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Post by Brad on Sept 24, 2009 10:36:08 GMT -8
I'm trying to spark some conversation about old school gangs, before the Bloods, Crips, Folks, SUR 13 & Norte 14 were here.
Hopefully this will be a good thread for the older guys.
I've been told before "Down Wit The Crew" was GDN Folks they were a break dancing crew in Holly Park projects.
Before gangs were really around in Yakima, Yakima had a HUGE drug problem, who was running all that back in the mid 1980's?
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Post by Brad on Sept 30, 2009 10:38:50 GMT -8
(LONG ASS STORY ABOUT SEATTLE GANGS IN THE 80'S)
The first shots may have been fired in Seattle's new drug war on the night of March 4, 1987. A pair of young hoods from Los Angeles, armed with a shotgun and a pistol, blasted the walls and windows in the Rainier Valley apartment of a woman police say had a history of drug dealing.
She was evicted shortly after the incident and dropped out of sight, declining to lodge a complaint against her assailants.
The gunmen were members of the Elm Street Piru-Bloods, a branch of a Los Angeles street gang big in the crack cocaine trade. For the next few months, Michael Dalong Edwards, 20, and Tony Walker, 21, terrorized the apartment complex at 6002 Martin Luther King Way.
They were in the vanguard. More Bloods would follow. And the Crips, a rival Los Angeles gang. Many Crips and Bloods came north with their caches of crack, drawn by the potential for big profits.
What sold on the streets of drug-gorged Los Angeles for $200 an ounce could fetch as much as $1,400 in Seattle. An entrepreneurial spirit, combined with a willingness to mete out lethal punishment to those who crossed them, made the Crips and Bloods a troublesome new force on the city's streets.
From the Rainier Valley into the Central Area, red and blue graffiti began showing up on road signs and walls. Red is the color of the Bloods; blue that of the Crips.
Walker and Edwards were arrested May 4, 1987, for possessing stolen property and for an alleged assault four days before. They were never charged. Again, the victims disappeared, too frightened to cooperate, police sources say. But the crime spree at the apartment complex ended.
In the 12 months since, the city would see a new dimension to street life in the Central Area and Rainier Valley, where the Los Angeles street gangs have centered their activities.
Police now count seven gang-related murders - six of them solved - and more than 30 violent assaults since March 4, 1987, the night of the Elm Street Piru-Bloods' shooting rampage.
The number of Crips, Bloods and their abettors identified through arrests in the past year has reached more than 200 in Seattle, police say. At least 150 more gang members are believed to be operating in the rest of the Puget Sound region. Together, they are responsible for more than 300 felony crimes ranging from theft to murder.
The early Bloods, Walker and Edwards, were from Compton, Calif., a largely black community on the south side of Los Angeles, and came to the Seattle area in late 1986. Police say the two connected with an old friend, a fellow Blood named Cash Adams, who was hiding out from a California murder rap.
Adams eventually was extradited. But Walker and Edwards linked up with another Blood named Dwight Richburg. They worked for Richburg until July 14, 1987, when Richburg was murdered at a rock house at 110 10th Ave., in the Yesler Terrace public housing project.
A Crip, Kavin Lamar Lee, 25, was arrested trying to leave town and pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in Richburg's slaying.
Leaderless, Walker and Edwards drifted on their own. They splintered off from Richburg's group and, according to one source, became mere bit players in the street scene.
Their rap sheets grew. Seattle police questioned them about a burglary. Walker was arrested for menacing and for traffic infractions; Edwards for a drug violation and by Normandy Park police for a liquor violation and driving without a license.
They remained free until recently. In February, Walker pleaded guilty to simple assault for slapping a Holly Park woman. On March 9, Edwards was arrested for investigation of auto theft. The case is still pending and no charges have been filed.
At the time of the first incidents, Seattle police intelligence knew the gang scene consisted of perhaps two dozen free-enterprising Crips, Bloods and their associates, called California Boys.
By June their numbers had doubled to 50, and Seattle Police Chief Patrick Fitzsimons announced that a new team of five officers was being added to the city's Coordinated Criminal Investigation Unit to focus exclusively on LA gang activity.
Federal drug agents this year joined local police in a task force aimed at eventually bringing federal racketeering charges against the Bloods and Crips, and their associates.
The Los Angeles gangs brought with them their psychopathic blood sport - "gang-banging," street slang for reckless gunplay. They use greed and intimidation to extend their drug pipelines, police say.
Most worrisome to authorities is the gang influence on Seattle's young. As they infiltrate the city's drug culture, the gangs project a lifestyle attractive to local youths locked into poverty and deprivation, or already absorbed into the world of drugs.
It was a fatal attraction for Christopher Eugene Tyler, 21. On Feb. 8, Tyler's body was dumped under a sign on the side of lonely, wooded Mountview Road in the heart of Rainier Valley. He had been shot through the heart.
Rising like a tombstone above his body, the sign read "Dump no material whatever."
A Nova alternative school dropout, Tyler was known on the streets as "Major." He was a crack addict with a reputation as a good hustler, capable of selling the cocaine a dealer gave him within a half-hour. Police believe he had fallen in with the Crips, who by then appeared to outnumber the Bloods on Seattle's streets.
He trafficked in the Central Area until his face became too familiar to police and he moved south, to the streets around the Rainier Vista apartments in the Rainier Valley, where he was hanging out before he was killed.
When police found his body, a detective noticed splotches, streaks and graffiti in still-wet blue (Crips' colors) spray painted on the "no dumping" sign.
In the weeks before his death, Tyler had told his sister that he'd had "a couple of (drug) packages from some Crips," said Tyler's soft-spoken mother, Marsha. When Tyler was arrested recently on one of his numerous drug charges, a Crip named "Copper" had called the Tyler household, she said.
Tyler was his mother's hope and her heartbreak. For years she'd pleaded with her son to turn himself around. The fifth of her seven children, she urged him to become like his brothers and sisters, who graduated from high school or attended college.
Ironically, last year she had moved from the 6002 Martin Luther King Way apartments at the initial outbreak of Walker's and Edwards' spree of violence, in part to protect her children. She doesn't know whether her son ever met the two Bloods.
Crack cocaine dealers appeared in the apartment complex in 1985, she said. But last spring, "all of a sudden every apartment around there was dealing drugs almost. You'd walk through the hallway and somebody would ask, 'Looking for the rock?"'
Tyler was the first local youth killed in the string of gang-related slayings. Until his death, LA gang members had been killing each other. The victims in all five gang slayings in 1987 were LA gang members.
But 10 days after Tyler was slain, another local youth, 19-year-old Malcolm Hubbard, was found shot in the head early one morning outside an apartment building at 715 24th Ave., just north of the Garfield High School playfield.
Tyler's family said he and Hubbard were acquaintances on the streets. Both had recently been jailed on separate drug charges.
Police suspect Hubbard's slaying also was linked to the Crips. By last week, homicide detectives had traced a suspect to California.
To date, one innocent victim has been hit in the cross fire during a "drive by." At a bus stop on the 200 block of 23rd Avenue last Oct. 16, four witnesses saw two people drive by in a car and fire several shots at the bus stop. Several people were standing there. A 17-year-old Renton boy was hit in the shoulder. Police said he had no connection to either gangs or drugs. They suspect the target was an 18-year-old standing near him, wearing red, the Bloods' color.
In addition, police on Jan. 11 reported a gang shooting during business hours at a fast-food restaurant near Franklin High School, on the 3100 block of Rainier Avenue South.
Three customers and two employees were inside when several Bloods and Crips had words with each other at the lunch counter. It was followed by an explosion of gunfire. They shot out three of the restaurant's windows before fleeing. A 20-year-old woman in the restaurant suffered a bruise, caused by a spent bullet found inside the shoulder of her leather jacket.
In the last gang slaying, both the victim and the suspect were Crips. Last Thursday, Charles Michael "Rocky" Gaines, a Crip in custody in Los Angeles, was charged with the Dec. 22 slaying of a fellow Crip, Donald Barfield, 19. Barfield was shot when Gaines, who had just flown from LA to deal drugs, kicked open the door of an apartment at 832 28th Ave. S. and fired at him almost point-blank, the charges allege.
Witnesses' accounts of the motives vary. Some said it was over drugs, but another heard Gaines telling Barfield it was for "disrespecting my woman," an affidavit accompanying the charges alleges.
Despite the slayings, attempts by the gangs to organize Seattle's drug trade remain in incipient stages, kept off balance in part by a constant hammering by police anti-crime strike forces and a mushrooming number of narcotics search warrants on small drug dens.
After a year in Seattle, Crips and Bloods are involved in perhaps half of Seattle's rock houses, said Tim Perry, a Seattle narcotics detective who follows gang-related cases. He estimates there are about 400 rock houses in the city at any one time.
"What they've been doing here and in other places is muscle the local (drug dealers) and just flat take over and get the locals to sell for them," said Perry.
Also, Perry said, the gangs prey upon pathetic drug users in Seattle's low-income neighborhoods, offering them drugs or money in return for the use of their homes.
Gang activity is scattered through South and East Central Seattle. But an inordinate amount of gang activity has turned up in the Central Area, especially around Garfield High School, according to narcotics search warrants and court documents.
On Aug. 29, Bryant M. Moore, 19, a Blood nicknamed "Big B," returned to Seattle from California with a new supply of cocaine, according to court documents. Armed with a .38-caliber revolver, he couldn't wait to get to the corner of 25th Avenue East and East Cherry Street, in sight of the Garfield campus, to "check out the action."
"B is back!" he proclaimed as he strode onto the sidewalk, only to find a Crip named Darnell Tarver, 29, had moved onto his turf in his absence. Heated words were exchanged, then shots were fired. Tarver died on the street.
Moore was captured a few blocks away. Detectives found 12 shell casings of two different caliber guns on the drug corner. Of the 40 witnesses in the area, no one offered any solid information to police. To make a case, the prosecutor had to subpoena material witnesses.
At a preliminary hearing in Seattle District Court, Donnell Dixon, who was slightly wounded by a stray bullet in the fray, was asked about a gang term called "dis'in" which means roughly "disrespectful" in LA street jargon. Would it be "dis'in," Dixon was asked, if one gang member were to sell on the corner of another gang member?
"No. That be suicide," Dixon responded.
Moore pleaded guilty to manslaughter and second-degree assault and was sentenced to concurrent terms of 20 months and three months in Shelton state prison. His accomplice at the scene, Marty Ray Dennis, 19, also a Compton Blood, pleaded guilty to rendering criminal assistance.
Narcotics search warrants and court documents reveal that in the last four months police served four narcotics search warrants on apartments in a building at 715 24th Ave., across from Garfield's playground. Including Hubbard's slaying, the area around the building has been the scene of three gang-related shootings.
On Nov. 18, 1987, Gregory Chrishon, 32, a Crip, got angry when his friend, Anthony Jackson, refused to lend him $20, so he shot him in the leg on the landing of the apartment building, court documents allege.
Chrishon was charged with second-degree assault, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He has previous arrests or convictions in Los Angeles for auto theft, narcotics violations, assault with a deadly weapon, second-degree burglary and carrying a concealed weapon.
On Christmas Eve 1987, Lamont Harper, 19, a member of the Long Beach (Calif.) Bloods, walking to the building with three friends, didn't like being admonished by an older Seattle man to "finish school and leave crack cocaine alone," according to court documents. So Harper pulled a gun, told the man to mind his own business and "punctuated his remarks by firing a round into the ground," the documents said.
Harper pleaded guilty to second-degree assault. California authorities said he has been dealt with "as a juvenile for forcible rape, attempted murder, burglary and vandalism." "He is in Seattle for the sole purpose of selling cocaine," according to his court file.
Perry said the Bloods are the smaller, tighter knit, the better organized group, and work together more than the Crips. Yet members of the two gangs have been known to work together for the sake of drug profits.
"One of the things they both like about Seattle is it's not sectioned off by gangs. They can sell anywhere they want to," Perry said.
But the alliances are shaky. Frederick Lamont Colvin, a Blood who attended a Crips' party of between 50 and 100 people at 2716 E. Yesler Way on Jan. 24, was shot three times for seemingly bad taste. He wore red, "a highly objectionable color to wear around Crips," according to a search warrant affidavit. Colvin survived.
The man whose rage was triggered by Colvin's choice of colors was Tyrone "T-Bone" Crosby, 24, of Compton, a member of the Santana Block Crips. He was charged last month with first-degree attempted murder for shooting Colvin. A $250,000 arrest warrant was issued for his capture, a higher bail than that set in many murder cases. Proceedings are under way to extradite him from California, where he fled after the shooting.
Far from being fearful of retribution from a rival gang, Crips and Bloods wear their colors with bold pride.
"They're usually flashy. They wear their colors, like blue or red shoelaces or rubber bands if they braid their hair. They like baseball warm-up jackets, and even paint their cars their colors," he said.
They bring drugs into the area on Greyhound buses, in their cars, and by plane.
A favorite place to hide drugs is inside containers designed to look like Valvoline oil cans, marked with labels but weighted and fitted with screw-on caps. Tossed into the trunk of a car, they look and feel like unopened oil cans. Nicknamed "California safes," they're available in downtown department stores for $19.95.
In flagging Seattle drug cases involving gangs, Perry said he has the option of filing them at the state level or with federal authorities, which bring stiffer penalties.
"To charge federally, they have to have a quantity of dope that equals .5 grams of base cocaine, or 10 to 15 grams of rock or crack cocaine," he said. "If there's a gun involved, we charge them federally; if they were at school grounds or within 1,000 yards of school grounds, we charge federally."
In the Rainier Valley a community group, the Rainier Chamber of Commerce, is trying to reclaim its turf, holding periodic graffiti paint-outs, advising the police on hot crime spots, and putting peer pressure on fellow business owners to go along with the anti-crime effort.
These developments are of some small consolation to Marsha Tyler, the mother of Chris Tyler, who sees a greater need:
"The government has got to take this seriously," she said. "We need help with our young people, especially poor people like me who are in the middle of this, and treatment (centers) to get our children away from the drugs and gangs."
Marsha Tyler, mother of Chris, a Crip murder victim:
"I used to be glad when Chris went to jail because he was off the street," she said, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Arrested about 30 times, he only scoffed at judges' orders to seek treatment, and rebuffed her attempts to enroll him in a treatment center, which she could scarcely afford. His drug use caused him to have seizures that dramatically reduced his weight, she said.
"His aunt once asked him 'Do you believe in God?' He said 'The only thing I believe in is another hit.' God help him, he was being sarcastic. He didn't know what he was saying," she said.
"The day he was killed he came over and made a couple of hamburgers. I asked him to get out of drugs. He looked at me with sad eyes. His eyes just said to me 'mom, if I could I would.' He left. I went into my room and cried."
The next day, she said some friends told her, and she heard on the radio, that his body had been found.
"There's too much drugs on the street and the black man is getting the worst of it," said Tyler's mother. "These young people are supposed to be our next society coming up and drugs and gangs are destroying them. Forgive me for saying this but the big white dealers are selling it to the black man, who are the ones getting killed and going to jail over it," she said.
"The police, the government, they've got to get after this gang thing, get on them. And they've got to help people like us, who don't have money, to be able to get our children off of drugs, to put them into somewhere and keep them there where they can get off drugs. If Chrissie had had more push and more help he could have been something in life," she said.
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Post by unknown on Oct 14, 2009 22:42:03 GMT -8
not too sure about who was runnin the show when it came to dope but like every growing city in AMERICA crack-cocaine made its mark in YAKIMA.heard from a few black OG dope dealers/users that the NATIONAL GUARD had been brought to YAKIMA because shit was gettin so bad.from what BLACK OGs told me YAKIMA litterally had army tanks rollin down streets.can anybody back the story up?supposedly happend in the mid 80s. Yeah, I know that they got called in because of the situation, but I don't know any of the details. Brad, perhaps you could look into that matter. As for who ran the drugs in Yakima in the 80s, from what I've been told it was the outlaw motorcycle gangs, but no word on who may have had "control". A friend of mine told me that the "peckerwoods" or something similar to that ( honestly can't remember the actual name ) ran a lot of stuff back and forth between here and California during that time.
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