” Lyons says. “We understand the risks we’re taking.”
But the risks are about to become much greater.