6 Black Hitmen More Dangerous Than The Bosses Who Hired Them – HT

 

 

 

On February 26, 1988, a 22-year-old police officer named Edward Byrne sat alone in his patrol car on 107th Avenue and Inwood Street in South Jamaica, Queens. It was 3:30 in the morning. He had been on the force for less than a year. His assignment that night was simple. Guard a civilian witness whose house had been firebombed the week before by local drug dealers.

At approximately 3:32 in the morning, a man approached the driver’s side window of Byrne’s blue and white cruiser, raised a .38 caliber revolver, and fired five rounds into the back of his skull. Byrne never drew his weapon. He never saw the shooter’s face. The hit team was four men. The payout was $8,000. But the man who ordered the execution was not a drug lord.

 He was not a kingpin. He was not even free. He was an enforcer sitting in a cell at the Brooklyn House of Detention, and the boss he worked for could not have stopped him even if he had wanted to. Every criminal empire has a name at the top. But behind that name, in every era and every city, stands someone the boss himself is afraid to look in the eye.

The man who collects debts with a curling iron. The man who walks up to targets in broad daylight and pulls the trigger from 3 feet away. The man who does not flinch, does not negotiate, does not stop. These six men were never the boss. They were the weapon. And in every case, the weapon became more dangerous, more feared, and more consequential than the hand that held it.

But it is the last name on this list, a man sentenced to five life terms for robberies, not murders, whose story forced the same judge  who locked him away to do something almost unprecedented in American legal history. Between 1984 and 1995, the crack epidemic did not just flood American cities with a new drug.

It restructured the entire underground economy. >>  >> The kingpin became a chief executive officer, insulated, delegating, visible only when he chose to be. The enforcer became the operational core. Collections, territory defense, witness elimination, rival neutralization. In cities like New York, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.

, the man who pulled triggers accumulated more power than the man who gave the orders. Because without the enforcer, the product did not move, the corners did not hold, and the competition did not stop. Between 1985 and 1995, federal prosecutors indicted more than 40 major black drug organizations across the country. In almost every case, the enforcer’s body count exceeded  the kingpin’s.

 In several, the enforcer’s sentence did, too. Prince Miller walked free in September 2024 after 35 years behind bars. King Tut Johnson was released in October 2024 by the same judge who had sentenced him. Stacey Colbert was re-indicted in October 2025 after a routine traffic stop in Wisconsin. These stories are not history. They are still unfolding.

The man who ordered Edward Byrne’s execution was Howard Mason, known on the streets of South Jamaica  as Pappy. He was born on September 8th, 1959. He wore Rastafarian dreadlocks, spoke in an adopted Jamaican patois that set him apart from every other enforcer in Queens, and rose through the ranks of the Bebos crew under the command of Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols, the undisputed crack kingpin of Southeast Queens. Fat Cat ran the supply.

 Pappy ran the fear.  And the way he built fear was not subtle. He pistol-whipped debtors in broad daylight on crowded streets. He pressed a hot curling iron into the skin of runners who came up short. He staged beatings in public deliberately and theatrically >>  >> so that the next man who considered skimming would remember exactly what he saw.

Under Pappy’s enforcement, Fat Cat’s crack operation generated an estimated $200,000 a month. But Pappy wasn’t just a blunt instrument. He was the operational architecture of Fat Cat’s entire distribution chain. The runners ran because Pappy made the consequences of stopping worse than the consequences of getting caught.

When Fat Cat was arrested on state charges, Pappy did not slow down. He accelerated. From inside the Brooklyn House of Detention awaiting his own trial, he gave the order to execute Officer Byrne. The target was chosen deliberately, a uniform NYPD officer in a marked patrol car on a visible assignment.

 The message was not to the police. The message was to anyone in the neighborhood who might consider cooperating with them. The four-man hit team carried it out in under 90 seconds. They were paid $2,000 each. Byrne was 22 years old. He had graduated from the police academy 5 months earlier. The killing detonated a political firestorm that reshaped drug enforcement in New York City.

President Reagan referenced the murder in a national address. Mayor Ed Koch called it an act of war against the people of the city. The NYPD launched the largest narcotics crackdown in the history of Southeast Queens, deploying hundreds of officers into the same housing projects that Fat Cat’s crew had operated from openly for years.

The Tactical Narcotics Team, called TNT, was created in direct response to Byrne’s murder. Every major crack organization in South Jamaica was systematically dismantled in the months that followed. Fat Cat, facing the full weight of federal prosecution and the political fury that Pappy’s decision had unleashed, eventually cooperated with authorities.

Pappy Mason never did. He was convicted on federal RICO charges on December 11th, 1989. In 1994, he received a life sentence after a jury deliberated for 13 hours and rejected his insanity defense. He is currently held at ADX Florence, the federal supermax in Fremont County, Colorado, the same facility that has housed the Unabomber, the Boston Marathon Bomber, and the worst of the worst in the federal system.

Fat Cat was paroled by New York State >>  >> in 2020, though he still owes time on a separate federal sentence. The boss talked and walked. The enforcer said nothing and will die in a cage. Just 10 blocks from Fat Cat’s territory, another enforcer was about to prove the same  point on an even larger scale.

Gerald Miller, known as Prince,  was born around 1964 in South Jamaica, Queens. He was Kenneth Supreme McGriff’s nephew by blood, and his chief enforcer by reputation. The Supreme Team controlled the Baisley Park Houses, a sprawling public housing complex that became the most profitable open-air crack market in the borough.

At its peak in 1987, the operation grossed over $200,000 a day selling crack under the brand names Thriller and Ghostbuster. McGriff was the strategist. Prince was the violence that made the strategy work. He outfitted his crews in military fatigues, posted sentries on rooftops with walkie-talkies to spot police, and conducted interrogations >>  >> that witnesses described in clinical, horrifying detail.

When two Colombian suppliers named Fernando Suarez and Pablo Polasa were suspected of theft in August 1989, it was Prince’s crew, Roy Hale, Julio Hernandez, and Jose Goncalves that held them at gunpoint in a Baisley Park apartment, bound their hands with tape, placed plastic bags over their heads, and beat them with a baseball bat until they stopped breathing.

The bodies were disposed of across Queens. When McGriff was arrested on federal charges in 1987, Prince did not wait for instructions. He assumed full operational command. Court records show that he ordered at least eight murders in 1987 alone while his uncle sat behind bars. He rebuilt the Supreme Team’s daily revenue to an estimated $10,000 a day under his direct control.

He expanded the enforcement apparatus, putting Harry “Big C” Hunt on as his personal bodyguard, coordinating with Ernesto “Puerto Rican Righteous” Pinella on security, and using a network of corrupt contacts to neutralize threats before they reached the courtroom. In one documented case, a corrupt parole officer named Ena McGriff tipped Pinella that a cooperating witness named James Page was talking to prosecutors.

Page was murdered before he could testify. The NYPD called Prince untouchable. Queens District Attorney John Santucci publicly called the Supreme Team >>  >> extremely volatile. Lieutenant Michael Garrity, head of the Queens Narcotics Major Case Squad, later said that taking Miller down dispelled the myth of his invincibility.

>>  >> But for years, the myth held. The boss was in prison. The enforcer was the organization. Prince Miller was convicted in March 1990 on RICO and continuing criminal enterprise charges. He received six concurrent life sentences plus 20 years. He served approximately 35 years. On September 20th, 2024, he was released by order of Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis.

He now works in anti-violence outreach in New York City. Nas immortalized the Supreme Team on Illmatic, rapping on Memory Lane about the crew that owned Basquiat. On Ghetto Quran, 50 Cent later bare, Preme was the businessman and Prince was the killer. The businessman received life without parole and remains at USP Lee in Virginia.

The killer walks free. Every profile so far ended the same way. The enforcer was convicted, sentenced, locked away. The next man on this list faced the same fate. But the reason he is still in prison is not what he did. It is what he refused to do. Wayne Silk Perry, known as Silk, was born on November 14th, 1962 in Washington, D.C.

He grew up in the capital’s southeast quadrant during the years when D.C. earned its reputation as the murder capital of America. He became the personal enforcer and bodyguard for Alberto Alpo Martinez, a drug dealer born in Harlem, who relocated his cocaine and heroin operation to the nation’s capital in the late  1980s.

Alpo chose D.C. because the profit margins were higher and the competition was disorganized. He chose Perry because Perry made the competition disappear. Perry’s method was direct to the point of audacity. >>  >> He walked up to targets on the street, sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes on their own front steps, and shot them in the head.

He refused drive-bys. He considered them imprecise, the mark of an amateur who was afraid to look at what he was doing. Don Diva magazine editor Tiffany Chiles called him the Michael Jordan of the murder game. Court-documented victims include Brooklyn drug dealer Demencio Benson  and D.C.

 dealer Michael Fray Salters. Perry did not just protect Alpo’s territory. He was the reason the territory existed. Competitors did not challenge Alpo’s operation because they understood that challenging Alpo meant encountering Silk. The supply chain functioned because the enforcer made the cost of interference lethal. By the early 1990s, anyone in the D.C.

drug trade who heard the name Silk Perry understood that the conversation about negotiation was over. On November 7th, 1991, Alpo Martinez was arrested in Washington. Within  weeks, he made the decision that would define both of their lives forever. He cooperated with federal prosecutors. He gave them Silk Perry.

 He gave them names, dates, addresses, methods. He gave them everything. Perry was arrested, tried, and convicted. He received five consecutive life sentences. He named no one. He cooperated with no one. He did not negotiate a reduced sentence. He did not ask for consideration. The inversion was total.

 The boss became the most infamous snitch in modern American crime history. The hitman became a symbol of loyalty taken to his logical, brutal extreme. Alpo entered the Federal Witness Protection Program and was placed in Lewiston, Maine under the name Abraham Rodriguez. He lived quietly for nearly 30 years. On October 31st, >>  >> 2021, Halloween night, someone found him.

 Alpo Martinez was shot and killed in a drive-by on a Harlem street. He was 55. No arrest has been made. Perry remains incarcerated. He has spent decades at ADX Florence and is now held in the Washington State correctional system under the name En  Kosi Shaka Zulu El. Jay-Z references him on the 2013 track Tom Ford.

Rapper Wale has optioned his life rights for an in-development television series titled Silk. The man who talked is dead. The man who said nothing is still breathing. From Washington, we move 500 miles west to a city where the enforcers did not just work for the bosses. They outlived every single one of them.

Between 1984 and 1993, Detroit recorded more than 4,800 homicides. Federal prosecutors linked more than 80 of them to a single organization called the Best Friends. Nathaniel Craft, known as Boone, was born on March 25th, 1957 in Detroit, Michigan. He entered the drug trade as a bodyguard for Richard Carter, known as Maserati Rick, one of the city’s most flamboyant crack dealers, known for the fleet of luxury cars that gave him his street name.

On September 12th, 1988, Carter was shot and killed in his bed at Mount Carmel Mercy Hospital, where he was recovering from an earlier gunshot wound. The assassination was carried out by members of the Best Friends gang. Boone’s boss was dead, >>  >> but Boone did not stop working. He simply changed clients.

 His true employer was not  any single kingpin. It was the contract itself. He freelanced across Detroit’s warring factions, taking assignments from the Brown brothers, Terrence, Otis, and Demetrius, who led the Best Friends gang, the organization that controlled much of the city’s East Side crack distribution and had ordered the very killing that left his first boss dead.

His method was patient and clinical. He surveilled every target for 2 weeks before making a move. He studied their routines, what time they left the house, which route they drove, where they stopped for gas, which door they used. He struck on the third day of an identical pattern when the routine was confirmed and the target’s alertness was at its lowest.

 He preferred the Mac-11 submachine gun. When he could close the distance, he used the knife. Silence mattered. By his own account in later interviews and testimony, he carried out roughly 30 contract killings across Detroit during the crack era. His most infamous assignment was the contract on Richard “White Boy Rick” Wershe Jr.

, the teenage FBI informant who had become a major dealer in his own right. The reported price was $125,000. Boone took the job. He found the target. He raised his weapon. The gun jammed. He was  the most feared contract killer in Detroit and his weapon failed on the most high-profile hit in the city. Wershe survived. Years later when Boone’s own brother was murdered on the orders of Best Friends leader Terrence “Boogaloo” Brown, Boone made his choice.

 He cooperated with the DEA, not out of fear, out of revenge. He testified against the Brown brothers, provided evidence that helped dismantle the Best Friends organization, and received approximately 17 years instead of life. He is free today. He lives in Detroit. He has given documentary interviews about his years in the trade. Every boss he ever worked for is dead or in prison. He is the last one standing.

He survived not because he was the most violent man in the room. He survived because he understood when the killing had to stop. But one man from the same crew chose the opposite path. He didn’t stop killing. He killed the boss himself. Remember the $8,000 Pappy Mason paid to have Officer Byrne executed in Queens? That was the price of a cop’s life in 1988.

In Detroit,  the price of a boss’s life was a Ralph Lauren bedsheet and a stolen truck. Stacey Colbert, known as The Machine, operated  within the same Best Friends network as Boone Craft, but his trajectory was darker, his methods more indiscriminate, and his loyalty more conditional. He was approximately 24 years old when he became one of the Best Friends primary enforcers, working alongside the Brown brothers during the peak years of Detroit’s crack wars.

Organized crime historian Scott Bernstein described him simply as machine-like, a man who carried out assignments with the detachment  of someone clocking in for a shift. Federal prosecutors tied Colbert to at least 13 homicides, including the killing of a child. He was the crew’s most reliable instrument of permanent silence, the man you called when the problem needed to disappear and never come back and when the method didn’t matter as long as the result was certain.

By 1993, the Best Friends organization had consumed itself. Maserati Rick was dead. Otis Brown was dead. Demetrius Brown was in prison. Only Terrance Boogaloo Brown remained. The last surviving leader operating from the shadows moving between cities to avoid federal surveillance. He made it to Atlanta.

 It wasn’t far enough. Boogaloo was found dead in a stolen truck parked at the College Park Ramada Renaissance Hotel outside the city. >>  >> He had been shot once in the head. His body was wrapped in a Ralph Lauren bedsheet. The man who killed him was his own enforcer. Cobert had turned on the organization from the inside eliminating the boss who had once signed his contracts.

 The same man who had ordered the murder of Boomcraft’s brother. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to life in federal prison. He later cooperated with prosecutors and had his sentence reduced to 27 years. He was released in 2018 and settled in the Grosse Pointe area of Metro Detroit where he operated a trucking business under a quiet suburban identity.

But freedom didn’t hold. In October 2025, a routine traffic stop in Wisconsin produced a DNA match. Cobert’s genetic material was found on two cocaine packages in the vehicle. He was re-indicted on federal drug charges and is currently held without bond awaiting trial. He killed the boss, served the time, walked free, and then the past found him on a highway 7 years later.

Every enforcer on this list was more dangerous than the man who hired him. But the last name does not fit that pattern. No one hired him. He worked for himself. His targets were not rival dealers or disloyal runners. They were icons. This is where the story you think you know becomes the story you do not. Walter Johnson, known as King Tut, was born in 1963 in the Cypress Hills projects of East New York, Brooklyn.

He was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness by his mother. The nickname Tut was what friends called him and an NYPD desk officer logged it as King Tut during one of his earliest arrests. So the name stuck in the system permanently. He co-founded a robbery crew that became known as the Black Mafia alongside  Jacques Haitian Jack Agnant and their entire business model was targeting drug dealers.

 Men who could not report the robbery without exposing their own operations. Tut’s criminal career began with acts so brazen they read like fiction. On June 23rd, 1982 at the age of 18, he walked into his own mother’s Kingdom Hall in East New York and robbed roughly 300 worshipers at gunpoint during a service. He made bail. On October 7th, 1982, he and four associates held 12 passengers  at gunpoint on a New York City bus traveling the Queens to Brooklyn  route.

 He was convicted on multiple robbery charges and served two to six years.  After parole in 1988, he was convicted of weapons possession and served another four to eight years. In 1993, he was charged in the shooting of NYPD Officer Richard Aviles inside a Brooklyn barbershop. Aviles was left  partially paralyzed. Tut was acquitted of attempted murder but convicted of armed robbery and served an additional year.

Upon release in the early 1990s, he returned to the same streets, the same methods, and the same targets. But on November 30th, 1994, Tut’s name entered a completely different kind of history. That night at Quad Recording Studios on West Broadway in Manhattan, Tupac Shakur was shot five times and robbed of $40,000 in jewelry in the building’s lobby.

Tupac survived and he named Tut publicly. On the posthumous track against all odds >>  >> recorded before his September 1996 murder in Las Vegas, Tupac addressed him directly. In a prison letter dated August 15th, 1995, Tupac listed Tut among what he called the walking dead. In 2011, a man named Dexter Isaac serving a life sentence at MDC Brooklyn, publicly claimed on allhiphop.

com that he, not Tut, had carried out the Quad Studios shooting allegedly on the orders of promoter Jimmy Henchman Rosemond. The attribution has never been definitively resolved. What happened next is not disputed. Five life terms. He was 34. In 1997, Judge Frederick Block of the Eastern District of New York sentenced Walter Johnson to five consecutive life terms under the federal three strikes law for a series of armed robberies committed over an 18-month period.

He became the first defendant in New York City history to receive a mandatory life sentence under that statute from the Eastern District. He was sent to USP Lee in Virginia, then transferred to USP Lewisburg in Pennsylvania, then to FCI Otisville in New York. For 27 years, he moved through the federal system.

He completed educational programs. He mentored younger inmates. >>  >> He married Natoka Johnson while behind bars. And every year, the mandatory minimum that had locked him inside remained unchanged until the 2018 First Step Act created a pathway for resentencing. On October 17th, 2024, Judge Block, now 90 years old, convened a hearing.

In his written opinion, the judge acknowledged that the original sentence was lawfully rendered under the statute as it existed. But he called it excessively harsh. He wrote that Johnson had demonstrated genuine rehabilitation over nearly three decades and that the man standing before him in 2024 bore no resemblance to the man he had sentenced in 1997.

He ordered Johnson’s immediate release. The courtroom was silent. The same judge who had put him away >>  >> at the peak of tough on crime sentencing decided at the end of his own career that the punishment no longer fit the man. Johnson walked out of federal custody at the age of 61. His wife, Natoka, met him at the gate.

He is currently on supervised release in Brooklyn. He now mentors at-risk youth in the same borough where he once robbed a church. He robbed 300 worshipers, was linked to the shooting of the most famous rapper in the world, and served 27 years. And the man who locked him away was the same man who set him free.

Every enforcer on this list followed the same invisible arc. The boss provided the capital. The enforcer provided the terror. And when the empire collapsed through federal indictment, through betrayal, through a bullet from someone they trusted, it was the enforcer, not the kingpin, who absorbed the full weight of the system.

Pappy Mason  sits in a supermax cell while Fat Cat walks the streets of Queens. Silk Perry serves five consecutive life sentences while Alpo Martinez lived free under a government name for 30 years. Prince Miller served 35 years while his Uncle Supreme received the same life sentence for ordering the same kind of violence from the same kind of distance.

The muscle bears the cost. The money negotiates the exit. And the system that created both roles, the enforcer and the executive, has never once addressed the conditions that made the arrangement inevitable. Of the six enforcers on this list, four are currently free. Of the six bosses they served, only one is.

 Today, Prince Miller works in anti-violence outreach on the same Queens blocks  the Supreme Team once owned. King Tut Johnson mentors teenagers in the same Brooklyn where he once robbed a congregation at gunpoint. Boomcraft lives quietly in Detroit. The last man standing from an organization that consumed itself. Stacey Cobert sits in a federal holding facility in Wisconsin awaiting trial on charges that prove the past never finishes with you.

Silk Perry >>  >> remains behind bars decades into a sentence he earned by refusing to say a single name. And Howard Pappy Mason has not seen daylight outside of a federal supermax since 1989. The organizations they enforced for are gone. The Supreme  Team, the Bebos, the Best Friends, the Black Mafia.

All dismantled. All scattered. All history. But the conditions that built them, the abandoned neighborhoods, the collapsed economies, the policing without investment, those have no expiration date. New enforcers stand behind new bosses on new corners in the same cities under the same economic logic that has never been solved, only policed.

Edward Byrne was 22 years old when he died guarding a witness on a Queen Street at 3:30 in the morning. Howard Mason was 28  when he ordered the killing from a jail cell. One of them is remembered as a hero. The other is remembered as a monster. But they were both young men from the same city, shaped by the same decade, standing on opposite sides of the same failed infrastructure that turned teenage boys into soldiers and street corners into war zones.

The six men in this video did not build empires. >>  >> They protected them. They enforced them. They killed for them. And when the empires fell, they were the ones left holding the weight. The bosses wrote their memoirs. The enforcers served their time. And the machine that manufactures both of them, the one no one has ever indicted, the one that runs on poverty and neglect and the absence of anything better, just keeps running.