Inside The Gang World Of Zoe Pound: The Untold Story Of Miami’s Most Secretive Criminal Organization HT
All right, one of y’all actually asked for this in the last video, and I’m not going to lie, when I saw that name pop up, I knew this one was different. So, let’s talk about it. Miami, 1990. You want to know how feared these dudes really were? By 2003, Sony Pictures had their name in a Will Smith movie.
Big budget, 273 million. Will Smith going at him. Martin Lawrence chasing him through the streets of Miami. And here’s the wild part. Nobody asked permission. Nobody paid for the name. And Hollywood never really explained why they used a real crew like that. That ain’t even a flex. That’s just what it was.
They ain’t wear colors, ain’t throw signs, never even admitted they existed. Most of them told police they were just quote a movement about Haitian pride. But that’s not the full story. This right here is about the man who helped build one of the most low-key, hardest to track organizations Florida ever seen. His name, depending on who you ask, was McCary Lafon, but out on the streets they called him Ma Zoey.
And this is his story. This story doesn’t start with Maka Zoey. It starts on a boat. December 12th, 1972. A leaking 56- foot wooden sailboat makes landfall at Pompano Beach, Florida. 65 passengers aboard. 3 weeks at sea. Some traded their shoes for food in Cuba. Some were briefly jailed in the Bahamas.
All of them, every single one, believed America would be different. They were arrested the moment they touched shore. No welcome, no processing, no asylum hearing, just handcuffs and a holding cell. That was America’s greeting to the first documented boat of Haitian refugees to reach South Florida. And that was just the beginning.
Through the late 70s and into the 80s, they kept coming. Fleeing the Duvalier dictatorship, fleeing political persecution, fleeing poverty so deep it had no bottom. They came on boats that weren’t built for open water and storms that didn’t care who survived. Nearly 2th3 of all foreignb born Haitians in Miami arrived in the 1980s. 40% between 1980 and 1984 alone and almost 20% of them, one in five, were 14 years old or younger.
children arriving in a country that had already decided what it thought of them and what America thought of Haitians in the early 1980s was not kind. In 1983, the Centers for Disease Control publicly identified Haitians as one of the four primary risk groups for AIDS. Not a region, not a behavior, a nationality, an entire people branded on federal letterhead as a biological threat.
Think about what that does to a kid just trying to make it through middle school in Miami. You already the one speaking Creole, already the one whose lunch smelled different, already the one getting called banana boat walking down the hallway. And now the US government just told everybody your people got disease. Think about how that hits.
They called it Haitian Friday. Coordinated attacks on Haitian students at Miami schools. Organized, repeated, expected. Kids who knew what day it was would brace themselves before the bell rang. That ain’t just a rough time. That’s a whole war being fought on a generation of kids. Now into this world, a family arrives.
Ali Adam was born in Haiti to a politically connected family. When the regime changed, as regimes in Haiti always eventually did, the entire family was targeted. No time to plan, no time to pack properly. They fled by boat. Three aunts, two cousins, lost at sea before they reached Florida. The crossing took everything. The kind of loss that doesn’t leave you, it just becomes part of how you see the world.
He was 9 years old when he arrived. 19 people in that family pulled everything they had, scraped together $40,000, and opened a supermarket in Carol City. The Carol City supermarket, legitimate, hardworking proof that the dream was still possible. This is where Little Haiti took root.
a neighborhood north of downtown Miami named by an activist named Ver just who wrote a letter to the Miami Herald proposing they call it Little Porto Prince. The name stuck. A whole community built on refusal. Refusal to disappear. Refusal to be ashamed. But here’s the part about Little Haiti. They don’t put on no brochure. Right outside that store, right in front of everything that family was trying to build, there was a whole different world.
Dudes with rope chains, Benzes parked out front. Money that definitely wasn’t coming from selling rice and beans. And right there in that doorway, a 9-year-old kid just standing there watching. Years later, Ali Adam would say it plainly. To me, if I look back, it’s like they became the visual of what I wanted in America. That boy’s name was Ali.
But there was another boy not far away watching the same streets drawing the same conclusions. The published record calls him McCary Lafon. A more recent interview gives a different name entirely. The streets would come to know him differently. Before there was Zoe Pound, there was somebody else’s empire.
And before there was somebody else’s empire, there was a 10year-old boy watching from a doorstep. His name was Kenny. Kenneth Williams. But Carol City didn’t call him Kenneth. Carol City called him Booby. And Booby, let me be real clear about this. He wasn’t no street corner hustler. Booby was an architect.
The man put together an $85 million cocaine operation, moving product across 12 different states. His crew, the Booby Boys, got tied to at least 35 murders. And later on, federal prosecutors said it themselves. This was one of the most dangerous operations South Florida had ever seen. And every single day, Booby Williams posted up in front of a Haitian family’s supermarket in Carol City.
rope chain, Mercedes, money that announced itself before he even opened his mouth. Ali Adam was 10 years old when he first saw him. 10. And here’s the thing I keep coming back to. This isn’t a story about a bad kid making bad choices. This is a story about a child with extraordinary intelligence and zero legitimate infrastructure watching the only visible model of success available to him and making a completely rational decision.
He wanted in Booby made him a lieutenant 10 years old, a lieutenant running shifts, managing people, handling $79,000 at a time and taking home 3,000 just for that. You want to talk about an education? That’s advanced level training right there. Logistics, people management, money flow, all taught on a street corner to a kid.
By his early teens, the operation Ali was running reached Jacksonville, Savannah, Atlanta, Mississippi. Projects and trap spots stretched across the southeast, all feeding back to Carol City. Now, I want you to really sit with that for a second. Cuz this is the part where it gets easy to judge and the part where that judgment don’t really get it.
This kid had already seen his family lose three ants and two cousins just trying to cross the ocean. He watched them come here, build something the right way, and still stand in that doorway like nobody saw them. And then right outside that same door, there’s a man who figured something out.
A man who found a way to matter, to have power, to actually be seen. The system didn’t fail Ali Adam. The system never showed up for him in the first place. Booby eventually went federal. Convicted in 2000 on all charges, 35 murders attributed to his organization, five tons of cocaine, 12 states, life without parole. The Sun Sentinel covered the sentencing.
The feds called it a victory. What they didn’t put in the press release is what happened next. The Carol City projects, the physical geography of that entire world were being torn down. Redevelopment, urban renewal, whatever name they put on it. The community that raised these men was being systematically dismantled.
And if you know Miami, you know what gets built when poor neighborhoods get cleared out. It ain’t community centers. The Booby Boys were gone. The John Doe’s were taken down the same year. Two of Miami’s dominant street organizations dismantled inside of 12 months. And into that vacuum, into that sudden enormous silence, stepped an organization that had been quietly building for nearly a decade.
No colors, no tattoos, no hierarchy you could put on a chart in hand to a jury. Just 19 people who had found each other in a juvenile detention facility in Saber Palm. Just a word zo that meant bones in Haitian creole. Just a conviction forged in a cell that they would never again be the ones getting jumped on a Friday. The vacuum was real and 19 people were already waiting to fill it.
It didn’t start in the streets. It started in a sale. Saber Palm juvenile detention early 1990s boys cycling in and out two months three months back to the neighborhood back again the state of Florida’s answer to Haitian Friday to Carol City to a generation of children the system didn’t know what to do with so it just kept locking them up and releasing them and locking them up again and in that facility something happened that nobody planned they found each other Adam tells plainly.
He’s 9, 10, 11 years old, cycling through Saber Palm on minor charges, and he stops meeting boys from a different part of the world. Boys from Little Haiti, from Saber Palm itself. Chub, Joe, Annie, Poe, out go Happy, a young man the streets would come to know as Makazoi. The published record calls him Mari Lafon.
A 2024 interview gives a different name entirely. Even his identity stayed hidden. Here’s what Ali said about those early days. And I want you to hear this carefully because it reframes everything that comes after. They ain’t never had no war with no Americans. They going through it with some Haitians. The original conflict that forged Zoe Pound was not black versus Haitian.
It was Haitian versus Haitian. internal, territorial, the brutality of scarcity turning people against their own. What they built in response was a stronghold, not a gang, not yet. A collective, 19 people who decided that whatever happened on the outside, they moved together. They gathered addresses. They noted names.
They established inside a juvenile detention facility the foundational logic of what would become the most secretive criminal organization in Florida history. And they needed a name. Zo bones Haitian Creole for the hardest thing in the human body. Ali again. It come from really fighting in jail. They don’t make a dude numb.
Dudes still start cultural situations within jail. Bones don’t break easy. Bones survive what flesh cannot. You could beat a Zoey. You could lock him up, but you could not make him soft. That was the declaration. That was the entire ideology compressed into two letters. The History Channels Gangland documentary would later confirm it.
Pound. Power of unified negroes and divinity. Zoey pound. Hard to the bone. Unified in God. No colors, no tattoos, no initiation beatings, no gang signs you could photograph and put in a police report. If you were Haitian, you were already a Zoey. You didn’t join. You were born into eligibility.
That organizational design, that deliberate invisibility was not an accident. It was genius. But here is where the crack appears. The crack that runs all the way through this story from founding to collapse. The History Channel documented it. Makazoi saw movement, Haitian pride, cultural protection. Ali counted money. Both of them were right.
And they were building the same organization for completely different reasons. In organizations built on that kind of contradiction, the crack doesn’t close. It widens. 1990 19 people. One word Zo ain’t no founder. Ali would say 30 years later ain’t no founder word who got more money that I understand.
Maka Zoe would have told you something else entirely. That difference quiet ideological never fully resolved is the engine of everything that follows. The Zoey Pound was born and nobody outside of Saber Palm knew yet what that meant. By 1993, the 19 people from Saber Palm had become something else entirely. They had a headquarters, corner of Northeast 56th Street and 1st Avenue, Little Haiti, a house.
They called it the White House. And if you drove past that corner and didn’t lower your window, didn’t identify yourself, they would shoot up your car. Welcome to the Empire. Here’s the part about this time that really gets me. While the FBI was building files, while Miami Dade had eyes on everything, Zoey Pound was out here doing something nobody else in South Florida was doing.
They were throwing parades, old school Chevrolets, candy paint, oversized rims, Haitian flags hanging from every window, snapping in the Miami Heat. They would pull these convoys up outside high schools across greater Miami right as the bell rang and just sit there visible, proud, unmistakable. Think about what that meant to a Haitian kid who’d been absorbing Haitian Friday since middle school.
Suddenly, here are your people, loud, beautiful, untouchable, parking outside your school and daring anyone to say something. Before long, Haitian youths across South Florida were wearing Haitian bandanas. Not because Zoe Pound told them to, because Zoe Pound showed them they could. Whether you call it gang recruitment or cultural reclamation depends entirely on which side of that school gate you were standing on.
For the kids inside, it looked like power. For law enforcement watching from a distance, it looked like something else entirely. But 1995 brought a rupture. The feds put Zoey Pound on the front page, wanted for 40 bodies. Several prominent members panicked. They publicly denounced the violence, split off, and formed a rap group under the same name, created distance, created deniability.
Ali Adams take on it was blunt. The 40 bodies, he said that had nothing to do with them. The split happened because some people couldn’t handle the heat. Maka Zoe didn’t split. Maka Zoe stayed. That decision defines him completely. Now, the Miami River. I need you to understand something about that river before we get into what went down there.
The Miami River had already been a drug route since the 80s. So dirty that back in the mid80s, Miami cops themselves got caught pulling cocaine straight off boats and then flipping it. At one point, three people drowned in a single raid just trying to get away. That river had blood on it long before Zoey Pound ever showed up.
What they did was industrialize it. Throughout the late 1990s, they boarded ships carrying Colombian cocaine into the port of Miami, took crews hostage, robbed the shipments. Crew members who resisted did not survive. According to law enforcement records, witnesses were eliminated to protect the operation. No loose ends. March 5th, 1997.
Six armed members stormed a freighter at the Miami docks. Crew taken prisoner. According to investigators, what followed was brutal. The ship was robbed clean. Alli Adam later wrote an entire book about it. Zoey Pound Port of Miami Boat Robbery, published under his own name from experience.
And if the river was the muscle, Haiti was the vein. From 1998 to 2005, verified by federal indictment, Zoe Pound transported over 1,000 kg of cocaine from Haiti to Miami. boats and American Airlines flights. Pre 911, the method was almost embarrassingly simple. Suitcases on commercial flights, corrupt workers inside the airline.
Federal prosecutors later documented the scale in their indictment. The numbers were staggering. Ali described it simply. Before 911, that [ __ ] was sweet. You could do that every day. They even had a cop inside. Ali’s uncle Gary Jerome, a Miami Police Department crime scene investigator, used the official vehicle, moved at least 125 kilos, sent millions back to Haiti.
Two other officers fled the country when the arrest came. Never caught. Still out there somewhere. Then 1999, M. Azoi was arrested for allegedly shooting two Haitian men. But here is the detail that reframes everything. Those men had been placed under the organization’s internal protection code, the don’t touch law.
You put a man under that code, nobody touches him. Nobody. Makazoi allegedly touched them anyway. The organization he helped build, the code he helped write, swallowed him first. Witness recantations failed. He went to prison. And the empire he co-built kept growing without him. $1.5 million a week by 2004. 400 people involved.
The machine didn’t need his maker anymore. Let me tell you something that still doesn’t have a clean explanation. July 18th, 2003, Bad Boys 2 opens in theaters worldwide. Directed by Michael Bay, produced by Jerry Brookheimimer, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. $273 million at the box office. The fourth highest opening weekend for an R-rated film in Hollywood history at that point behind only The Matrix Reloaded, Hannibal, and 8 Mile.
And right there in the first act, a Haitian gang called the Zoey Pound hijacks a DEA money transfer on the MacArthur Causeway. Car chase shootout. Will Smith fighting them through the streets of Miami. The most secretive criminal organization in Florida. The organization that never wore colors, never threw signs, never admitted it existed on a Sony picture screen in cinemas across the world.
No consultant credit in the film. No licensing agreement on record. No statement from Jerry Brookheimr Films explaining how a real gang’s real name ended up in a $273 million blockbuster. The Zoey Pound Mafia biography written by someone with direct access states plainly that the organization garnered a featured segment for The Bad Boys 2 movie debut.
That’s the book’s claim. Nobody from Hollywood has ever confirmed or denied it. I’ll say this much. By 2002, when that film was shooting in Miami, Zoe Pound’s name was already all over FBI files. Miami Dade briefings. They ain’t need no meeting. The streets had already told that story. Now, that’s just how I see it.
I could be wrong, but the fact nobody’s ever really answered that question, this says more about Zoe Pound’s reach than any raid ever could. Now, while Maoie was behind bars, the organization’s other arm was moving in a very different direction. Music. Zoey Pound Entertainment, a legitimate label or at least legitimately structured. Mac Azoi was directly associated with it even from prison.
Their flagship artist, Red Eyes, was recording with Lil Wayne, Rick Ross, Pitbull, and Bun B. Makazoi himself was featured on the television series American Gangster. He was given interviews from inside a federal facility about his sentence, his appeal, his faith in God. The man was incarcerated and still building a brand.
Respect the work ethic even if you can’t respect the work. On the outside, Ali Adam was neck deep in the industry. Diddy parties in Miami, the white parties in the Hamptons. He released Freddy P from the band directly from Puff’s contract. He mediated situations for Jim Jones. He handed Lil Wayne $230,000 to flip when Wayne was in the mud between Cash Money and his solo run.
And then Wayne tried him. Wayne wouldn’t cooperate on a music situation. Kept playing games. So Ally printed 20,000 flyers. 20,000 distributed them across Miami. The flyers read, “Cash money must leave Miami or show Miami love.” Then he found Wayne’s Rolls-Royce Phantom at a gas station and lit it on fire.
20,000 flyers and an arson over a music deal. That is not a threat. That is a demonstration. That is Zoe Pound telling the most valuable artists in hip hop, “You are in our city and cities have rules.” They reconciled on live radio shortly after. Ali and Wayne on air in Miami declaring the beef dead. Wayne still had Ali’s $300,000 somewhere, but the point had been made.
Bergman found out even earlier. Circlehouse dice game lost $28,000 to Ali in one sitting. When Cash Money eventually moved their base of operations to Miami when Lil Wayne and Baby and the whole operation relocated to the city, Zoey Pound laid the red carpet. Ali described it exactly. Zoey Pound Miami.
It was like, “Oh, they would y’all that z lay a red carpet for them. Y’all Gucci, right?” It had become culture. The empire ain’t fall from the outside. It fell from within. That’s the thing about anything built on silence. When it finally breaks, it’s not because of surveillance or some genius police work or the feds figuring it all out.
No, it’s cuz somebody talked, then somebody else talked, then another one did. June 2009, Fort Pierce, Florida. After more than a year of investigation, six of the highest ranking Zoey Pound leaders in the area were arrested simultaneously. Fort Pierce Police Chief Shawn Baldwin stood in front of cameras and said, “Taking down these particular six members of the Zoey Pound gang is going to have a tremendous impact on the safety and security of the streets of Fort Pierce.
” He wasn’t wrong about Fort Pierce. He just didn’t know about everything else still running. Because while Fort Pierce was being celebrated as a victory, Ali Adam was still operating, still moving weight, still building, still untouchable. or so it appeared. Then came the BET Awards. Los Angeles. Ali walks out of the building. Federal agents are waiting.
The charges read like a criminal career highlight reel. Kingpin. Continuing criminal enterprise. Conspiracy to distribute over 6,000 kg of cocaine. Money laundering. Wire fraud. Mortgage application fraud. 6,000 kg. To put that in perspective, the federal indictment covering the entire Booby Boy’s operation, the crew that raised Ali covered five tons total over a decade.
Ali’s charges covered more than that. The student had exceeded the teacher. He was placed in solitary confinement, a one-man room for 3 years and 7 months before sentencing even began. No general population, no yard, just a room and the weight of what was coming. And what was coming was 115 people, 115 cooperating witnesses, cousins, business partners, street level dealers, the two women who were mothers of his children, his cousin P.
Jerome, his right-hand gray, airline workers, real estate attorneys, the broker who signed off on the houses, even his own accountant, the man who structured 123 homes, two Dairy Queens, a coin laundry, a record label. All of it built to clean money. All of it now evidence. 115 people decided that whatever loyalty meant, it didn’t mean triple life.
I’m going to be real with you. I don’t even know how you sit in a one-man cell and process that people who ate with you, moved with you, called you family, every last one of them across the table from a federal prosecutor. Facing triple life, Ali accepted a 30-year plea deal at age 33. He later filed a motion, argued successfully that he was a supervisor, not the organizer leader of the moneyaundering scheme, and got 12 years removed.
He served 18 years total. My only fear, he said after his release, is being broke, but going back, that’s over with. And Maka Zoey, he was released from prison, then deported. Ali Adams said it plain. He gets deported when he gets out. The Bahamas, it’s over with. He ain’t seen America no more. The man who co-built the most feared Haitian organization in American history.
who ran an empire from a federal sale, who gave interviews about his faith in God and his pending appeal, who had his name put in a Will Smith movie without anyone asking permission. Deported to the Bahamas. Not dead, not glorified, just gone. The founders are gone. The name remains. June 18th, 2018, Deerfield Beach, Florida.
A 20-year-old rapper named Yasay Onroy, known to the world as XSX Tentacion, walks out of Reva Motorsports carrying a Louis Vuitton bag containing $50,000 in cash he had just withdrawn from his bank account. There is surveillance footage of every second of what happened next. An SUV blocked his BMW. Two masked men rushed him. They took the bag.
Boatright pulled the trigger. XXXTentacion was pronounced dead at the hospital. He was 20 years old. His album released three months earlier had debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Boatright, Trayvon Nuome, and Dedric Williams were convicted of firstdegree murder on March 20th, 2023. Each received mandatory life sentences without the possibility of parole.
All three were affiliated with ZMF, the Zoey Mafia family, a faction of Zoey Pound. Miami Dade police described ZMF as the Zoey Pound identity fused with the BMF financial model using rap music as a front while running active criminal operations. Members who didn’t rap were enforcers, ZMF tags documented across Miami, Atlanta, and Memphis.
30 years after 19 boys found each other in a juvenile detention facility in Saber Palm. 30 years after Zo was just a word scratched into a wall meaning bones, meaning we don’t break. The name had traveled so far from its origin that it was now attached to the murder of one of the most streamed artists of his generation. That’s not a legacy.
That’s a warning. Ali Zoey Adam is in New York right now. Three-year probation. cannot return to Miami. 115 cooperating witnesses see to that he has written 11 books. He is doing press. He is talking loudly and publicly about Haiti and politics and the music industry and what the streets cost you when you finally sit down and do the math.
Makazoi is somewhere in the Bahamas. No confirmed public presence, no interviews, no books, no press. The man the streets built their mythology around has no street left to stand on. And Zoe Pound, the organization they co-founded in a juvenile facility over 30 years ago, is still running. federal convictions as recently as 2025.
Active in Florida, the Bahamas, Haiti, and multiple states. The 19 people from Saber Palm became something that outlasted all of them. One co-founder banned from his own city. One deported to an island. The organization still operational. The cases still ongoing. And somewhere in Little Haiti, on a wall, on a corner, spray painted in an alley that gentrification hasn’t reached yet, it still reads, “Zoey Pound, inside the criminal empire of Maka Zoey, the Haitian king who built Miami’s most secretive gang.