He Snitched on the Jamaicans in Flatbush — 2 Weeks Later, His Whole Family Disappeared ht
It started with a single phone call. A man decided he wanted out. He was tired, probably scared, and the federal agents who had been building a case against the crew he ran with made him a promise. “Cooperate,” they said. “Tell us what you know. We’ll take care of the rest.” He believed them.
2 weeks after that call, his mother stopped answering her phone. His brother was gone from his apartment. His kids couldn’t be found at their school, and the house his sister had been renting on the other side of the burough had been emptied overnight, windows dark, door left unlocked. He hadn’t been touched. Not yet.
That was the message. To understand why this happened and why it was almost inevitable the moment he made that call, you have to understand what kind of organization he decided to testify against. Not just what they did, but where they came from and what they believed about loyalty, silence, and the people who broke both.
This is the story of the Jamaican poses in Flatbush, Brooklyn. What they built on those streets, how they enforced their code, and what happened to the men and families caught between the gang and the government. Flatbush is a neighborhood that has been many things to many people over the decades.
In the 1970s and 1980s, as Caribbean immigration to New York exploded, large portions of Flatbush and East Flatbush became home to one of the largest Jamaican communities in the United States. Church Avenue, Nostrand Avenue, Flatbush Avenue itself lined with West Indian bakeries, record shops and social clubs where men from Kingston and Spanish Town and Montego Bay gathered and felt something close to home.
But something else came over with the community, something that had roots in the same Kingston slums these men had fled. The possesses Jamaican organized crime gangs known as possesses had their origins in the garrison communities of West Kingston in the 1960s and 1970s. They began as political enforcers hired muscle for the two major Jamaican political parties who needed men willing to intimidate voters and control neighborhoods.
By the time the 1980 Jamaican general election came around, these gangs had murdered approximately 800 people in the course of the political violence alone. 800 people over an election. When that political structure shifted and many of the gunmen associated with the losing faction needed to run, they ran to New York. They ran to Miami.
And when they arrived, they brought the same organizational model they had operated under in Jamaica, applied it to the drug trade, and built something that American law enforcement was completely unprepared for. By 1989, federal estimates put the number of PAR members and associates in the United States at somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000.
operating across 40 gangs in 15 major cities. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms attributed roughly 1,000 murders to these groups between 1985 and 1989 alone. four years, 1,000 murders in New York, Flatbush, and East Flatbush became primary territory. The blocks off Church Avenue and into the avenues below became a corridor that Jamaican crews controlled through marijuana distribution, crack sales, and a level of violence that made even hardened NYPD veterans take note. One federal official who worked organized crime cases in Brooklyn during the late 1980s said the
posies reminded him of something out of a war zone, not organized crime in the traditional sense, [snorts] something raw, something that didn’t negotiate first. If you’re finding this kind of street history compelling, hit subscribe. We cover stories like this every week and it costs you nothing to stay connected.
The most important thing to understand about Jamaican posy culture, the thing that explains what happened to that man’s family in Flatbush, is the code around informants. Other organized crime groups had rules about snitching. The Italian mafia had OMAr. Street gangs had their own versions of the same principle.
But Jamaican pizzazz took it further, much further. The poses had a documented practice called jointing. When a member of a gang was discovered to have cooperated with police or federal authorities, the punishment wasn’t simply death. It was dismemberment at the joints using a hacksaw.
And the body parts weren’t just discarded. They were sent to the informants family as a message, as a demonstration of what the code costs when you break it. This wasn’t unique to one crew. It was documented across multiple posi investigations by the FBI, DEA, and international law enforcement as a standard enforcement mechanism.
Not a rare act of rage, but standard procedure. And here’s the part that matters for the story we’re telling. The family wasn’t collateral damage in this framework. The family was the point. Targeting those closest to an informant served two purposes. First, it punished the person who had broken the code in the most personal way possible.
Second, it sent a message to every other member of the organization watching. This is what cooperation costs, not just your life, everyone connected to yours. The poses understood something that federal witness protection programs are still struggling to fully address decades later.
that for people embedded in these communities, the threat to family is often more effective than any threat to the individual. Men who would face their own death with something approaching calm would fall apart over their children, their mothers, their brothers. So when a man inside a flatbush connected crew decided to cooperate with federal agents, he wasn’t just putting himself in danger.
He had made a decision on behalf of every person who shared his blood, his address, history, or his name, whether they knew it or not. By the time the ’90s crew, a Brooklyn-based street gang with Jamaican roots, was operating out of Flatbush and Canazi in the 2000s and early 2010s. The neighborhood had decades of established gang infrastructure beneath it.
The crew operated marijuana trafficking networks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, ran multiple stash houses across the borrowers, and maintained armed control over their territory the way these organizations always do. through reputation, through fear, and through the willingness to act when either of those two things was challenged.
Federal and DEA investigations into Flatbush connected crews repeatedly ran in K to the same obstacle. The communities these gangs operated inside were tight. People didn’t talk, not because they supported the gangs in every case, but because they understood exactly what talking cost. You lived two blocks from these men. You saw their cars every morning.
Your kids went to the same schools as their kids. Calling the feds wasn’t just a moral decision. It was a calculation about survival. And the math almost never worked out in favor of cooperation. When DEA agents began building a case against one Flatbush connected crew and tapped a phone line, what they heard wasn’t unusual.
A suspected informant inside the drug network had been identified. Within days of the identification, the call went out. The conversation was brief. The price to have the man killed was agreed upon quickly. $5,000. That number should make you pause. $5,000 for a human life for someone’s son, someone’s father.
That’s what the calculus and code looked like inside these organizations. Not because life was cheap in some abstract sense, but because the code treated informants as something outside the category of person that normal protections applied to. Someone who had crossed that line had, in the logic of the street forfeited the usual considerations.
Federal agents identified the target in time. In that specific case, the murder was stopped. But the case revealed something that investigators already knew and was still struggling to fully prosecute. The decision to kill had been made immediately, reflexively, without hesitation.
There was no debate, no consideration. The moment cooperation was suspected, the elimination was the response. That is the world the man in Flatbush was dealing with when he picked up the phone and called the agents. What happened to his family in the weeks after his cooperation became known followed a pattern that federal prosecutors and victim advocates working in Brooklyn had documented across multiple cases.
The first moves are never the most violent. The first moves are designed to communicate. A sister’s address gets visited. Not a shooting. Just men standing outside making sure she sees them see her. A mother’s phone starts receiving calls at odd hour hours. Silence on the other end. Then a hang-up.
A brother finds his car has been damaged in a way that could have been random. But both he and the people who did it know it wasn’t. This is the language and it is remarkably effective because the person who cooperated understands every message perfectly. They know what comes after the language. They’ve seen it.
They’ve been part of the world that sends these messages. They know that the silence on the phone and the men outside the building aren’t a warning that might not be followed through. They’re a countdown. In the case of the shower posy informant who cooperated in the federal prosecution of Christopher Dudus Ko, one of the most powerful Jamaican gang leaders ever prosecuted in the United States.
The aftermath was documented in court filings that read like a war casualty report. After the man’s testimony, his sister’s house was burned down. The home of his children’s mother was bombed. Six of his cousins were murdered. His father was forced to flee the country. And when immigration authorities initially ordered the informant himself back to Jamaica, his attorney argued in court that he would be killed the moment he stepped off the plane.
A judge agreed and called it not speculation given what had already happened to the people around him. Six cousins murdered for one man’s decision to cooperate with federal law enforcement. That is not collateral damage. That is doctrine. If you’ve made it this far into this story and you want to see more videos like it, subscribe right now.
We drop new content weekly and every video goes this deep. Don’t miss the next one. The federal government has spent decades attempting to address the threat that witness retaliation poses to the entire system of law enforcement. Witness protection programs, relocation services, new identities, all of it exists because investigators understood early that no one would cooperate if cooperation meant death for everyone they loved.
But the programs have limitations that the posies and organizations like them have always understood better than anyone. You can relocate a man. You cannot always relocate his mother who doesn’t want to leave. You cannot always relocate his children’s mother who has her own family and her own life. You cannot erase every connection in a world where everyone on the block knows everyone.
Where community ties run decades deep. Where a new name doesn’t mean anything if the people who knew you before can still find the people who knew you. Ronald Williams, a leader of the ’90s crew in East Flatbush, was convicted in 2018 of conspiracy to commit murder for hire, conspiracy to obstruct justice through murder and marijuana trafficking, among other charges.
He was sentenced to 24 years in federal prison. His codefendant Leon Campbell received 9 years for his role in the murder for hire conspiracy against the suspected informant in their network. The murder in that case had not been carried out. Federal agents had moved fast enough to prevent it.
But the lesson that investigators took from that case and from every case like it was not that the threat had been defeated. It was that they had gotten lucky. The infrastructure that makes witness retaliation possible. The network of eyes in the neighborhood. The communication systems between jailed members and those still on the street.
The doctrine that treats informants and their families as legitimate targets. All of that remained intact. The conviction of one leader didn’t dismantle what had been built over 40 years on those blocks. The man who made the phone call in Flatbush eventually had to leave Brooklyn. He didn’t have a choice. His family was scattered.
Some by the gang’s pressure, some by the federal agents who were trying belatedly to protect people who hadn’t asked to be involved in any of this. He cooperated. He testified. The case moved forward. And somewhere in Flatbush, on one of those blocks of Church Avenue, where this whole world operates, things kept moving. New faces on the same corners.
The same code enforced by people who had watched what happened to the last man who broke it and understood the lesson perfectly. This is not a story with a clean ending. Most stories from these streets aren’t. The machine outlasts the individuals. The code survives the arrests.
And the families of the men who talked are still in some cases living with the consequences of a decision they had no part in making. The only question the man in Flatbush probably asks himself now is whether the federal agents who told him they take care of the rest ever thought about what the rest actually meant.
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