The sight of Gio on those street corners worried him. The way he stood huddled with other boys––some of them older looking, glaring all tough––reminded Vick of his childhood friends, the ones he’d lost to prisons and graveyards. It reminded Vick of what he’d seen in Pup and Dajuan and Big Oomz before they’d fully immersed themselves in the street life. Once the weather warmed, Vick knew, the streets would heat up.
He didn’t stop and say anything to Gio. Just rolled past. Calling him out in front of his friends was a good way to win resentment. But he planned to talk to the boy soon. Spring practice was right around the corner.
Vick was looking forward to spring. On a frigid day in February, he finally made the trip to the welfare office. He’d been putting it off, but a job never came and he needed the money, so he swallowed his pride. Fate rewarded him. At the office, he met a man handing out fliers for a medical assistant training program. It was a seven-month course, the man told him, and steady jobs were nearly guaranteed for those who completed it. It was a career. Vick signed up. “Health care’s where it’s at,” he said. Classes started in April.
6
PRESSURE CHAMBER
March–April 2014
A THICK, HARD LAYER OF ICE COVERED THE FIELD FOR three months. It was a cold winter, by far the coldest Gio had ever experienced. This was the 12-year-old’s first winter outside the Caribbean, of course, but even his friends, Brooklyn born and bred, told him that this winter was harsher than normal. He was not as annoyed as they were about the cold and constant snow. He appreciated the novelty of bundling up in multiple layers, and he marveled at the snow. He would look back at footprints he had made, or bend down on his walk to school and crumble the powder through his fingers. He made his first snowman. This was the sort of winter he had seen in many movies. He was disappointed that it didn’t snow on Christmas.
But while the cold and the snow did not wear on him, being stuck indoors did. He was an outdoor child. In his early months in the neighborhood, his hours at the park had stabilized him. At a time when most everything around him was strange and different, the field felt familiar. Soccer was the same, football was the same, footraces were the same. Sports had eased his transition into the neighborhood. Few traits can win friends, Gio realized, as effectively as the ability to throw a football.
With the field frozen over, though, Gio spent much of the winter inside his family’s small two-bedroom apartment with his mother and 20-year-old brother. Antsy from being stuck inside, Gio was primed to butt heads with his mother. Their relationship had already begun to fray just weeks after his arrival. His mother was stricter than his father had been in Saint Lucia. She’d been worried about the influences of the neighborhood and vowed to protect him. She was cautious. She wanted him in before dark and she shouted at him when he missed curfew or when he went somewhere after school without first asking her permission. Gio, who craved independence, pushed back. He rebelled in small ways. He talked back. He ignored her calls. He stayed out at the park without telling her. The park was where he let off steam.
Over the winter, the pressure simply built up. The arguments between mother and son turned louder and nastier. One night, after his mother chided him for returning home too late, Gio punched the living room wall. He found other places to go after school and on weekends. This only made his mother angrier with him. By the time the field had thawed in late March, Gio’s mother was ready to disown him. This was no empty threat. She’d contacted the family court, seeking to send Gio to foster care. The stress was more than she could handle. She’d begun the process and paused only when Coach Chris found out and convinced her to rethink the decision. Once he’s in the system, Chris had told her, there’s no going back.
So, though spring had come late, it had come at a much-needed time for Gio and his mother. He was eager to return to Betsy Head and the sanctuary of the field and the mind-numbing repetition of football drills. On the first Saturday in April, he arrived at the park at 11:15 a.m. for Mo Better’s opening practice of 2014. He wore a black compression shirt and white basketball shorts and carried a small gym bag containing a water bottle and cleats. The coaches all shook his hand and told him how glad they were to see him. Chris pointed to the track. Gio knew the routine.
“How many?” Gio said.
“How many fingers on your hand?” Chris said.
Gio eased into a jog. He felt good running. It was sunny and the air was cool. He accelerated into a near sprint with long, effortless strides. He gazed toward the field, where a dozen or so kids played a carefree game of touch football and nobody seemed to be keeping score. They were all younger than him, nobody older than 11, but Gio had spent time with many of them at the park. It was usually younger kids who were playing ball when he dropped by after school.
He’d been coming to the park less often since the late fall. He’d been spending more of his free time with kids around the neighborhood his own age or older, at friends’ apartments, on stoops, in housing project courtyards. They played video games and talked about girls and the NBA. Most of them were affiliated with a neighborhood clique that claimed an unofficial allegiance to the Crips. Some of them sold drugs. Gio didn’t sell drugs, and he didn’t consider himself a gang member. But he appreciated the other kids’ company. They had the same day-to-day struggles he had. He concluded these were the ties he needed to survive in the neighborhood.
He saw himself as no different from most of them, except for his football abilities. He recognized his unique talents. His coaches often told him how good he was, and high school coaches had courted him after watching him play. He had manhandled nearly every opponent who lined up against him last season. He wanted to be a professional football player, truly believed he was good enough and dedicated enough to make it. That was why he was here, running around a track on a Saturday morning while most of his friends were asleep.
When practice ended, Gio headed to the long green bench. He swapped his cleats for sneakers, zipped up his gym bag, and turned toward the park’s gate.
“Gio, come here,” he heard behind him.
It was Coach James, standing on the edge of the field. They slapped hands.
“It’s really good to see you here, Gio,” said James, a big, goateed Puerto Rican man who worked with the Mitey Mites. “Stay out of trouble, OK?”
Gio nodded, and continued on. As he passed the benches, he saw Coach Vick headed straight for him.
“Giooo! Good work today,” Vick said. They slapped hands and hugged.
“Thanks, coach.”
“I don’t know why I’m saying this.” Vick paused and clasped his hands in front of him. “Stay off them corners. Stay off them corners. I don’t know why I’m saying this. Stay off them corners. Where you live at?”
“Off Kings Highway.”
“That’s Crips, right?”
“Yeah,” said Gio, eyes a bit wider with surprise, lips curled into a nervous grin.
“Crips. High Bridge. Wave Gang. Hood Starz. You running with any of them?”
Gio shrugged, stared at his shoes. He was taken aback.
“I don’t know why I’m saying this…,” Vick repeated.
He did know why he was saying this. He knew this neighborhood, the pressures that pushed against a 12-year-old boy, especially one new to the country. He’d seen many of his players pass through the gangs. Hell, Mo Better players had founded the Hood Starz more than a decade earlier. Vick remembered when those kids started a beef with some kids from the Wave Gang, triggering a cycle of retaliatory beatings and murders and constant trash talk. During stretches when the beef was particularly heated, kids would take long, circuitous routes to get to a school or park a couple of blocks away. It was too risky to pass through enemy turf. A few years back, a group of Hood Starz boys shot a video on Betsy Head’s red cement steps, lobbing vague threats at their Wave Gang rivals and boasting like teenagers do. One of them posted the video on Facebook and YouTube. Police saw it and rounded up the boys,
charged them with making criminal threats. Two former Mo Better players spent eight months behind bars on Rikers Island. Prosecutors didn’t pursue charges against a third because he was only 12, and that kid was now one of the best high school wide receivers in the city. That boy was lucky, and Vick had attended too many funerals to trust luck.
“I ride my bike out around here and I see you out here on them corners, you don’t even wanna know what I’ma do,” Vick continued. “You out on them corners, you gon’ die. Do you wanna grow up? Don’t be hanging around certain people. You know who I’m talking about.”
Gio nodded.
“Them corners gon’ bring you down or get you in jail. Can’t get no coochie in jail.”
Gio snickered. Vick pointed to Gio’s bag.
“Focus on this right here and this’ll take you to college for free. That’s where the real coochie’s at. You think you getting coochie now? Boy, they’ll be all over you in college. Say you from Brooklyn, they’ll be all over you. You seein’ the same hood rat girls you grew up with. In college, you got girls from all fifty states. Name a state. And they’ll be all over you. Stay off them corners. I don’t know why I’m saying this. All right?”
Gio smiled and lifted his bag in recognition.
On his way out the front gate, Gio passed Coach Esau, who was standing with kids waiting for their rides.
“Stay safe, yo,” Esau said. “Stay off them streets.”
Gio nodded, slapped hands once more, then strolled up Livonia Avenue. He shook his head, chuckled, and said under his breath, “Like they planned it or something.” His coaches were always looking out for him. He knew they worried about him. Coach Chris often spoke to his mom on the phone. Gio appreciated that his coaches cared. He respected them, and he really did want to be the kind of kid they wanted him to be. “He’s a good kid. You won’t need to worry about him,” Chris would tell high school coaches about a kid like that. But the coming football season and getting into a good high school—those were distant concerns. Gio’s immediate objective was making it to school and back home without getting jumped.
Gio was an obvious target during his first few months in Brooklyn, when he was new, with few friends and a thick West Indian accent. He was bigger than most kids his age, but older kids messed with him once in a while. It was nothing serious, just mildly threatening taunts: “Where you from?” “You live around here?” “Yo, we’re talking to you.” But Gio was no punk. He didn’t walk by, head down and meek, absorbing the blows. He stepped to the older boys and told them to mind their business. Sometimes things would get a little heated, with smack talk back and forth, but in the end, everybody would cool and Gio would be on his way. Going solo was asking for trouble, Gio knew. He’d made a few friends who lived around his block, and he decided he should stick closer to them. They were cool kids, who wore Air Jordans and snapback hats, and they treated him warmly. He began walking to and from school with three, four, five others. The walks became easier. The friendships developed.
But Gio soon found that his decision to simply walk to school with a group brought its own complications, which Gio didn’t like to talk about. A couple of his teammates had heard about the situation, and when they shared the story they made up pseudonyms because they didn’t know the real names of those involved: Word on the street was, one of the kids in the group, DT, had gotten into an argument with a kid nicknamed Eazy over a girl. Eazy said he would fight DT. Out of solidarity, Eazy’s friends declared each of DT’s friends an enemy. DT’s friends did the same. The two crews now had a beef. Like it or not, Gio was part of it. Eazy’s crew had seen Gio out with DT and DT’s friends. It didn’t matter that he and DT weren’t particularly close. They were associates, and that was enough. Lines had been drawn, ranks closed. Gio knew that he might get jumped if he was alone outside and ran into two or more boys from Eazy’s crew. So, he tied himself even tighter to his neighborhood friends. It was these friends, not his coaches, who made sure he got back to his block every afternoon.
THE STREETS HAD changed since Vick’s days. Back when he was a teenager, kingpins ran the streets of New York City, ran streets across America: Freeway Rick Ross in Los Angeles, Willie Lloyd in Chicago, Frank “Black Caesar” Matthews in Brooklyn, “Boy George” Rivera in the South Bronx, Alpo Martinez in Harlem, and Howard “Pappy” Mason, Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols, Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff, and Tony Feurtado in Queens. These kingpins and their armies ran sophisticated, interstate, multimillion-dollar operations, with strict hierarchies and rulebooks. “We ran it like a Fortune 500 company,” said Lance Feurtado, who served as his older brother’s right-hand man. “It was a bureaucracy, with managers and supervisors at each level, from the corners all the way to us.”
Feurtado’s Seven Crowns gang, based in South Jamaica, Queens, pulled in a million dollars a week, the New York Times reported at the time, and by the late ’90s was sending packages to 23 states. Feurtado and the other kingpins provided Thanksgiving turkeys to their communities and jobs, with the chance for upward mobility, to scores of young men and women. “Back then, drug dealers were the rich role models who sponsored basketball teams and covered bill payments for families,” said James Brodick, project director of the Brownsville Community Justice Center, a nonprofit that advises 16- to 24-year-old criminal offenders on how to avoid trouble in the future. “They served as a main economic driver in their neighborhoods, neighborhoods that lacked services and opportunities.”
They also drove much of the violence in those communities. The streets were bloody in those days, with murder rates hitting new highs by the late 1980s. Some locals still remembered one early ’90s gun battle, when drug gangs from the Brownsville Houses and the Tilden Houses traded more than 100 shots over a business dispute. For the kingpins, violence—and the threat of it—struck down up-and-coming competitors, kept their own soldiers in line, paralyzed the community into obedience, and shielded their turf from rival kingpins. Violence protected their power. Gang leaders frowned on violence that didn’t help advance the bottom line, and those who went rogue were punished. “It was economics,” Feurtado said. “On the whole murder is bad for business. Bodies can draw police attention or start some shit with another gang for no reason, and so you want to avoid violence as much as possible. But the drug game is what it is. And the unfortunate thing was that that’s how disputes were settled.”
In the late 1980s, authorities began to crack down on the kingpins and their soldiers. Congress passed laws creating mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, including especially harsh sentences for crack cocaine possession and sales, and expanded those laws so they applied to anybody tied to a “drug trafficking conspiracy,” which meant decades in prison for even low-level dealers caught with a few crack rocks or heroin packets. The Department of Justice awarded federal grant money to local agencies focused on drug enforcement. Prosecutors used RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) statutes—originally crafted to combat the Italian Mafia—to build conspiracy cases against inner-city criminal organizations. In 1992, US attorney general William Barr told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he had reassigned 300 FBI agents “from foreign counter-intelligence work to work on violent-gang squads and anti-gang task forces.” This shift in focus toward drugs and gangs “represents one of the largest re-allocations of resources in FBI history,” Barr said.
In New York City, longtime cops cite the murder of Officer Edward Byrne by Pappy Mason’s gang in 1988 as the spark that ignited the city’s strike against the kingpins. It became a rallying call to destroy the drug trade responsible for his death before it swallowed more officers. More than 10,000 cops from around the country showed up at Byrne’s funeral. “Right after that murder happened, they went, like, crazy,” said retired NYPD detective Steve Chmil. “They were locking up everybody. They were flooding areas that had a lot of narcotics. It was really a frontal assault. They really went after the drug dealers.” The campaign brought thousands of arrests over
the next few years and took down drug rings. Similar efforts were emerging across the country. Mason, Ross, Lloyd, Martinez, Nichols, McGriff, the Feurtado brothers, and many others ended up in prison. By the early 2000s, the age of the drug barons had come to an end, the old gang social structure significantly eroded.
Their absence left a vacuum. The socioeconomic factors that pushed young men into gangs remained, as did the anger, the fear of exclusion, and the yearning for belonging, purpose, and fraternity. Over the years, with a generation of street leaders gone, the younger generation formed new groups, smaller factions based around a housing project or a few square blocks. These crews were informal and loosely organized, made up mostly of teenagers and young men in their early 20s. Unlike the gangs before them, they weren’t formed for the purpose of committing crimes. There was no initiation process or detailed hierarchy. They formed and dissolved and changed names. Some had scores of members. Others had several to a dozen. Their territories could be as small as a block or a single building in a housing project. Some crews had members who sold drugs. Others were simply a group of teens who grew up in the same area and hung out together and gave their clique a cool name. While some criminal organizations of the past lived on—the Crips, the Bloods, MS-13, the Latin Kings—the smaller crews became the dominant social dynamic of the streets, in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Saint Louis, and elsewhere.
This new social landscape brought new dangers. A higher number of groups meant a higher chance that two groups would come into conflict. Because territory was divided up into more slices, teens had to cross over another crew’s turf more often, without even leaving their neighborhood. And when a conflict did arise, there were no shot callers or OGs to step in and mediate. “You don’t even know who is the leader you go to,” said Brodick. “In the past, if things were getting too hot, you could gather leaders and talk to them. They treated it like a business model, and at the end of the day it was driven by money. When things got too hot, there were leaders to call it off.”
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