Oakland’s Deadliest Kingpin — The Feds Couldn’t Touch Him – HT
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008. Just after 7 in the morning, Castro Valley, California, a residential street 15 miles southeast of Oakland. The kind of culde-sac where the lawns get watered on a timer and the neighbors wave at the mailman by name. A man named Mark Anthony Candler is asleep inside one of those houses.
33 years old, 6 feet of West Oakland Street legend, living under a Castro Valley roof. He has been shot multiple times in his life and walked away from every one of them. His girlfriend is asleep next to him. He does not know that 400 officers from 17 agencies are converging on 34 addresses across the East Bay at this exact moment.
He does not know one of those addresses is his. The knock comes, the door opens, the handcuffs go on. No shots fired, no struggle on the lawn, no grainy news footage of a man dragged across a driveway. Just a quiet arrest at sunrise in a quiet suburb, ending the longest run any West Oakland figure had managed since Felix Mitchell. By noon, the California Attorney General was at a microphone in downtown Oakland, calling ACORN members urban terrorists.
By the end of the news cycle, an Oakland police lieutenant named Ursy Joiner had told reporters that his homicide unit had counted 37 murders in West Oakland in 3 years, and most of them trace back to a war between three crews. The man at the top of one of those crews had just been arrested in his pajamas.
The block called him Mac. The records called him Mac Blast. The federal government never indicted him. The state of California did the work the feds didn’t have to. This is how he was born in East Oakland in the mid 1970s, somewhere on the flat lands east of the lake in the years right after Felix Mitchell’s 69 mob had turned heroin into a citywide industry.
Public records do not give up his exact birthday. The court files don’t either. What the police would later say at a press conference was that he was 33 at arrest, that he had grown up east of the freeway, and that at 14 years old, he moved across town to the Acorn projects in West Oakland and never really left.
Acorn sat between Brush Street and Mandela Parkway, the Embaradero on one side, 10th Street on the other. roughly a thousand units of low-rise public housing built between 1962 and 1974, paid for by an urban renewal program that had bulldozed the historic Black Seven Street neighborhood to make room for it.
Old Oakland called the area the cornfields. Newer Oakland called it the corns. The center of gravity was a high-rise at 10558th Street called City Towers. Hollywood shot scenes of Set It Off There in the mid 90s. National Geographic eventually devoted an episode to it called Cokeand. By the time a 14-year-old kid from the east side walked into Acorn, the buildings already had a history.
He was the next chapter, not the first. To understand what ACORN meant to a 14-year-old in the late 1980s, you have to understand what Felix Mitchell had done to those buildings 10 years earlier. Mitchell had run the most disciplined heroin operation Oakland had ever seen out of the San Antonio villas in East Oakland and the Acorn Apartments in West Oakland.
He had done it with a hierarchy, a payroll, and a code. He had been killed at the federal penitentiary in Levvenworth on August 21st, 1986. And his funeral procession through Oakland had run a Rolls-Royce hearse and 14 flower cars past crowds that line the streets. Federal prosecutors had thought taking him out would clean up the city.
What it actually did was remove the only authority strong enough to keep the corners from killing each other. The body count went up. It never came back down. That was the city the kid walked into in the late 80s. Acorn no longer had a king. It had crews. It had open territory. It had teenagers willing to do what older men had stopped doing.
He started running drugs the way any other acorn teenager in 1988 or 1989 started running drugs. The California Attorney General’s Office, looking back, would write that the Acorn operation began as a marijuana and cocaine network in the 1980s and that Candler grew up inside it. The lieutenant who would eventually arrest him put it differently.
He said Candler began to flex his power early. He said people follow him. He said he built a reputation. The word reputation in West Oakland in those years did not mean grades or politeness. It meant the block knew you would do what you said you would do. By the time he was old enough to drink legally, he was old enough to be listed in police intelligence files as someone to watch.
10 years later, he was the man the police were watching. 20 years later, he was the man the police finally took. But Acorn made something else inside him, too. Something that would matter as much as the drug operation. When his name finally went into the record, he understood that a project like Acorn had never had its own voice on a record.
He understood the studios that mattered were across the bay in San Francisco. And in 1999 or 2000, he took a teenager from the building, a kid who would later record under the name Shady Nate into a San Francisco studio for the first time. He let him spit a verse on a project Candler had paid for himself. The teenager would later tell a Bay Area paper that Mac was the first man who had ever shown him what a studio looks like.
The kingpin was also the mentor. The dealer was also the producer. The corner, he claimed, was not really a corner. It was a building. City Towers, 1055 8th Street, a highrise that looks over the rest of Acorn the way a watchtowwer looks over a yard. From its higher floors, you could see the Bay Bridge and the port.
From his lower floors, you could see who was walking into the project and who was walking out. The man who controlled the towers controlled the flow. By the early 2000s, the flow was his. The Acorn operation was moving cocaine and marijuana out of the project into the broader East Bay. And according to a California Department of Justice press release issued the day of his arrest into Detroit, that last word did some work.
Detroit, 2,500 miles of pipeline between Acorn’s highrise and the Midwest’s worst neighborhoods. The state never published the volume. Court records do not list a kilo count. The DEA never put a public bounty on him. So, this story will not invent one. What the state did say in writing on the record was that he had been a prolific drug trafficker in Oakland and in Detroit, had been shot several times and was suspected to be responsible for homicide and a number of shootings.
That sentence was the state of California’s official summary of him on the morning he was arrested. Every word of it had been chosen by lawyers. The inner circle was small and known. His girlfriend, April Williams, kept the guns. She kept them specifically at her mother’s house in the 1300 block of Sea Street in Hwood, which would later be searched and produce enough firearms charges to require $75,000 bail.
A man named William Loven ran with him. Loven worked for the city of Oakland, seven years as a water meter repairman on the city payroll in a uniform with a city ID card. The fact that one of the Acorn Gang’s known associates was clocking in at a municipal job every morning would matter more than anyone realized in June of 2008.
A codefendant named Elijah Thomas, 24 years old, was on the street with him on the night of the attempted murder that would eventually put him in a cage. The block had three rivals. Ghost Town to the north, a crew built around the long blocks west of San Pablo Avenue, the lower bottoms further west, anchored in the projects below 14th Street, and the loose set of West Oakland independents who didn’t fly any flag, but answered to whoever paid.
Every one of those rivals had been at the same playgrounds as Acorn 15 years earlier. Every one of them was now staking out the same four square miles. The lieutenant who eventually put Candler in cuffs would say the war between Acorn Ghost Town and the Lower Bottoms had started over a dispute about a car and a girl.
That is how those wars start. That is also how they end. The signature move was the label. He called it Hustlanity Mobism Entertainment. He used it to put Acorn names on wax. Shady Nate, Jay Dub, Mac Booty, Young New, a teenager named Bird, a producer named Maya Gutter. Half the building eventually had a verse on something. He pressed the records.
He distributed them through a Bay Area outfit called Rap Bay. The Kingpin, who controlled the building, also controlled the brand of the building. The corner had a logo. The logo had a back catalog. That was not an accident. That was not vanity. A record label that moved cash through CD sales and live bookings and merchandise was a business.
A business could explain a lifestyle. A business could explain a phone full of unknown numbers. A business could explain why a 30-some ACORN native owned what he owned without ever filing a tax return that listed a corner. The state never charged him with money laundering. The state never had to.
The label did his job for 15 years before anyone with a badge had time to look at the books. By the time the federal government would later look at Acorn, what they saw was not a street crew with a side hustle. They saw an organization that had wrapped itself in a record label and a record label that had wrapped itself in an organization and could not always tell you which was which.
That ambiguity worked for a long time until the day in May of 2008 when Jerry Brown sent 10 state agents to Oakland and told the Oakland Police Department to start preparing for the largest gang takeown in the city’s history. The body count is the only honest way to measure what Acorn became at its peak.
Lieutenant Ursy Joiner, who has spent 17 years in the Oakland Police Department and was running the homicide unit when Operation Nutcracker came together, told reporters at a podium on June 17th, 2008 that he had counted 37 murders in West Oakland in 3 years and that most of them sat at the intersection of Acorn, Ghost Town, and the Lower Bottoms.
He called Acorn the most violent gang he had ever seen. The reporters wrote it down. Nobody printed a list of the 37 names. Some are still cold. The number is the left tenants number. The number is also a fact about how the West Oakland Police Department understood the war. By the spring of 2008, they had stopped trying to solve them one by one.
They had started trying to take the head off the snake. The state had been listening. Beginning in March of 2008, the Oakland Police Department had opened a wiretapdriven investigation into Acorn. The phones were up, the buys were happening. In May, California Attorney General Jerry Brown sent 10 special agents from the State Department of Justice across the bay to join the operation.
The FBI was already on it. The Alama County Sheriff’s Office, Berkeley Police, Union City, Livermore, Fremont, 17 agencies in total had quietly joined a single command working out of the city of Oakland’s Emergency Operations Center at605 Martin Luther King Jr. Way. But here’s where the story turns dark. Because 9 days before the dawn raid that would end the Acorn era on the afternoon of June 7th, 2008, a small thing happened that would tear apart not just the Acorn organization, but the city government on top of it.
An Oakland police patrol car drove past a liquor store in West Oakland and saw a gun on the seat of a parked vehicle. The officers ran the plate. The vehicle was registered to William Loven, Acorn Associate, water meter repair man, city employee. They called for a tow truck.
They wrote up the report and while the report was being written, a phone call came in. The phone call was Loan on his cell from somewhere offse scene talking to Mark Anthony Candler. The officers would have to write that conversation into the report. They would have to log it. The wiretap had now metastasized from a phone in a project to a phone call documented in a field report that was about to be filed in the record system the entire city government had access to.
A few hours later, the Oakland city administrator herself rolled up to the tow scene. Her name was Deborah Edgerly. She was the highest ranking black woman in the history of Oakland city government. She had been appointed by then Mayor Jerry Brown. She had spent 22 years on the city’s payroll. And William Loven, the man whose car was being towed, was her nephew.
She demanded to know what was happening. She threatened the officers with internal affairs. She got back in her own car and drove away. The officers finished the tow. The report went into the file and inside the emergency operations center on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, a federal state task force that had been listening to ACORN’s phones for 3 months realized that the city administrator of Oakland had just walked into the middle of their investigation 10 days before they were scheduled to take it
down. 10 days. The clock was already running. Tuesday, June 17th, 2008, 7 in the morning across the East Bay, 400 officers from 17 agencies hit 34 locations simultaneously. Berkeley, Alama, Castro Valley, Haywood, San Leandro, Polle, Hercules, Antioch, Concord, Vallejo, Fairfield. 250 officers and active raid teams at the moment of breach with the rest staged on perimeter.
The command post was the city’s own emergency operations center. The ground game was OPD. The optics were Jerry Browns. The most striking footage came from City Towers itself. Officers walked handcuffed Acorn residents out the front of 10558th Street and past a daycare on the opposite side of the block where parents were dropping their children off for the morning.
Children in strollers watched men they had grown up around being put into vans. The buildings the Kingpin had spent 15 years claiming were emptied out one floor at a time. Mark Anthony Candler was not in those buildings. He was at a residence in Castro Valley, 15 miles from the project. The arrest there was clean.
No weapons fired, no standoff. April Williams, his girlfriend, was taken into custody for the firearms recovered at her mother’s Hwood home. Elijah Thomas was taken in for the attempted murder count. By the time the press conference started downtown, the attorney general had a list of names ready and a phrase already chosen.
Jerry Brown stepped to the microphones and called ACORN members urban terrorists. He used the words asymmetrical warfare. The Oakland Police Chief Wayne Tucker said it was a great day for the city and warned that there would be more. Lieutenant Ursy Joiner said Acorn was the most violent gang he had ever seen.
The numbers were read out. 54 arrests across the 3-month investigation. 41 firearms seized. 34 addresses hit at dawn. What the press conference did not say, because the press conference could not yet say it, was that this raid had already cost a different woman her career. By June 27th, 10 days after the raid, Mayor Ron Delums placed Deborah Edgely on administrative leave.
By July 1st, he fired her. 22 years on the city payroll, a career that had started before any of the Acorn defendants were old enough to read, ended over a tow truck and a phone call. She had not been criminally charged. She would never be criminally charged. She would later sue the city for wrongful termination and gender discrimination and an Alama County jury would reject her case in 2011 after deliberating for 40 minutes.
Her own lawyer would tell reporters afterward that the case had come down to a beauty contest between Ron Dels and Deborah Edgely and Ron Delums had won. A police report had written itself into the destruction of the second most powerful person in Oakland city government. The kingpin she had never met had taken her down without ever speaking her name.
The case against Candler himself was assigned to Judge Vernon Nakahara of Alama County Superior Court. The lead prosecutor was Deputy Attorney General John Bruhard. The defense was a Bay Area attorney named James Giller. The preliminary hearing ran three weeks. The name victim of the attempted murder count, a 27-year-old reputed Ghost Town member with prior felonies, had recanted his identification of Candler.
Other witnesses had recanted theirs. The judge sealed the victim’s name at the prosecution’s request because of credible threats. One witness on the stand testified that she had received two threatening text messages during the hearing itself. Bruhar argued that the recantations were fear, not innocence. Judge Nakahara held Candler to answer.
The witnesses had already learned what Acorn could do from inside a courthouse. The trial that followed has not entered the public case law databases. The two open mirrors of California state appellet decisions return errors on the underlying ruling. The official sentence imposed on Mark Anthony Candler, the exact number of years, the structure of any enhancements, the parole eligibility does not exist in any source the public can access without a trip to the Alama County Clerk’s Office. What is on the
record is that he was convicted at trial of attempted murder with a criminal street gang enhancement that the California Court of Appeal affirmed that the California Supreme Court denied review and that on February 13th, 2015, the Honorable Claudia Wilin of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California denied his federal petition for a writ of habius corpus in the case captioned Candler versus Miller.
The respondent was the warden of the California Department of Corrections facility holding him. Her name was Amy Miller. He has been a state prisoner ever since. The federal government never indicted him. That phrase deserves to be said twice. The federal government never indicted Mark Anthony Candler. No RICO.
No continuing criminal enterprise. No murder for hire. No federal drug conspiracy, no firearms charges in federal court. The Northern District of California’s United States Attorney’s Office, which is one of the most aggressive raketeering offices in the country, watched the state of California prosecute the man at the top of West Oakland’s most violent organization and never filed a single federal charge against him.
The takedown was Jerry Brown’s. The conviction was Brewhard’s. The sentence was Judge Nakahara’s. The federal courthouse on Clay Street in downtown Oakland sat across the bay from his project for 15 years and never once put his name on an indictment. But the work he started did get federal time.
It just got it later and on different defendants. From his sale, Candler kept building. He pressed a double disc album called Operation Nutcracker on his label Hustellanity Mobism Entertainment and distributed it through Rap Bay. The album’s structure was a series of interludes called Live from the Hole, Candler rapping straight from Prison between studio tracks recorded by Shady Nate, Jay Dub, Mac Booty, Young New, Maya Gutter, and the rest of the Acorn artists he had been mentoring since 1999.
He turned his own conviction into a brand. The state had taken his body. The label kept his voice on the street. What happened on that street while his voice was on the records, however, was the real legacy. On the evening of November 28th, 2011, 3 years and 5 months after the dawn raid, ACORN members fired into a crowd at a music video shoot at the corner of 7th Street and Willow in West Oakland.
They believed the Lower Bottoms were filming a video that disrespected Acorn. They were wrong. The crowd was just a crowd. A father named Hyram Lawrence was holding his 23-month-old son, also named Harum, in his arms. A bullet hit the child in the head. 11 days later, on December 9th, the family withdrew life support.
A 23-month-old boy was the answer to a music video. That murder was the case the federal government finally built. The Northern District of California indicted ACORN members under federal racketeering statutes. Deonte Hoof, street name Birdman, the shooter, pleaded guilty and went away for nearly four decades.
Houston Nathaniel III, street name Lil No, was charged with 21 felonies, including racketeering conspiracy, and went away for nearly four decades. Frederick Charles Coleman, 16 years old at the murder, pleaded guilty in state court to first-degree murder and got 25 years to life. Germaine Ernest called Acorn Maine pleaded guilty to a separate 2014 driveby killing at 10th and Willow and got 37 years federal.
John Devalier Daniels, the driver in that driveby, pleaded guilty and got 14 years federal. The cases were heard by Chief Judge Phyllis Hamilton. The prosecutors were assistant United States attorneys Bridg Martin and WS Wilson Leyon. None of those defendants was named alongside Mark Anthony Candler in any indictment.
They were the next generation. They were the children of the project he had built. The federal indictments that finally closed in on Acorn closed in on the kids who had watched him get walked out of a Castro Valley driveway in 2008 and decided the answer was to kill harder. The federal government got his case and just had to wait for a 23-month-old to die first.
That is the truer version of the story. The Kingpin California took down the federal courthouse that watched and waited and the toddler whose name now sits in a federal indictment that the man at the top of ACORN never had to read because by then he had already been a state prisoner for 4 years. The block called him Mac blast.
The state called him a prolific drug trafficker. The lieutenant who arrested him called Acorn the most violent gang he had ever seen. The federal government never gave him a docket number. None of those names is the most important one. The most important name in the entire story is Hyram Lawrence Jr.
23 months old shot in his father’s arms at 7th and Willow on a Monday evening in November because somebody on his block thought a music video was an insult. The kingpan California broke. The federal case waited for the children. That was the price of a decade in the high-rise at 1055 8th Street. A kid in a stroller paid it.
The corn always collects.