Rude Boys

The raid began as a faint wail, barely audible over the evening hubbub on the streets of Brooklyn. In Crown Heights, an impoverished community well acquainted with the ravages of the drug trade, the sound of approaching sirens was nothing new. But on this particular evening, the residents took special notice as the sirens got closer and louder. As of December 1990, most police activity in the neighborhood had been related to an expanding, violent group known as the Gullymen. Made up primarily of Jamaican nationals, they had become one of the city's most powerful gangs.

The "rude boys," as the gangsters liked to call themselves, had taken over Crown Heights' thriving cocaine and heroin trade and were living the life of newly crowned drug lords. When they weren't showing off the lavish accouterments of their success in the clubs along the main thoroughfares, the Gullymen were ruthlessly reinforcing their criminal power. They took over a 59-unit apartment building at 1367 Sterling Place, and when the landlord threatened to call the police, he was gunned down in a third-floor hallway, his bullet-riddled body tumbling over a railing and landing on the floor below.

"Dem rude boys think dey was God," says a woman who works in a barbershop near the gang's Crown Heights headquarters.

Once they were in control of the building, the Gullymen used it to sell dope and provide crash pads for recruits recently arrived from Jamaica. Gunfire echoed loudly throughout the building and out into the neighborhood. It became too blatant for the police to ignore, and on December sixth, at approximately eight P.M., a massive caravan of law-enforcement vehicles sped past the dilapidated tenements and shuttered storefronts. At the corner of Schenectady Avenue and Sterling Place, nearly 200 city and Federal agents jumped from their vans and squad cars. Four SWAT teams of 25 men each began busting down doors and climbing through windows.

At the same time the agents were making arrests and confiscating cocaine, heroin and illegal firearms in Brooklyn, raids were taking place on Long Island, in Albany and in Dallas. The following day, front-page stories in The New York Times and the Dallas Times Herald and a report on NBC's Nightly News trumpeted the busts. A local newscast called it "one of the largest raids in the city's history."

Federal agents familiar with the Jamaican gangs knew better than to gloat. Despite the massive show of force and the many arrests, the gang's leader, 31-year-old Eric Vassell, was nowhere to be found. It was a sobering reminder of what the police already knew: The posses were here to stay.

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With the establishment of crack cocaine as the single most lucrative underworld racket since bootleg liquor, the face of organized crime in America has changed dramatically. The once-legendary five families of La Cosa Nostra have been destroyed in court; time has taken its toll. Into that void have stepped the posses, named for the Westerns once so popular in Jamaica. Like their namesakes, today's cocaine cowboys adhere to the rules of the wide-open urban frontier. Old-world concepts of turf and protocol are rarely honored. Because the rude boys' ability to replenish their ranks seems limitless, even the concept of family is dispensable. Unlike the Mafia or the notorious Chinese Triads, the posses have little or no organizational structure and no apparent blood oaths or initiation rites. Each group has a leader, but there are no godfathers or capos or underbosses.

About the only thing the Feds can say for certain is that the posses are more pervasive than anyone first imagined. From 1986 to 1989, there were posse raids in locales as disparate as Miami, suburban Maryland, Rochester and Kansas City. In one massive raid in October 1988, more than 120 members of the Shower Posse, believed to be the largest in the U.S., were rounded up in a sprawling 20-state bust.

In 1989, the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, published a report that identified 21 states in which posses had definitely established operations and ten states in which activity was suspected. "In the beginning, we looked at this group almost as a novelty," says a Federal agent who has been investigating the posses for years. "Now it's become an epidemic."

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In the early Eighties, when Vassell and his fellow Gullymen began selling cocaine on the streets of Brooklyn, the Mafia was still talked about as the only game in town. Most cops knew, of course, that Asian and South American sources controlled the major flow of narcotics, but it was the Italian-American Mobsters who grabbed newspaper headlines and were portrayed in movies. The few Jamaicans involved in organized crime were thought to be little more than ganja-smoking Rastafarians who casually sold a little herb on the side.

Law-enforcement personnel knew little or nothing about the politics and economics of the West Indies. Sun, surf and sand--that was Jamaica. As the Eighties wore on, they would have good reason to learn more. On the streets of drug-infested immigrant neighborhoods such as Crown Heights, a new generation was arriving. Raised primarily in the decrepit shantytowns of Kingston, Jamaica's capital city, these newcomers were hardened gunmen from some of the meanest, most poverty-ridden streets in the Third World. They proved to be the perfect training ground for a group that had designs on the toughest turf in America.

In part, the level of violence associated with the posses can be attributed to their perilous position in the drug trade. If the international narcotics business is a buzzing hive, the rude boys are worker bees, pushing at the retail level whatever the Colombians, the Sicilians and the Chinese are able to import. And out on the street, dealers and buyers don't carry American Express. When a deal goes sour, people die.

Even so, within the world of organized crime, where rolling up a high body count may normally be expected to earn you a seat at the head of the table, the rude boys are thought to be hopelessly volatile. More than 2100 posse-related homicides since 1985 may have something to do with that opinion. Although it would be comforting to dismiss the posses' penchant for mayhem as the product of an inherently violent class of criminal, it would also be wrong. The roots of their behavior are buried deep in Jamaican society, where grinding poverty, violence and fratricidal politics have been festering for years in the tenements and back alleys of the island's capital city.

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McGregor Gully is a garbage-choked ghetto in East Kingston. Rubble and broken glass are everywhere. The residents live in crumbling concrete homes sheltered only by thin sheets of corrugated tin. In a nearby shantytown, the streets are teeming: Goats, dogs in heat and raggedy children amble past graffiti-splattered walls and open-air fruit-and-vegetable stands. Mired in a world of poverty and neglect, the inhabitants of this and a dozen other ghettos just like it have been dubbed "the sufferers."

It was in McGregor Gully that Eric Vassell got his start. Like many a Johnny-too-bad" growing up in Kingston's shantytowns, Vassell became involved in politics at a young age. With few jobs available, the sufferers turn to their political system for sustenance and self-esteem, trusting that the party they back will extend its patronage after an election. As one social activist in Kingston puts it, only half jokingly, "Whether or not the party you support is in power determines whether or not you eat."

As a teenager in the late Seventies, Vassell joined a youth organization affiliated with Jamaica's ruling People's National Party (P.N.P.). It was not exactly like joining the Young Republicans; it was more like joining a street gang. Guns were supplied, political contacts established, and the wide-eyed youths were indoctrinated into Jamaica's rambunctious political process.

Elections had been violent through much of the country's history, but it took a massive infusion of guns into Jamaican society in the Seventies to produce the current harrowing conditions. The many high-powered weapons that flooded into the country arrived at the same time the CIA, under its director George Bush, was widely reported to have taken an active interest in Jamaican affairs. The American (continued on page 98) Rude Boys (continued from page 88) rationale was unambiguous: Throughout the Seventies, the government had followed a leftist doctrine, courting Fidel Castro and the Sandinistas, among others. The opposition party was led by Edward Seaga, a friend of Ronald Reagan.

Destabilization of the Jamaican government paved the way for a Seaga victory. It also forced the gunmen employed by the losing side to flee the island or face the victors' retribution. One favored destination for the losers, of course, was the United States, and this tide of well-armed Jamaican refugees produced America's initial wave of posse-related violence in the early and mid-Eighties.

Along with grinding poverty and political violence, Jamaica's ghetto dwellers must deal with abuse from the island's security forces. The Council for Human Rights, located in tiny downtown offices near Kingston's once-thriving port, devotes the majority of its time to investigations of police beatings and shootings. "On a slow day," says the group's head, Florizelle O'Connor, "we might get four reports of brutality. When the police are really having a good time, we can get anywhere from fifteen to twenty per day."

Outside O'Connor's office, in a cramped, sweltering third-floor hallway, residents gather to file official complaints against the police. In the first two and a half months of 1991, The Daily Gleaner, Jamaica's largest newspaper, reported 156 violent deaths, an average of two a day. Of those, nearly one quarter were killings by police.

A small, finely featured woman dressed in traditional African garb, O'Connor stands at the door of her office. "Here," she says, nodding toward a group of sufferers who have lost all faith in the law, "this is our future."

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Through a maze of loosely connected one-room shanties, near the back of a bustling tenement yard, a 28-year-old bicycle repairman named Johnny extends his hand to a visitor. He wears his dreadlocks gathered in a ponytail that flows to the middle of his back. Johnny is not a rude boy, but he knows many young men who are. As a male in his late 20s who is not dead, in prison or on the run, Johnny is viewed as something of a wise old man in Denham Town. He is at first hesitant to criticize life in Kingston in front of a stranger. Speaking in a heavy patois, he says of those who complain about their lot in life, "Dem people, dey get up inna mornin' an' see de sunshine an' dey curse de sun. Next day, dey see de rain fall, an' dey curse de rain."

As Johnny speaks, a scruffy teenage boy walks into his one-room shed. A gauze bandage soaked with blood is stuck to his forehead, and his neck bears a fresh five-inch knife wound. Shaking his head in dismay, Johnny sends the kid away, presumably to have his wound tended to by a neighborhood bush doctor.

As Johnny explains it, the young man was at a Denham Town "moulood," or yard party, the previous night. A gang of thugs associated with a rival politcal faction crashed the moulood, touching off a violent rumble. Surprisingly, no one was killed.

As he speaks, Johnny becomes more upset--and forthcoming--about living conditions in the ghetto. "De cost a livin' is killin' dese people," he laments. That day, the price of basic foods such as milk, flour and butter had gone up once again. Along with everything else, malnutrition was a major concern, especially with the "lickle pickneys," or young children. "I'd like fe dem tings to change," he says pleadingly, "an' me know dem must change. Our youts is comin' up, an' we can't continue livin' like dis."

Despite the violence, Johnny refuses to bad-mouth the rude boys, or "badmen," as they are called in Kingston. If nothing else, the badmen are a force the establishment must reckon with, which gives them a certain stature in the ghetto. To some, they are seen as the inheritors of Afro Jamaica's rebellious history, which began with the maroons, the 17th Century runaway slaves who refused to submit to their colonial masters, and continued through many violent uprisings in the centuries that followed.

It is no accident that reggae became the music of the rude boys. "Fe years, Rasta been persecuted by society," says Johnny. "Society chase de Rastamon, an' dem chase de badmon. So de badmon an' de Rastamon becomes friends. Just as Jesus Christ was walkin' an' him never choose a priest, an' him never choose a high mon. Him choose some fishermon, a lowly mon."

The reverence with which Johnny and other ghetto dwellers view the island's gunmen is based on the realities of life in the ghetto. Brutalized by the police and ignored by their government, the sufferers are sustained by their own mythology. They see the outlaw as an avenging angel, a latter-day Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the sufferers.

To illustrate this point, Johnny tells the story of Rhyging, the gangster/outlaw whose exploits have become ghetto folklore in Kingston. In 1948, Vincent "Ivanhoe" Martin, a 24-year-old burglar and gunman from a West Kingston ghetto, escaped from prison. Nicknamed Rhyging, patois for wild, angry or foolhardy, he eluded a massive police dragnet with the help of sympathetic ghetto dwellers. Johnny takes obvious pleasure in relating the tale, made famous in the Jimmy Cliff movie The Harder They Come. "Rhyging de baddest badmon," he says, "but de people support him, fe him one a dem."

The visitor asks Johnny about another violent tale, one that took place in Brooklyn, where a family of four lived in a tiny tenement apartment. One night, gunmen entered the apartment and brutally murdered the residents. One of the victims was a pregnant woman. The gunmen, believed to be posse members exacting revenge for a drug deal gone bad, deliberately shot the woman in the belly, killing her unborn child.

Johnny has heard this story before. A few weeks earlier, it made headlines in Jamaica. "Dem posses," he says, "me hears dem de roughest, toughest. Killers!" He shakes his head, then adds in a firm voice, "But dem people carries wit' dem de sufferin' a de Jamaican people."

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To the Gullymen's Vassell, organized gangsterism must have seemed like a natural career move. After spending many months shooting up rival campaign rallies and delivering votes with the barrel of a gun, he fled Jamaica after the 1980 elections. Upon his arrival in New York, all he had to do was adapt his skills to America's criminal market place, where prospects for advancement were vastly superior to anything back home.

At 5'8" tall, with a scrawny ghetto physique, Vassell was not physically intimidating. Soft-spoken, with short, neatly coifed hair, he had a broad, toothy smile that made him look years younger than he was. Because of his (continued on page 178) Rude Boys (continued from page 98) diminutive stature, he knew the value of surrounding himself with physically impressive strong-arm men.

In Brooklyn, Vassell made contact with a group of Jamaican killers called the 98th Street Men, a resident gang near Crown Heights. With this group of trained hit men, Vassell targeted a section of the neighborhood then controlled by a small group of Panamanian nationals. "The Panamanians themselves were no slouches when it came to violence," says a New York detective formerly assigned to the Gullymen's turf. "But the Jamaicans just shot them right off the block."

Once he had established a base of operation, Vassell's drug business followed a pattern similar to that of other posses across the United States. Guns and henchmen flowed easily back and forth between Jamaica and the States. Violence was used not as a last resort but as a calling card. The Gulleymen staked their claim through drive-by shootings--the gangland equivalent of a leveraged buyout.

Despite his lack of formal education, "Brooklyn Barry," as Vassell became known on the street, possessed an undeniable business acumen. By the late Eighties, his operation included some 40 Gullymen who were reaping combined profits of more than $60,000 a day. Business was so good that in 1988, Vassell sent Paul Moore, his brother-in-law, to Texas to explore the possibility of expanding their operation to include the sale of crack. Two murders and many assaults later, the Gullymen were the largest crack dealers in Dallas.

To a bunch of young ruffians weaned in a Kingston ghetto and only recently arrived in America, it must have seemed like a dream. They pulled up in sleek new BMWs in front of their headquarters on Schenectady Avenue, the Crown Heights Soccer & Domino Association, dressed "spree-boy," with gold jewelry on their fingers and around their necks.

One of the few Gullymen who refrained from indulging in opulent displays of wealth was Vassell himself, who preferred to explore other benefits of the trade. He would take his pick of the beautiful women gathered at the rude boys' favorite Brooklyn dance halls and have them taken to his apartment. Apparently, his reputation was hard to resist. As of last December, Vassell is said to have fathered 19 children from 13 women, or "baby mothers," as he likes to call his ladies.

Having established himself as a prominent figure in criminal circles in America, Vassell found that his reputation was growing back home in Kingston. Like many posse leaders, during trips to Jamaica, he took money, clothes and lavish trinkets to the sufferers, which he handed out at annual "treats," or street festivals. Brooklyn Barry was welcomed in McGregor Gully as a renegade hero who had returned to help redistribute the world's riches. Beauty pageants were held in which budding baby mothers were sponsored by Vassell and other members of his gang. For the adults, Vassell often took guns--"vote getters," as he sometimes called them--that he had purchased in Florida and Texas, packed inside television sets and shipped via air freight.

The reign of the Gullymen might have lasted indefinitely were it not for their tendency toward unpredictable acts of violence, which, as their business became more profitable and more unwieldy, inevitably turned inward.

Among Vassell's most visible lieutenants were Danny, Winston and Fitzy Reid, three brothers from Kingston. Because the Reids had been with the government and the police department back in Jamaica, Vassell never completely trusted them, even though he valued their talent for mayhem. Fitzy was particularly brutal and had been used as the Gullymen's favored hit man on numerous occasions.

In late 1989, Fitzy was arrested on drug- and gun-possession charges. Vassell refused to post bail. When Fitzy had to sell his car to raise the money, it ignited a smoldering resentment that led to a series of murders and attempted murders within the gang. In May 1990, after a night of dancing at a popular reggae dance hall in Brooklyn, Fitzy was trailed by two gunmen as he walked to his new Mercedes. Someone yelled, "Hey, Fitzy!" as he got behind the wheel. He looked up just in time to catch the barrage of gunfire from an M-16 assault rifle. The shots wreaked so much devastation on Fitzy's body that initial reports of the murder stated that his head had been chopped off. Street talk held that Vassell had paid $25,000 for the hit.

In the wake of Fitzy's death, a distraught Danny Reid, already a cooperating witness, found new inspiration to tell everything he knew to FBI agent Robert Chacon and Detective Tom Bruno, members of a task force that had been investigating the Gullymen for months. Reid's cooperation touched off a panic in Brooklyn posse circles, with dozens of rude boys tripping over one another to cut deals with the Feds. "Generally, posse members are easy to turn," says one agent involved in the investigation. "I guess they're used to Jamaican law enforcement, where they might get shot at the drop of a hat. We give them a sandwich and a Coke and talk to them in a nice voice and they act like puppies. They come right up and lick you."

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In Brooklyn, the excitement of a major organized-crime bust is soon consumed by the daily travails of life in New York. At 1367 Sterling Place, formerly one of the hottest coke and heroin locations in New York, only the bullet holes in the lobby walls are a reminder of the building's former status as a drug haven. "It's quieter, but I'm not saying it's any safer," says a woman who lives on the ground floor. When the sun goes down, gunshots and sirens are still a common sound. Five blocks to the east, a group of Jamaicans known as the Jungle Posse is said to be expanding its operation, hoping to capitalize on the demise of the Gullymen.

Vassell is still at large. Some say he's hiding in Kingston, while other reports suggest that he may be in Brixton, a densely populated Jamaican community in London. A profile on the television show America's Most Wanted reported that he might be in Long Island or Brooklyn.

Despite the increased success in capturing and prosecuting individual posses, Federal agents are baffled by their continued growth. The problem, it seems, lies far beyond the traditional domain of American law enforcement. "We have a sayin'," explains Johnny, chewing on a piece of roasted fish in Denham Town. "If a fire, mek it burn. If a blood, mek it run." In other words, as long as Jamaica's sufferers see themselves as victims, a parade of aspiring rude boys can be expected to follow the Gullymen.

In Kingston, young boys continue to prowl ghetto neighborhoods with such names as Concrete Jungle, Lizard Town, Dunkirk and Beirut. With their fathers dead, in prison or off fighting for their little piece of the American dream, the youths' tough, street-wise exterior masks a burning desire to find someone who cares for them, who has an eye out for their interests. With no families and few role models, they look to the rude boys.

Last spring, the talk of Jamaica was 25-year-old Nathaniel "Natty" Morgan, the latest gangster to follow the legendary Rhyging. Wanted for the murder of seven people, Morgan escaped from jail and had been eluding the police for the past five months. In the meantime, he continued his life of crime, robbing from the rich and allegedly giving money away to people in his home community of West Kingston.

The closest the police came to capturing Morgan was when they fired at him one night from a considerable distance. He ran, leaving behind a shotgun and a Bible marked outlaw Natty Morgan. Inside the Bible, he had written: I have the will to live and not to die, though I prefer my freedom more than my life.

The Daily Gleaner chronicled Morgan's exploits with blazing headlines, and the youths of West Kingston dreamed of being just like him. "When he gave me his gun to hold," one youngster was reported to have said, "it made me feel like a general."

The New Mob First in a series

"A boy walks in, a bandage soaked with blood stuck to his forehead. His neck bears a fresh knife wound."