The dark holes of slavery, segregation, and poverty plagued America’s Blacks for hundreds of years. Martin Luther King Jr. led America into a new era of social and legal justice, but there is a new deep, dark hole swallowing communities: criminality. Fifty years ago Blacks had only to look in any direction to see blatant racism and prejudice; some Blacks have become their own worst enemy and only have to look in a mirror to identify a big part of the problem today. I should know because I, too, was once such a person.
There is a solution: if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. As a criminal in my youth, I have pondered this issue for years and realize the change must come from within.
I talked about this with a friend and fellow journalist, Zacharia Ali, the chairman of Gangster Chronicles.com and the founder of Kidz at Risk.org. His focus is America’s disadvantaged youth, specifically those of color. Over the years, we have considered various possible solutions. He produced material for Gangster Chronicles.com that he thought may shine a light on the insidious nature of urban genocide.
Mr. Ali is committed to helping disadvantaged youth get the knowledge and opportunity to thrive. He also states that he has not been personally affected by parental incarceration, but is deeply affected by the struggles of those families, and the terrible odds against their children. He says his inspiration is motivated by the idea that the opportunity to prosper is the right of all children, regardless of race, gender or economic standing. He expresses that he can no longer afford to sit idly by as a generation of children continues to be damaged by circumstances for which there are practical solutions.
“How can we have an educated understanding of their plight, yet take an approach-avoidance attitude to altering the process?” Ali says. So he decided to take action and created Kidz at Risk. “We intend to take on this battle, and fight for our children to become who they were truly created to be – SUCCESSFUL!”
Gangster Chronicles is a collaborative between global businessmen and those who are responsible for creating some of the problems. It was developed to re-educate two generations of misguided young people. It intends to expose and correct this condition, where the minds of our children have been maliciously indoctrinated into an altered reality, largely based in fiction, and solely created for profit. Both widespread and largely unaddressed, their perspective is a direct result of been raised in the eye of the Hip Hop storm.
“The base of the opposition to some Hip Hop is the belief that the lyrics endorse drug sale and use, violence, crime, sexual promiscuity, and an overall climate of ignorance. In fact, these accusations are very well founded; as teen pregnancy, the high school dropout rate, and increase in crime are all on the rise, not only in urban communities, but in their suburbs as well. Gangster Chronicles differs from other approaches to combat this trend, by not only ‘pulling the weed’, but ‘killing the root,’” Ali states.
“It is common knowledge that these rappers and entertainers model themselves after Real Gangsters, except, they have never been Real Gangsters! By exposing the lies of posers with the truths of those they attempt to emulate, Gangster Chronicles will take a serious role in turning around the mentality of not only the Generation “X” and “Y” youth currently affected by the lies, but also future generations of children being raised in this counter-culture.
“Thanks to massively popular gangster movies, such as ‘Scarface,’ ‘The King of New York,’ ‘New Jack City’ and so on, the ruthless Gangster has become an iconic representation of urban culture. These images have heightened popular interest in ‘real’ urban legends, such as Aaron Jones of Philadelphia, Rayful Edmond of Washington, DC, Wayne ‘Akbar’ Pray of New Jersey, Eric Bozeman of LA, and Haitian Jack of New York. These criminal icons became the educators and role models of the entertainers who, in turn, now educate our youth through the content of their lyrics.
“Our approach has been to procure the rights of these ‘Urban Legends,’ and expose the public to the duality of their reality, the extravagance and glamour depicted in Hip Hop, as well as the consequences of reckless, ruthless lifestyles and death, prison and loss. These stories will be told through documentaries, biographies and full-length feature films. Our focus is not intended to glamorize the fame and the fortune these individuals enjoyed, but to honestly present the destruction, betrayal and shattered lives that these individuals experience as a result of their choices. We believe that by dispelling the myths, we can positively impact, and hopefully change, how our youth think and behave,” Ali concludes.
The following are excerpts from gangsterchronicles.com by Marvin Ellison, a contributing writer to gangsterchronicles.com and a prisoner in the New Jersey State Prison.
From an article entitled, Hood Kingpin (Everybody Wants To Shine): “When one generation fails to take heed to the missteps of those who preceded them, more likely than not, they’re destined to repeat the same fate… I grew up in an era (‘50s and ‘60s) when black numbers bankers embodied the criminal urban swagger of self-made men. Unlike the succeeding kingpins of notoriety (Frank Lucas, Frank Matthews and Nicky Barnes), numbers bankers weren’t a cancer on the community. They were respected benefactors of the church and charitable causes. Hundreds of storefronts and bars augmented their incomes as drops or writing numbers, and untold thousands of minimum wage factory workers and retirees earned a descent living as bookies, runners and the like. No, those weren’t the good old days, but there was order, respect, and community pride.”
It’s an historic fact: the drug game was imposed upon our impoverished urban communities during the aftermath of the Great Migration from the then-Jim Crow South, initially by Jewish gangsters such as Arnold Rothstein, then by Italian gangsters in the likes of Lucky Luciano. Segregated and disconnected from the so-called greater society, we were easy prey. And although Jewish gangsters were the first to deliberately concentrate heroin within our midst, the Italians made it readily available.
We all know the long line of legendary stars whose lives and careers were cut short due to heroin addiction (John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, etc.). The drug game was never a game, but a sinister scheme to enrich racist mobsters without a conscience.
The term “kingpin” wasn’t a part of the then-food chain hierarchy. More violent than most, I faced a “death penalty” trial before my 19th birthday. After several hours of deliberation, an interracial, gender-mixed jury brought back “manslaughter” and one count of “atrocious assault and battery.” Soon afterwards, I landed in the then-Trenton State Prison (New Jersey State Prison) with a 13-17-year sentence.
“I don’t think ‘I’m sorry’ is really the right words to say, because most people is sorry they get caught. So I just ask that you show me as much leniency as possible, so that I can get on and do my time.”
-Demetrius “Big Meech” Flenory, page 276, second paragraph, BMF (The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family)
In a twisted code of “survival of the fittest,” the violent ends of death merchants, addicts and stickup-kids, were acceptable. To the so-called norms of the greater society, it was considered “murder”. Today, it’s assault weaponry, drive-bys and innocent casualties. Yesteryear, it was one to the head. Today, a club gets sprayed. Forward-thinking gangsters like Luciano and Meyer Lansky laundered their illicit millions into legitimate fronts and parlayed their hold over corrupt politicians to elevate the socioeconomic and political prestige of the Jewish and Italian races. From the legendary Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson to the Big Meeches of today, we have nothing to show as a trade-off for all the hell and affliction that resulted from their gaudy spotlights of infamy.
“We can’t all become drug dealers.”
-Newark detective (1979)
Truly, it’s time to break the warped mold. Kingpin is a dated term, old, tired and useless. Every budding hand-to-hander has a supposed foolproof plan to preside at the thrones once held by RICO-lifers and hood legends. This self-destructing phenomenon or plague, is second only to the welfare policies and failed inner city school systems of the United States government, in having a lasting consequential impact on African Americans as a race. In my sick glory days declaring ownership over city blocks, a Newark detective trying to thwart several idolizing project youths from falling into my poisonous sphere stated, “We can’t all become drug dealers.” Although I hated cops, I understood and agreed with his point (Having steered clear of them, hopefully they succeeded in accomplishing their aspirations.) The ones who chose the streets (wanting to be just like me), I’ve bumped into them at this or that hellhole prison over 30-plus years of my incarceration.
“Slaves were property protected by the Constitution…”
-Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Dred Scott v. Sandford (March 6, 1857)
There’s a saying that “History repeats itself.” Whether or not that’s true, I do know that the fiery race-tinged rhetoric and divisive indignation being spewed by today’s so-called Tea Party, sounds a lot like the Taney Supreme Court and slave holding plantation owners of the Bible-thumping Confederacy (“…as being of an inferior order” blacks have “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” –Chief Justice Taney, Dred Scott). When we fail to recognize the big picture, we’re easily misled and duped into the grab for instant gratification. Knowledge is power, acquiring it takes time, study and commitment. The deck was always stacked against us. Snatched from separate tribes and ethnicities, speaking different languages from different cultures, having different diets, customs, and holding different beliefs, we were nonetheless over the course of more than 150-years of brutal slavery; eventually, and forcible, forged into a genetically distinct, psychologically imbued and culturally infused, race of commonality on the soil of North America. Neither class, skin hue, religion nor desertion, can refute that fact.
“I thought I was on top of things and that the right people in place… I though I could beat the system, but I lost.”
-Leslie “Ike” Atkinson, page 384, last paragraph, Sergeant Smack (The Legendary Lives and Times of Ike Atkinson, Kingpin, and His Band of Brothers)
When the so-called slave holding Founding Fathers declared, “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are, life Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness…” they branded our foreparents “three fifths” of a “person”. Thus, giving themselves an escape clause in the ownership of their ocean transported fellow-human beings of a different color (-United States Constitution, Article I, section 2, paragraph three). Between the Constitution, the King James Bible, Jim Crow, and infamous doctrine Supreme Court decisions such as, Plessy v. Ferguson (“separate but equal”), we’ve overcome monumental obstacles in asserting our humanity. Along the way, a few became foolishly corrupted and enamored with the dangled trinkets of chance. Such became the nefarious path to being a kingpin (flashy bling, cars, etc.) But in the end, there’s nothing to show except the contrite of regret (“I’d like to apologize to the many families hurt by the result of this ignorance…” –Terry “Southwest T” Flenory, page 275, fourth paragraph, BMF). Meanwhile, state and federal prisons are crammed with life-sentenced kingpins, most of whom are likely to reach their senior years and pass away in the twilight of life without parole. Convicted of smuggling hundreds of kilos of “China White” heroin out of Thailand in the early 70s using military aircraft, Ike Atkinson was lucky in having been sentenced to 40-years opposed to life with out the possibility of parole. He was finally released from federal prison in 2007, after serving almost 32-years (page 387, last paragraph, Sergeant Smack).
I saw a woman holding two small children by the hand while waiting on line to get product from one of my dealers… I saw more and more broken spirits and sad souls trudging to get the drugs that would make them feel better temporarily. But I also saw my money — cash was being stuffed inside the pockets of the dealers on that corner. I was on one corner of Harlem. And I had dealers on every corner of Harlem and beyond.”
-Frank Lucas, page 159, paragraphs three and four, Original Gangster.
“A teenaged township girl remains hospitalized in stable condition after being shot in the abdomen during a drug buy gone bad early Saturday morning…”
-The Trentonian, November 16, 2010
“Two Camden men have received state prison terms for their roles in a 2007 double slaying in the Southern New Jersey city. Authorities say 29-year-old Jason Rodriguez and 32-year-old Christopher Figueroa killed the pair so they could keep $22,000 in drug money the four had agreed to split…”
-Burlington County Times, November 15, 2010
“Thirty-two members of a Hunts Point drug syndicate known as ‘Satan’s Bloods’ were either arrested in morning raids by law enforcement, were already in jail or being sought, authorities say… The gang dealt powder cocaine, crack and heroin ‘seven days a week, 24 hours a day,’… Neighbors expressed relief — and some resignation — after the arrests (“I’m happy. It’ll be quiet around here for a few days,” said Tamicka Jones, 20).”
NYDailyNews.com, November 11, 2010
“A judge yesterday denied lowering the $1 million bail for an accused teenaged killer who tried to pay off a $10,000 drug debt by robbing a Laundromat employee, only to panic and shoot him dead… Thomas Hawkins – an 18-year-old troublemaker whose mom predicted a year ago that he’d kill somebody if authorities didn’t keep him behind bars…”
-The Trentonian, October 8, 2010
“Bail was set at $100,000 each Tuesday for two suspended Camden police officers charged last week with using their badges to steal drugs and cash from neighborhood narcotics dealers (Antonio Figueroa, 34, and Robert Baird, 32)… three other Camden police officers implicated in the case had been free on bail since pleading guilty (Kevin Perry, 30, Jason Stetser, 32, and Dan Morris, 47, each face potential 10-year sentences)… Authorities say that the five were part of a special operation unit assigned to help enforce the law in some of the city’s most drug-infested neighborhoods…The officers stole drugs and cash from dealers, planted evidence, falsified police reports, and lied under oath.”
-The Philadelphia Inquirer, October 20, 2010
“On an August night 32 years ago, authorities say, three men who believe five teenage boys had stolen their drugs herded them into an abandoned house at gunpoint, tied them up and set the building on fire, burning them alive and leaving no trace… The boys, Melvin Pittman and Ernest Taylor, both 17, and Alvin Turner, Randy Johnson and Michael McDowell, all 16, were last seen on a busy street near a park where they had played basketball Aug. 20, 1978”
-The Press of Atlantic City, March 24, 2010
When it comes to juvenile lockdowns, the offenders are overwhelmingly African Americans. We shouldn’t be surprised. The majority of inner city households are headed by single mothers. Without positive role models, young males tend to emulate what’s around them. Within high-crime environments, it’s usually drug dealing and gangbanging. We say we want something new and improved for our young people, unfortunately we keep duplicating the same tired mold. Single females having babies in drive-by relationships. The adulation of fatherless brothers vying for his attention is a boost to the kingpin’s ego. He starts smelling himself and believing himself to be invincible, or as in Nicky’s case – Mr. Untouchable. Admittedly, kids use to mob me as if I were some kind of hero, even though I never presented myself to be anything other than a drug dealer. I had no second occupation; I lived the so-called game full-time. So I clearly understand that the foundation of a child’s values comes about an early age. And in tough neighborhoods, kids more readily look up to the kingpin over President Obama, mainly because Obama can’t part his troubled waters in his hood. You know, keep bullies off his back or buy him small treats. I was such a kid growing up in Pennington Court projects. I had juice. I therefore know young people lured to the corners are more apt to listen to those who are in the game or who lived it, over school teachers and such. When I sue to talk to at-risk young people don’t have a clue about the legal ramification and consequences relative to the situations they get caught up in. They don’t know that in states like Florida, an 11-year-old can be sentenced to life. And in states like Pennsylvania, they sentence juveniles to life without parole. Stacy Torrance was arrested at the age of 14. A former honor roll student, he was duped by an adult gang-banger uncle who wanted to rob a friend of Stacy’s brother who dealt drugs. Things didn’t go as planned and the friend was killed. Despite being home in bed at the time of the killing, Stacey’s nonetheless serving “life without parole” for second-degree murder. The streets don’t care, the system don’t care, it’s on us to care. Without a doubt, no one’s too young to lose their life to a prison number or tombstone running in drug circles. The five youths who disappeared in Newark 32-years ago, demonstrate the safety in numbers theory don’t always work (“With 10 homicides, Newark Nears a Bleak Milestone… one body short of a 1995 record, when Newark was buckling under a wave of crack-fueled mayhem… With three times the number of homicides per capita as new York, Newark remains one of the most violent cities in the country… young thugs, guns and drugs rule the streets.” –New York Times, December 6, 2006).
“Ex-drug lord is free… Nicky Barnes said to be a changed man… Once known as Mr. Untouchable, Barnes was convicted in 1977 of being a narcotics boss in the first federal trial decided by an anonymous jury. He was sentenced to life without parole and sent to prison in Marion, IL. In 1981, after he learned that his drug partners were cheating him, sleeping with his wife and his girlfriend, and doing drugs in front of his two young daughters, he offered to cooperate with federal authorities. For the next 15 months, he worked undercover against his Harlem drug partners, his ex-wife, his girlfriend and his Mafia suppliers. His testimony helped convict 50 drug dealers and killers…”
-Daily News, March 14, 1999
Having read Mr. Untouchable, and a host of other drug dealer autobiographies, I’m amazed how they gloss over the human suffering of the enterprise. Like miniature Hitlers, they can’t stand to bear witness to their work up-close and personal. The women who tricked until their good looks faded with pus oozing from their horridly swollen discolored abscessed arms and legs. The mothers with no money who pimp their daughters for a bag. The children with no clothes for school because the welfare check went into their mother’s arm. The broken men who trade their wives and girlfriends to the kingpin who can do him the most favors. Nicky was a junkie, until the end he took pleasure in smoking dust. Some crime boss. Big Meech smoked blunts. But then again, all of his poster idols got high (Tupac, biggie, and Scarface’s fictional Tony Montana). Let’s weigh their big dreams. Frank Lucas wanted a plane. Nicky wanted a casino, Big Meech wanted a record label. So they plowed through thousands of people’s lives.
“If you haven’t buried a child, you can’t possibly know what’s it’s like…
-Shalga Hightower, 48 (Asbury Park Press, April 19, 2009)
Let’s reclaim our heritage and sanity. There’s absolutely no justification for continuing this mad circus. Think about it. Uneducated immigrant mobsters planted a Trojan horse in our midst. We fell for it. They’re long dead, but we’re still chasing the curse they left behind. If we’re more worldly than the illiterate Afghan peasant farmers who cultivate poppies and the Mexican cartels pumping us an endless pipeline of cocaine, we need to show it. In short, we have to take our power back. The August 4, 2007 execution-style murders of the three college students in a Newark schoolyard (Iofemi Hightower, 20, Terrance Aeriel, 18, and Dashon Harvey, 20); revealed the lack of respect we command from foreigners. There’s no one protecting our neighborhoods. Whether it’s trigger-happy cops or immigrant gangbangers (M-13), we’re having funerals without consequences. Meanwhile, bubble-heads preen about claiming to be running things. Check out their sob stories in Don Diva and F.E.D.S.. Everything was gravy until it became time to pay the cost (“My partner dimed on me… My lawyer crossed me… the feds robbed me…” Boo-hoo). If we continue the status quo, permitting blinged out peacocks to rein over our zip codes with impunity, we’re acquiescing to the mounting lives being cut short in the interconnectedness of a violence-fueled subculture with a track record of collateral damage (Mistys). Brothers on the block, that “shine” ain’t worth 30-years, life without parole, or 20-years if you sing. Sisters, think about Whitney Houston. Not even having money will save you from the eventual toll from living that life. No one’s flying down or en route to save us. So let’s honor the great sacrifices of our indomitable ancestors. Look out for one another, and have a life and future (No more hood kingpins). Peace.
LIFE WITHOUT A CAUSE
“Officials at Parker Elementary School, a kindergarten through fifth grade institution, discovered 70 grams of crack cocaine on the person of a 7-year-old male student… What is clear, police said, is that there was probably plenty of crack lying around his house. The crack apparently belongs to the boy’s parents and uncles, who’ve all been arrested on a host of drug and child endangerment charges.”
-The Trentonian, February 26, 2008. “Drug worker, 12, gunned down. At least 20 bullets pumped into him. James Coleman, a city resident (Camden) who friends and family called ‘PeeWee,’ was shot in the head and leg shortly after 11 p.m. in the Branch Village housing complex (“His mom uses drugs, his dad is in jail…” –Demetrias Williams)”
-Courier-Post, July 6, 2007
“If you don’t challenge yourself, you will never know what challenging means. I know a lot of people that ruined their future by taking the easy path in life.”
-Kareemah Austin, 12, 7th grade (The Press of Atlantic City, January 26, 2010)
In gang-related violence-plagued city after city, our children are forced to duck around cars and corners fearful of being shot on their way to or from school. And they’re ducking from the gunfire of people who live on the same streets, and went to the same schools as they do. Not even the gutless Klan was as unrelenting in gunning down children as today’s self-hatred masked bangers. They’ll throw away their guns and run from white cops, but a 6-year-old or 80-year-old at the bus stop doesn’t stand a chance. That’s not gangster; it’s cowardice (they’re subconsciously and boastfully killing the disappointing mirror of themselves). Such madness will continue for as long as it’s tolerated and we fail to reach the compassion and inner humanity of those who give the “orders” and give them a reason to do right. According to recent government statistics, less than 40-percent of young teens found summer jobs. When it comes to our kids, it’s more like 7-percent… The more you read, study and become globally knowledgeable, the more you’ll come to recognize the bigger picture and its backdrop. And once you’ve learned the real game, you’ll discover our options and avenues to equality and prosperity are far more expansive. Check the newspaper archives (LA, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, etc.), you’ll find gangbanging and its related criminality, is tired and old. After all, the so-called fast money and untold number of lost lives, prison years and destroyed neighborhoods, no one wins except career prosecutors and the government. We can either test our mettle against the challenges as 12-year-old Kareemah so maturely states, or remain victims of our own acquiescence to being erased. Let’s stop the infectious spreading virus of colors. Embrace life.
“…you can’t give up in life.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Quite a few of us blame Africa’s pompous tribal kings for having participated in the Middle-passage, transporting of our foreparents to endure insufferable tortures in the deconstruction of their humanity. Yet, we appear to be accepting of predators and parasites in the trade of enslaving us through drugs; for their self-enrichment. I doubt that this is the future envisioned by the brilliance of Justice Marshall, when he stood smartly suited and tall before the all-white male justices of the Supreme Court to argue, Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed government enforced segregation (it’s really not that long ago, when it was a crime to drink from a “whites only” water fountain; a time when a cowardly mob of Klansmen kidnapped 14-year-old Emmett Till, and slaughtered him because he supposedly uttered something to a middle-aged white woman. A time when the original Tea Partiers wore hoods and could get away with bombing churches and killing four little girls. A time when police dogs, Billy clubs, cattle prods and high-powered fire hoses were used to prevent Civil Rights marchers from protesting for our right to vote. A time when Rosa Parks went to jail for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. The “Little Rock Nine,” and so forth). A lot of dues were paid, a lot of lives were lost, and a tremendous amount of blood was spilled to gain the opportunities that are now taken for granted.
