A Note on Sources

My research for this book began in January 2012 while working for the New York Daily News. I covered the paper’s courts beat in the Bronx, where thousands of Crips and Bloods live and fight. Accordingly, I attended many legal proceedings involving the gangs’ members. I also spent countless hours at crime scenes, plodding through bloodstained streets, learning about turf lines, and picking up gangland gossip wherever I went. In this way, I got a primer on the brutal worlds both gangs inhabit and developed a fascination with their long-running conflict.

At Bronx Supreme Court, where I spent my workdays, fights between Bloods and Crips regularly broke out in courtrooms and hallways. Things got so bad that some judges prohibited court attendees from wearing red or blue. Others had extra sets of metal detectors installed directly outside their courtrooms when Crips or Bloods were on trial. During one such proceeding, a city police detective I knew—and whom I frequently used as a source—was on hand to testify for the prosecution. He pulled me aside outside the courtroom one day and told me about a Bloods-Crips conflict even bloodier than the ones I’d been covering.

“It’s real bad,” he said.

“Where is it?” I asked. “The Bronx? Brooklyn?”

“Long Island,” he said. “They’re fighting over a piece of territory called the Triangle.”

“Bodies?”

“Oh yeah. Bodies. Crack. Guns. All in the ’burbs.”

The next day, I made the twenty-two-mile drive from the Bronx to the Village of Hempstead, following a map the detective had drawn for me. The well-manicured lawns and upscale shopping centers dotting most of Long Island’s streets quickly gave way to run-down buildings and abandoned homes in Hempstead. Parts of the village remained relatively safe, their streets lined with pharmacies and sandwich shops. But a large swath of it embodied the very picture of urban blight, its streets dirty and decrepit, its decayed housing stock more reminiscent of the South Bronx than the rest of Long Island.

Even so, when I arrived in the Triangle, I thought I’d taken a wrong turn. The neighborhood had the look and feel of a drug market—narrow roads, long-abandoned houses, drug baggies and vials strewn about—yet it was empty, not a single corner boy in sight. There were two schools located almost directly next door, as well as a playground. Surely Long Island crack dealers wouldn’t be so brazen as to sling in sight of kids walking to class or children at play.

I made a U-turn with the intention of circling back onto the main road. It was there, at the corner of Linden Avenue and Linden Place, that the Hempstead Crips appeared. Three of them strode out into the middle of the street, gesturing for me to roll down my window. They knocked on the hood of my car, as if in greeting.

“What you need?” one of the Crips said. “Yayo? Rock? Some weed? Come on, yo, ain’t got all day.”

I looked past the Crips who’d come out to serve me. Five or six of their brethren shifted about on a Linden Place stoop, watching me closely, seemingly ready to join their homies in the street if anything went awry. I told the touts I wasn’t looking to cop.

“I’m a journalist writing a story about the Linden Triangle,” I said. “Is it all right if I hang out with you guys for a little while?”

Before I could say another word, they were shouting curses at me. One accused me of being an undercover narcotics cop. Another leaned in through my open passenger window and said, “Nigga, you best leave right now.”

I drove off to the sound of them jeering. In my rearview mirror, they saluted me with middle fingers, hawked loogies in my direction, and grabbed their crotches. All in all, I thought, my introduction could have gone a lot worse.

“Shit, you’re lucky they didn’t shoot your white ass,” my detective source said when I told him about the encounter. “Maybe you need a different approach.”

As winter wore on, other stories took precedence. Fresh murders needed covering in the Bronx each day. So did trials of the accused. I put the Triangle story on the back burner, promising I’d come back to it during a lull on my beat. Not long after, I got a call from the managing editor of Newsday, Long Island’s Pulitzer Prize–winning daily newspaper, offering me a job covering criminal justice. I’d applied months earlier, fascinated by the island’s salacious murders, drug epidemics, and gang problems. Hungry to explore the seedy underbelly of suburbia, I accepted the position and immediately delved back into the Triangle story.

I started by attending a Hempstead community meeting, organized by Triangle residents concerned about the recent gang violence. They complained of drug dealers swarming their cars and making aggressive sales pitches, just as the Crips corner boys had done to me weeks earlier. The residents said gunfire was so common in their neighborhood they didn’t let their children outside after dark. Some even hid their kids in the bathtub when bullets started flying. And they always kept their windows closed, lest a stray slug find its way inside amid a Bloods-Crips gun battle.

“I’ve been trying to get through to these young men for a long time,” Male Timmons, the leader of a local neighborhood association, told me after the meeting. He’d been shot at while trying to make peace between the gangs, but that hadn’t deterred him. “We have something new going on now. We’re doing prayer marches. Why don’t you come out and see for yourself?”

He gave me the number of the man in charge of the marches, Reverend Kirk Lyons, a fifty-one-year-old Hempstead native who ran a ministry with locations in Newark, New Jersey, and Brooklyn, New York. Some of Lyons’s old friends had called to alert him to the Bloods-Crips gang war ravaging his hometown. He’d agreed to come home to try and calm the violence. When I called him, he said I was welcome to march with his men, with one caveat: I ought to be ready for anything.

“We march at midnight,” he said. “One side of the neighborhood is Crips. The other’s Bloods. We’re walking through both.”

I joined the marchers that Friday and many others, rain or shine, walking through Long Island’s largest, most dangerous open-air drug market. I observed their prayer circles, and sometimes participated in them, holding hands with the gang members, addicts, and prostitutes they prayed with. One night, I held the hand of a young Crips associate, just a child, his palm small and sweaty. He wore expensive Nike high-tops and a kid’s-size basketball jersey. I wondered how he’d ended up working a drug corner.

“Keep praying for me,” he told me as I walked off. I told him I would. A few weeks later, I heard he’d been wounded in a gang shooting in Brooklyn. A bullet fragment had penetrated his eye, blinding him. On another march, I’d met a pretty young woman trying to beat heroin and cocaine addictions. At her request, I’d given her the number of a treatment hotline. She thanked me with tears in her eyes, gave me a hug. Two weeks later, she died of an overdose.

Every week brought more heartbreak: murders of Bloods and Crips, wounded children left handicapped, addicts lost to the needle or pipe. But the marchers never relented. They came to walk and pray every week. Gradually, both gangs came to trust them. In time, they came to trust me, too.

“If you going to write about our lives,” Anthony “Big Tony” Sherman, the Crips lieutenant, told me one day over breakfast at a Hempstead diner, “you need to tell it right.”

He and Flex Butler, then the set’s third-highest-ranking member, had agreed to meet there after determining with certainty I wasn’t a cop. The first few times they’d seen me on marches, they looked at me with contempt, probably recalling my initial drive into their territory. Lyons and others in the neighborhood vouched for me, though, and after a few weeks, the gangsters accepted my presence. I’d join them in prayer circles just like the other marchers, and sometimes lag behind to ask a few questions. The gangsters bummed my cigarettes and called me “crazy white-boy reporter.” Since they seemed to defer to Tony on most matters, I did, too. He turned down my offer to buy him and Flex breakfast five times before he finally said, “Aight, but I’m getting lunch to go, too.”

So we ate, and they told me their stories.

“Once you in the game, you in,” Tony explained. “That’s your family right there. You all are brothers, same as blood.”

He said he made his first dollar acting as a lookout for the Crips, a job they tried him out for when he was twelve years old. He was told to whistle loudly three times and shout “Police!” at the dealers whenever cops headed their way. That was the signal to hide the stash, which, if seized, could land them all in jail and, more important to the gang’s leaders, bring a heavy loss in profits.

“That’s why lookout’s so important, because that’s like the center in football,” Tony said between bites of his omelet. “Game can’t be played without him doing his job, quarterback ain’t get the ball without him. It’s some basic shit. But essential, too. That’s the first job the older niggas give you, to see if you can maintain. To see if they can trust you. Find out if you got a brain.”

It was the first of many lessons I’d be given on gang protocols, history, rituals, and etiquette while interviewing Crips and Bloods, as well as the cops, activists, and addicts who peopled their world. I asked Tony if he’d be willing to let me spend weekends with his set to supplement the reporting I’d done during prayer marches. He agreed to take my request to Tyrek, leader of the Hempstead Crips.

“Nothing go down without his say-so,” Flex said.

Just then, Tony’s phone rang. It was one of those plastic disposables all the Bloods and Crips carried. They called them “burners” and usually burned through three or four a week.

Tony answered, listened for a few moments to whoever was on the other end, then said, “Do it.”

He asked me to drop him and Flex off near the Triangle. Tony was making phone calls in my car the whole trip, giving instructions to various Crips. When we stopped at a light near the Triangle, the men got out. Tony gave me a final piece of advice.

“You’ll want to stay far away from here tonight,” he said.

Hours later, a Bloods associate was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds. The shooter or shooters were in the wind, police said. Whether or not Tony and his men were involved, I didn’t know.

I got a call from him the following night.

“Tyrek say you good for this weekend,” he said. “From there, we’ll take it week by week. If you do some stupid shit, you out.”

For the next year, I hung out with the Crips most weekends. They told me war stories, took me on missions, and gave me access to their world. It was more violent than I’d imagined, crueler than I thought possible.

The Bloods were a harder sell.

“Yeah, you can come around, but you get popped, it ain’t on me,” Michael “Ice” Williams, the Bloods leader, said after I’d spent two months pressing for interviews with him and his set. “If you make these niggas angry, I can’t protect you. They don’t like what you write? Shit, they might kill you just for that.”

Despite those risks, I took the deal. On nights I wasn’t hanging out with Crips, I immersed myself in the world of the Bloods. The access was unprecedented—an opportunity to cover an ongoing gang war from its front lines. But there were plenty of dicey moments, too. I found myself ducking as bullets flew around me on several occasions. I had guns pointed at me two other times—once during an attempted robbery on my way home from an evening with the Crips, and another time by a Crips member himself. He’d gotten so high he’d convinced himself I was an undercover FBI agent posing as a journalist. In his stupor, he also believed I was the Hempstead police chief’s adopted son. These paranoid thoughts led him to stick a revolver in my face, an act for which he later apologized.

It was one of dozens of times various gangsters, addicts, and community members accused me of being an undercover. To negate their suspicions, I spent as much time around them as I could, showing folks pictures of my family, bringing them copies of newspaper stories I’d written, telling them jokes, talking sports. I said nothing that got anyone arrested. I never discussed any of their conversations or activities with police. In time, most people came to realize I was probably who I said I was: a journalist who wanted to write about their unique world. A “crazy white boy,” yes, but not a cop.

My goal was to delve as deeply as possible into the local Bloods-Crips war and, in doing so, to understand what has fueled the broader, forty-five-year-old conflict. To do so, I focused on the day-to-day decision-making processes of both Hempstead sets, analyzing each tactical move and strategic shift. I approached my coverage as a reporter would any complicated conflict, focusing on both sides’ strategies, goals, and motivations; daily battlefield developments and atrocities; impact on civilians; and the involvement of law enforcement officials.

I also sought to tell the story of the Bloods-Crips conflict in terms of its human costs. No gang war in this country has dragged on as long or caused so much trauma, both physical and mental. The death toll, more than twenty thousand lives lost in forty-five years, is astonishing. Yet the Bloods-Crips war, as a whole, receives scant coverage in the press. Residents in war-torn communities say that’s because nearly all those killed or wounded in the conflict are poor and African American. But it’s also due to the nature of the battle. It is dangerous to cover, difficult to track, and even harder to make sense of. For those reasons, I felt the only way to do the story justice was, as Reverend Lyons said, to “get in close” and track it in real time.

In exploring the plights of gunshot victims, rape victims, and sufferers of PTSD, I tried to deal with the subject matter as sensitively as possible, while also examining the issues in the broader context of the Bloods-Crips conflict. As for the victims of sexual violence who shared their stories in these pages, each is more courageous, in my mind, than anyone caught up in this senseless feud.

Just one article about the Triangle war had been published before. I wrote it in June 2012 for Newsday. The piece focused on village police redoubling their efforts to stop the Bloods-Crips battle, along with the actions of the prayer marchers. I’d planned to write more stories about the conflict, but as they had in the Bronx, breaking stories took precedence. I put my notes on the gangs aside, hoping to revisit the project one day.

Then, in May 2013, I got a call from Toni LaFleur. Her son Devon, a Bloods member on the verge of escaping gang life, had been shot by a Crips member and left partially paralyzed. I’d spent many hours interviewing him in the months before his injury. Toni asked me why I hadn’t done anything more with the material I’d gathered—why I hadn’t told the story of her son, and so many others whose lives had been destroyed by gang violence.

“If a journalist on Long Island isn’t going to tell this story, who is?” she said. “If you don’t care enough to write it, it means no one will ever care. It means no lessons will be learned from all this pain.”

I took Toni’s words to heart. When we ended our conversation, I started writing. After hundreds of follow-up interviews and nearly a year of additional reporting, this book was born.

As for methodology, I mostly conducted interviews on the fly, without any prearranging. I’d meet up with Crips or Bloods and follow them around with a notebook and pen. Same thing for the cops, activists, clergymen, crime victims, sexual assault victims, addicts, concerned citizens, and others I spoke with. In the midst of illegal activity, I usually put my reporting tools away, fearing they might inhibit the gang members or otherwise impact the natural course of events. I’d write down my recollections of those events later—not an ideal reporting method, but my best choice given the circumstances.

I saw 40 to 50 percent of the events chronicled in this book with my own eyes. The rest I reported through interviews with more than 250 people who’d been involved in the events, or otherwise witnessed them. Sometimes, a shooting or other important development in the gang war would take place while I was doing reporting elsewhere. In my descriptions of those events, I’ve relied primarily on the accounts of gang members. As for the dialogue recorded in these pages, I heard much of it myself. In other cases, I reconstructed conversations as accurately as I could based on interviews with those involved. Beyond that, I’ve used interior monologues or referenced a subject’s thoughts only in cases where I questioned them in detail about their thinking at a particular moment.

Gang members have a tendency to embellish, and some viewed the presence of a reporter as an opportunity to elevate their reputations on the street. As a result, I corroborated the anecdotes shared by Bloods and Crips whenever possible through the use of legal records and witness interviews. Since much of what took place during the Triangle war escaped the notice of law enforcement and the public, such corroboration could not always be found. Therefore, I’ve taken care to include only anecdotes I believe accurate. Many others have been excluded.

Throughout the reporting process, I tried my best not to insert myself into the events I covered. In that same spirit, I’ve chosen not to include myself in this narrative about the Bloods, Crips, and their world. The story is not mine; it is theirs.

A final word of disclosure: I did on occasion, though not without cause, help my subjects. I’d regularly give spare change, a few dollars, or a word of support to those who seemed legitimately in need. I also sometimes gave rides to subjects, saving them the cost of bus or taxi fare and using the trips as opportunities to interview them. In cases where addicts or gang members looked to me for information about drug treatment or social services, I provided it.

As for the names of people in this book, most have been changed to protect their identities. In exchange for anonymity, they granted me access. Some gang members agreed to let me use one of their street aliases (each typically has several). Others chose variations on their street names and agreed to be identified by those. A few people I met during the course of my reporting could not later be located to discuss these matters, sometimes due to their imprisonment or death. In such cases, I’ve chosen aliases for them. And in instances where gang members implicated in criminal activity were killed, I’ve identified them by one of their aliases rather than their real names, out of respect for their families.

Other than Hempstead police chief Michael McGowan and Nassau Police detective sergeant Patrick Ryder, all but one of the law enforcement officials mentioned in this book is quoted anonymously, since they were not authorized to speak with me. The lone exception was Detective Mark Delahunt, who chose that alias himself. (Delahunt didn’t have approval from his bosses to speak with me, either, but his deep involvement in the gang war necessitated his being identified pseudonymously in the narrative.)

In regards to numerical data pertaining to the local and national Bloods-Crips conflicts, most of it is drawn from my analysis of multiple source documents and hundreds of interviews. The documents include annual gun crime statistics compiled by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services; incident reports and court records from 528 shootings in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut; shooting statistics from the NYPD, Nassau County Police, and Suffolk County Police; local, state, and federal government data on gunshot injuries in all fifty states; thousands of newspaper and magazine articles; and interviews with more than 250 Bloods, Crips, and gang investigators.

For guidance on writing about drug dealers and gangs as well as information on those subjects, I found a number of works invaluable. Among them: The Corner, by David Simon and Edward Burns; Do or Die, by Leon Bing; Dark Alliance, by Gary Webb; Gangs in Garden City, by Sarah Garland; Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America, by David M. Kennedy; and “Cocaine Incorporated,” a story by Patrick Radden Keefe published in The New York Times Magazine.

I’ve stayed in touch with some of the people mentioned in these pages. Devon LaFleur, who believes he’ll one day walk again, is a continuous source of inspiration to me. He now lives with his mother in Brooklyn, where I have dinner with them every few months. When Devon talks about his days as a Bloods member, he doesn’t sound bitter about what happened to him, nor does he appear to hold any rancor for Bolo Jay, the still-imprisoned Crip who shot him.

If anything, he smiles more now than he used to.

“I smile because I’m still here,” he says. “A lot of my boys aren’t.”