The 1988 War That Let the Junior Black Mafia Take Over Philadelphia from the Italians – HT

 

 

 

It’s late 1988 in Philadelphia. Inside a federal courtroom, Nicodemo Little Nikki Scaro sits at the defendant’s table alongside 16 of his closest associates. The jury has been deliberating for days on charges that include 10 murders, five attempted murders, extortion, gambling, and drug trafficking.

 Two of Scaro’s own men, Tommy Deljorno and Nikki Caramandi, have already flipped and are testifying against him. On November the 19th, the verdict comes down. Guilty on over 32 counts of rakateeering. Scaro receives a 55-year sentence. His under boss, Phil Leonetti, gets 45 years. Three of the family’s four capos are going away for decades.

 The most violent Italian crime family in America has just been decapitated in a single trial. But while federal prosecutors celebrated their historic RIO conviction, a group of young black men in West Philadelphia saw something else entirely. They saw an opportunity. This is the story of the Junior Black Mafia, the organization that would rise from the ashes of the Scaro regime to seize control of Philadelphia’s cocaine trade and the 1988 war that made it all possible.

 If you’re enjoying this content, make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss our upcoming videos on American organized crime history. To understand how the JBM came to dominate Philadelphia, you have to go back to the organization’s roots in the early 1980s when a young man named Aaron Jones was running errands on the streets of West Philadelphia.

 Jones wasn’t just any street kid. He was a protetéé of Robert Nudy Mims, one of the founding members of the original Black Mafia, the organization that had terrorized Philadelphia throughout the 1970s. The original Black Mafia had been one of the most violent crime syndicates in American history. They were responsible for over 40 killings, including the infamous 1973 massacre in Washington DC.

That left seven people dead, five of them children. They controlled the numbers rackets, the heroine trade, and used their connections to the Nation of Islam to build an empire that stretched from South Philadelphia to Atlantic City. But by the mid 1980s, the original black mafia was finished. Most of its leaders were locked up or dead.

 The streets they once controlled had been invaded by a new force. Jamaican poses, most notably the shower posy, were flooding into Philadelphia from New York, bringing with them cheap crack cocaine and a reputation for indiscriminate violence. It was in this chaos that Aaron Jones saw his moment. In January 1985, Jones founded the Junior Black Mafia in North Philadelphia. He wasn’t alone.

Alongside him were seven other founding members, including James and Haywood Cole, Mark Goldie Casey, Leonard Basil Patterson, and Benjamin Benny Goff. These men shared a common vision, one that centered around Aaron Jones’s fascination with the movie The Godfather. Jones saw himself as the Godfather. Leonard Patterson was his Sunny, and Mark Casey was the brain, the one who came up with the ideas and knew how to put things together.

 What set the JBM apart from other drug crews was their organization. They weren’t just corner boys slinging crack. They were trying to build something that would rival Lacosa Nostra itself. Members wore gold rings with the JBM initials encrusted in diamonds. They drove matching MercedesBenzes with JBM emblems on the door handles.

They held regular meetings. They had a motto that would become legendary on Philadelphia’s streets. Get down or lay down. That phrase meant exactly what it sounded like. Either you joined them and paid tribute or you were going to end up in the ground. The timing of the JBM’s rise couldn’t have been more perfect.

While they were consolidating power in North and West Philadelphia, the Italian mafia that had ruled South Philadelphia for decades was tearing itself apart. Since 1980, the Philadelphia crime family had been in a state of near constant warfare. Boss Angelo Bruno was assassinated in March 1980. His successor, Phil Tester, was killed by a nail bomb under his porch in March 1981.

And the man who emerged from the bloodshed, Nikki Scaro, was perhaps the most violent boss in American mafia history. Scaro’s reign was defined by paranoia and murder. He ordered people killed over the smallest perceived slights. He demanded that all criminals in his territory pay a street tax and he increasingly pushed his organization into narcotics trafficking which brought intense heat from federal law enforcement.

 By 1987, the walls were closing in. Two of Scaro’s own soldiers, Caramandi and Deljouro, had flipped and were feeding information to the FBI. In January 1988, a federal grand jury returned a sweeping RIO indictment against Scaro and 18 associates. The trial that followed would expose the inner workings of the Philadelphia mafia.

 Wiretaps, surveillance footage, and the testimony of made men who had decided their lives were worth more than their oath of silence. When Scaro and his 16 CO defendants were convicted in November 1988, it wasn’t just the end of his reign. It was the end of Italian dominance over Philadelphia’s underworld. And Aaron Jones was watching closely.

But the JBM didn’t just benefit from the Italian mafia’s collapse. They actively cooperated with what remained of it. From the earliest days of the organization, JBM members had been building bridges with Italian mobsters. Benjamin Benny Goff served as Jones’s primary conduit to the Italians. JBM members were regularly spotted at mob hangouts in South Philadelphia.

 And according to law enforcement reports, one JBM member was seen in the company of a young Joseph Skinny Joey Merino at local sporting events. The relationship made perfect sense for both sides. The Italians had connections to cocaine suppliers and the political protection that came from decades of corrupting city officials.

 The JBM had the muscle and the street network to actually move the product in black neighborhoods where Italian faces would stand out. Michael Younglood, an adviser to the JBM, used his Italian connections to obtain cocaine and methamphetamine for his drug trafficking operation. In 1983, he was indicted on drug charges alongside George Cowboy George Marterano, the son of Philadelphia crime family member Raymond Long John Marterano.

 It was a relationship that the Pennsylvania Crime Commission would later document in detail. They noted that the JBM cooperated with associates of the Bruno Scaro family in the distribution of cocaine and appeared to have modeled its criminal methods after the Italian organization. The JBM wasn’t just copying the Italians, they were becoming their partners.

 If you’re finding this story as compelling as we did while researching it, hit that subscribe button. We cover organized crime history from across the country every week. By 1988, the JBM had expanded beyond anything Aaron Jones could have imagined when he was shining shoes for black mafia members as a kid. According to federal prosecutors, the organization controlled drug networks across North, West, Southwest, and Northwest Philadelphia.

 The numbers were staggering. At their peak, the JBM was moving between 100 and 200 kilos of cocaine per month. That translated to roughly $30 million in revenue every single month. They had infiltrated or obtained financial interest in more than 33 legitimate businesses to launder their profits. Video stores, delicates, detail shops, security firms, car washes, barber shops and restaurants.

But there was a problem. The Jamaican shower posi wasn’t going to give up territory without a fight. The shower posi had earned their name from their habit of showering opponents with bullets. They operated out of Kingston, Jamaica, and had established cells across the American East Coast, including Miami, New York, and Philadelphia.

 By the mid 1980s, they controlled significant drug turf in West and North Philadelphia. In March 1988, something happened that would escalate tensions into open warfare. A man appeared on a television documentary, his face obscured, and claimed to be one of Philadelphia’s top four drug dealers. He flashed a gold ring with JBM engraved in diamonds and made a declaration that would send shock waves through the streets.

 “We’re going to start exterminating them,” he said, referring to the Jamaicans. “I’m telling them, we’re coming. Not maybe, might, or we’re thinking about it. We’re coming. Just think when, where, or how. Who’s going to be first? The man identified himself as the leader of the junior black mafia. Whether it was Aaron Jones himself behind that obscured face or another JBM member, the message was clear.

 War had been declared. What followed was a bloodbath that would transform Philadelphia’s streets into a war zone. Over the next 14 months, from the spring of 1988 through the summer of 1989, authorities would link more than two dozen murders to JBM Affairs. The killing started in March 1988 when rival drug dealer Albert Reagan was gunned down.

 Over the next three weeks, three members of Reagan’s crew, Dennis Caldwell, Brock White, and James Tate, were all murdered. But the JBM wasn’t just fighting external enemies. They were killing their own, too. On July 12th, 1988, JBM’s chief enforcer, Anthony Bigton Reed, shot Mark Lisby twice in the chest and once in the leg in front of Lisby’s home.

 The debt that cost Lisby his life, $150. In March 1989, Reed struck again, this time ambushing JBM soldier Neil Philresh Wilkinson. Reed and his driver, Kevin Black Bowman, believed Wilkinson had become a federal informant. Wilkinson was killed. His partner, Daryl Hickey Woods, was paralyzed from the waist down.

 5 days later on March 18th, 1989, Reed shot and killed a teenager named Michael Waters. The reason Waters had hit Reed’s car with a snowball. The war was not going smoothly for Aaron Jones either. In August 1989, gunmen from the rival Craig Haynes organization opened fire on Jones’s entourage. Jones survived. His lieutenant Donnie Debbone Branch, who had been acting as his bodyguard, was killed.

 Meanwhile, the JBM was also fighting the shower posi. The Jamaicans were not intimidated by television appearances or gold rings. They drove Volvos loaded with baby uzzies and had a simple policy. If you owed them $5, they’d spray your whole family. The Pennsylvania Crime Commission documented the war in a 1990 report, noting that longtime black drug dealers and members of the junior black mafia were attempting to regain territory taken over by the Jamaicans.

 But according to some sources, the war was also partially manufactured with federal agents using informants to stoke tensions between the crews in a divide and conquer strategy. Either way, bodies were dropping on both sides. By the time the dust settled, the JBM had lost several of its founding members.

 Mark Goldie Casey died of a drug overdose in Holsburg prison in September 1989 while awaiting trial for murder. Leonard Basil Patterson had been convicted for the murder of James Tate and Aaron Jones himself was facing charges for attempted murder. While Jones sat in detention awaiting trial in late 1989, he assigned Leroy Bucky Davis as acting boss of the JBM in West Philadelphia.

 It was a decision that would come back to haunt everyone involved. Davis ran the operation for several months while Jones fought his case, but Jones started hearing rumors from behind bars. Davis was not just running the business. He was planning a palace coup. On May the 14th, 1990, Brian Mucci Thornton, who would succeed Davis as acting boss, shot Leroy Bucky Davis to death on the front porch of a row house in West Philadelphia.

It was a hit ordered by Aaron Jones himself. a message to anyone who thought they could take his throne while he was locked up. Less than a month later, Thornton’s driver and bodyguard, Eric Little Hawk Watkins, killed a motorist named Greg Jackson in a road rage altercation, pistol whipping him and executing him in front of his wife.

 And in August 1990, JBM Latutenant Bruce Kennedy was shot to death behind the counter of his West Philadelphia market, Mommy’s Food Market. His crime, allegedly romancing Aaron Jones’s girlfriend while Jones was behind bars. The JBM was destroying itself from within. The federal government had been building a case against the JBM since the late 1980s.

They had wiretaps, surveillance, and most importantly, they had witnesses willing to testify. On October the 2nd, 1991, the hammer finally dropped. A federal grand jury returned a 32count indictment charging Aaron Jones, Brian Thornton, Bernard Quadier Fields, and 23 others with conspiracy to distribute cocaine, crack cocaine, and heroin.

 The indictment alleged that the defendants had been running a criminal enterprise that had distributed over 1,000 kg of cocaine between 1985 and 1991. The street value was estimated at $100 million. At the trial that followed, the government introduced evidence from 10 cooperating witnesses, more than 60 wiretapped conversations, and physical evidence, including documents, photographs, drugs, weapons, and drug paraphernalia.

 The evidence demonstrated how Jones and James Cole had founded the organization. It showed the numerous sources they had used to purchase cocaine, including connections to the Italian mafia. It detailed the division of the JBM into squads controlling different sections of Philadelphia, and it laid bare the violent tactics they had used to expand their territory.

 On April the 23rd, 1992, Aaron Jones and Brian Thornton were convicted. Jones received a life sentence for running a continuing criminal enterprise. Thornton received life as well. Bernard Fields, Mark Casey’s codefendant, Reginald Reeves, and other top left tenants all received life sentences. But Jones’s troubles weren’t over.

 He was also facing state murder charges for the 1990 killing of Bruce Kennedy. Prosecutors alleged that Jones had orchestrated the hit from behind bars using Sam Black Sam Brown to arrange for two hitmen to carry out the contract. The gunman shot Kennedy more than a dozen times as he was cooking a steak sandwich inside his market.

 James Anderson stood over Kennedy and fired three bullets into his head. Aaron Jones was convicted of firstdegree murder and sentenced to death. Today, Jones sits on Pennsylvania’s death row, having spent over three decades behind bars. The organization he built, the JBM that once controlled Philadelphia’s cocaine trade and generated $30 million a month, has been relegated to street legend.

 But the story of how they rose to power in the vacuum left by the collapse of Nikki Scaro’s reggime contains lessons that would be repeated in cities across America. When the Italian mafia fell, other organizations were waiting to take their place. The crack epidemic created fortunes that street crews could never have imagined in the heroine days.

 And the violence required to control those empires would leave entire communities traumatized for generations. The Junior Black Mafia lasted just 7 years at the top. But in that time, they proved that organized crime in America was no longer just an Italian affair. If you made it this far, you’re clearly interested in how criminal empires rise and fall.