Chapter Eight

Eye for an Eye

 

Revenge is always, always on my mind.

—Leticia

 

Before committing a murder, Rock always says a prayer. Clutching his gold crucifix charm, he’ll ask God to forgive him for what he’s about to do; he’ll ask for mercy and understanding, so that he’ll be granted entrance to heaven one day. With Steed in his crosshairs, he adds a caveat: “If I got to burn in hell for doing this nigga, it’s worth it,” Rock says, squeezing the trigger of his MAC-10.

Muzzle flashes light up the car’s interior as the smell of gunpowder carries through the stale June air. From her couch, Hempstead resident Nadine Johnson sees the flashes, hears the gun blasts, followed by tires screeching. She dials 911, looks out her window, and sees the bodies of two young men splayed in the street.

“Better come fast,” she tells the operator. “People shot.”

The Bloods on the ground are Steed and one of the set’s lookouts, Spider Rick. Steed, shot in his leg, limps away from the scene before authorities arrive. Rick, his wound more severe, is rushed to the hospital by paramedics. Both men leave behind small pieces of flesh—remains torn off by bullets and left to bake in the next day’s intense afternoon sun.

When the detectives arrive, Nadine Johnson tells them that she didn’t get a look at the getaway car she heard peel out. Nor did she see the men inside it.

“All I know is it happened very fast,” she says. “And the smell . . . it smelled like flesh burning out there. The bullets went in, the smell came out. The worst scent I’ve ever smelled.”

Detectives check security footage from local businesses facing the street, but none show the getaway car. They fan out to interview Bloods and Crips, believing the shooting is linked to their gang war. But no one gives them anything tangible to go on.

“Snitches get stitches? Fuck that,” Delahunt says. “What about the stitches it’s going to take to sew that kid back together? Why doesn’t that part of it matter to them?”

The shell casings littering the scene are their best evidence, but they need the gun that fired them if they’re going to find the shooter. No easy task, they know. In the Triangle, recovering a hot weapon can be an excruciating process that takes weeks, months, or even years, if it happens at all. In 2010, just two illegal guns were recovered in Hempstead, according to state records. The following year, police found none.

“Sometimes it feels like a fucking lost cause,” says Delahunt. “Like it’s a zoo, and we’re the zoo minders.”

The next morning, Tyrek sees a report about the shooting on the news. One man, Spider Rick, wounded, but expected to survive. No mention of a second victim—the intended target, Steed—even though Tyrek saw him take at least one slug.

“Nigga’s got nine lives,” Tyrek says.

“No worries, yo,” says Rock. “I got this.”

He calls up two of his soldiers in Brooklyn and orders them to find Ice’s sister, mother, niece, or any other close female relative.

“Do what you need to do to make this even,” Rock says. “Eye for an eye and shit.”

By week’s end, they’ve found an address for Ice’s sister in Yonkers, where she lives with her husband and his son from a prior marriage. Francine Williams is a thirty-three-year-old retail clothing store worker who hasn’t spoken with her brother in years, wanting nothing to do with him or his gang. She’d been a heroin addict in her younger days, supplied by her own brother’s criminal associates. But she’d cleaned up her act years ago and put as much distance between her old life, and Ice, as she could.

She’s long anticipated a knock on the door or phone call from authorities, notifying her of her brother’s death, so when the doorbell rings just after eleven p.m. on a sweltering Saturday night in early July, she’s expecting men in uniform. She’s alone; her husband and his son are upstate for a long-awaited weekend at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

When she opens the door, the men standing before her aren’t in uniform. And from the flashy jewelry on their necks and wrists, she knows right away they’re not cops. She gets a sinking feeling in her stomach.

“I’m sorry, can I help you?” she says.

“Yeah, you can, sweetie,” one of them says, stepping past her before she can shut the door. She’s just begun to scream when the other Crips soldier covers her mouth and forces her at gunpoint into the bedroom.

“You can thank your brother for this,” he says.

The sexual assault is quick and brutal, leaving Francine sobbing and badly bruised. Afterward, when her attackers are gone, she rifles through a drawer full of old papers and finds her brother’s cell-phone number, the one she’d held on to in case of an emergency. She dials and waits, imagining what she’ll say, framing the words she’ll use to blame him for the evil he has brought into her life. The line rings and rings, but there’s no answer. Not even voicemail. Ice was always careful that way, she knows, using burner phones for almost all his calls.

When her husband and his son return two days later, Francine acts as if nothing’s amiss. She’s too ashamed to speak of what her brother’s rivals did to her.

One day after work, she drives to downtown Yonkers and buys a bag of heroin. She returns to the corner the next day, and the day after that. One of the bags of heroin she buys is cut with an extremely high dose of fentanyl, a painkiller roughly a hundred times stronger than morphine. Within minutes of injecting it, Francine stops breathing. A passerby finds her slumped over in her car two hours later, cold to the touch.

The rapes of Leticia and Francine are not anomalies. Crips and Bloods members in eleven sets across Long Island and New York City say their crews have perpetrated sex crimes in an effort to lower enemy morale, deter retaliatory shootings, encourage payment of drug debts, or meet other gang objectives, especially during prolonged turf conflicts. The gangsters see sexual violence as a strategic and tactical weapon, as important to their arsenal as guns and blades. Some acknowledge personally participating in acts of rape, forced prostitution, and insertion of objects into women’s body cavities as instruments of sexual torture.

Such attacks are considered crimes against humanity under international law, but on America’s streets, similar crimes perpetrated by gang members are rarely reported or punished, according to victims, perpetrators, and police.

Like Leticia and Francine, many victims don’t report rapes to law enforcement because they fear retaliation from their attackers. As a result, culprits are rarely held to account. When victims do report gang-related sexual assaults to friends or family, payback is usually doled out by male relatives, or whichever gang the victim is connected to. It’s street justice, since the nonviolent variety is often not enough to quell a victim’s desire for revenge.

Crips and Bloods say women and young girls are routinely raped because their boyfriends or male relatives owe the gang money for drugs or guns. Other victims are targeted because their boyfriends are rival gang members suspected of carrying out drive-bys. In some cases, rape victims are selected at random—a tactic aimed at terrifying the population within an opposing gang’s territory, and keeping them from snitching about gang activities. Random sexual assaults are also used by rival gangs to pressure civilians to withdraw support for their neighborhood’s gang, leaving that gang more vulnerable to police raids and surprise attacks from enemy crews.

“It’s the deepest kind of revenge you can get, besides straight murder,” says Flex Butler, the Crips lieutenant. “You do that to somebody’s sister, somebody’s girl, some bitch who runs with them, and they get all torn up over that. It’s the ultimate disrespect to your enemy . . . doing their women like that.”

During his gang career, Flex says he’s participated in at least three group sexual assaults against women affiliated with the Bloods. One of the girls was just fifteen, the younger sister of a former Hempstead Blood, Leroy “Brick” Brewer, who’d stolen $2,000 worth of cocaine from a Crips stash house.

“Brick was hiding from us,” Flex says. “So we got his sister when she was walking home from school. She fought hard, but there was a lot of us.”

On the Bloods side of Hempstead, the preferred mode of sexual assault is also gang rape. Members say they learned the tactic from a Queens-based Bloods crew they’re close with—a set that habitually uses rape to run competing dealers off their corners.

“The way they do it in Queens is, if a boy don’t want to leave a corner after they told him a couple of times that he need to, they find his house, where his people stay at, and they go after his sister or his niece or his moms,” says Steed. “Just whoever they can grab while they there.”

His own set has found such attacks build camaraderie among newer and older members, Steed says, giving them a shared, twisted experience to bond over.

“It sound crazy, but that shit do bring you together sometimes, especially if it’s good and she ain’t trying to hit and fight everybody.”

Doc Reed says he generally chooses to watch such attacks rather than partake. “I don’t want to get no HIV or STDs,” he says. “I don’t know where any of these hos have been. I ain’t taking the chance.”

For victims of sexual assaults perpetrated by Crips and Bloods, the impact—both physical and emotional—is immeasurable. Leticia says she has had a series of medical problems as a result of her attack, including genital herpes and gynecologic fistula. She undergoes weekly psychological counseling and believes certain traumatic memories of her assault will never leave her.

“I wish I could forget about it,” Leticia says. “But it’s something that’s always with me—when I wake up, when I go to work, when I go to sleep, when I’m walking around or on the bus. Wherever I go, it’s there.”

For months, she tried to erase those painful memories with alcohol and drugs, she says.

“But there wasn’t enough liquor or coke in the world to cover up that pain. I realized I would just have to deal with it head-on, get treatment, work through what I was feeling. But what I feel most strongly, still and probably always will, is hate. I hate those boys for what they did. They’re animals, and I will never, ever forgive them, even if they came begging, I wouldn’t. Revenge is always, always on my mind.”

Francine, Ice’s sister, also turned to drugs to deal with the emotional trauma from her rape—something her husband discovered by reading her journals after she died. She’d never once mentioned the attack to him, he said, nor hinted that anything went awry while he’d been in Cooperstown.

“She kept everything locked up inside of her, all that pain and anger,” he says. “It was what they did to her that killed her. The drugs were just a vehicle, just the end of the process that started once they violated her.”

Some victims of sexual violence perpetrated by Crips and Bloods find solace in spending time together, sharing stories of their experiences in an effort to heal and move on with their lives. In East New York, Brooklyn, a territorial war between Crips and Bloods sets in 2009 and 2010 became so dangerous for women associated with the gangs that some of them moved out of the neighborhood and into a home in southern Queens. There, they live together to this day, cooking for one another and participating in group therapy.

One of the victims, Tania, says Bloods members raped her because her second cousin—a Crip whose immediate family lived with her own in a large apartment—participated in a drive-by that wounded two set leaders. In an alley behind a liquor store, she says, several gangsters bound, beat, urinated on, and raped her numerous times. They stopped the assault only when a Good Samaritan walking his dog stumbled upon the scene and scared them off.

“What they did to me . . . should never happen to anybody. The worst part of it was seeing them around the neighborhood after that. And they said, ‘You tell anybody, we’ll kill you.’ So I didn’t say anything for a few months, until I was sure I could get out of there and they couldn’t find me.”

When she finally confided to a female friend about the attack, the woman put her in touch with another victim assaulted during the same gang war. That victim, a social worker named Linette, had recently opened the Queens safe house, where she already lived with five other women raped during the conflict. Tania moved in with them a few weeks later.

“My attacker was this 250-pound guy, a Blood they called Tub, because he was big as a bathtub,” says Linette. “They sent him after me because I had a boyfriend at the time who owed the Bloods a lot of money for a package [of coke] they’d fronted him. It got stolen, and he didn’t have the money to pay them. He asked for time to get the money together, and they said he could have a little more time. But then they found out he went to some Crips he was friends with to ask for money, and they didn’t like how he was dealing with the situation, I guess. I guess they saw it as him being tight with their enemy, set on top of already owing them money, and they knew I was with him.

“So Tub followed me home one day and pushed in behind me when I was coming in my front door. And he raped me. At one point, he said ‘This what you get for messing with them Crips.’ He took out a blade, some kind of pocketknife or switchblade, and started carving something into my back while he was raping me. When he was gone, I looked in the mirror and saw what he’d carved was a B, for Bloods.”