The 1989 War That Let the Jamaicans Take Over the Crack Trade in Brooklyn – HT

 

 

 

It’s the summer of 1989 in Brooklyn. A federal jury has just convicted a Jamaican drug lord named Delroy Edwards on 42 counts, including 10 murders, 13 assaults, and running one of the most violent crack operations the borough had ever seen. The jurors were so terrified that after delivering their verdict, they asked the judge what precautions would be taken to protect them.

Edwards, known on the streets as Uzi for his preference for the Israeli-made submachine gun, had been the first dealer to bring crack cocaine to Bedford-Stuyvesant. His crew, called the Rankers, had spent 3 years turning Brooklyn into a war zone while expanding their operation into Philadelphia, Washington, and Baltimore.

Prosecutors described him as pathologically violent. His workers who got caught stealing didn’t get fired. They got chained to ceiling beams in basements, beaten with baseball bats, and scalded with boiling water. But here’s the thing that nobody expected. Edwards going down didn’t end the Jamaican takeover of Brooklyn’s crack trade. It accelerated it.

 Because while the Feds were celebrating one conviction, dozens of other Jamaican posses were watching, learning, and moving into every block the Rankers had just left behind. This is the story of how a tiny  Caribbean island’s political wars produced some of the most violent drug gangs in American  history.

 And how by 1989, those gangs had a stranglehold on Brooklyn’s crack market that law enforcement couldn’t break fast enough. To understand how Jamaican gangsters ended up running crack in Brooklyn, you have to start 1,500 miles south in Kingston, Jamaica, where politics and violence have been inseparable for decades.

Jamaica’s two major political parties, the Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party, didn’t just campaign for votes. They built what became known as garrison constituencies, entire neighborhoods constructed by the government and populated with carefully selected residents who would support their local politician without question.

These garrisons became the breeding ground for every Jamaican posse that would later terrorize American cities. Winning politicians rewarded their supporters with construction projects, municipal services,  and jobs. Losing politicians left their people to starve. The stakes of every election weren’t just political.

They were existential. During the 1980 general election, the violence between JLP and PNP supporters reached an almost unthinkable scale. Over 800 people were murdered in a single election cycle. Gunmen from both sides fought block by block across Kingston. Armed with weapons that had been funneled to them by the very politicians they were fighting for.

Reggae music became a desperate voice for peace. And the One Love Peace Concert was held in hopes of stopping the bloodshed. It didn’t work. The JLP stronghold was Tivoli Gardens in West Kingston. And that neighborhood produced the most infamous posse of them all. Lester Lloyd Coke, who went by the name Jim Brown after the football legend turned  actor, organized Tivoli’s gunmen into a fighting force during those 1980 street battles.

He called them the Shower Posse. The name supposedly came from a JLP campaign slogan, promising that blessings would shower down from the sky. Though the meaning most people remember is different. They showered their enemies with bullets. Using M-16 rifles and automatic weapons, the Shower Posse earned a reputation for extreme violence that would follow them across the Atlantic.

After the JLP’s Edward Seaga won the election, he launched a crackdown on PNP supporters. But Seaga also did something else that would have massive consequences. His government embarked on a campaign of marijuana eradication, sometimes spraying chemicals that destroyed legal crops alongside the ganja fields.

For Jamaican farmers who depended on marijuana as a cash crop, this was devastating. And it opened a door. With the ganja trade disrupted, Jamaica became a major transshipment point for cocaine flowing from South America to the United States. The posses, who had previously trafficked mainly in marijuana, now had access to something far more profitable.

Many posse members from both sides fled Jamaica for the United States, and they didn’t arrive empty-handed. They brought connections to Colombian cocaine suppliers, a willingness to use violence that shocked even hardened American gangsters, and a code of loyalty forged in literal warfare. They also brought a practice that would define them.

When the posses arrived in American cities in the early 1980s, they quickly figured out that cooking cocaine into crack was the fastest route to serious money. And unlike other groups who bought from middlemen, the Jamaican posses maintained the entire pipeline, from smuggling to conversion to street-level sales.

Now, if you’re learning something new from this breakdown, do us a favor and hit subscribe. We cover stories like this every single week. And trust me, you don’t want to miss what’s coming next in this one. Vivian Blake, a scholarship kid from West Kingston who’d first visited New York on a cricket tour in 1973, established the Shower Posse’s American operations from Brooklyn.

According to authorities, Blake didn’t just distribute drugs. He’s been credited by some investigators as one of the early innovators of crack cocaine itself. Throughout the 1980s, Blake flooded Bronx neighborhoods like Soundview and Crotona Park with cocaine and crack. While the Shower Posse spread to Miami, Los Angeles, Kansas City, and even Anchorage, >>  >> Alaska.

But the Shower Posse wasn’t the only Jamaican crew operating in Brooklyn. Delroy Uzi Edwards had arrived from Tivoli Gardens on a tourist visa and set up the Rankers Posse in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Rather than wait to bring his own allies from Kingston, Edwards recruited local Jamaicans and recent arrivals off the street.

 The prosecutor at his trial, John Gleeson, put it plainly. Edwards didn’t treat his employees well. He didn’t pay them. He beat them. He shot them. Edwards and his uncle Kenneth Manning opened a storefront  in Crown Heights that looked like a corner shop straight out of central Kingston with an apartment upstairs.

 Next door, they opened a car service  that doubled as a drug courier fleet. They bought their cocaine in the Bahamas and Los Angeles, then cooked it into crack at their Rogers Avenue location and in a house in Amityville, Long Island. But the Posse was soon fighting turf wars on multiple fronts. A detective from Brooklyn North Homicide  described it as the Rankers fighting a war on two fronts, Eastern and Western, simultaneously.

Meanwhile, other Jamaican crews were staking their own claims. The Gallimen were building power in Crown Heights. The A-Team had set up in East New York. The Jungle Posse, which would eventually grow to an estimated 2,500  members, was operating out of Brooklyn as well. And across the river in Queens, the Dunkirk Boys had assembled roughly 2,000 members of their own.

The posses didn’t just fight American gangs for territory. They fought each other. On August the 4th, 1985, a gun battle erupted at a picnic in Oakland, New Jersey, attended by approximately 2,000 Jamaicans. Elements of the Shower Posse and the Spangler Posse from Brooklyn >>  >> and the Bronx clashed with the Boston-based Dog Posse and Tel Aviv Posse.

Three people were killed, nine were wounded, and when the smoke cleared, police recovered 33 handguns from the scene. A picnic. 33 handguns. That gives you some idea of what these posses considered a casual social gathering. What made all of these groups different from the African-American drug crews they were competing with was their willingness to use a level of violence that most American dealers simply wouldn’t.

Posses had a practice called jointing, where informants were dismembered at the joints using a hacksaw, and the body parts were  sent to the informant’s family. According to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Jamaican posses were  responsible for approximately 1,000 murders between 1985 and 1989 across the United States.

 That’s an average of more than one killing every two days for four straight years. Then came 1988 and 1989, the years that paradoxically both disrupted and expanded Jamaican control over Brooklyn’s crack trade. In September 1988, a federal grand jury in Miami dropped a 62-count indictment on 34 members of the Shower Posse,  including Vivian Blake and Lester Coke.

Blake’s two half-brothers, Errol Hussing and Tony Bruce, who had been running the posse’s New York City operations, were also named. Authorities linked Blake to eight murders, four attempted murders, and the smuggling of over 1,000 tons of cocaine. The Shower Posse’s principal business had been moving cocaine and marijuana from the Bahamas and distributing the drugs in suitcases to New York, Los Angeles, Detroit, Canada, and beyond.

Blake fled the country on a cruise ship and slipped back into Jamaica. A massive law enforcement operation called Rum Punch rounded up 219 Jamaican gang members across 20 cities. It was the largest coordinated strike  against Jamaican organized crime in American history. Then, in the summer of 1989, Delroy Edwards  went down.

The federal jury convicted him on all 42 counts. He was sentenced to seven consecutive life terms in December of that year, the first time the federal government had ever used RICO charges against a Jamaican criminal enterprise. The Rankers, who had introduced crack to Bed-Stuy and terrorized Brooklyn for years, were effectively decapitated.

But Brooklyn’s crack market didn’t collapse. It just changed hands, and the men who filled that vacuum were even harder to catch. Before we get into that, make sure you’re subscribed and hit the bell icon so you don’t miss our next upload. We’ve got some wild stories coming that you will not believe.

 See, the 1988 and 1989 takedowns removed the biggest names, but they didn’t remove the infrastructure. The demand for crack in Brooklyn was enormous. The supply chains from the Caribbean was still intact, and there were plenty Jamaican soldiers ready to step into the void. By 1989, federal estimates put Jamaican Posse membership at 10,000 to 20,000 members and associates nationwide, most of them in the country illegally, affiliated with roughly 40 different gangs operating across 15 major cities.

They controlled an estimated 35 to 40% of the entire crack cocaine market in the United States. In Brooklyn specifically, the fall of the Rankers and the disruption of the Shower Posse’s leadership created exactly the kind of opportunity that hungry and violent newcomers thrive in. One group that seized that moment with ruthless efficiency was the Gully men.

The Gully men were made up primarily of Jamaican nationals who had arrived in Brooklyn and quickly took over Crown Heights’ thriving cocaine and heroin trade. They called themselves rude boys, a term loaded with meaning in Jamaican culture, referring to the defiant, violent young men who’d grown up in Kingston’s most dangerous neighborhoods, and they lived up to the name.

The Gully men’s power play in Crown Heights was brazen. They took over a 59-unit apartment building at 1367 Sterling Place and turned it into their headquarters. When the landlord threatened to call the police, they shot him in a third-floor hallway. His body, riddled with bullets, tumbled over a railing and landed on the floor below.

After that, nobody in the building said a word. Once in control, the Gully men used the building to sell drugs around the clock and to provide crash pads for new recruits arriving straight from Jamaica. Gunfire echoed through the hallways and out into the surrounding neighborhood on a regular basis. They flaunted their wealth in the clubs along Crown Heights’ main streets, spending lavishly and making sure everyone knew who ran the blocks.

A woman who worked in a barber shop near their headquarters later said it plainly, “Those rude boys thought they were God.” But by December of 1990, the Gully men had gotten too brazen for even the NYPD to ignore. On the evening of December 6th, a massive caravan of law enforcement vehicles tore through the streets of Crown Heights.

At the corner of Schenectady Avenue and Sterling Place, nearly 200 city and federal agents jumped from their vans and squad cars. Four SWAT teams, 25 men each, began kicking in doors and climbing through windows at 1367 Sterling Place. It was one of the largest raids in Brooklyn’s history, and it sent a message.

But the message didn’t stick for long, because even as the Gully men were being dismantled, other Jamaican crews were already operating in their shadow. The Jungle Posse in Brooklyn had 2,500 members. The Samoan Posse had another 1,000. And across the borough, smaller crews controlled individual blocks with the same combination of Caribbean cocaine connections and unflinching violence that had made the posses so dominant in the first place.

The pattern kept repeating throughout the early 1990s. The feds would take down one group, and two more would fill the gap. The posses were fluid, loosely organized, and almost impossible to infiltrate because membership was based on family ties and childhood friendships forged in Kingston’s garrisons. Unlike the Italian Mafia with its clear hierarchy of bosses, underbosses, and soldiers, Jamaican posses operated in shifting networks >>  >> that could reform almost overnight after a bust.

And all the while, the crack kept flowing. The Jamaican posses had perfected something that no other criminal organization in America had managed at that scale. They controlled the entire supply chain. They smuggled the raw cocaine from the Caribbean, cooked it into crack in safe houses across Brooklyn and Long Island, and sold it at the street level through their own networks.

 No middleman, no sharing profits with other organizations. That vertical integration, >>  >> combined with violence that made even the Italian mob nervous, was why by 1989, Jamaican posses controlled more than a third  of America’s crack market. The 1989 war for Brooklyn’s crack trade wasn’t a single battle. It was a power shift that played out over months and years, driven by federal takedowns that kept removing leaders, but never the conditions that created them.

Every conviction of a Jamaican drug lord, from Delroy Edwards to the Shower Posses’ inner circle, just opened the door for the next wave of soldiers from Kingston who were willing to kill  for a corner. The Posses’ dominance would eventually fade in the mid to late 1990s as federal law enforcement developed better strategies for dismantling their networks, and as the crack epidemic itself began to decline.

Vivian Blake was finally arrested in Jamaica in 1994 and extradited to the United States in 1999, where he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 28 years. He served just eight before being paroled and deported back to Jamaica, where he died of natural causes in 2010 at age 54. Delroy Edwards, on the other hand, is still sitting behind bars, serving seven consecutive life sentences.

He’ll never see the outside again, but the damage was done. The neighborhoods of Brooklyn that the Posses had controlled, from Bed-Stuy to Crown Heights to East New York, bore the scars for decades. The crack epidemic devastated  families, hollowed out communities, and left behind a generation of children who grew up with parents addicted, incarcerated, >>  >> or dead.

And the violence wasn’t abstract. It was personal. Landlords shot in their own buildings, workers beaten in basements, informants dismembered and mailed back to their relatives in pieces.  If you found this story as wild as I did, make sure to subscribe and leave a comment telling us which gang or crime organization you want us to cover next.

We’ve got another deep dive dropping soon that goes even further into how the Jamaican Posses operated inside American prisons, and you are not going to want to miss that one. Hit the bell  and we’ll see you there.