Chapter Three

Black Widows

 

Women always be making shit crazy.

—Lamar

 

“Yo, Steed,” Lamar says on a frigid February morning as they mix a batch of crack inside a Bloods cookhouse. “How you get that scar?”

“From fucking yo mama too hard,” Steed says.

“How my mama going to give you a scar from fucking? That don’t even make sense.”

“Life don’t make sense,” Steed says with a shrug.

“For real,” Lamar says. “How you get that?”

Steed ignores the question, adding more Arm & Hammer to the batch. He doesn’t like to talk about the scar. In fact, none of the Bloods except Ice knows how he got it. They often see him stroking it, though, mostly when he’s angry. It’s a habit he’s been trying to quit for years—a perceived weakness in a profession where weakness isn’t allowed.

But Lamar won’t let it go. He swears he won’t tell a soul if Steed shares the story. He’ll even finish up the cook on his own so Steed can go home early, he promises.

“From what I heard, you getting your scar had something to do with a girl,” Lamar says. “A fine-ass girl.”

“Yeah, that much I’ll tell you is true,” Steed says, remembering his nights with Patrice. “Girl was for real.”

Stirring the batch, he reflects on that fateful, sun-drenched afternoon six years earlier when Tyrek showed up in his girlfriend’s building lobby with a straight razor. They’d been beefing all year over Patrice Cunningham, one of the prettiest girls at Hempstead High School. Steed had spotted her first, winning her hand shortly after his mother moved their family from Los Angeles to Hempstead, wanting to get Steed away from the Southern California Bloods set he’d joined. Tyrek, already running with the Crips but not yet an official member, lived in the same building as Patrice and kept hitting on her, no matter how many times she insisted Steed was her man. The boys almost came to blows a few times over the situation, but Tyrek always backed down.

“See? He ain’t nothing but a punk, Patrice,” Steed said as they watched Tyrek slink off after one such encounter. “Ain’t man enough for a girl like you.”

Steed quickly forgot about the beef. Patrice got pregnant, and he was thrilled at the prospect of being a father. He planned to marry her once they graduated.

“You going to be a great dad,” Patrice told him. “But you can’t be running with no gang. I know you were Bloods in Cali, but that won’t play here. Not if we’re together. I need you to be down for me, not them.”

“You got my word on that,” Steed said. “No more banging.”

But he hadn’t accounted for Tyrek, who two months after getting punked in front of Patrice got offered official membership with the Crips. To prove his toughness, the Big Homies told him, he’d have to kill a Blood.

“I got one in mind,” he said.

The following afternoon, Tyrek and a few Crips stood in the lobby of his and Patrice’s building, knowing Steed walked her home from school each day. When the couple arrived, Tyrek pulled the blade from his backpack and lunged at Steed, who jumped backward just in time to avoid being gutted. Instead, as Tyrek swung the blade upward, it grazed Steed’s chin, slicing it open where it met his right cheek.

But Tyrek wasn’t finished. His momentum carried him forward until he stumbled into Patrice, the rusted blade piercing her swollen stomach. Her skin made a tearing sound, “like paper ripping,” Steed said, as the blade sliced through.

“Oomph,” she cried as the Crips took off running.

“Oh my God, baby,” Steed said. “Oh my God.”

Steed ran upstairs to Patrice’s parents’ apartment and told them she’d been stabbed. Her mother called 911 while her father ran down with bathroom towels and tried to stem the blood gushing from his only child’s stomach.

“What did you do?!” he howled at Steed.

The paramedics arrived and whisked Patrice away in an ambulance. Cops showed up a short time later and, at the direction of Patrice’s father, handcuffed Steed.

“He stabbed my daughter,” Gerald Cunningham said.

“I didn’t, I swear,” Steed said, and he was about to blurt out Tyrek’s name when he noticed a crowd had assembled in the lobby. If he snitched, it would be even worse than going to jail for something he didn’t do. His reputation in the neighborhood would be ruined, his punishment severe. So he held his tongue and spent the next few months in county lockup.

Patrice survived the stabbing, but her unborn child didn’t. As soon as she was well enough to leave the hospital, Gerald Cunningham moved his family to LA, where, like Steed, they had roots.

As for Tyrek, the Crips Big Homies decided he’d sufficiently proven his toughness, despite his failure to kill Steed. They initiated him days after the stabbing and put him to work selling crack and weed. On Saturdays, he’d steal a car and drive a few Crips without felony convictions out to Virginia or Pennsylvania to buy guns and ammunition. They’d keep some of the guns for themselves and sell others on the street for double what they’d paid.

In his bedroom at night, Tyrek scratched out serial numbers and sawed off shotgun barrels in preparation for future missions. He moved quickly through the ranks, dropping out of Hempstead High School, getting a Crips gang sign tattooed across his chest, and gaining a reputation as a savvy, ruthless hustler who got things done. He was as adept at holding up liquor stores and bodegas as he was at clearing a Bloods corner with his fists or, if that failed, a submachine gun.

In those early years with the Crips, Tyrek would hang with fellow gangsters in the crew’s clubhouse or a Triangle stash house, getting blunted and drinking forties, always with the lights off so that any drive-by crews rolling past wouldn’t have a clear target to aim for. For a teenager, he was afforded an unprecedented amount of responsibility, managing corner crews, carrying out assassinations, and mediating disagreements between fellow Crips. He was tough, smart, and creative in his schemes, his colleagues said, a gangland prodigy unlike any who’d come before him in Hempstead.

Once, when a stickup crew stole the bulk of a just-arrived cocaine package from the Crips, the Big Homies panicked, knowing they still owed their supplier for the full amount he’d fronted them. Tyrek, as usual, stayed calm. He convinced his crew to “step on” their remaining coke three times instead of once, thinning it out with powdered milk and Epsom salt so it would last longer. The dilution meant they could make up the lost profits by selling more crack of weaker strength. Some Crips worried their customers would complain and take their business to Bloods corners, but no one seemed to even notice the weakened crack. From then on, they stepped on all their product at the same rate, tripling profits.

When the set’s leader, Nathan Dukes, was murdered in a shoot-out with Bloods in Brooklyn, Tyrek replaced him as Top Homie. Immediately, he beefed up the gang’s dealing operations, opening new Triangle corners and giving away free samples to junkies every morning to help spread buzz about Crips product. He and Tony routinely worked sixteen-hour days, cultivating a wider customer base and building up their reps. The Crips at that time sold only weed and weak, low-quality powder coke, which could be easily purchased from gang affiliates in the city. That changed after Tony got a line on a much stronger coke package being offered by a couple of Mexican boys he knew in Manhattan.

The Mexican coke, its sellers boasted, was “the ultimate in purity”—a product of far higher quality than most of the competing packages wending their way through Long Island and New York City markets at the time. The product’s higher purity meant it could weather the crack-cooking process without losing its punch, so Tony convinced his Mexican contacts to front him half a kilo, or about $8,000 worth.

Next, he and Tyrek went to Walmart and put together a crack-cooking starter kit—Arm & Hammer baking soda, a saucer, glasses, and pans. They started cooking right away, breaking up their product into $20 hits of crack they called ready rocks, “since you could cook them up so fast and they was ready-made to smoke,” Tony says. Within a few months, the Crips’ Triangle crack-dealing operation was flourishing.

And it had all started with Tyrek giving Steed his scar—an attack that established Tyrek as a player in Hempstead’s underworld and allowing for his rapid ascension through the Crips’ ranks.

Four months after their encounter, Steed’s lawyer pleaded the stabbing down from attempted murder to assault, for which he received time served and probation. Sprung from jail, he packed a bag and bought his own ticket back to LA, vowing to track down Patrice and make things right with her and her family.

He looked all over, scouring every LA neighborhood and waiting outside a different high school each day with hopes of spotting her. He kept this up week after week, month after month. To make a living, he did the only thing he thought himself qualified for: hooking up with a Bloods crew in South Central and dealing drugs. His reputation on the streets grew and promotions came quickly, until he was the set’s co-leader. After five years of doing everything imaginable to find Patrice, he finally received a letter from her. “I forgive you. But please leave me be,” she wrote. With that, Steed gave up, finally letting her go.

But there was another piece of unfinished business.

Tyrek, who Steed heard was now running the Hempstead Crips, still hadn’t paid for the stabbing. So when Steed got a call from his old friend Ice, asking if he’d bring some of that good California coke out to Long Island, he decided to head back to Hempstead. The men teamed up to launch a thriving drug market along MLK, quickly moving in on Crips territory and setting the stage for the current Triangle war.

Steed hasn’t yet gotten his revenge against Tyrek, but he believes his opportunity will come before the conflict is over. The only question, he says, is whether he can stay alive long enough to kill the man he says slayed his unborn child and drove away the woman he considers his “first love.”

“Women always be making shit crazy,” Lamar says. “Every nigga got a fucked-up story about women messing up their hustle. They can ruin your game real quick.”

That’s why Crips and Bloods are forbidden from discussing gang business with wives, girlfriends, or temporary pieces of ass, Lamar says. It’s a rule the crews continually struggle with, despite the obvious risks.

“Just look at what happened to Rick,” Lamar says.

“Who that?” asks Steed.

“Oh, you need to get schooled about Rick, yo.”

In the mid-1990s, a Bloods dealer known as Fat Rick, despite moving slowly due to his 350-pound frame, turned the MLK projects into his own personal fiefdom. He’s said to have earned several million dollars selling coke and heroin in the neighborhood, and, as his wealth grew, to have cultivated a harem of women—young, middle-aged, and old—scattered throughout Hempstead.

“Fat Rick was fucking five, six bitches a day, in addition to all the business he had to attend to,” Lamar says. “The man was a legend in these parts. Larger than life. Fat Rick was like the Hempstead Biggie Smalls.”

A popular parlor game in the projects at the time of Fat Rick’s reign was guessing what might bring him down: the Crips, an STD, an angry boyfriend, or a heart attack caused by the stress from all those bedroom romps.

In fact, it was Rick’s own compassion for a woman, his need to warn her of danger, that got him killed. The blame lay with one of his concubines, a long-limbed twenty-five-year-old hairdresser named Sheila who Rick sometimes slept with while her sanitation worker boyfriend made his rounds. In bed one afternoon, Rick casually mentioned to Sheila that she ought to stay away from the bodega across the street that night. A rival dealer, Carlos Slim, was to be assassinated there after ignoring multiple warnings to stop selling coke in Rick’s territory. The hit would go down around ten p.m., when the dealer made his nightly visit to the bodega for cigarettes and Phillie blunts.

It was rare for Rick to reveal any details of his drug syndicate to women he bedded, but he made an exception for Sheila. He knew she stopped in the bodega some nights to buy Lotto tickets and didn’t want her in harm’s way when his hitter arrived. Sheila thanked Rick profusely for the heads-up.

But Sheila had also been sleeping with Carlos Slim, who rounded out her own male harem when Rick and her sanitation worker beau were otherwise occupied. As soon as Rick left her apartment, Sheila called Carlos and explained the plot. Instead of strolling into the bodega as usual that night, he and his crew staked out Rick’s apartment building. When the big man arrived, they greeted him with a fatal volley from their .45s.

The lesson of Rick’s demise hadn’t been lost on Hempstead gangsters who followed in his footsteps.

“That’s why you don’t tell a ho anything—no exceptions,” Lamar says. “No piece of pussy worthy dying or going to jail for. If it happened to Fat Rick, it can happen to anybody.”

While forbidden from talking business with females, members of both crews still spend plenty of time with them. Young women from the Triangle and MLK walk down to the drug corners every day to try and cop for free, or at a discount, by flirting down dealer’s prices. Some offer their bodies in exchange for drugs. Others promise to service the whole set. While leaders of both crews expressly forbid such exchanges, corner boys sometimes make them anyway.

Girlfriends, prospective girlfriends, and groupies are shooed away by the Crips during peak business hours, but tolerated when business is slow. The Bloods also allow women to hang around during lags in business. Bloods hustlers will sometimes sneak off with a project girl into an empty stairwell to trade a blow job or sex for a snort of coke or nugget of crack. Others take “lunch breaks” from their corners and head to their girlfriends’ apartments for a half-hour of sex.

“Women are used and abused on these corners, the misogyny unparalleled,” says Delahunt. “And yet they’re pretty much all these gangsters think and talk about, outside of getting money and getting high.”

Recently the gang war has kept most females off drug corners. Like other noncombatants, they fear catching a stray bullet. And some know they might be considered targets because of their relationship with the gangs. But while girlfriends and groupies keep their distance, Leticia Lewis, the only woman employed by either crew, does not.

Leticia—or “Black Widow,” as she’s known in the Triangle—is considered one of the best runners in the game. The secret to her success is simple: No police know she’s part of the Crips drug operation. Rather, they believe she’s just another “chicken head” who has sex with Crips corner boys or flirts her way into crack discounts. It’s all part of her cover act, which she’s developed with the guidance of her cousin, Tyrek. He put her to work a year earlier after a string of his male runners got locked up in rapid succession.

“Good help hard to find,” Tyrek says. “She filled a void and filled it well.”

To watch Leticia in action is to marvel at her ingenuity. She begins each workday by sashaying up to her designated corner in black high heels and kissing each hustler on his cheek, looking every bit the part of crew groupie or dope fiend. One of the corner boys will take her hand and lead her up to the stash apartment. Watching Leticia strutting off in her tight jeans, shiny heels, and puffy North Face jacket, an observer might assume she and her Crip companion are sneaking off for a quickie.

Inside the stash apartment, Leticia takes off her top. Taped to her midsection and breasts are several large bags packed with crack, fresh from a Bloods cookhouse. They’re impossible to spot when she’s wearing her North Face, even for veteran narcotics cops in the neighborhood.

“That was her idea, the extra large coat,” Tyrek says. “She’s a smart girl.”

Leticia’s delivery assignments vary. In the morning, it might be five g-packs1 to the crew on Linden Place. Come lunchtime, it’s three packs to the boys on Marvin Avenue and one to the Laurel Avenue crew. After each delivery, Leticia returns to a cookhouse or stash apartment to pick up more product and embark on another round of deliveries. Orders are made by corner supervisors based on how much product their crew is selling on a given day. Each order must be approved by Tyrek or Tony, who can often be spotted doing what they call “crack math” on their iPhone calculators.

1 Packs of 100 crack vials sold for $10 apiece

Leticia has an excellent memory, Tyrek says, so she never needs to take notes or make written calculations for her orders. Rather, she does all the math in her head. More remarkably, cops have never stopped her. Not once. For her efforts, Leticia makes between $300 and $400 a day, plus occasional bonuses paid by Tyrek.

But it’s not just money that keeps her in the game.

“It’s fun,” she says. “You know, it’s an adventurous life. I can’t complain.”