Chapter Ten

Branching Out

 

It’s what you might call, in the legitimate business world, a volatile market. Every step of the way, there’s uncertainty.

—Ice

 

The Mexicans have come through yet again. The new package they’d sent the Crips is the bomb, Tyrek says, superior to any coke the Triangle pipeheads can recall smoking in Hempstead. A top-notch product needs a name to match, so Tyrek gives it one he figures his crew and customers will appreciate in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election: “Obama.”

“Got that Obama,” the touts cry from every Crips corner. “Come get that Obama. Shit’s White House–pure. Pass me by, you won’t get Air Force One high.”

Some of the pipeheads, amused by the touts’ pitches, begin calling the vials “Air Force Ones” instead of their official name. Whatever they call them, this batch is selling like no product has on these corners in recent years.

Stick-thin addicts, desperate for the stuff, shift nervously in a line that snakes around the corner of Linden Place. Fights break out over who’s queued up first. And as profits increase, anger over the murders of Little James and Crazy Ray, as well as Leticia’s rape, seems to recede; the mood among the Big Homies now borders on jubilant.

“Money is right right now,” Tyrek tells Tony and Flex during their weekly meeting to go over the books. “This shit keep up, we going to need to grab some more corners.”

The Crips have been talking about a major expansion since before the Triangle war but say the conflict has consumed all their time and energy, keeping them from doing the laborious work of scouting, holding, and staffing large swaths of added territory. Now, with their high-grade coke and a promise from their Mexican suppliers to sell them as much of it as they want, the set is considering a major purchase.

“We put fifty grand of that Obama on the street, we can come back with half a mil,” Tyrek says.

“Big investment,” Tony says, sounding leery. “Lot of product to stash, lot of risk, especially with the number of police that be creeping right now.”

A coke purchase of the magnitude they’re now considering could, if the gambit worked, transform the Hempstead Crips from local players into a regional powerhouse. A $50,000 order would give them enough guaranteed-to-move product to open at least two, and possibly three, more corners in central Nassau and New York City. And if the initial expansion succeeded, Tyrek says, they could double their next re-up and extend east into Long Island’s more rural half, Suffolk County, where there are still plenty of untapped coke markets.

“This is what we’ve been wanting since way back,” Flex says. “This shit right here goes right? We millionaires, man.”

“Millionaires,” Tony says, smiling.

Tyrek warns them not to get ahead of themselves. Before they can expand, they must first lay final claim to the territory they’re now warring over, defeating the Bloods once and for all, he says. No stalemates. No uncertain terms.

“We’ve got to obliterate them niggas,” Tyrek says.

“No doubt,” says Tony.

“But first, go buy us as much of that good new Mexican shit as you can.”

Like most well-established Crips and Bloods sets, the Hempstead crews buy their coke and weed from traffickers connected to international drug cartels. The Crips patronize a wholesale supplier in New York City, who, in turn, gets his drugs from a contractor for Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel—the largest, richest, most successful drug-trafficking organization in history. Sinaloa purchases most of its coke from growers in Colombia’s mountainside farms for about $2,000 per kilo—the first step in a highly structured supply chain that allows Sinaloa to export as much as half of all illegal narcotics currently on America’s streets.

“From Colombia,” says Tony, the Crips’ designated expert on drug markets and trends, “that coke package just gets more valuable every step of the way.”

The kilo’s price rises to about $10,000 in Mexico. After it’s smuggled into the United States, its value increases to roughly $30,000. Depending on the quality of an individual cocaine shipment, the Hempstead Crips can buy a kilo for $17,000 to $25,000 from their supplier. Once they have the coke, they turn it into crack inside a series of cookhouses they control in Long Island and Queens. Then they break the crack up into g-packs to sell at retail on the street.

By the time every rock has sold, they’ve made about $100,000.

“We taking in eighty thousand dollars’ profit, give or take a few grand, on every kilo we move,” Tony says. “That right there is why crack ain’t never going to die. That profit is just too good.”

Buyers at each level of the supply chain are not just paying for the drugs. “They’re paying for the risks everybody took to get the drugs to that point,” Tony says, “which is what drives that price up higher and higher each step of the way.”

Corner-dealing crews like those employed by Crips and Bloods probably assume more risk than anyone in the supply chain, standing out in the open in neighborhoods heavily patrolled by police, interacting with strung-out pipeheads, and competing for market share with an enemy crew just blocks away. As a result, the difference between how much they pay for coke versus how much they sell it for is usually significant. They hike up their prices based on the belief that they might be arrested or killed at any moment—and must earn as much money as possible while they’re still here. That inflated cost gets passed to street customers, Tony says. And the less competition a crew has in their neighborhoods, the more they can charge.

“In drug markets, like any lucrative markets for illegal goods, there’s a ton of pressure driving competitors to try for monopoly,” said a high-ranking Drug Enforcement Administration official who’s studied the nexus between Latin American drug cartels and African-American street gangs. “The way to achieve monopoly is to destroy the other guy. In the legitimate business world, you can drive a competitor out of business with a number of weapons: predatory pricing, lawsuits, buying them out. But for the drug gangs, violence is pretty much the only way. The situation in the Triangle, when you think about it, is really the result of market forces. Just like the cartel wars in Mexico are about the market.”

The carnage wrought by Crips and Bloods can seem tame compared with the Mexican cartel wars south of the border, where the organizations’ soldiers are known to murder entire families, behead police officers, and dump decapitated bodies in the streets.

“The Mexican situation looks worse, but when you consider the scale of the damage Crips and Bloods have been causing to individual communities across America for the past half-century, well, the impact’s about the same in those neighborhoods,” the DEA official says. “Both the cartels and the gangs destroy everything they come near.”

Sinaloa isn’t overly concerned with the behavior of Crips and Bloods who sell much of their product in America—as long as they help to keep the organization’s coffers full, drug investigators say. But that doesn’t mean the cartel doesn’t keep a close watch on how the gangs do business. In fact, Sinaloa leaders and middle managers read American newspapers and blogs to stay abreast of the havoc wrought by street-level dealers at the bottom of the supply chain, says Pedro Guerrero, a former Sinaloa soldier who helped to manage the cartel’s interests in Tijuana and Mexicali for over a decade. Even the cartel’s leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, is kept apprised of what Crips, Bloods, and other American gangs moving Sinaloa product are up to.

“El Chapo respects these street gangs, but thinks they are unnecessarily brutal and bad at doing business in the sense that they bring too much violence to their markets, and violence attracts police,” Guerrero says of El Chapo. “Keep in mind, this guy was ordering six murders every day before he had a cup of coffee. And he thinks the Bloods and Crips kill each other too much!”

El Chapo’s eventual capture in 2014 would deal a symbolic blow to Sinaloa, but in October 2012, it’s the arrest of a different cartel leader, El Chapo’s lieutenant, José “El Che” Salgueiro Nevarez, that gets the attention of New York’s Bloods and Crips sets.

As one of Sinaloa’s logistics and supplies expert, El Che played a significant role in trafficking much of the cocaine and marijuana making its way to Long Island and New York City street gangs, investigators say. In the days following El Che’s capture, the Hempstead Crips’ main supplier in New York City became so concerned about a delayed drug shipment that he flew to Mexico City for a meeting with his Sinaloa contact. He wanted to know whether El Che’s arrest might jeopardize their business arrangement.

“They [cartel leaders] knew there would be a lot of worry after they got El Che, and they wanted to [assure] customers that his capture would not interfere with deliveries or the business they were used to,” says Hector Quinones, a former Sinaloa messenger. “To them [Sinaloa senior management], this is a corporation. So just like the top leaders of a big computer or soda company would do if one of the board of directors got arrested and they wanted to calm investors, they sent messengers who talked to all their big customers and said, ‘Listen, this is no big deal. It doesn’t change our arrangement. Everything will stay exactly as it is, so don’t worry.’ That’s what they told [the supplier] to the Crips in New York.”

As some of the largest purveyors of Sinaloa product in America, Crips and Bloods have a huge stake in the narco wars being waged in Mexico. If Sinaloa supply lines are attacked by competing cartels, or law enforcement deals further significant blows to the organization, it can leave the gangs without enough weed, coke, and heroin to meet demand on their corners throughout the United States.

“I read the papers looking at how Sinaloa’s doing, because if the Zetas or Juarez Cartel or Knights Templar end up on top, then we might have to find a way to get connected with their connect,” says Tony, referencing three of Sinaloa’s fiercest rivals. “When they got that Sinaloa homie [El Che], I ain’t going to lie . . . I was worried. But our connect went down there, got some assurances, and sure enough, everything got back on track soon enough. But, you know, shit changing down there all the time. It’s all about who’s on top today. Same as out here.”

The Bloods, too, get their coke from a city-based trafficker supplied by Sinaloa. In fact, the coke sold on Bloods corners in Hempstead and throughout the corridor usually comes from the same shipment the Crips purchase from.

But differences in the crews’ respective products do exist. Because they use different chemicals to cut their coke and dilute it to varying degrees, one gang’s batch of crack is usually stronger than their competitors. And their suppliers, although both connected to Sinaloa, are not equally reliable. The Crips’ wholesaler is rarely late with a delivery. The Bloods’ supplier, however, is often delayed with his shipments, and sometimes fails to come up with the full amount ordered. Ice sticks with him only because he has access to some of the highest-quality coke anywhere in New York, and charges the lowest price in town.

“It’s what you might call, in the legitimate business world, a volatile market,” Ice, the accounting major, says of the drug trade. “Every step of the way, there’s uncertainty. In the beginning, we had to find a supplier who could get what we needed and who we could trust. You know how long it took to find that? Two years. For two years, we had to work with smaller dealers, people making promises they could get us more. Then, when they didn’t come through, we’d go up the chain to deal directly with the next guy. Eventually, we got in with some good people with Cali connections, through Steed, and we moved up to their main supplier, who was tapped into that good Sinaloa shit.

“That’s the ultimate, as far as I’m concerned. We compete with them [other gangs] on quality, and on pricing, too. As someone with a history in the financial world, I take those things seriously. It doesn’t matter whether you selling drugs or legal merchandise. The rules of economics and smart business still apply.”

Ice says he also has connections to a Dominican supplier in Manhattan, a used-car dealer who works with the Juarez Cartel to smuggle coke from Mexico to the United States. If his current Sinaloa-linked dealer proves unreliable again in the future, Ice says, he might explore doing business with Juarez instead.

“The most important thing in this business is supply,” Ice says. “Without that, you ain’t got anything else. Territory doesn’t matter, your people don’t matter, and your strategy don’t matter if you ain’t got any product coming in.”

In Tijuana, men and women who keep America’s coke trade humming along the border know all about the Crips and Bloods. Carlos Tomayo, a former driver for Sinaloa, says both gangs’ members—mostly from California—are treated like royalty at Mexico’s cartel-connected restaurants, hotels, and brothels.

“These black gangsters are the ones who make the cartels rich,” says Tomayo. “Without them, the cartels are nothing, because they are the ones who really move the product in America. If there were no Bloods, no Crips, all the other black street gangs would have never been formed. Those two were the first, the biggest, and toughest. They set an example of how you could take drugs brought into the United States and make it a business in their neighborhoods.

“The cartels know all about this. They know that these gangs are their bread and butter. So they respect them. If you are [a Blood or Crip] in Mexico, you are respected by the cartels, by their supporters. Because you are big money to them. You are their connection to the black communities all over America, and white communities, too. Americans love drugs, so the cartels love the gangs who sell it to them.”

Tony learns about that love firsthand when he flies to San Diego for his older brother’s wedding. He brings along his girlfriend, pregnant with their second son, even though he’s worried she’ll be uncomfortable traveling. In the end, he decides that leaving her in New York with a gang war raging—and a dozen or so Bloods probably willing to rape or shoot her without a second thought—isn’t an option.

The night before the ceremony, Tony, his brother, and five of his brother’s friends drive across the border into Tijuana to throw a bachelor party in the city’s red-light district. They choose a club recommended by the Crips’ coke supplier, who’d given Tony the name of a Sinaloa bigwig he’s to mention. Tony’s doubtful his role as a player in the suburban New York drug trade will have much of an impression on cartel kingpins or their friends. But once he drops the bigwig’s name, the club’s staffers give Tony and his party the royal treatment.

They bring out heaping plates of Mexican food and their best beer, mescal, and tequila—enough booze to fell an army. In between food and drinks, they’re ushered into upstairs rooms with prostitutes, sometimes several at a time. These are the brothel’s most beautiful and sexually “creative” girls, reserved for only the most distinguished visitors, Tony is assured by the club manager, a man named Federico.

“You are—and tell me if I’m saying this right—one of the Creeps?” he asks Tony amid the festivities. “We are great admirers of yours.”

“Crips,” Tony says, laughing at his host’s pronunciation. “I guess you all don’t see us New York hustlers down here too often.”

“Not often, no,” Federico says. “But believe me when I say, my bosses are very grateful for your business, and wish to ensure all your needs are met while you’re in Tijuana.”

As Tony’s party grows more boisterous, lighting up blunts and grabbing the backsides of waitresses as they pass, some of the cartel soldiers in the club shake their heads at them. The crudeness, gluttony, and lack of refinement on display disgusts them. Where do these animals get off, fucking our women, drinking our booze, they wonder? How come they’re being served at all in this establishment, much less treated so well? But when these men complain to Federico, each of them is scolded in turn, told to shut up and mind their own business.

“If you don’t understand how important these men are to us,” Federico says to one of the disgruntled soldiers, “then you are dumber than you look.”

Tony has no idea what the soldiers think of him and his gang brothers back home—that they’re fools and thugs of the worst kind, low-class criminals who enslave their own people to crack. All Tony knows is that the bosses of these men must appreciate the Crips’ business and respect what they do. The drug business, after all, is all about respect, Tony says: who gets it, who gives it, and how it’s earned. It’s something anyone in the drug game—a nightclub owner from Tijuana or a Crip from Long Island—can understand.

“At the end of the day, we all speak this same language,” Tony says. “Language of respect, language of the street.”

Back at his brother’s house, once he’s showered and washed the smell of prostitutes off him, Tony climbs into bed beside his girlfriend, kisses her belly, and whispers a greeting to his unborn son. The boy, he hopes, will speak this language, too.