One of Pistol Pete’s letters ordered SMM members to kill David “Twin” Mullins and his brother Damon Mullins, along with Efrain Solar. Pete believed the twin brothers and Solar posed a problem. They could testify against him, and even if they didn’t, the possibility was enough to require their deaths. Sex, Money, Murder carried out the order from their boss. They killed David Mullins and Efrain Solar. However, the connection between the letter and the murders was not made until after Pistol Pete’s trial.
As the trial progressed, Pete’s letters were introduced as evidence. Pursuant to a federal search warrant, all Pete’s mail had been intercepted, examined, copied and then allowed out through the mail. A handwriting analyst testified that the letters had been written by Peter Rollack. The letters validated the testimony of the government witnesses and indicated Pete’s active participation in an ongoing conspiracy.
As one SMM member said, “The letters that they got fucked Pistol Pete up. A lot of shit rode on the weight of those letters.”
On 9 January 1998, the jury found Peter Rollack, aka Pistol Pete, guilty of conspiring to possess with intent to distribute a quantity of cocaine and cocaine base, and of knowingly using and carrying a firearm, and of aiding and abetting such conduct in relation to a drug-trafficking crime.
He was sentenced to forty years in prison.
One month later, on 10 February 1998, the headline of the New York Times read: “Imprisoned Gang Leader Ordered Killings at Neighbourhood Football Game, US Attorney Says.”
It happened like this. On 27 November 1997, thirty people from the Soundview and Castle Hill projects were enjoying a game of touch football in a local park. A group of men, allegedly SMM gangbangers, swaggered into the park. Pulling weapons, they opened fire. Dozens of shots rang out. Then the gangbangers left, reloading their weapons as they walked away. Five blood-soaked bodies lay on the ground. David “Twin” Mullins and Efrain Solar were dead. Three other people were seriously wounded.
Sex, Money, Murder members Robinson “Mac 11” Lazala and José Rodriguez were arrested and charged with murder and attempted murder. As the Feds investigated the case, they discovered other murders that SMM had allegedly perpetrated. The emerging pattern of evidence pointed directly back to Pistol Pete. The pattern included racketeer activity, drug sales, robberies, acts of intimidation, acts of violence and murder.
In February 1998, Pistol Pete and ten other SMM members were indicted for nine murders and for trafficking in cocaine and crack in Pennsylvania, New York and North Carolina. A separate indictment against Pistol Pete charged him with narcotics trafficking, RICO violations, five actual murders, two conspiracies to commit murder and witness tampering, and with committing these acts for the purpose of maintaining or increasing his racketeering enterprises. The witness tampering charge referred to the murders of David Mullins and Efrain Solar.
The Feds were asking for the death penalty against Peter Rollack aka Pistol Pete.
And the prosecutors had plenty of witnesses lined up, including Yaro Pack and David Gonzales, along with SMM members Brian Boyd and Emilo Romero.
Pistol Pete’s attorney argued that “the witnesses are willing to admit anything and say anything. If they don’t, they will go to jail for a very long time. The government’s case rests solely on the uncorroborated testimony of cooperating witnesses.”
The jury didn’t buy the attorney’s argument.
The Feds case looked like a slam-dunk. Pistol Pete must have thought so, too, because he agreed to a plea bargain. Pete pleaded guilty to federal racketeering and the murders of six people. In return, the Feds agreed not to seek the death penalty.
To this day, Pistol Pete maintains that the only reason he pleaded guilty was because the Feds threatened to incarcerate his mother for receiving drug money. In other words, as Seth “Soul Man” Ferranti put it, “The Feds put some shit in the game.” Only the Feds and Pistol Pete know the truth of the matter.
In 2000, Peter Rollack aka Pistol Pete, age twenty-seven, was sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus a further 105-year sentence, for the murder of six people and drug-trafficking in three states. Conditions of his sentence were draconian. He was to be placed in special restrictive confinement and prohibited from communication or receiving visits from anyone other than his lawyers or his family members. And even these individuals had to be pre-approved by the court and the prison.
Even though Pistol Pete was out of business, SMM was not. Its members kept on banging.
In 2002, Tommy Thompson, who was the leader of SMM in Jersey City, New Jersey, established himself as a headliner. He was the biggest of the Big Wheels, moving drugs all over the East Coast and killing anyone who got in his way. Only his run didn’t last very long. On 14 November 2004, an eighteen-count RICO indictment charged Tommy Thompson with conspiracy, racketeering, conspiracy to murder, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, conspiracy to distribute heroin and cocaine, and nine counts of violent crimes in aid of racketeering.
In short order, the Feds put Tommy Thompson out of business too.
Next to step up and try their hand at becoming the top dogs of banging were Antonio Merritt and Bobby Williams of Trenton, New Jersey. Merritt and Williams were the co-leaders of the Trenton set of SMM. Their thing was drug-trafficking, and they were good at it. From 2005 to 2007 they flourished and got “hood rich”. Just like their predecessors, violence was their standard operating procedure. They killed anyone who got in their way. Which was their undoing. In 2007, the New Jersey State Division of Criminal Justice indicted them for first-degree racketeering and two counts of murder.
Merritt and Williams went out of business too.
Nevertheless, SMM continued to grow in numbers. SMM soldiers kept banging and moving heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine and crystal meth. To protect their “shit”, SMM relied on unleashing hell – a rain of blazing gunfire. Sooner or later, most of them ended up in prison. In response to SMM’s growth and activities – and that of the other sets of the East Coast Bloods – New York’s Department of Corrections started a Gang Intelligence Unit. The focus of the unit was to identify and mitigate the activities of the different Blood sets, including Sex, Money, Murder, the Gangsta Killers, the Concepts of War and the Nine Trey Gangstas. So far, the Gang Intelligence Unit has had little impact. In fact, staff officers of the unit have begun getting “popped” without warning, usually in drive-by shootings.
Today, Peter Rollack is incarcerated at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He attained legendary status during his brief career. Even though SMM flipped from the NYG Alliance, the Alliance still throws up the number seven hand sign (gun) in his honour. And SMM uses the number code 252 or 252 per cent to represent twenty-five years to life in prison – in homage to the life sentence that Pistol Pete is serving.
SMM has extended its reach into the hip-hop world. Various rappers are known members of SMM, including Hocus, S-ONE, Lord Tariq, Peter Gunz, Took and Hussein Fatal of the Outlawz.
Today, SMM members refer to themselves in verbal shorthand as “Murder Gang” or as “Blazing Billy”, because, like Billy the Kid, when it comes down to it, they blaze away with their guns. A new Pistol Pete may be in the making.
WILLIAM COSS (USA)
An American Citizen with Nerves of Steel
Introducing … William Coss
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN a fairly ordinary person doing an ordinary job on a normal day gets caught up in an extraordinary and terrifying situation? Can this turn someone who is not particularly tough into a tough, hard bastard? This is exactly what happened to William Coss, a thirty-two-year-old single father in Arizona, USA, who was living the life of a solid citizen when he had the chance to find out what he was really made of.
At just five foot eight inches and 165 pounds, average-looking with brown hair and brown eyes, Coss had joined the US Army as a paratrooper when he was a youngster. After his discharge in 2000, he returned to Arizona to live a regular life as a construction superintendent.
Other than the army stint, Coss had lived in the desert city since the second grade at school when his parents had settled there. He married, became a doting father and then divorced. When the housing market bottomed out, Coss left construction and found a new career in pest control, becoming certified in “The Sting of the Scorpion”, “Mosquitoes – Their Biology and Habits”, “Small Fly Control Strategies” and many other components of battling bugs. In 2008 he put his new skills to work at a local pest management company where he worked a night shift alone, doing a route of commercial properties with a truck full of poisons and sprayers.
Just as Coss was starting his new career as a bug exterminator, a chain of eateries based in the western United States was enjoying phenomenal growth and announced plans to open ten new locations in the Phoenix area within six months. A few months later, on 22 March 2009, the expansion of the food chain suddenly became quite important to the former paratrooper. It nearly killed him. “Almost Out of Time”, written specially for this book by Camille Kimball, is the story of how.
ALMOST OUT OF TIME
By Camille Kimball
The cold air whipped his jumpsuit into ferocious waves and whirling crests all over his arms, his shins, his trunk. The diesel and aluminium smell of the C-130 Hercules cabin suddenly seemed as comforting as a home-cooked meal. 1,200 feet below him, the landscape was tiny and distant and lethal.
He stomped a foot on the metal belly. In his mind he had visions of the squad member who had made the leap only to have the static line tangle and trap him on the exterior skin of the plane. His comrade had been “towed” for several minutes and banged about, mercilessly pinned between the rushing air and the hull, with only the snarled line holding him, very uncertainly, to the plane. The soldiers had to first keep him tethered, then battle against the 100 mph windspeed pushing the young man backwards. When he was finally hauled inside he was bruised, battered and lucky to be alive. That one had left the unit – and the army – shortly thereafter.
William Coss was remembering that incident as he hovered at the edge of the open hatch for his own first jump. 1,200 feet was such a long, long way to fall, but such a short distance for him to get safely away from the plane, orient himself, have the chute fully blossom and find the emergency cord if it didn’t. If all went well, it was just twenty seconds until thudding to earth; twenty seconds isn’t long to get it all right.
William’s heart was racing. He felt sick to his stomach. Images of his squadmate trapped underneath the fuselage, the tangled line, the struggle to pull him in, the broken body, passed through his mind. The tiny landmarks below were so far away, the time to get there so short.
He swung his legs over and dropped.
“You got people yelling at you and everything else, you never know what will happen when you come out of that plane: you could be towed, your chute won’t open, all sorts of things and you’re so low to the ground you don’t have a lot of time to react,” the thirty-two-year-old Arizonan says. “I smacked the door and fell out backwards once. I had too much weight. The air flow pushed me back into the plane and wouldn’t let me fall out. It knocks the breath out of you. I hit it pretty hard. I was nervous every time I jumped, then once you’re out of the airplane all those feelings go away and then you’re just amazed at everything: you go into a different world.”
A US Army paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne in North Carolina, William Coss eventually made upwards of 400 jumps, but his heart raced every time and he never forgot the sight of the helpless soldier bouncing against the fuselage in the wake of four Allison turboprops throwing out over 18,000 shaft horsepower.
And Coss never forgot how to think when too much open space becomes your enemy and death is coming at you fast.
In the northern corner of Iraq there is a region that is home to one of the oldest civilizations known to history: Assyria. The giant stone monuments with the rigid beards are familiar all over the world and the name figures prominently in Bible stories. In 2 Kings 17, the king of Assyria “carried Israel away into Assyria”. No wonder Jonah fled when God commanded him to preach to the Assyrian city of Ninevah and ended up in the belly of the whale for three days instead.
From Ishtar worship and other forms of paganism, Assyrians were amongst the first of the ancient ethnic groups to adopt the new religion of Christianity. This left them as a minority in Mesopotamia as Islam took over the region in the Middle Ages, on down to today’s vivid conflicts. Some Assyrians fleeing the various troubles that plagued the region have collected in one or two small towns in California. In Modesto – the same small town famed for the Laci Peterson murder in 2002 and the recent Chandra Levy case – they have slowly built their own churches and amassed a social life centred on their heritage: the flavours of anise and cardamom, yoghurty soups and lamb stews, the Syriac or Aramaic language, early paradigms of Christianity, women dancing in a circle to the music of the long-necked tambura and the rhetoric of a diaspora. The Mesopotamian politics emanating from California grew so heated that the FBI in 1990 foiled a plot by Saddam Hussein to assassinate a leader of the Assyrian-Modesto community.
But, as so many immigrant communities have discovered, the struggles of the first generation and the passion for homeland lose voltage for the sons born to good fortunes. American-born in 1977, Ramsen Dadesho, nephew of the man Saddam Hussein had ordered assassinated, gained a reputation in Modesto as a high-flying rich man’s son with a taste for the fast life and a family who used their power to get him out of trouble. He married within the community, but the marriage failed and a bitter custody battle pitted his ex-wife against his powerful family. Ramsen had the dark, good looks of his ancient bloodline, but at five foot seven inches did not cut an intimidating figure in person.
Everyone in the Assyrian clan in Modesto seemed to know everybody else and there was a lot of pressure on the generation coming of age in the 1990s and 2000s to marry within the community. It would not seem unusual then, that after his failed marriage Ramsen Dadesho would one day date another Assyrian girl, Sharokena Koshaba, who had already had a romance with one of his Assyrian-American friends.
That friend was Rami Merza. Rami was cherished by a family of five brothers and two sisters and he was the youngest. His father had died before he was born. A strapping fellow of six foot three with a handsome face and flashing smile, Rami found himself to be a very popular character in his community.
Rami and Ramsen grew up going to the same parties and the same churches and the same high school.
By 2009, Ramsen Dadesho was living with Sharokena in Modesto. He had no job, but he always seemed to have money. His battles with his ex-wife, involving their young daughter, sent sparks flying in the Assyrian social circles. Sharokena figured prominently in the gossip.
On the other hand, Rami Merza had left the Assyrian enclave in Modesto and was living hundreds of miles away in Mesa, Arizona. Mesa is a suburb of Phoenix. Rami had been working at a Honda dealership but, in a clash with the manager, Rami got fired. With no job and few Arizona friends, Rami had a lot of time on his hands to travel back to Modesto. He often did so, making the ten-to twelve-hour drive in a silver Honda. The centre of gravity of his life was still there, in the Assyrian-American community and the small town atmosphere. When in Modesto, he had his mother, brothers and sisters to fuss over him. And there was the vibrant Assyrian haven for socializing.
Both Rami and Ramsen liked flashy cars and nightclubs and cash.
In March 2009, twenty-nine-year-old Rami was visiting Modesto and palling around with thirty-two-year-old Ramsen. As the weekend of 20 March approached, Rami and Ramsen left California together. They drove back to Arizona in Rami’s silver Honda.
The players were now in place: the remnants of the ancient culture of Assyria, carefully fostered in California, were about to collide with the very modern 82nd Airborne, via a dark and deserted Scottsdale parking lot.
By Sunday night, 22 March, the two childhood friends were clubbing in Scottsdale. At 11
.30 p.m. that night, Rami called a friend and asked for directions.
William Coss was working in Scottsdale that night, a cool evening with temperatures around 60° Fahrenheit, the skies clear, the winds calm and the air bone dry.
At 11 p.m. the thirty-two-year-old former paratrooper had pulled into a sprawling shopping centre of free-standing buildings, small strip malls and giant open spaces. He had dropped off the 101 freeway north–south, and turned on to an east–west running street named Raintree. From Raintree, he turned north into the interior of the development. He drove his white pickup truck, with its Eco company logo emblazoned on its sides, to the eastern perimeter where a small strip mall sat with its rear nestled up against the frontage road of the southbound 101 freeway.
He parked the truck directly in front of the doors of Paradise Bakery. The acres and acres of paved parking lot stretching before the cafe were vacant. Immediately to the north, across a small private side road, was another little strip mall, anchored by a Pearle Vision Center. Stucco and lumber enclosures, discreetly masking dumpsters, dotted the Pearle Vision Center terrain.
Will had parked with his nose out so he’d have easy access to the back of his truck as he went in and out of the restaurant. Wearing his Eco uniform, he gathered up his materials, turned to the west-facing front doors and let himself in.
He turned on all the lights and began to spray.
About twenty minutes later, William had finished with the interior of the eatery. He stepped outside for a cigarette before starting his work on the outside grounds. He noticed another car was now there. It would be impossible not to notice the vehicle as it was so close to his own. It was a silver Honda Accord Coupe only six spaces away from his truck and not only were the headlights on but the engine was running and both the passenger and the driver’s doors were wide open.
The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) Page 15
