He K*lled 10 People, Got Snitched On By His Best Friend & Rumored D*ad: Delroy ‘Uzi’ Edwards

On December 7th, 1987, on a street in Brooklyn, New York, gunfire broke out. Aimed not at any one person, but at an entire category of people. According to accounts from the case, the gunmen had been given one instruction beforehand. Forget who actually did anything wrong, and just start shooting at anyone who looked Jamaican.

Two people went down within seconds. One of them, a young man named Rudolph Sims, would never walk again. The man behind that order was Delroy Edwards, known on the street and inside the federal prison system by the name Uzi. Prosecutors said he ran a crack cocaine operation, moving hundreds of thousands of dollars a day up and down the East Coast, and treated murder as routine business.

Two years after that shooting, a jury convicted him and sent him away for seven consecutive life sentences. He would not be the last person in this story mistaken for dead. How a teenager from one of Kingston’s most violent political neighborhoods, the son of a murdered Brooklyn grocer, built an operation big enough to draw a federal racketeering case, is one part of this story.

The other part is why the cousin who helped him build it stood up in a courtroom years later and told the jury everything he knew. Before we get into this, drop a like, and tell me in the comments what city you’re watching from. Let’s see how far this story travels. Tivoli Gardens sits in downtown Kingston, Jamaica, and for most of the 20th century, the people who ran it did not treat it as an ordinary neighborhood.

It functioned as what Jamaicans call a garrison community, a political stronghold, in this case for the Jamaica Labour Party, where loyalty to the party and loyalty to simple survival were more or less the same thing. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, Kingston’s poorest neighborhoods were divided along party lines, and the dividing lines were armed.

Young men loyal to the Jamaica Labour Party fought young men loyal to the People’s National Party, sometimes over territory, sometimes over an election, sometimes over disputes nobody outside the neighborhood could fully explain. Guns moved freely. Police mostly stayed out of it. In that environment, picking up a weapon was not considered deviant behavior.

It was closer to a job interview, one that older men running the neighborhood were always quietly watching. A young man willing to use violence on behalf of his neighborhood had a path forward that a young man who was not willing simply did not have. Delroy Edwards was born into this world in 1959, and he did not have to look far to find that path.

By his own description, written years later from inside federal prison, Edwards stands about 5 feet 10 inches tall and has weighed around 195 pounds. He has identified himself as Rastafarian. None of that physical description explains the nickname that followed him out of Jamaica and into the American prison system.

Uzi came from the weapon, not the man. He favored the Israeli-made Uzi submachine gun, compact and fast-firing, built for close range, and the people around him started calling him by the name of the gun he carried. It stuck for the rest of his life. What made Edwards useful to the people above him and frightening to those below him was not his size.

It was that he treated extreme violence as a routine business decision, rather than a last resort. Most people running drug operations reach for violence only as a last resort. Edwards reached for it early enough that a second option was rarely necessary. Edwards’ path to Brooklyn ran through violence on both ends.

His father, Lloyd Edwards, known on the street as Pants, had already emigrated ahead of him and ran a small grocery store on Rogers Avenue in Crown Heights with a quiet side trade in marijuana. In 1982, someone murdered Lloyd inside that store. Men who used to drink with him and play dominoes later said they believed Delroy had done it himself, eager to take over his father’s business.

He was never charged. Delroy and his cousin Kenneth Manning, related according to federal court records through a half sibling and raised together in Kingston like brothers, helped found a street crew of their own while they were still teenagers. They called it the Rankers Posse. Some of the men who ran with them also went by a second name for the same group, the Southies.

Both of them eventually left Jamaica for the same reason a lot of young men did in those years. The gang wars had gotten too dangerous to stay. Delroy entered the United States illegally, crossing through Mexico on his way to Brooklyn. Manning followed in 1985. It was Manning who, years later, stood in a courtroom and helped send his own cousin away for the rest of his life.

The timing worked in Edwards’ favor in a way he could not have planned. Crack cocaine, cheap, smokable, and far more addictive per dose than the powder cocaine that came before it, was just beginning to spread through American cities. Prosecutors would later credit Edwards as one of the first people to bring crack into the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn as early as 1985.

A claim that, if accurate, means the son of a murdered Crown Heights grocer helped open one of the most destructive chapters in American drug history. He did not build that reputation by being a careful businessman. He built it the way his father’s death had been settled. With violence nobody had to answer for.

Within a few years, Edwards had turned a small crew of Jamaican immigrants into a full distribution network stretching along the East Coast. The Rascals posse, the Southies, depending on who was talking, grew to somewhere between 40 and 50 members, most of them Jamaican, some of them American. They ran crack houses through Crown Heights, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Flatbush, the same Brooklyn neighborhoods where Edwards had gotten his start.

How much the operation was worth depends on which account you read. Reporting from the time of his arrest quoted the lead federal prosecutor at $100,000 a day. Trial testimony months later put it lower, as much as $100,000 a week in the operation’s best year. Either way, it was serious, routine money for a crew that had started out running a corner store.

Edwards did not stop at Brooklyn. Where most local drug crews fought over a handful of blocks and stayed there, Edwards thought like a distributor with a map. He pushed the operation south into Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., then into Baltimore, using couriers who bought cocaine in the Bahamas and Los Angeles to keep product moving north.

Recruiting was not difficult. Every year more young Jamaican men made the same illegal crossing Edwards had, arriving with nothing and needing work fast. Edwards had that work ready for them. Setting up in a new city rarely went smoothly, though. Local dealers were already there, and they did not step aside voluntarily.

Edwards’s answer to that problem was not negotiation. It was a level of violence significant enough that police in several cities eventually connected a wave of unsolved killings to Jamaican crews expanding into their territory. Some of which investigators would later tie back to Edwards’s own push into new markets.

In Philadelphia alone, law enforcement would eventually link as many as 30 killings between 1984 and 1988 to Jamaican posses expanding through the city. He was, in other words, running something closer to a small interstate corporation than a neighborhood drug crew. Sales territory, org chart, and a human resources policy built entirely around the threat of death.

Running an operation that size across multiple cities required people willing to follow orders without asking many questions, and Edwards built his enforcement wing around a very specific kind of recruit. Young Jamaican men who had entered the country illegally, the same way he had. The appeal of hiring undocumented immigrants was practical, not sentimental.

They had no green card, no local family, and no safety net outside the organization. If law enforcement ever came looking, they had nowhere else to turn. That kind of dependency bought Edwards a level of loyalty that money alone does not usually buy. One of the men who rose furthest inside that structure was Stanley McCall.

He started low, watching security cameras and answering phones at one of the organization’s drug spots, the kind of job that looks unremarkable on paper. Whatever qualities Edwards was looking for, McCall had them. And he moved up quickly from watching the phones to carrying out the orders that came over them. Discipline inside the organization ran on the same logic as everything else.

A worker suspected of skimming money got a visit. A worker who lost product in in robbery got blamed for it personally, fault or not. There was no formal warning system, no appeal. There was only the question of whether Edwards believed you had failed him and what he decided to do once he had. McCall, by this point, was usually the one Edwards sent to have that conversation.

It rarely stayed a conversation for long. The clearest picture of how Edwards handled problems inside his own organization comes from a killing that surfaced repeatedly during his trial. The death of Norman Allwood, known on the street as Egghead. He was 16 years old. Nobody in the case file explains what Allwood did wrong.

In an organization run the way Edwards ran his, that omission is its own kind of detail. The reason mattered less than the demonstration. According to testimony given by Kenneth Manning, several men took Allwood down to the basement of a Brooklyn crack house in January of 1987 and spent more than an hour beating him with baseball bats.

At some point during that hour, someone brought a pot of boiling water and poured it over him while he was chained to a beam in the ceiling. Manning, describing the scene years later from the witness stand, said he watched the skin come off Allwood’s body while it happened. Nobody in the room stepped in to stop it and nobody who took part seemed to expect anyone would.

It was one of at least 10 killings prosecutors would eventually lay out to the jury count by count as part of an ongoing pattern. Reports on the case describe a second pattern of enforcement. On June 27th, 1987, a worker at one of Edwards’s drug spots told him he had just been robbed. Edwards did not ask who was responsible.

He sent Stanley McCall to the location with a simple instruction. Shoot whoever was standing in the hallway. And McCall fired 16 rounds at people on the stairwell inside the building, whether or not they had anything to do with the robbery. The December shooting that left Rudolph Sims paralyzed didn’t come out of nowhere.

Edwards, reports on the case say, had been shot and wounded by a rival earlier that year. And when the moment came to retaliate, he never bothered identifying who had actually shot him. He sent McCall out with one instruction, forget the actual shooters, just fire on anyone who looked Jamaican.

He was, by every account of his own background, Jamaican himself. Taken together, the pattern prosecutors eventually put in front of a jury involved 13 separate assault counts that left 18 people injured, nine of whom had no connection to the drug trade at all. They were simply in the wrong hallway, on the wrong stairwell, or on the wrong street corner when Edwards decided someone needed to answer for something.

By the time federal prosecutors were ready to move, they had spent months building a case under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, RICO. The same law originally built to take apart Italian organized crime families, now pointed at a Jamaican posse working out of Brooklyn. The case against Edwards personally centered on one particular killing.

 

Two months before his arrest, a man had been shot dead inside Love People One, the crew’s favorite nightclub, after allegedly stepping on Edwards’s foot. On March 9th, 1988, more than 30 law enforcement officers moved on the organization at once. Edwards was arrested on a Brooklyn street along with five other people, two of them American.

Kenneth Manning was picked up separately in the same sweep. What happened next inside the case is, in its own way, the real story here. Facing life sentences of their own, member after member of the organization began cooperating with prosecutors rather than risk trial. Stanley McCall was one of them. Kenneth Manning, Edwards’ own cousin, was another.

And Manning’s cooperation went further than most. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in state court and to racketeering in federal court and admitted on the record to killing four people himself, assaulting 10 others, and kidnapping a rival dealer. Manning agreed to serve 20 years on the state charges and faced a minimum of 10 years up to life in prison on the federal side.

Prosecutors later called his testimony the centerpiece of Edwards’ conviction on four of the murder counts and said they could not overstate its value. Manning went on to serve 28 years in prison, every one of them in protective custody because the cousin he had grown up calling a brother was still, by every account, capable of reaching him.

The trial itself ran 7 weeks in that Brooklyn courtroom in front of Judge Raymond J. Dearie. Jurors sat through detailed testimony about murders and torture, Manning’s account of the Allwood killing among it, delivered by men who had once carried out that violence themselves, now describing it for a lighter sentence.

Prosecutors built the case on exactly that kind of witness. Physical evidence from years-old basement and stairwell violence was thinner than most murder cases get to rely on. The jury deliberated for 4 days. On July 25th, 1989, they returned a guilty verdict on all 42 counts in the indictment. 10 murders, 13 assaults, one kidnapping, and the racketeering and continuing criminal enterprise charges tying the the of it together.

Then came the detail that made this case different from most. The same jury that had just convicted him turned and asked the court what would be done to protect them going forward. A federal jury does not typically need to ask that question after convicting one man of running one drug operation out of Brooklyn.

This one did. Sentencing came several months later in the first days of December 1989. Judge Dearie handed down seven consecutive life sentences. At the time of the verdict, prosecutors had told the court Edwards faced additional prison time measured in the hundreds of years on top of those life terms.

Accounts of the exact figure vary, but even more conservative reporting on the sentencing puts the additional time somewhere around 450 years. Practically speaking, the exact number stopped mattering the moment the first life sentence was handed down. Adding several hundred years on top of seven consecutive life terms is less a punishment calculation than a formality.

The legal equivalent of double-checking that a door is locked after you have already welded it shut. Edwards was assigned Bureau of Prisons register number 25109-053. There would be no parole hearing in his future. No mechanism built into that sentence for him to argue his way back into a lower security facility, let alone the outside world.

The appeals that followed in the years afterward added little. The public paper trail on them is thin and in places contradictory, but the outcome never moved. Edwards did not walk out of that courtroom with any realistic path back to a normal life. And no motion filed since brought the number of life sentences below seven.

At some point after sentencing, most commonly cited as 1995, the year ADX Florence opened, Edwards was transferred to the Fremont County, Colorado facility that holds the small number of federal prisoners the Bureau of Prisons considers too dangerous for anywhere else. By his own description, written from inside the prison years later, he lives in a cell about the size of two queen-size mattresses pushed together.

And he has called ADX, in his own words, a version of hell that the government keeps clean. That description lines up with what is publicly known about the facility. Inmates spend nearly all day alone, with contact outside the walls limited and monitored. A place built by design to make a person disappear from the world while still technically alive inside it.

Even now, he shows no doubt who was right. In a blog post published under his own name in 2015, he called the men who testified against him rats and wrote that they should have taken their own lives rather than live with the dishonor of informing. Which makes what happened next unusually strange.

On November 12th, 2005, a man was shot to death on the doorstep of a house in East Kingston, Jamaica, 9 days after being deported there from the United Kingdom. His name, as it happened, was also Delroy Edwards. He had been born the same year, 1959, in the same country. He was not a drug boss. He was a man who had spent years refusing to join a street gang tied to a rival political party, had watched two of his daughters die in a house fire set because of that refusal, and had fled to Britain seeking asylum before immigration officials sent him

back to the country that killed him 9 days later. The two men shared a name, a birth year, and a home country, and nothing else. But the coincidence was enough. For years afterward, corners of the internet treated the killing in Kingston as confirmation that the Brooklyn drug lord known as Uzi was finally dead.

He was not. As far as the most recent public prison records show, he is still sitting in that cell in Colorado. A fact that is, in its own way, harder to verify than his death would have been. Confirmed rumors travel. Confirmed silence mostly does not. There is something almost fitting about a man who spent his career trying to make people disappear ending up mistaken for dead himself.

Edwards built an operation on the idea that violence could erase people, witnesses, rivals, anyone standing in the wrong hallway at the wrong time. For years, a rumor did to his own reputation exactly what he had spent a decade doing to other people. Made him vanish without anyone checking too closely.

The other Delroy Edwards never got that kind of attention. A man who refused every opportunity to become what Uzi Edwards chose to become was shot on a doorstep. And outside a small number of immigration researchers, almost nobody noticed. The version of this story where the system sorts out who deserves to be remembered and who does not would be a more comfortable place to end.

That is not how it worked out. One man is still breathing behind the most secure walls in the federal system, and everyone knows exactly where he is. The other is mostly forgotten. He was the one who did nothing wrong. Somewhere, a young man is deciding right now whether the fastest path to respect runs through a gun.

Kingston taught Edwards that answer before he was old enough to vote. A lot of neighborhoods are still teaching it. If this story made you stop and think, hit the like button. That is how YouTube decides to show this to more young people who might be hearing the wrong voices right now.

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