Chapter Eighteen

True to the Game

 

You’ve got to know when to give up . . . when a place is killing you.

—Mike Clary

 

Tyrek and Tony sit smoking blunts in the Crips clubhouse, discussing how to deal with Devon’s shooting. They know the cops, especially Delahunt, are searching intensely for the gunman. They also believe one or more commuters at the train station may be able to identify the Crips who ran from the scene.

“Detectives already been by Bolo’s crib,” says Tony. “Somebody must’ve seen him run off. Or might be they got him on a surveillance camera.”

“What the fuck he thinking, opening up on that weak-ass nigga D-Bo in the middle of the day and shit?” says Tyrek.

“Bolo thought Devon and them Bloods was coming to jack they stash,” says Tony. “Turns out they was actually chasing Devon because he was dodging them and shit. But Bolo ain’t know that, so he panicked, squeezed one off.”

“Where he at now?”

“He up in our safe house in Brooklyn,” Tony says. “But it seem like five-o ain’t going to quit till they find his ass. Devon’s mom making all kinds of noise about wanting justice and shit. Police coming down hard on our people, jacking up our corners, saying they going to keep on with all that until Bolo turn himself in.”

Tyrek takes a deep pull off his blunt, considering his options. He doesn’t want to lose his young hitter-in-training, but business takes precedence. If Bolo’s freedom means an unacceptable level of police focus on Crips corners, then he can’t stay free.

“Aight, tell him he got to put in for [the shooting],” says Tyrek. “Tell him we’ll take care of his little bro while he in, take care of the money for his lawyer, everything. When he comes out, long as he do his time like a soldier, he’s going to have a bigger piece of the pie. My word on that.”

Tyrek’s order is not out of the ordinary. Crips and Bloods leaders have long been known to sacrifice a soldier in the short term if it’s beneficial to the set. The tricky part, Tyrek says, comes when detectives start making them promises in return for testimony or information about the gang.

“Make sure he’s clear on his responsibilities,” Tyrek says. “He keeps his got-damn mouth shut. He stay true to the game.”

“Aight, I’ll go get him,” says Tony. “What you want to do with his corner in the meantime? You want another soldier on that?”

“Nah, forget that corner,” Tyrek says. “With all this heat, we ain’t got to push things local. We going to open some more of them city corners.”

“We on that multimillion-dollar plan now, huh?” says Tony.

“No doubt,” Tyrek says. “Bills about to get even larger.”

An hour later, Tony’s sitting down with Bolo at the safe house, explaining that he must turn himself in for the good of the gang.

“But how’s that good for us?” Bolo says. “How having me in jail going to help us? I thought I was doing good.”

“You was,” Tony says. “You a soldier for real. You showed a lot of heart. But that ain’t got nothing to do with you putting in for this [shooting].”

Bolo looks as if he’s about to cry. He lowers his head, sniffles a few times.

“I still don’t get it,” he says.

“This just the way it is, yo,” Tony says. “You down for your niggas, so you do what you’ve got to do. Too many cops on our corners looking for you right now, and it’s bad for business. You go in, it takes the heat off us.”

“But then I got to go to jail, right?”

“Probably,” Tony says. “And you’ll carry that like a soldier, too. You ain’t going to tell them detectives shit about shit. They going to ask you all about our business, make you all kinds of promises to keep you out of jail if you snitch, but you ain’t going to say a got-damn thing. ’Cause you down for your crew, right?”

“Yeah,” says Bolo. “But I ain’t never been to jail before.”

“You get used to it real quick,” Tony says. “We getting you a pay lawyer who going to get you as little time as possible, maybe get you down from attempted murder to assault and a weapons charge, depending on what kind of witnesses they got. So you hooked up on that front. And when you get out, Tyrek says he’s promoting you. Going to double what you making now. Plus, he going to take care of your little bro Alex while you away. Clothes, cash, whatever he needs, we’ll get to him.”

With this last caveat, Bolo seems to resign himself to the situation. He meets his lawyer at a diner near the police station to talk strategy, with Tony manning the door to make sure Bolo doesn’t make a run for it.

That night, in county lockup, Bolo makes a vow to leave the criminal justice system “twice as hard a hustler” as he is going in. “It’ll make me tougher,” he says. “When I get out, ain’t no Blood going to want no part of me. And one day, I’m going to be in charge of all this shit. I’m going to be like Tyrek, the king, the number-one nigga in Hempstead. I’ll show all these Bloods niggas what I’m about. Shit, I’ll jail like it ain’t nothing. Jail ain’t going to do shit to me but prepare me to swallow all them Bloods niggas up when I get on the street again with my nine.”

Back in the Triangle, Reverend Lyons and his marchers return to try and tamp down the talk of renewed warfare. He keeps working to impact the lives of gang members he’s met, to help them find better paths for their lives. But he still doesn’t know when the next homicide will come, or how the local Bloods–Crips conflict might be permanently solved.

“It’s an uphill battle,” Lyons says. “We believe these young men are capable of so much more than what they’re doing out here.”

For every gang member the marchers have influenced over the past year, it seems that many others have ignored their message. Skinny Pete says praying with the men each Friday night has had a powerful impact on him, sparking his interest in theology and making him consider swearing off all violence.

“Sometimes, when I think about all I’ve done to niggas, I’m ashamed,” Pete says. “I feel that way more and more ’cause I got prayer in my life now, because of the reverend. He made me see things differently.”

In the other camp are unrepentant gangsters like Savant Sharpe, who’s still convinced Lyons and his marchers are working for the police. He’s written rap lyrics declaring the men “snitches and slobs [Bloods] lovers.” Whenever he sees them, he walks off in the other direction and tries to calm his temper, “because if I don’t, them Jesus-loving niggas might get hurt.”

In Lyons’s view, his marches have been a success—instrumental to the slowdown in gang-related gunplay. He attributes this partially to the efforts that he and his colleagues have made, and partially to the grace of God. But as a preacher born to these streets, he’s not so naive as to think the gang war is over for good. He knows that, in all likelihood, he’ll once again be summoned into the breach.

“When it’s time to come back and march again,” Lyons says, “we’ll be here. We’ve put in too much time, too much effort, to give up on these young men.”

But one hustler the marchers had no choice but to give up on was Tyrek. He’d once told Calvin Bishop he didn’t mind the activists coming through the Triangle to pray, but that “if we ever interrupted him in the course of his doing business, no quarter would be given to us,” Bishop says. “He said murder was nothing to him, and that the Lord has no say in it. That young man has too much of the Devil in him to be saved, I’m afraid.”

Tyrek is rarely seen in the Triangle during the early months of 2013, having shifted many of his resources and best talent to New York City now that the Triangle, in his words, “has been locked up permanently as our stronghold.” His crews are running several corners in Brooklyn and Queens, tapping into brand-new markets and doubling their profits in the process.

But with new territory comes new enemies. Tyrek’s men are already making a few in East New York, Brooklyn, and Jamaica, Queens. A member of one Brooklyn crew, the Very Crispy Gangsters, shoots a Hempstead Crip in the shoulder over a turf dispute in March. In response to a different territory grab in Jamaica, a notoriously violent Queens crew called the Get Touched Boys sends a group of gangsters to retake a corner from the Crips. They jump out of a car holding baseball bats, tire irons, and pistols. Before the Crips lookouts and touts know what’s happening, some of the GTB gangsters are beating them while others train guns in their direction. The Crips are carrying but have no time to draw. Their rivals pummel them, bloodying their noses, pounding their skulls with gun barrels. Still, the Queens crew does not relent. They kick the ribs and faces of the Crips, the sound of bones cracking audible amid the scrum.

“It was ugly,” Tony says after the attack, icing a black eye. “That’s the cost of doing business sometimes.”

The Crips relocate to another corner a few blocks up the street, outside the Get Touched Boys’ territory. The change appears to satisfy GTB. Within a week, the Crips are making as much selling crack there as they had in the original spot.

“More than enough territory to go around in New York, because everybody need they fix on any block in any neighborhood,” Tyrek says. “You just bring the product, and customers will find you. We can all get paid—Crip, GTB, whatever.”

The Very Crispy Gangsters, though, are not as easy to appease. The crew’s members are known as fierce protectors of their Brooklyn turf, and when Tyrek refuses to withdraw from a corner his crew took from VCG three weeks earlier, VCG takes the battle to Hempstead. In the heart of the Triangle, they beat down a Crips corner crew, humiliating them on their own turf. The move is brazen and, Tyrek believes, foolish.

“They don’t know who they’re dealing with,” Tyrek says. “They think we soft ’cause we ain’t from Brooklyn. But we going to show them niggas something about how we do in Hempstead.”

In response to the beating, Tyrek dispatches Rock and two soldiers to shoot up a VCG corner. The mission is only a partial success, leaving two gangsters wounded, but neither fatally. The VCG response, on the other hand, is highly effective. They reach out to J-Roc through an intermediary and form a temporary alliance with the remaining Hempstead Bloods, both crews seeing the benefit in teaming up to fight a common enemy. Within hours of the agreement, J-Roc drives past a Crips corner in Brooklyn and opens fire, killing Flex Butler.

“How you like us now?” he says while speeding away.

Flex, the third-highest-ranking Crip in the set’s hierarchy, lay in the gutter for over half an hour, his body obscured by the shadows cast by nearby project towers. A local pipehead stumbles upon the body and rifles through Flex’s pockets, coming away with several bags of premium crack. Only after he smokes one of the rocks does he bother calling 911.

The murder sets off a new wave of violence at a time when Hempstead residents believed their neighborhood’s fortunes had finally improved. As VCG and Bloods soldiers wage a campaign of force and intimidation against Tyrek’s men, the staccato sound of gunshots once again becomes frequent in the Triangle. The Crips, caught off guard by their foes’ partnership, call for reinforcements and additional weapons from affiliate sets in Brooklyn and Queens.

“They brought the fight to us,” Rock says. “We didn’t expect it.”

The resurgent Bloods, led by J-Roc, Big Boy, and Rick, see the campaign as an opportunity to improve their own credibility and reputations in Hempstead after last year’s embarrassments. A few of them catch Dice Beckles alone on his way home from a corner shift and beat him down, shouting out insults about the Crips while pummeling him. Next, they rape a female pipehead who’s friendly with Tyrek.

“That’s payback,” says J-Roc, who admits to taking part in the sexual assault. “She ran with them punks, so she got to pay the price.”

The barrage of shootings, rapes, and beatings sow confusion among the Crips. When under attack, they’re sometimes unsure whether VCG or Bloods are doing the shooting—and therefore unclear about who should be targeted for retaliation.

More significantly, the three-way gang war is affecting the set’s bottom line. Tyrek’s losing profits both on his Brooklyn corners, where customers are afraid to cop due to the constant threat of gunfire, as well as his Hempstead corners, now under siege. Under pressure from soldiers who have seen their pay drastically reduced in recent weeks, he decides to withdraw from VCG territory and relocate to unclaimed turf, just as he’d successfully done in Queens.

“I don’t want to back off, but sometimes that’s got to be part of the strategy,” he says. “It’s . . . how you call it? . . . A tactical withdrawal.”

The withdrawal, however, does not satisfy VCG. They continue to harass and attack Crips corner crews even after they relocate as far as Flatbush and Bedford-Stuyvesant. And they keep up their incursions into Hempstead, ripping off Crips stash houses, shooting up cookhouses, and tagging the set’s exterior clubhouse walls with spray paint.

“Them niggas are tenacious,” says Tony.

Tyrek says VCG’s reputation is being bolstered by their battle with his set; the longer and harder they fight, the more they’re seen as a major player in New York’s gang hierarchy. Taking on a respected Crips set, and hurting them, is the dream of most every start-up crew unaffiliated with a national gang network, Tyrek says.

“That’s why they ain’t quitting, even though we gave them back their corners,” he says. “They names ringing out now because they taking us on. They got a lot of street fame out of this.”

The renewal of hostilities again makes it unsafe to roam the Triangle after dark. For Marsha Ricks, the return of gunfire outside her door is almost too much to bear. If her spirits had been buoyed by the temporary peace, the resumption of violence saps her of energy and hope.

“I truly believed the neighborhood had finally turned a corner, that these boys had found a way to coexist,” she says. “I was taking walks and shopping on my own for the first time in a long while. Shoot, I was even feeling a little younger, going to the beauty parlor once a week.”

The violence has again left her trapped in her house, held hostage by the ongoing threat of stray bullets. Her health seems to be worsening, too, her body achier than usual. Perhaps she’d exerted herself too much during those peaceful weeks, she says. One night, she slips and falls in her bathroom, fracturing a bone in her leg. She crawls into the living room to reach her phone and call an ambulance, which whisks her to the hospital. When she returns home, it’s in a wheelchair, her leg held in place by a stabilizing brace.

She finds it difficult to get around but refuses to burden her son with news of her injury. He’s busy finishing up his residency while mentoring Steed, and she doesn’t want him distracted at such an important time. She wheels through her home as best she can, calling on neighbors, including Mike Clary, to buy her groceries and run other errands. Once again, she sleeps with her windows closed.

Cooped up in her house every day, she grows weak and depressed. Her medical issues mount. But she still waxes nostalgic about a time in the Triangle before crack, Crips, and Bloods.

“There was a time, when I was growing up, when this was a beautiful place,” she says. “I suppose my problem’s always been that I kept seeing it that way, even after that world was long gone. Now I realize it isn’t coming back.”

The following month she suffers a major stroke as she lay in bed, the sound of gunfire crackling outside her window. Clary finds her the next day when he arrives to collect her grocery order. He checks her pulse, feels only cold stillness. He kisses her on the cheek and calls her son.

Clary is deeply affected by Ricks’s death, believing it represents the end of the “old neighborhood,” as well as a victory of evil over the forces of good that Ricks embodied.

“If we had a hundred more like her, we could have made this place good again,” Clary says. “But she alone was a miracle. She kept me going many times when I didn’t want to. A lot of us who wanted better things for this area feel . . . just kind of lost without her.”

On the morning of Ricks’s funeral, a stray bullet fired by J-Roc, still drunk and high from a night of partying, shatters the rear window of Clary’s car. When he comes home and finds the mess of shattered glass, he begins to cry right there in the street.

“Enough,” he says.

He packs up his most important possessions, loads them into the car, and begins the long drive to Florida, where he plans to start fresh. He leaves shattered glass strewn about the car floor, hoping it will serve as a reminder of why he’d left—should he have any second thoughts.

Clary puts his house up for sale, but like so many others in the Triangle, it sits uninhabited and unmaintained, its windows quickly broken out by gangsters and junkies before village workers board them up.

“Best thing I ever did was leave,” he’ll say a year later, talking on the phone from a poolside lawn chair in Orlando, his wife, Diane, lying beside him. “You’ve got to know when to give up . . . when a place is killing you.”