The 1991 War That Let the Haitians Take Over Flatbush from the Jamaicans – HT

 

 

 

It’s the summer of 1988 in Flatbush, Brooklyn. The intersection of Foster Avenue and Nostrand Avenue is so soaked in blood that local reporters have given it a nickname. They call it the front page because every week there is something new to write about. Jamaican men in Clark’s shoes and Kangol hats move crack cocaine through the neighborhood like it’s a Fortune 500 operation.

 The Shower Posse and the Spangler Posse, the two most feared Jamaican criminal organizations in America, have turned this corner of Brooklyn into an open-air market that stretches  block after block. And anyone who gets in the way learns the hard way what showering means. But by 1995, something had changed on those same blocks.

The Jamaican posses were still there,    but they were sharing turf they had never shared before. There were new faces, harder faces,  men who spoke Haitian Creole and had watched their country burn from the inside. Men who had crossed the ocean with nothing and had decided that dying in Brooklyn was still better than going back.

This is the story of how the 1991 coup in Haiti sent shockwaves all the way to Flatbush Avenue. And how that moment started a shift in street power that the Jamaican posses never fully recovered from. And if you are new here, subscribe before we get into it.    We cover the stories that the mainstream news buried.

 Hit the bell so you never miss one. To understand why 1991 mattered so much, you have to go back further. You have to understand who the Jamaicans were, what they built in Flatbush, and why  it took something as catastrophic as a military coup to dislodge them. The first Jamaican posses were identified in Brooklyn in the 1970s. They came from the garrison communities of Kingston, places like Tivoli Gardens and Rema, where loyalty to a neighborhood was the difference between life and death.

The gang concept, the posse, came straight from Hollywood westerns  that were popular in Kingston’s outdoor cinemas. Young men from these garrison slums adopted the imagery and built criminal networks around it. When political violence in Jamaica started getting out of control in the early 1980s, many of these men came to New York.

 They landed in neighborhoods where the Caribbean immigrant population had already settled. Flatbush in Brooklyn was the heartland. The Shower Posse, founded by Lester Jim Brown Coke in Kingston and run in the United States by Vivian Jamaican Dave Blake, established a powerful presence there.

 The Spangler Posse operated alongside them. The two gangs,  rivals in Jamaica, but both hungry for the same American markets. They moved weed first, then cocaine, and then when crack  hit in the mid-1980s, they moved into a completely different gear. The ATF later estimated  that Jamaican posses were responsible for roughly a thousand murders across  the United States between 1985 and 1989 alone.

By 1989, law enforcement had identified around 40 posses operating across 15 American cities with an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 members and associates  between them. And the hub of all of it was New York, specifically Brooklyn, specifically the blocks of East Flatbush around Nostrand Avenue and Church Avenue.

The Jamaican posses had locked down the crack trade in those neighborhoods with a brutality that made even seasoned New York cops uncomfortable. They used metal reinforced doors, closed-circuit cameras at crack houses, and TEC-9 machine pistols when diplomacy failed. The 67th Precinct, which covered East Flatbush, became known internally among NYPD officers by a specific nickname, Fouled Jaw.

That tells you everything about who was running the streets.  The posses were not a disorganized mob. They had structure, generals, captains,  lieutenants, and street-level soldiers. They had discipline and codes. They had connections back to Jamaica that provided supply and shelter. In a neighborhood of working-class Caribbean immigrants  trying to build lives, the posses were the most organized force on the street.

But in September 1991, something happened 900 miles away that would start to unravel all  of it. If you have been watching this channel for a while, go ahead and hit that like button right  now. It helps us more than you realize, and it keeps stories like this from disappearing into the algorithm.

On September the 30th, 1991, General Raoul Cédras led a military coup that overthrew Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected president. Aristide had only been in office    for eight months. He won 67% of the vote in December 1990, which was a landslide in a country that had spent decades under the Duvalier    dictatorship.

 His election felt like a genuine turning point for Haiti. The coup ended that feeling in a single night. What followed was three years of military rule that human rights organizations described as one of the most brutal periods in Haiti’s modern history. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people were killed in the years after the coup. Soldiers with automatic weapons stormed universities and arrested  students.

 Aristide supporters were beaten, tortured, and murdered. Paramilitary groups like the FRAPH moved through neighborhoods targeting anyone suspected of dissent. The climate of fear was total, and the people who could leave left. In the first eight months after the coup, 38,000 Haitians fled the country  by boat. The US Coast Guard intercepted most of them at sea.

The Bush administration sent thousands to a makeshift camp at Guantanamo Bay rather than allowing them to land on American soil, where they would have legal protections. Advocates argued this policy discriminated against Haitian refugees compared  to how Cuban refugees were treated.

 But many Haitians did make it through, and a significant portion of them ended up in Brooklyn. The Haitian community in Flatbush was already established by then. Haitians had been coming to New York since the 1960s, initially fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship. The area around Nostrand Avenue and Church Avenue had slowly become a Caribbean patchwork of Jamaicans, Trinidadians, Grenadians, Guyanese, and Haitians.

 But the 1991 coup wave was different. It brought a different kind of immigrant. These were not people who had come looking for opportunity. These were people who had been running for their lives, men in their late teens and early 20s  who had watched paramilitary soldiers terrorize their neighborhoods. Men who had already learned that the world was violent, and that survival belonged to those willing to match that violence.

They arrived in Flatbush with almost nothing,  and they found a neighborhood where they were not exactly welcome. The Haitian community in New York had already been dealing with a brutal stigma. In 1983, the Centers for Disease Control had grouped Haitians alongside  hemophiliacs, heroin users, and homosexuals as a high-risk group for HIV, a designation that was both scientifically wrong and devastating to the community’s reputation.

  In 1990, over 150,000 Haitians marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to protest it. The march literally shook the bridge. It was the largest demonstration by Haitians in American history. But stigma in America means stigma on the street, too. Young Haitian men in Flatbush in the early 1990s were getting targeted, not just by strangers, but by other Caribbean groups.

 Being called Haitian on a Flatbush block in those years was often an invitation to violence. And the young men who had arrived post-coup, men who had already survived things most people in Brooklyn could not imagine, were not going to absorb that quietly. They started organizing. Not in the formal, hierarchical way the Jamaican posses organized.

The Haitian street crews that formed in Flatbush in the early 1990s    were tighter, more personal, built around neighborhoods within neighborhoods, groups of men who had come from the same part of Port-au-Prince,  or who had crossed on the same boats, or who had known each other since childhood back home.

When someone was your brother from Haiti, that was a different bond than a gang affiliation. These men protected each other because there was literally no one  else to do it. Go ahead and subscribe right now if you are watching this without being subscribed. We have more stories like this dropping every week, and the subscribe button is right there.

It takes 2 seconds. The Jamaican posses were not initially threatened by these groups. The Haitians were seen as  outsiders even within the Caribbean immigrant community. They spoke Creole rather than Patois. They had different music, different culture. The posses had been on those Flatbush blocks for over a decade.

They had relationships with local drug suppliers. They had the territory mapped. They had the corner workers in place. But the Haitian crews had something the posses had not fully anticipated. They had men who had nothing to lose. When you have survived a military coup and lost family members to state violence, the calculus of street risk is different.

The threat of violence that worked as a deterrent against many rivals simply did not land the same way with these men. Confrontations started happening around 1992 and accelerated through 1993 and 1994. The Haitian crews began pressing on the edges of posse-controlled territory, particularly on the side streets off Nostrand Avenue, and inside the Vanderveer Estates complex,  the 59-building housing project that was already known as one of the most dangerous pockets in East Flatbush.

The posses pushed back. The Haitians pushed back harder. The ATF and NYPD were watching all of this, but it was difficult to penetrate either side. The Haitian crews operated on the same tight, personal loyalty that made the posses hard to crack. Informants were rare, and the consequences of being identified as one were severe on both sides.

Meanwhile, the broader situation was working against the Jamaican posses. In October 1988, a federal grand jury had already indicted 34 Shower Posse members, including Lester Coke and Vivian Blake. 53 members were arrested in New Jersey shortly after. Blake escaped on a cruise ship bound for Jamaica. Tony Bruce and Errol Hasseng, Blake’s half-brothers who ran the New York operation, were both taken into custody.

The Shower Posse in New York was absorbing serious law enforcement damage right at the moment when the Haitian crews were finding their footing on those same streets. By the mid-1990s, the Shower and Spangler posses had been significantly weakened in New York    from a combination of federal prosecutions and internal pressure.

Other Jamaican groups, like the Jungle Posse and the Samoan Posse out of Brooklyn, filled some of the gap left behind. But the Haitian crews were also expanding, moving more aggressively into territories that the decimated posses could no longer hold. The balance around Nostrand and Church Avenues was shifting.

It was not a single dramatic battle. That is not how territory actually changes hands at the street level. It was a slow, violent erosion. A corner here, a building there, a supplier relationship that switched sides, a crew member who went to prison and whose replacement came from the Haitian side of the line.

Over 5 to 6 years, the character of power in Flatbush shifted in ways that old-timers in the neighborhood describe as a complete reversal of who you checked with before you moved anything on those blocks. By the time Aristide was restored to power in October 1994 with US military assistance, the window was already long closed for the world that had produced the early ’90s migration  wave.

The men who came in those first years after the coup had already dug in. Those who survived the street wars between 1992 and 1995 had established something that would outlast the political situation that created them. The area around Nostrand Avenue and Church Avenue eventually became officially recognized as Little Caribbean, and the south end near Newkirk Avenue was designated Little Haiti.

The subway station there was renamed Newkirk Avenue-Little Haiti in 2021. Brooklyn now has more than 90,000 residents  of Haitian descent. Today, that same intersection at Church and Nostrand is the site of Haitian Heritage Month parades and community rallies for Haitian immigrants fighting deportation.

 But the ground those celebrations stand on was not given. It was contested violently during a 5-year stretch in the early 1990s    when the Jamaican posses were facing men who had already survived something worse than anything Flatbush could offer. The 1991 coup in Haiti did not just change Haiti.

 It changed Flatbush,  and it changed it permanently. If you made it to the end of this video, you already know you want to subscribe. We put real research into every story on this channel, and there are plenty more where this came from. Hit subscribe. Hit that like button, and drop a comment  telling us what you want covered next.

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