Chapter Six

Revenge

 

Just when you think you’ve seen it all, little Bolo come out blasting like John mothafucking Wayne.

—Ice

 

A black Denali pulls up at a Crips drug corner on Linden Place, Nas’s “N.Y. State of Mind” pounding from its speakers. Tyrek, in the passenger seat, stares down each member of his corner crew while chewing on a toothpick. Tony, in the driver’s seat, steps out to survey the operation: Savant Sharpe, wearing a Darryl Strawberry Mets jersey, is handling lookout duties today; “Bolo” Jay Woodson, who’s in the midst of a tryout for the crew, acts as tout; Dice Beckles and Skinny Pete, decked out in blue Crips bandanas, serve as corner muscle.

“Look alive, niggas—ain’t even lunchtime yet,” Tony says, his voice strong and resonant. “This wartime, so you all got to be on y’alls toes. Morning, noon, and night, them guns going to be busting. Any Bloods fuck with you, anybody drive by looking like they about to do some shit, anybody mouth off, you handle it like soldiers. No exceptions. Nobody get a pass for nothing. Far as the Shop goes, you don’t let no niggas cop if they ain’t got the full amount. No mothafucking IOUs, aight?”

The young men all nod in unison.

“This the way we bang on a mothafucking daily basis,” Tony says. “Every time we see them Bloods up in here, we popping at them, we clapping at them. Shit’s about to get real after what they did to Crazy Ray. Aight?”

The hustlers nod again, seeming excited by the prospect of exacting vengeance.

“One other piece of business, then I’ll let y’all get back to work. Name of the product changing as of right now. We calling the two-for-one bags ‘Ghost Rider,’ because when you smoke that shit, you feel all Johnny Blaze.”

The Hempstead gangs change the names of their product every few weeks, even though there’s generally no difference between one “brand” and another. Before Ghost Rider, Crips’ vials and baggies had been called “Luda,” which had replaced “Scarface,” and before that, “Reebok.” Just like the advertising executives on Madison Avenue, gangs know that finding the perfect name for their brand can make it more desirable to customers, even if nothing about the product itself changes. Crips touts must either hype the brand with success or face Tony’s wrath. And selling the two-for-one bags is a priority, since they get customers hooked on a higher dose of crack. When the “special” is over and prices double, most pipeheads will fork over the extra cash without a second thought.

A few blocks away on MLK, Tony tells his men, Bloods are slinging their own newly named product: “Occupy.”

“You tell our customers that Occupy package is weak, and they need to get turned on to Ghost Rider for twice as much at the same price,” Tony says. “This shit going to sell itself because it’s premium, but you all being vocal ain’t going to hurt none.”

Tony looks around at each of the gangsters, eyebrows raised, expecting questions. Bolo Jay’s hand shoots up.

“Yeah?” Tony says.

“Yo, why we calling it Ghost Rider?” asks Bolo.

“Because that’s what the fuck we calling it, nigga,” Tony says.

“But why him instead of a better comic book character?” Bolo continues. “Why don’t we call it Spider-Man or Hulk? Yo, even better, what about Beast from X-Men? Beast off the chain.”

The Crips standing in the street all laugh, except for Tony.

“Yo, you think this funny?” Tony says.

Bolo is still a Crips associate, not yet an official member. And in Tony’s view, he’s been acting like a little kid for weeks now instead of stepping up during his tryout shifts and proving he belongs. There are also suspicions among some Crips—though no hard proof—that Bolo’s been skimming coke from the gang’s packages to sell on the side. Even worse, there’s talk that he’d fed cops information about Big Mac’s murder. Bolo, undeterred by those previous strikes against him, keeps on talking.

“Nah, I’m just saying, if the name going to be a superhero, it should be the best superhero, right?”

Tony doesn’t answer. Instead, he pulls a rubber-gripped Glock from his waistband and slams it into Bolo’s nose, splitting it open in a spray of blood and mucus. The rest of the crew watches in silence, backing away from their bleeding compatriot. No one dares go over to help him—not until Tony climbs back in the Denali and drives off. Tyrek beside him continues to suck on his toothpick, smiling at the bloody scene left in his wake.

Such acts of sadistic violence, so seemingly out of proportion to the incidents that trigger them, are daily occurrences in the Triangle. Perhaps, Tony confides later, he’s guilty of posturing, of trying to appear tougher than he needed to in front of the younger Crips and, in doing so, behaved more cruelly than the circumstance required. On the other hand, maybe it was a perfectly reasonable response, he says, given that the memory of Crazy Ray’s murder, and Tony’s overwhelming desire to avenge it, is still fresh.

“When we going to hit back for Ray?” Tony asks his boss as they cruise through Crips territory, surveying their other corners.

“We just waiting for the right moment,” Tyrek says.

On a rainy night in March, the right moment comes.

A deafening spray of semiautomatic gunfire echoes down MLK just after sunset, causing all the queued-up pipeheads and children playing in project yards to hit the deck. The Bloods stationed outside the Park Lake Apartments draw their weapons, aiming at the darkened street. They squeeze their triggers fast as they can, guns going off everywhere now. MLK is quickly shrouded in clouds of gun smoke and orange muzzle-flash explosions, the air stinking of gunpowder, sweat, and burned rubber.

The Park Lake apartments, a low-income housing development on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, served as the Hempstead Bloods’ headquarters and primary drug-dealing location.

Kevin Deutsch

Then there is silence; nothing in the street but shadows. No drive-by cars. No Crips.

The sounds of gunshots have a way of echoing through the maze-like project yards along MLK, making it seem as though one’s being attacked from all directions. Such grim acoustics make it hard to determine the location from which bullets are flying. The mystery on this night is solved by Doc Reed, who comes bolting around the corner of Oakland Street onto MLK.

“Yo, Lamar shot!” Doc says. “It looks bad, yo. He took one in the chest.”

Doc runs back around the corner, leading the rest of his crew to where Lamar, Ice’s fast-rising protégé, lay curled up in the street. The chest wound has soaked the front of Lamar’s shirt in blood. He’s muttering something unintelligible, his body trembling, his eyes rolling up toward the back of his head.

“Nigga having a seizure,” says Doc. “Damn.”

The crew argues over whether to call 911, weighing the potential for lifesaving medical care versus the risk of police interrogations sure to follow. The dilemma is rendered moot by an MLK resident who’d watched the scene unfold through his bedroom window and called police. As the ear-splitting bleeps of ambulance sirens and squad cars draw closer, several Bloods stand over Lamar, offering words of encouragement.

“Ambos coming—you be aight, Lamar,” says Big Boy. “Hold on, yo.”

“They going to stitch you back up like nothing happened,” Doc says, kneeling so that his face is just above Lamar’s. “That slug ain’t shit.”

But Lamar soon stops trembling, his fluttering eyes going still.

“Dang,” Doc says.

People are starting to come out of their apartments, drawn by the approaching sirens and shouts in the street. Rhonda Lovejoy, Lamar’s girlfriend, stumbles out onto MLK in her blue bathrobe, looking bleary-eyed, and walks up to the growing crowd gathered around the body. She gets close enough to see it’s Lamar and lets out a mournful scream paramedics will later claim to have heard from a full mile away. Her howl seems to rouse the Bloods from the morbid trance they’d fallen into, watching their friend die.

“Yo, let’s go before five-o get here,” Doc says.

They run to their cars and speed off, leaving Rhonda standing alone over the corpse, her screams drowning out the shouted orders of policemen as the cavalry arrives. Cops fan out across MLK and the Triangle, rounding up junkies and gangbangers for questioning. Detectives door-knock apartments and homes, announcing they’ll be enforcing old warrants for everyone in the area unless witnesses start cooperating. But the threat does little to sway residents on either side of the war zone; they all know a night or two in county lockup is preferable to the fates that await them should they talk to cops about a gang murder.

The Bloods who’d left Lamar to bleed out head for East New York, Brooklyn, where an affiliate set maintains a safe house. There, they meet up with Steed and Ice to figure out the crew’s next move. Meanwhile, several Crips involved in Lamar’s shooting rush to their own safe houses in the nearby neighborhoods of Wyandanch and Central Islip. When detectives show up at the Crips Triangle clubhouse, the place is quiet, not a single hustler slinging outside.

“We ain’t done shit,” Flex announces as Delahunt pounds on the door. “If you ain’t got no warrant, you ain’t coming in.”

At nearly every address in the neighborhood, residents claim to have been asleep when the shooting happened. No residents admit to hearing or seeing anything that might help detectives. In fact, for all the anguish exhibited by Rhonda Lovejoy and other local noncombatants over Lamar’s murder, no one—not even Lamar’s own aunt, Donna Crawford—will cooperate with police.

“I don’t know anything,” she tells detectives the night of his shooting, even though she has an excellent idea of who shot her nephew, and why. Gossip about fresh murders travels fast in the Triangle—just not to cops—ricocheting around the contained space much like the sounds of gunfire.

“Yes, you do,” Delahunt replies.

“You a mind reader?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

Crawford can’t help but smile. She respects the detectives and appreciates the fact they have a job to do. But they know as well as she does what could happen if she talks to them about Lamar’s killing.

“We can protect you,” the other detective says, declaring the Crips “won’t get near you.”

But when she asks what guarantees can be made for her safety, they promise neither round-the-clock protection nor relocation.

“We’re not the FBI, ma’am,” says Delahunt.

What they do promise is a police cruiser stationed outside her house at all times for the foreseeable future, rapid response to any 911 calls made from her home, and occasional police escorts for her and her family.

“Not good enough,” she says.

Crawford refuses to lose another child to the streets, she tells them, and if that means her nephew’s killer remains free, she’ll swallow that bitter pill.

“About fifteen years ago, my son was killed in a shooting, and I helped the police find the boy who did it,” she explains. “The day after that boy got arrested, his gang came back and killed my other son in retaliation for my giving the cops information.”

That second son died in her arms, she says, and the image of him breathing his last breath enters her dreams most every night.

“I only have one son left,” she says, “and I’d rather all the criminals in the world walk free than put him at risk by talking to you all.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, ma’am,” says Delahunt.

“Don’t be sorry,” Crawford says. “Just understand my reality.”

Impoverished residents like Donna have little chance of ever escaping the Triangle, since housing costs in nearly every other neighborhood—both in Long Island and New York City—are more than they can afford. Being trapped here necessitates they maintain a cold-eyed realism about their circumstances. Seeking justice from police for past grievances, even the murder of loved ones, will not bring the departed back. And, more than likely, it will land the justice-seekers in a grave of their own. So they hold their tongues, hoping for a day when the gangs are gone and things are different.

Lamar’s funeral a few days later is a sea of red, with Bloods from across Long Island and New York City in attendance. Absent among the mourners are the parents of the deceased. Lamar’s father, once a beloved car mechanic and handyman in the neighborhood, succumbed to a heroin overdose about five years earlier. Less than a year later, his mother began chasing crack to dull some of her grief. As her addiction worsened, Lamar and his little brother and sister spent more and more time alone, forced to take care of each other. One day, their mom disappeared with her dealer-turned-boyfriend and never came back, leaving Lamar, a child himself, to raise his two younger siblings.

“He deserved better than he got,” Donna Crawford says during the eulogy. “But justice will be served. Maybe not from the police, but from the Lord on high.”

At a Bloods safe house after the burial, Ice tells Steed he wants to know with certainty which Crip shot Lamar. There are rumors, Steed says, that Bolo Jay did the shooting, with Rock behind the wheel. But Ice struggles to wrap his mind around that dynamic. In targeting his protégé Lamar, Ice says, Tyrek must have known the Bloods’ response would be swift and overwhelming, regardless of whether the mission succeeded. Why, then, would Tyrek have tasked one of his newest, least-experienced foot soldiers, Bolo Jay, with the drive-by? And could Bolo really have carried out such a meticulously planned hit, one in which Lamar had been caught alone and off guard in the open, with no gun on him? To Ice, the hit seemed more like Rock’s handiwork, and the rumor about his being the wheelman suggested he’d indeed played a significant role.

“I’m seeing Rock’s fingerprints all over this,” Ice tells Steed. “Even if Bolo did pull the trigger, it had to be Rock doing the recon, planning that shit, telling Bolo exactly what to do, how to do it, when to do it.”

“So you want them both done?” Steed asks. “Rock and Bolo?”

“I want them both, no question,” Ice says with practiced nonchalance, ordering the killings the way he might a drink. “Sooner the better. Let them shells off.”

Bolo, hiding out a few miles away, knows he’s a marked man.

He’s holed up in a Crips stash apartment in Uniondale, prohibited from leaving for any reason. Rock has even dispatched two soldiers there to make sure he doesn’t try to run off or communicate with anyone until the heat dies down. The Big Homies don’t want the kid doing anything stupid in the aftermath of his triumph.

“Yo, when I’m going to be able to get up outta here?” Bolo asks his minders.

“When we say so, nigga.”

They watch the Knicks game, Bolo crammed between the two much larger men on the living room couch. They have some Chinese food delivered, and when the game ends, one of the Bloods soldiers flips through the channels until he lands on Jurassic Park. Bolo can’t take his eyes off the TV.

“Whoa,” he says when the T-Rex makes its first appearance on-screen. “What’s that?”

“Nigga, you ain’t never seen no dinosaur before?” one of the soldiers asks.

“Nah,” Bolo says with awe in his voice, his mouth slightly agape. In the television’s glow, he looks younger than his sixteen years. And for a moment, both soldiers grin with what seems to be real amusement, remembering, perhaps, being awed by such things when they were children.

“These things were real?” Bolo asks a little later. “Like, walking around, for real? Before there were humans?”

“Yeah, son,” one of the men says. “Ain’t you learned about them in school?”

Bolo shakes his head and munches on an egg roll. He hasn’t been to school in a year, not since his mom fatally overdosed on heroin, leaving him to care for his eight-year-old brother, Alex. Between taking care of him, dealing with their crack-addicted foster mother, and working shifts on Tyrek’s corners, there’s no time for academics, he explains.

“I didn’t like going to school nohow,” he says. “Them classes were hard.”

Instead of doing homework, Bolo’s done his best to be a good soldier, showing up to his tryout shifts on time every day, trying to make sure his corner profit tallies are correct. But math has always been his weakness. Sometimes, he can’t calculate a pipehead’s proper change; no matter how hard he racks his brain, he ends up making a mistake. A few boys in the gang think he’s stealing, he knows. But Bolo loves running with the Crips more than anything, he says, and would never take from his own crew.

“I wanted to be Crip my whole life.”

Tony’s pistol-whipping him in the Triangle three weeks earlier had been humiliating, he says, but not as bad as when Delahunt stopped him in a bodega and started asking about Big Mac’s killing. Bolo didn’t tell him anything, other than to say he hadn’t the slightest idea who did it. Delahunt kept pressing anyway, moving in front of Bolo whenever he tried to leave. To anyone passing by, it must have looked like they were having a real conversation, Bolo knew. On his way home from the store, he prayed word of the encounter wouldn’t get back to the Big Homies. But it quickly did, spurring rumors he’d turned snitch.

The humiliation from the pistol-whipping hadn’t waned, nor had Bolo’s desire to prove he wasn’t a rat. So when Tony had asked him if he’d help kill Lamar, Bolo saw it as a chance to get back the respect he’d lost. He believed such an act would redeem him, while proving once and for all that he was loyal to the Crips.

The following day, Rock had driven him to a shooting range in Suffolk County for target practice. Bolo had fired several guns, but told Rock he felt most comfortable handling the Glock 9mm. Rock secured a clean one for him and explained he’d be doing the driving while Bolo did the shooting. This was a test of his loyalty as much as anything, Bolo knew.

“If you miss that nigga or he don’t go down from what you hit him with, I’ll finish him off,” Rock said. “Just aim true, young’un.”

Bolo did, squeezing off six rounds and hitting Lamar with three, including a chest shot that had pierced his left lung.

“Nice shooting,” Rock had said as they sped away from the scene. “You a natural.”

Bolo had been giddy on the ride to the stash apartment afterward, feeling for the first time that he’d earned his place in the crew. He’d envisioned getting a hero’s welcome, endless daps and shout-outs from his fellow soldiers for dropping his first body, maybe even a celebratory blunt packed with bomb weed. But when Rock dropped him off, there was no one around except these two hard-looking soldiers.

This treatment makes perfect sense to Tyrek, who fancies himself a kind of gangland military strategist.

“Keep the young’un hungry,” he says of Bolo, and “he’ll be motivated when it’s time to hit again.” Deny him praise, keep him away from his exultant fellow gangsters, and he’ll become the focused, clear-eyed killer Rock needs by his side at a time like this, Tyrek says. The kid’s a blank canvas, and the Crips can paint him any way they’d like.

“I’m in a chess game with those slobs,” Tyrek says of the Bloods. “Bolo’s a part of that game. All of us part of it.”

Later, at Seduccion, Ice lights up a blunt, waving off a stripper who’s bent over with her backside inches from his face. She offers a lap dance, but Ice tells her he must first talk business with his lieutenants, Steed and Doc.

“You can’t find Bolo and Rock?” Ice asks.

“Nah,” says Steed. “They hiding out somewhere.”

“We still sure they did it?”

“Yeah, it’s like we thought. Rock was driving, Bolo shooting.”

Ice nods slowly, taking a long pull from his blunt.

“That little bitch manned up,” he says, shaking his head, still amazed that Bolo had pulled it off. “Just when you think you’ve seen it all, little Bolo come out blasting like John mothafucking Wayne.”

“His punk ass still ain’t got no heart,” Steed says. “Probably just closed his eyes and squeezed is all, got lucky and shit.”

But there’s no denying the significance of the blow Bolo has landed. Before his drive-by, the war appeared to be shifting in the Bloods’ favor, due to the murder of Crazy Ray. Now, Ice’s crew is seemingly on the ropes, with the Triangle and MLK abuzz over Lamar’s death.

“Bottom line is, we looking like bitches right now,” Steed says. “Word on the street is we got shook and ran off, retreated and shit.”

“Word?” Ice says. “They talking that shit on the block?”

“Shit, they talking like this war be over,” Doc says. “That’s what everybody be saying.’”

Ice finishes his Hennessy in one gulp, ashes out the blunt, and throws a $20 bill at the dancer spread-eagled on the edge of the stage.

“Let’s go then,” he says. “This shit can’t wait.”

They stop at the apartment of one of Ice’s girlfriends on Peninsula Boulevard, where the Bloods keep some guns and coke stashed. Inside, he pulls a trunk packed with firearms and ammo out of a bedroom closet. It contains all the crew’s favorites: Glock-9s, .22 Berettas, .45 Smith & Wesson pistols and revolvers, a few Saturday Night Specials, two TEC-9s, two sawed-off Remington shotguns, and an AR-15 assault rifle, with what looks to be enough ammo to take down King Kong.

“That’s the Crip killa,” Ice says, picking up the AR.

Steed grabs two Glocks and a sawed-off, while Doc spins the chamber on a Smith & Wesson revolver, sticks it in his waistband, and pockets a Beretta for good measure. They have enough firepower to mow down anyone they find standing on a Crips corner, Ice says, which is exactly what they plan to do.

“Time to ride,” says Steed.

They roam the streets in search of a car to use for the mission, ideally something subtle and nondescript, a model no one will remember. They settle on an off-white Dodge Stratus with heavy tints. Ice expertly hot-wires it and then they drive until they’re just around the corner from the Crips’ Triangle clubhouse. Dice Beckles, who’s on lookout duty tonight, doesn’t seem to notice the Stratus’s arrival. The Shop is up and running but traffic is light, with just a few drive-up customers pressing $10 and $20 bills into the tout’s hands and hardly any foot traffic. It’s been raining on and off since morning, keeping most of the pipeheads indoors while waiting for the clouds to move out.

Doc checks the AccuWeather app on his iPhone every few minutes, knowing the rain and fog are supposed to get worse as the evening wears on. He keeps Ice and Steed abreast of the forecast, since the men have laid out a plan that aims to take advantage of the foul weather. They’ll wait until the Crips’ midnight shift change, when Tony, Flex, and sometimes Tyrek himself show up to supervise the Saturday-night rush. Then, they’ll open fire. Their goal is to “decapitate” the Crips leadership, Ice says, to “cut off the head of that ugly-ass snake.”

They hold guns in their laps and stash others under the Stratus’s seats, waiting for the Big Homies to show. Shooting in the rain won’t be ideal, they know. But their plan calls for such an overwhelming use of firepower, it’s hard to imagine them missing their trio of targets. With fog and downpours keeping visibility low in the Triangle, the Crips will be hard-pressed to even see where the bullets are coming from, much less return fire with any degree of accuracy.

“Be like shooting fish in a barrel, yo,” Ice says. The men watch the digital clock on the dashboard. Another hour until midnight. “I can’t wait to see these bitch niggas run when we start popping off.”

What the Bloods leaders don’t know is that the Crips have decided to change their routine, part of their efforts to make a retaliatory strike more difficult. The directive came down from Tyrek two nights earlier: No Big Homies on the street until further notice. Lower-level dealers, working longer shifts to make up for the loss of manpower, would run all Crips corners.

Knowing his dealers, runners, touts, and lookouts would likely protest the longer shifts, Tyrek’s making it worth their while, nearly doubling their wages. The crew can afford it now, their coffers swollen thanks to a newly opened corner in Uniondale and some bulk sales they’d made to independent dealers in Staten Island and Queens.

Midnight comes and goes without the Crips leaders showing, but Doc, Steed, and Ice sit tight, believing Tyrek and his lieutenants will arrive at any moment. Another hour passes, then two. Despite the bad weather, the late-night party crowd turns out in droves for the Ghost Rider vials. Many of them return an hour or two later to buy more.

Still, no Big Homies show their faces.

“Something up, man,” Steed says. “Flex and Tony here like clockwork every Saturday. And Tyrek almost always check in, too. They must’ve changed shit up.”

At five a.m., the Crips dealing crew closes down the Shop, getting into their cars to drive home or walking back to their Triangle apartments. On the busiest sales night of the week, none of their bosses had shown. The Bloods head home, too, vowing to finish the job as soon as they get a fix on their targets’ whereabouts.

“These niggas was ready for us,” Ice says. “That’s aight, though. They can’t hide forever.”

But the Crips’ Big Homies are disciplined and careful. They stick to their plan and are rarely seen in public over the next few weeks. Despite the Bloods having enlisted an army of neighborhood informants—mostly pipeheads paid in vials—Tyrek, Tony, and Flex’s whereabouts remain a mystery as April arrives in Hempstead.

Thwarted by the Crips, Ice begins planning a different move aimed at reasserting the Bloods’ position in the neighborhood.

“We going to hit ’em where it hurts,” Ice says. “We going after one of their women.”