He Robbed the Jamaicans in Brooklyn — 3 Months Later, They Found His Body in 6 Pieces – HT

 

 

 

It was a garbage collector who found the first piece. Early morning, Crown Heights, Brooklyn. The kind of block where nobody looks too hard at  anything and everybody minds their own business. He was emptying a dumpster on Albany Avenue when he saw what looked like a trash bag that had been tied differently from the others, heavier, darker, leaking. He called it in.

 By the time detectives arrived and started checking the surrounding blocks, they found five more bags within a/4 mile radius. Each one sealed, each one containing a different part of the same man. The victim was identified through dental records 3 days later. He was 28 years old. He had a mother in Flatbush who identified him.

 And the word on the street passed in whispers through the barberh shops and corner stores of Crown Heights was that everyone already knew exactly why this had happened. 3 months earlier, he had robbed  a Jamaican drug crew. That was his mistake. And in that world, mistakes like that didn’t  just get you killed.

 They got you sent back in pieces. If you’re new to this channel  and you want to understand how the most violent organized crime groups in American history operated, subscribe right now. We cover stories like this every single week. Now, let’s get into it. To understand what happened to that man in Crown Heights, you need to understand the world he walked into when he decided to rob that crew.

 Because the Jamaican posies in Brooklyn weren’t just drug dealers. They were something else entirely. Something that law enforcement spent decades trying to categorize and mostly failed. The poses the word itself comes from American western films which were enormously popular in the slums of Kingston,  Jamaica in the 1960s and the 1970s.

Young men growing up in neighborhoods like Tivoli Gardens and Remma watched gunfighters dispense justice and saw themselves in those characters. They adopted the name and then they adopted the  violence. But before the drugs, before Brooklyn, before any of that, the process was something even stranger. They were political soldiers.

In Kingston, Jamaica, the two major political parties, the Jamaica Labor Party and the People’s National Party, ran their operations through garrison communities. These were neighborhoods that each party effectively controlled, fortified, and armed. The local gang leaders called dons or generals were funded by politicians to deliver votes, intimidate opponents, and keep rival party supporters out.

 In exchange, the Dons received money, weapons, and protection. In the worst election year, 1980, over 800 people were murdered in Kingston in political gang violence alone. These were the men who would eventually come to Brooklyn. The first Jamaican posies were identified in Brooklyn as early as the 1970s. At that point, they were moving marijuana,  which had been a cash crop in Jamaica for decades and had established trafficking routes to the American  East Coast.

 The money was decent, but it was nothing compared to what was coming. In the early 1980s, cocaine arrived. More specifically, crack  cocaine arrived, and the poses positioned themselves to dominate the street level market in a way nobody had ever seen. By the mid 1980s, the Shower Posi  and the Spangler Posi, the two largest and most organized Jamaican gangs in the United States, had operations running from Brooklyn and the Bronx to Miami, Philadelphia, Kansas City, Dallas, Houston, and Los Angeles.

They weren’t just a New York problem anymore. They were a national problem. and the violence they brought with them was unlike anything American law enforcement had encountered. James Brown, the special agent in charge of the ATF’s Miami District Office, put it plainly. He described the posies as having a total disregard for human life.

Another federal official, William West of the Mid-Atlantic Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, said something even more striking. He said he had never seen a group operate the way the Jamaicans did. They would take people out in public places. They did not care if bystanders got caught in crossfire.

US Attorney General Dick Thornberg, who had seen a lot in his career, called their methods urban terrorism. By 1989, the ATF estimated that Jamaican poses were responsible for roughly 1,000 murders in the United States in the previous four years alone. >>  >> Some estimates accounting for the full crack epidemic years  put the total figure at 4,000.

In Brooklyn and the Bronx, where the shower posy and spangler posy had the deepest roots, the violence wasn’t random. It was calculated. It was systematic. And it served a very specific purpose. Every piece of it was designed to make people too afraid to ever cross them. The posies operated through a code, not written down anywhere, not spoken about openly, but understood by every single person who worked for them or around them.

 You did not steal from the posi. You did not inform on the posy. And if someone outside the organization decided to rob a posy member or hit a posy stash house, the response was not a warning. The response was a message so severe that nobody in that neighborhood would ever consider doing the same thing again. The practice that law enforcement came to call jointing captured this code in its most extreme form.

 When a thief or an informant was caught, they weren’t simply  killed. They were dismembered, broken down at the joints, the way a butcher breaks down an animal. And the pieces were sent, sometimes back to the victim’s family in Jamaica, sometimes left in the neighborhood itself as a public display. The message was not subtle. It was not meant to be.

In the garrison communities of Kingston,  where many posy members had grown up, this kind of retaliation was already understood as the cost  of betrayal. They brought that understanding to Brooklyn and they applied it without  hesitation. This is the world that man on Albany Avenue  had decided to rob.

What exactly happened during the robbery is the kind of detail that only surfaces in court testimony and street gossip. And in this case, there was no trial because there was never an arrest. But the broad  strokes were known. He had hit a crew operating out of Crown Heights, the Jungle Posies Territory, a Brooklynbased organization that at its peak had an estimated 2,500 members and associates throughout New York City.

 The jungle posy had been one of the posies that rose to fill the vacuum when the shower and Spangler operations were partially dismantled by federal law enforcement in the early 1990s. By the mid90s and into the 2000s, they controlled significant drug distribution networks across central Brooklyn. Robbing them wasn’t just a financial hit.

 In that world, it was a challenge and challenges had to be answered. What followed over the next three months was the kind of patient, methodical hunt that the pauses were known for. They didn’t rush. Rushing created witnesses and mistakes. Instead, the word went out through the network. The man’s name was known. His neighborhood was known.

 His family was known. People who knew him were quietly located and questioned. His movements were tracked. The posies had eyes in every corner of Crown Heights. Lookouts at the crack houses. Connections at the barber shops. Runners who knew every block. A man living in that neighborhood couldn’t disappear even if he tried.

 And apparently he didn’t try hard enough. By the time he was found on Albany Avenue, there had been no public confrontation, no visible pursuit. That was the point. The efficiency of it was the message. You can rob us and walk your street for 3 months thinking you got away with it. And then one morning, you simply don’t exist anymore.

 If this kind of deep dive into the hidden history of New York’s gang world is what you’re here for, make sure you’re subscribed. Drop a comment below with what you want us to cover next. These stories take real research, and every subscriber genuinely helps us make more of them. The shower posi  story, which runs parallel to everything happening in Brooklyn, is worth understanding on its own  because it shows just how deep this thing went.

 The shower posi was founded in Tivoli Gardens, Kingston in the early 1980s, anchored by Lester Lloyd  Ko, known in Jamaica simply as Jim Brown, and expanded into the United States by his partner Vivian Blake. Blake established operations in Miami first, then  New York, then built cells in Chicago, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and over a dozen other cities.

 The name came from two things simultaneously. The political slogan of the Jamaica Labor Party, which they were aligned with, and their practice of showering enemies with bullets. Ko ran  the Kingston end. Blake ran America. It was an arrangement that made them almost impossible to prosecute  because the leadership was physically separated by an international border  and law enforcement on both sides had trouble coordinating  effectively.

In September 1988,  a federal grand jury in Miami indicted 34 shower posy members, including Blake. Blake’s half brothers, who ran the New York City operations, were also caught up in the indictment.  But Ko himself remained untouched in Jamaica for another two decades, protected by his political connections before finally being arrested in 2010 and extradited to face federal charges in New York.

 He was sentenced to 23 years in 2012. At their peak, the shower posi alone was linked to between 1,00 and 1,400 murders. That number isn’t a community estimate. It came from federal law enforcement tracking. In Brooklyn, their operations overlapped with the Spangler Posi,  which had its own roots in Kingston’s political gang warfare and had built distribution networks across the burough and into New Jersey.

 The two groups weren’t always friendly. In August 1985, a gun battle between Shower Posy members and a rival gang broke out at a community picnic in Oakland, New Jersey. A picnic attended by approximately 2,000 people. Three were killed, nine wounded, and police recovered 33 handguns from the scene. This wasn’t unusual.

This was Tuesday. The Brooklyn Pies ran their operations through a structure that looked fluid from the outside but had a clear internal logic. At the top were the dons and generals insulated from street operations. Below them were  captains and left tenants who managed geographic territories.

 Below them were foot soldiers, often recent arrivals, often undocumented, who worked the gate houses and stash houses, and took the most risk for the least protection. Roughly 70% of Posi membership at the street level were undocumented immigrants. They had no real legal recourse and no safe path to law enforcement, even if they wanted it.

 The structure made prosecution brutally difficult. You could arrest street soldiers all day and the organization barely felt it. What cracked them open ultimately was what cracks most organizations, informants, members willing to flip. But even that took years and produced only partial results.

 Because the loyalty calculations in these organizations were different from Italian American crime families. There was no deep philosophical code of silence the way there was Omea in the Kosan Nostra. Instead, there was fear. Pure immediate fear. Flip and the people back in Kingston would know. Flip and your family could be reached.

 flip and what happened to the man on Albany Avenue could happen to anyone you loved. That fear held for a long time.  The Crown Heights case was never solved. No arrests were ever made. The detectives who caught the case worked it for a while and then moved on to other cases the way Brooklyn homicide detectives always had to in that era.

There were too many. The neighborhood already knew what had happened and why. But knowing something and saying it in front of a detective are very different things in Crown Heights. And that impunity was the point. The poses understood something that law enforcement spent years catching up to. The actual murder was only half the message.

 The other half was the silence that followed. Nobody talks. Nobody sees anything. The body gets found. The detectives ask around. And then the case goes cold. And every single person in that neighborhood processes that outcome. They see a man robbed a crew and was found dismembered 3 months later. and they see that nothing happened to anyone who did it and they adjust their behavior accordingly.

That was the real product the poses were selling in Crown Heights. Not just cocaine, fear, control, the certainty that the rules of their world applied and that no other rules did. The Jamaican posies at their peak in the late 1980s and 1990s were by any objective measure one of the most organized and most violent criminal enterprises in American history.

 The ATF, the DEA, and the FBI all eventually acknowledged it. They controlled 35 to 40% of the crack cocaine market in the United States at their height. They operated in 15 major metropolitan areas simultaneously. They had working relationships with Colombian cartels, with traditional organized crime groups, with West Coast street gangs.

 They moved weapons back to Jamaica while moving drugs into America. They funded politicians in Kingston and operated front businesses in Brooklyn and they killed people methodically, efficiently and without apology whenever the business required it. By the  mid 2000s, a combination of sustained federal prosecution, deportations, and internal fragmentation had significantly reduced the posy’s footprint.

 The shower poss leadership was behind bars or in exile. The Spangler operation had contracted. The jungle posy and others like it had devolved in many cases into smaller neighborhood crews. Still dangerous, still connected back to Jamaica, but no longer the kind of nationwide enterprise that had once terrified  federal agents.

 But in the neighborhoods where they had operated deepest, Crown Heights, Flatbush, East  New York, the culture they left behind didn’t just disappear. The rules they had enforced, the hierarchies they had established, the understanding of what happened to people who  stepped out of line that persisted. It got inherited by whatever came next.

 And that man’s remains on Albany Avenue were a reminder for anyone who needed one of exactly what those rules had always been. If you made it to the end, you already know this channel doesn’t cut corners on these stories. Subscribe so you don’t miss what we cover next. We have more on New York’s gang history coming up, and you won’t want to miss it.

 And if you want to go deeper right now, there’s a video on screen covering the rise and fall of another one of New York’s most feared criminal organizations. Click it. We’ll see you there.