Chapter Four
Infantry
We’re seen as less valuable to America, like we got nothing to contribute.
—Tony
Though runners like Leticia serve important roles in the Bloods and Crips, the most valuable members of both organizations—especially in wartime—are its “hitters,” hit men who intimidate, strong-arm, and kill in accordance with the needs of their set’s leadership. A hit man is rarely seen on a drug corner unless he’s there to hurt someone, or worse. As a result, sightings of the men usually instill panic in all but their closest associates. Such fears are warranted; one look at them can mean the end for a rival dealer or indebted customer.
Each Hempstead crew has its own main hitter: The Crips have Joey “Rock” James; the Bloods have Jerome “Big Mac” McDaniel. Rock, for his part, has a reputation as one of the cruelest gangbangers in town. According to neighborhood lore, Rock cemented his legend in ninth grade at Hempstead High School after a neighborhood tough two grades ahead of him grabbed his big sister’s bottom in the hallway. Sasha James began crying and ran off; her tormentor gave chase, continuing to squeeze her as she fled.
Rock, just walking out of social studies class, saw the kid molesting Sasha. He chased him down, held him by his collar, and palmed his head like a basketball in one of his massive hands. Then he bashed the persecutor’s head against a nearby classroom door over and over until a crack opened down the middle of his forehead, “like a coconut,” Rock says. The kid lay there until a teacher found him and called for paramedics, who arrived just in time to stem the bleeding and save his life.
Despite months of coaxing from school administrators and police, none of the students who had witnessed the beating would identify Rock as the perpetrator. A churchgoing loner who’d been easily ignored by classmates before the fight, Rock became a schoolhouse legend after it. Bullied peers, and sometimes their parents, sought him out for protection or to exact revenge for earlier beatings, robberies, and assorted humiliations they’d suffered. By the time Rock entered his sophomore year, both the Bloods and Crips had taken notice of his talents. Competition for potential recruits is fierce among the gangs, and Rock’s skills—street smarts, intimidation, and toughness—are especially sought after.
In their efforts to recruit Rock, Hempstead Crips had a major advantage: He lived with his mother in a one-bedroom apartment on Linden Avenue, which sits squarely in Crips territory. The location of Rock’s residence hadn’t mattered to the gang until he’d carried out the legendary beatdown to protect his sister’s honor. Few Crips could even recall ever seeing him in the neighborhood until word got around about his toughness.
“He had a face that blended in, like just a regular kid,” says Flex Butler. “That’s one of the things that made him so good. He didn’t look like no killer or nothing. He looked like anybody you see around, so he snuck up on people real easy at first. But now? Everybody knows that nigga. His name ring out. So he’s got to wear a mask when he go on missions.”
Despite being at a geographical disadvantage, the Bloods tried luring Rock to their side first. As he walked out of school one afternoon, a car full of Bloods, including Doc and Ice, sat waiting for him at the curb.
“Yo, come here, shorty,” someone in the car called out.
Rock was leery, knowing the boys were Bloods from MLK, and mortal enemies of Crips living on his block. But he approached the car anyway. Doc Reed reached out the passenger-side window and handed him an envelope.
“Open it,” Doc said. Rock did and found $1,500 inside.
“That’s for you, to use however you want,” Doc said. “You could set your moms up in a bigger place. Buy yourself some new clothes. And when you done spending that, there’s more.”
Stunned by the gift, Rock asked what he had to do in return, figuring he was being hired to protect or beat someone—although he couldn’t imagine why the Bloods would need his help.
“My nigga, we want you in red,” Ice said from the backseat. “We want you riding with us.”
They drove him to a Bloods associate’s house off MLK that doubled as an occasional party spot for the crew. There, they smoked blunts packed with their finest weed, getting Rock so high he could barely stand up to leave once it was time to go home. That night, he slept with the envelope of cash under his mattress, wondering whether he should give it to his mom to get a nicer place, or give the money back and decline the membership offer. He knew the danger in accepting Bloods money and membership while still living on Crips turf, but figured he and his mom could quickly move to a new apartment outside enemy territory.
By the time school ended the next day, he’d decided on accepting the cash. But as the Bloods waited for him at the curb again, some Crips Big Homies intercepted him at the schoolhouse door. It turned out they had something to offer that Rock wanted even more than money and a new apartment.
He was a virgin until that night, when the Crips got him high and brought him to the home of a forty-something crack queen who, despite her addiction, still had her looks. She slept with him as part of a deal she’d worked out with the crew for some free vials. Rock spent the whole weekend holed up at her place, and when school started again on Monday, he was working a Crips corner instead of in class. Two months later, his membership was official.
“Shit was meant to be,” Rock says. “Allegiances born lots of different ways in the Triangle.”
For his first assignment, Tyrek tasked Rock with debt collection. When force was needed, the new Crip used it expertly. But street enforcement called for nothing more than intimidation and brutality, a far cry from killing with guns. For that, Rock needed training. So, every Wednesday, Tyrek and Tony drove him out to an isolated stretch of woodland in southern Nassau County. There, they fired at beer bottles and paper targets they posted on trees, shooting hundreds of rounds of ammo. Rock honed his aim with nine-millimeter Walthers and Glocks, a .38 Smith & Wesson, a Cobra .380, a Remington pump-action shotgun, and even a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum, a famously high-powered gun capable of blowing an enemy gangster’s head clean off with one shot. By summer’s end, he was routinely hitting bull’s-eyes with them all.
Today, his marksmanship is beyond expert. By Tyrek’s estimate, Rock’s “body count”—the number of people he’s killed, alone or with the help of others—is likely between ten and fifteen. But Tyrek refuses to waste the talents of his best hitter on routine drive-bys any Crip “with decent aim and a little heart” could pull off. Sounding every bit the CEO, Tyrek says he’s waiting for the “right opportunity to utilize Rock’s skill set.”
In the meantime, Rock imparts wisdom to younger Crips who aren’t as handy with their firearms. Like the woodland target practice his bosses once gave him, Rock stages drills for young gangsters aimed at honing their aim and tactical skills. In one drill, they carry paintball guns and try to clear the wooded area of “combatants”—Crips wearing red, playing the role of Bloods. The “enemy” gangsters leap out from behind trees, taking aim with paintball guns of their own. One gang member serves as a referee, shouting “Out!” whenever a combatant is struck. Those who make it through the drill alive win an extra day’s wages and—if Rock is especially impressed with their performance—a free half-hour with one of the prostitutes who turns tricks in the gang’s territory.
The Bloods, too, stepped up training at the direction of Big Mac. As the Hempstead set’s primary hitter, he’s tasked with making sure gang members are proficient with their guns. Thanks to him, all Bloods know how to properly clean, oil, and assemble their weapons. Before he began schooling them, their guns would sometimes jam or fall apart in the middle of shoot-outs, their clips sliding out at crucial moments.
“That don’t happen anymore,” Mac says. “Shit was embarrassing.”
He also moonlights as a security guard for a famous R & B singer but he says the money he makes as part of Ice’s drug-dealing operation is more than he’d make working full-time in the performer’s detail.
“Once you get used to money like this with [the Bloods], you can’t go back to waiting on paychecks week to week.”
A barrel-chested, weight-lifting enthusiast with a glistening bald head, Mac’s a stickler for detail, and hard on gang members under his command. He disciplines them harshly for infractions like showing up late for work, needlessly flashing their guns in public, or stealing from the gang. Early in the Triangle war, a Bloods foot soldier accidentally fired a bullet through his next-door neighbor’s wall, blowing a young boy’s ear off. After the child’s mother complained to Bloods leaders, Mac paid a visit to the offending gangster, beating him so badly he promised never to switch the safety off again.
“Nigga, you know you can’t be playing with that gun like a toy,” Mac said after the beatdown, the kid leering at him through two black eyes. “That’s your penalty. Don’t be messing with your piece.”
The most severe punishments, though, are reserved for gang members caught skimming drug proceeds or product. When a seventeen-year-old Bloods dealer named Derek “Big Boy” Owens began cutting his corner crew’s coke more heavily in order to stretch their supply further and keep the extra cash for himself, several pipeheads—a term reserved for Hempstead’s most hard-core crack addicts—noticed the difference in strength. They reported the weakened product to Doc, who’s in charge of quality control for the Bloods. He dispatched Mac to fix the situation, which the hitter did by docking Big Boy two weeks’ wages and punching the beefy teenager in his belly until he coughed up blood.
“One thing you never do is steal from your own people,” Mac told Big Boy as he lay writhing on the ground. “That’s your penalty.”
Two months later, Big Boy would go a long way toward earning back the trust of his bosses by winning three consecutive tactical drills—a new Bloods record.
“We Baghdad-ready,” Big Boy bragged. “Those niggas in the Triangle ain’t nothing to us after the training we done.”
Despite his occasional cruelty, Mac is proud of his pupils when they perform well. Some even see him as a father figure in a neighborhood desperately in need of one. The irony of those boys viewing him in a paternal light, despite the violence he routinely perpetrates against them, isn’t lost on Mac.
“It’s a fucked-up thing, but the truth is, a lot of these niggas don’t have nobody who gives a damn about them,” Mac says one day as he and a few Bloods are leaving a gang associate’s home in Rockaway Beach, Queens. “I guess I do care about these younger niggas. But I’m just doing my job, man.”
Risks, he knows, are also part of his job. For that reason, he’s nearly always on alert for enemy gangsters who might seek revenge. But for a moment this afternoon, breathing in the cool beach air blowing in off the ocean, Mac lets his guard down. He’s reaching into his pocket for his car keys when a well-built man wearing a black ski mask walks up from behind and presses a gun to his neck.
Pictured here, one of the masks Rock uses when he goes on missions. The Crips hitter says he must hide his face when committing certain crimes because he is well-known in the neighborhood and would otherwise be easily recognized.
Kevin Deutsch
Outside the home, a single gunshot rings out. Several of Mac’s fellow gangsters run outside to find him laying in the yard. His neck’s been torn open by the shot and he’s moaning loudly, rolling around on the grass. His wallet falls from his back pocket,opening to reveal a photo of his smiling daughter in a school uniform, her image now splashed with blood.
A blue Ford Taurus double-parked across the street screeches off, the masked gunman visible in the passenger seat. The Bloods draw their weapons and level them at the fleeing car. This reporter ducks back inside just as they begin emptying their clips in the Ford’s direction, shooting out a taillight as the sound of the car’s groaning engine fades into the distance.
The Bloods are heard yelling outside, screaming at each other to lift Mac into a car and get him to the hospital. Their vehicles roar off.
The next day, Ice explains that the shot to Mac’s neck was fatal. “I don’t know which of them stupid-ass niggas did this,” Ice says. “But somebody got to pay.”
At Queens Medical Center, doctors had tried frantically to save Mac once his gang brothers dropped him off. Dr. Jonathan Rose, the physician who’d pronounced Mac dead, said a short prayer for the fallen twenty-two-year-old hitter, noted the time of death, and lingered an extra few moments with the body. It turned out he’d seen the murdered patient before.
“He came in about a year ago with a bullet in his leg, and maybe two, three months before that, with a graze wound,” says Dr. Rose, whose patient lists some nights read like a Bloods–Crips membership roster. “I remember him because, both times he was here, he was the sweetest kid. I mean, tough guy, definitely. He looked like a hard-ass, and probably shot any number of people. But he was a real nice kid to me.
“First time I treated him, he asked me all about my daughters . . . said he had one himself. Second time he came in, he remembered my little girls’ names and asked how they were. Bright kid, too. I remember I told him, ‘Get out of this life while you can. Because when you live by the sword, you die by the sword.’ I thought maybe I got through to him. But then I saw him tonight. And I thought to myself, ‘Damn, he didn’t listen.’ ”
For the Bloods, the vital questions of who shot Mac and why aren’t easily answered. Because the gunman wore a mask during the attack, no one’s able to identify him. And the list of potential Crips suspects is endless. Mac accumulated too many enemies to count in his role as top Bloods hitter and enforcer, leaving several sons fatherless and half a dozen enemy gangsters either wheelchair-bound or hauling around oxygen machines.
In such a world—“a suburban jungle,” as Mac often called Hempstead—normal rules don’t apply. The Triangle is not truly a part of the affluent region that circles it; it’s a neighborhood cast aside, with its own bosses and martyrs, language and codes, a suburban war zone seemingly abandoned by its wealthier Long Island neighbors. In such a world, the death of a man like Mac—a “stone killer,” as Detective Delahunt called him—is neither unusual nor unexpected. The soldiers on this battlefield all know they must live by the sword. And all are prepared to die by it.
“They’re willing to risk their lives on those corners every day, because the money is so good,” Delahunt says. “There aren’t many other ways for them to make this kind of a living around here.”
In a village where unemployment is 16 percent—the highest on Long Island—Hempstead Crips and Bloods have built an economic system firing on all cylinders, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. In a community where 21 percent of residents live below the poverty line, nearly twice the state average, a drug corner is the rare local business that generates large cash profits day after day, a thriving enterprise immune from outside market forces and economic uncertainty. It’s a system so successful that its participants risk just about everything—their freedom, their families, their lives—to be part of it.
The drug markets offer steady work and same-day pay. For young men unable to find legitimate jobs because of their criminal records or lack of education and job skills, the corners also offer validation, responsibility, and respect. If there’s no room for them in the job market outside the Triangle, there’s plenty of room within it: opportunities to move up, to get rich, to get women, and to find a niche where before, none was apparent. If their lives lack meaning and purpose outside their gangs’ territories, they’re plainly meaningful and purposeful within them. These hustlers are, after all, the essential human capital keeping the drug markets humming. Here, slinging vials and hiding stashes, young men with no obvious place in America’s legitimate economy find that they belong, that they’re significant, that they matter. For the first time in their lives, they are defined by their work. And they’ve found out it feels pretty good.
“Way I see it, this is what I’m meant to be doing,” Tyrek says. “I’m an entrepreneur.”
In this ten-block-long world of the Triangle and MLK—the only world these young men know—hustlers say they see no opportunity outside their own neighborhoods; the desperate inheritances of poverty and lack of education passed down to their parents have also passed to them. It’s a world of stoicism and hardness, where gangsters boast about how much prison time they can do without breaking, and how willing they are to die for their set.
It’s a world where the preservation of one’s masculinity means everything, for weakness of any kind is considered a dangerous liability. And it’s a world where most any type of violence—against women, children, and senior citizens—can be justified through twisted gangland logic.
In this world, petty feuds wipe out multiple generations of the same families. Acts of brutality are seen as righteous, because they’re conducted in accordance with the unwritten Laws of the Street. As for police, gang members see them as enemy forces patrolling their neighborhoods not to protect and serve, but to persecute and destroy. Their hatred of law enforcement is perhaps the one thing that unites Crips and Bloods, who, like Steed, would rather go to jail than snitch to cops, even about their mortal enemies.
In such a world, new horrors lay around every corner. Clothing stores sell memorial T-shirts with a space left blank for the victim’s face. Grieving families simply bring in a photograph of the fallen Blood or Crip and—for $30—his likeness is quickly silk-screened onto the shirt. In this world, gang names are spray-painted on walls, and shrines to the murdered, featuring Hennessy bottles, shell casings, and condolence cards, are created with numbing frequency.
Makeshift memorials for murder victims, like the one pictured here, are erected with numbing frequency in the Triangle.
Kevin Deutsch
In this world, friends of the dead tattoo their brethren’s names on their chests and arms, so that they’re constantly reminded of the need to avenge. Gang members even build RIP Facebook pages for themselves while still alive, knowing they’re more likely than not to die prematurely.
“I know what’s coming; we all know,” says Steed, who has completed his own online memorial page. “Ain’t none of us delusional. But you can’t dwell on that stuff. You got to live while you’re here.”
The rules of this world are different, too. Here, the death of an innocent from a stray bullet is seen as the cost of doing business and the absence of community cooperation with police that follows, inevitable. Here, guns and knives are the answer to most any problem, and gangsters who survive long enough to have kids become fathers much like their own: rarely home, in and out of prison, heirs to a cruel legacy that’s turned murder, drug dealing, gunshot wounds, and incarceration into coming-of-age traditions in the Triangle. More than 1.7 million kids in the United States had a parent in prison as of 2007, according to federal and state prison data. In the Triangle, where roughly one out of every three males serves time behind bars, having at least one close relative in prison is almost expected. Despite all the suffering endured by their parents, almost no one who enters the drug business here leaves it of his own accord. The gangsters say that’s because most of them have felony records, leaving almost no alternatives to make a real living outside the drug rackets.
“We’re seen as less valuable to America, like we got nothing to contribute,” Tony says. “So why not sell drugs if that’s how the world feel about you? Why not make money the best way you can, given everybody already done gave up on you? We’re America’s leftovers, for real. They don’t need us, and they don’t know what to do with us. That’s why we out here hustling.”
Without traditional accomplishments to take pride in, like diplomas and varsity letters, Hempstead Crips and Bloods brag instead of their moneymaking prowess and willingness to kill. Without any real sense of civic pride, they name-check the nearest highway exits, zip codes, and street names. With no authentic outlets for their intelligence or creativity, they invent words and universes all their own. Westbury, a neighborhood in Nassau, becomes “Westbloodbury.” Nassau’s area code, 516, becomes a battle cry.
“Hempstead, exit thirty-two and twenty-one, LI, Parkside to Park Ave. That’s Crip money, nigga,” boasts one Hempstead Crip in a video his set made and posted online, seeking what they call “street fame.”
“Blue money, blue world. That’s Long Island money right there. Blue island, niggas. Wild stylin,’ five-one-six.”
Despite all their bravado, most Bloods and Crips aren’t blind to the inevitability of their failure. They know that whatever success they find in the Triangle and other drug markets will be fleeting—that at some point in the coming months, their corner escapade will almost certainly be over. When it ends, they’ll either be dead, like Little James and Mac; wheelchair-bound from a bullet, like Savant Sharpe’s older brother, Nico, a former Crips enforcer; or in jail, awaiting a long prison sentence, like most every Crips Big Homie of the past thirty years.
Even as they play at being invincible, the gangsters carry the secret of their own demise. Yet they continue down the path toward ruin, their desire to belong, receive respect, and get rich outweighing their hopes to one day escape the ghetto, to go further than their parents. Money may lure them to the corners, but it’s the feeling that their lives finally have purpose that keeps them there.
“This is what God put me on Earth to do, or else I wouldn’t be here,” says Rock, kissing the gold crucifix he wears around his neck.
The worst part, Delahunt says, is that the Triangle conflict “is just one of hundreds being fought by Bloods and Crips sets throughout the country. These young men are at war, not in Iraq or Afghanistan, but in our own cities and suburbs. It seems like nobody realizes that—either that, or no one cares.”
Dr. Rose, too, has seen the human toll of these gang wars. In all the hospitals he’s worked in across America, from San Diego to West Palm Beach, he’s treated Bloods and Crips who kill and maim each other in droves. In emergency rooms from Chicago to Atlanta, he’s seen gangsters wheeled in after getting shot by childhood friends over gang allegiances, perceived disrespect, or, sometimes, just for the hell of it.
“Too many kids have died in front of me over these stupid Bloods–Crips beefs,” Rose says. “When will people wake up and see these are actual wars being fought under our noses, in our own suburbs, in Long Island, for chrissake? And when will the gang members see the waste of it all?”
Rock, for one, says he’s too caught up in the local celebrity his reputation affords him to think about whether he’s wasting his life, or about the likelihood he’ll die a violent death. When he goes out to pick up his car from the shop two days after Mac’s murder, he admits to this reporter he’d been the masked gunman who cut Mac down. Still, he says, the possibility of retribution doesn’t occur to him. He’d taken care to hide his face, after all, and knows the Bloods must be in the dark about who did the shooting.
“I’m too smart for those slobs,” Rock says, using a derogatory term for Bloods. “I got more important things to think about, anyway. Like my ride.”
He’s been waiting on a call about his new car, a navy blue Mercedes E-Class, from the mechanics over at the Mercedes service center on Graham Avenue, half a block from the Triangle. The car’s been in the shop ten days now, and Rock says he’s tired of the delay. He wants to show it off to the girls in the neighborhood tonight, maybe find himself a date.
“When I roll past in my E-Class, they ain’t going to be able to resist getting in,” Rock says. “That car’s an aphrodisiac, yo.”
Mercedes, to the surprise of many, built their local service center at the edge of a notorious drug market; the affordable rent and tax breaks were apparently enough to allay any concerns over customer safety. Its construction was part of Hempstead’s revitalization effort—an attempt to attract new businesses and rehabilitate its image as an unsafe suburb in decline. Local politicians believed having a luxury brand in town might help to improve the village’s reputation and perhaps attract other prestige companies. But the Crips and Bloods, seeing those expensive cars rolling past the Triangle every day, had other ideas.
At first, Crips approached Mercedes owners outside the service center and touted their powder cocaine, which they market mostly to well-off white customers. The drivers looked terrified when gangsters approached, speeding past a stop sign that called for them to stop in Crips territory. Indignant Mercedes customers complained about the swarms of overzealous dealers harassing them every time they got an oil change. Within a few months of the center’s opening, municipal workers removed the stop sign, allowing panicky drivers to flee the area as quickly as possible.
“This is one of the only spots where you can see the idea of the suburban Long Island dream of money, luxury, and success butting up against the reality that is the crack and gang culture,” Delahunt says. “Here, all illusions are lost.”
Having a Mercedes branch within view of their corners caused many Crips to covet the cars. After all, the vehicles represent everything the gangsters grew up without: luxury, excess, privilege, and power. Rock was the first to give in and buy one with his drug-sale proceeds. Despite the car’s hefty price tag, it was trouble from the start, stalling at stoplights and failing to switch gears as fluidly as Rock expected for a luxury ride. At the service center, he’s making his displeasure known to the mechanic, demanding the repairs be made immediately—and without costs.
“How y’all going to charge me that kind of money and give me a faulty product?” he says. “In my line of work, you get killed for doing that.”
The mechanic looks up from under the hood, eyebrows raised, perhaps interpreting Rock’s bluster as a threat. He mutters something about how he’s “not going to be threatened by some fucking drug dealer” and stalks off, returning a few minutes later accompanied by a service center manager. That man orders Rock to leave the premises at once.
“Fuck y’all racist mothafuckas,” he says, climbing into his $50,000 lemon and heading back to the Triangle. “Luxury, my ass. This why Long Island be tripping, man.”
When he gets to the Crips’ clubhouse, his fellow gangsters are staring intently at the TV, the volume turned way up. It’s the afternoon news. An unidentified man has been shot and killed five miles away in Freeport, the newscaster says. No arrests have been made.
“They got Crazy Ray,” Tyrek tells Rock.
Crazy Ray was a Crips dealer responsible for running a busy drug corner in Freeport. Ray had nothing to do with Mac’s murder, but he found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Bloods rolled out, looking for revenge.
“Damn,” Rock says. “This a fucked-up day.”
“It’s just war, nigga,” Tyrek says. “Ain’t no thang.”