n March 14, 2016, Rudelsia Mckenzie took the witness stand in the trial of Rashid Derissant and Alex Crandon, the two GS9 defendants accused of murder. She was tall and middle-aged and wore her hair in a jet-black pixie. On the stand, her voice quavered, for she was the mother of the murdered boy. On the evening of February 8, 2013, her son, Bryan Antoine, 19 years old, had been shot inside a bodega in East Flatbush. He was buying soda pop. She was asked to recount the events of that evening, from her perspective. They ended at the Kings County Hospital with a doctor telling her, "I'm sorry, he didn't make it." She paused, and the courtroom was silent, except for Mckenzie's muffled sobs. Then she apologized. "It's just hard to relive that day again," she said.
Repeatedly during the trial, the prosecutors and the police detectives they brought to the stand as witnesses referred to Rudelsia Mckenzie's son as a member of GS9's purported rival, "the BMW gang." But when I spoke to her a few days after her testimony, she denied this. "I don't know why they labeled him as being a BMW gang member," she said. "Bryan wasn't in that life. It's just the friends he hung around with."
Maybe this was a mother in denial about her son's affiliations; maybe her son simply kept her in the dark. Or maybe what she said was the truth. Whatever the case, trying to grasp gang dynamics in New York City is a notoriously fraught undertaking. For one thing, New York was never like Los Angeles, birthplace of the Bloods and the Crips, or Chicago, birthplace of the Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples. Its "gangs" were always fractured, fluid, forming and dissolving and re-forming.
David Kennedy, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and the founder of a national violence-prevention program called Operation Ceasefire, tells me, "People think gangs are organized, purposeful, have a leadership, that they use violence to promote their illegal economic interests. In most places most of the time, none of those things are right."
But there is an institution that does often treat groups of young black males in poor neighborhoods as organized crime: law enforcement. One former N.Y.C. prosecutor who's recently entered private practice describes what he calls a "newer trend" in the city's criminal-justice system, whereby groups of kids, all friends, are lumped together and charged with conspiracy based on individual crimes—drug possession, gun possession, attempted robbery, say—that some in the group have gotten busted for. Now, he says, under conspiracy law, "you put them together as a gang and they're
all responsible for
all their criminal activities."
The danger, of course, is the possibility of tarring someone with guilt by association, of prosecutorial overreach. "The fact is, the law in this kind of thing is a very blunt instrument," Kennedy tells me. "Even among people who are really serious law-enforcement folks, people say we're casting too wide a net."
To compound the problem, groups identified as criminal gangs by the cops often include aspiring rappers. Social media today—not just Instagram and YouTube, but dozens of local message boards dedicated to hip-hop—is filled with homemade videos that feature the performance of what law enforcement might call "gang activity." The N.Y.P.D. monitors social media just for this.
There are rap groups that spin off from gangs, gangs that morph into rap groups, and rap groups that—as a marketing ploy, to gain the coveted street cred—pose as gangs.
It is the organizing cliché of rap: the authentic street hustler who exploits his authenticity to create hit songs, find an audience, become rich and famous. The demand for street cred is intense, and the history of the genre is filled with rappers who have felt its lack. The classic case was Tupac Shakur, the sensitive boy who played violin at a prestigious Baltimore art school. Even after he'd made it big, he aggressively sought to build street cred by surrounding himself with real hustlers—until he was shot to death on the Las Vegas Strip, his pursuit of authenticity his downfall.
Shmurda is Shakur's inverse, in a sense. During the summer of Shmurda, as he strove to launch a career in hip-hop and, behind the scenes, struggled to break away from his old crowd, Pollard worked hard in interviews to accentuate his street cred, aware that authenticity is what would sell. He bragged that he'd dealt drugs as early as the fifth grade, that East Flatbush was like "growing up in the jungle. Gotta be hard. If you ain't hard, you ain't gonna stand, you gonna fall."
Now, though, he is in the peculiar position, for a rapper, of having to draw a bright line between his art and his life. "Everything I rap about, it's just entertainment," he told me. His ability to market himself "makes people think every word I say is true."
Quad Studios occupies the tenth floor of a building at Seventh Avenue and 48th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Sha Money showed up there around midnight on the morning of December 18, 2014. He knew Pollard would be in the studio, recording songs for the new album. As usual, Pollard was surrounded by his entourage, maybe a dozen guys. When Pollard saw Sha Money enter the studio, the young rapper exploded with joy. Inside Epic there had been concerns that the kid was flaking out, and that Bobby Shmurda might be a one-hit wonder. But now Pollard seemed to be pulling it together. With pride, he sat Sha Money down and played him the songs he'd been working on—and it was "some next-level shyt," Sha Money recalls now. He and Sha Money danced in the studio to the new tracks. "I guess it was a going-away party, right?" Sha Money says now. "Without even knowing it."
A little later, Pollard decided to call it a night. He and his girlfriend rose to head to their car outside, and back to New Jersey. It was around 2 a.m. Not ten minutes later, Sha Money, still in the studio, got a call from Pollard's mother. In clear distress, she said she received a call from one of her son's road managers. Pollard had been arrested, and now he wasn't answering his phone. "That's impossible," Sha Money said. Then he looked up at the security-cam monitor, which showed the elevator bank downstairs. On the screen, police officers in plainclothes were holding up their badges to the cameras and hitting the Quad Studios buzzer. "Don't let them up," Sha Money said. "They don't have a warrant."
Much of the GS9 entourage was still in the studio. Rowdy was there, recording. But now, seeing the police, several people tried to leave the building and were immediately detained. Those who remained in the studio decided they would stick it out and spend the night at Quad if need be. Sha Money texted his wife as much. Then someone motioned for him to come look out the window. Down on 48th Street, a school bus painted blue and white had pulled up. Moments later, an N.Y.P.D. platoon emerged from the vehicle and entered the building. A minute passed. Then the elevator went "bing," and when the door opened, the N.Y.P.D. poured out, all rifle barrels and shouted commands. "Everybody put your hands up!"
Entertainment
Rick Ross: Man of the People
Sha Money says that he, his engineer, and three Quad Studios employees immediately complied. Everyone else—all the GS9 kids—scattered and hid. "Some turned into Batman, some turned into Spider-Man, climbing the walls," Sha Money recalls now. "Some tried to turn into Invisible Man and hid
between walls." The N.Y.P.D. searched the entire building. They didn't find the last man—Rowdy—until seven in the morning. All the while, Sha Money sat on the ground with his hands cuffed. (He was not arrested.)
Hours earlier, when Pollard left, Sha Money escorted him down to the lobby—the same lobby where, almost exactly 20 years earlier, unknown assailants shot but did not kill Tupac Shakur. "We had a little kind of like pep talk in the elevator," Sha Money says. Everyone was acutely aware of the N.Y.P.D. heat on Pollard and GS9.
"I was like: 'Yo, Bobby, you gotta be careful.' " He mentioned the large entourage at the studio. " 'You need to tone it down, because all eyes is on you.' " Pollard nodded and said, "I got you."
The elevator stopped. Another studio occupies a lower floor in the same building, and now the door slid open to reveal Busta Rhymes. Born and raised in East Flatbush, a generation older than Pollard, Rhymes had met the young rapper once or twice during the summer of Shmurda's rise to fame, and he said now: "
Bobby Shmurda!" The two exchanged a rapid greeting, and as the door slid closed again—there were too many people in the elevator for Rhymes to fit—the elder rapper seemed to echo Sha Money: "You got to be
safe out there, mon."
On the ground floor, Pollard stepped out of the elevator and reassured Sha Money that he would tread lightly, that he would be careful. Then he said good-bye and walked out of the building and into the darkness of the street.
![wow :wow: :wow:](https://www.thecoli.com/styles/default/xenforo/smilies/wow.png)
long article but a good read