Rasheid Butler, a skinny teenager with close cropped hair and a moustache, was sleeping in his apartment in the Soundview section of the Bronx on April 27th, 2016. Around three or four in the morning, he heard loud knocking and walked to the door in his boxers.

“I look out, I see like 30 cops,” he said. “I see ICE, ATF, DEA, Homeland Security, NYPD.”

Seven hundred law enforcement officers deployed in the Bronx that morning, looking for 120 members of two rival gangs as part of what’s believed to be the largest gang takedown in city history.

One of them arrested Butler and walked him out of his building. A helicopter hovered in the air. “Oh wow, there's got to be an indictment,” Butler, who was 19 at the time, thought to himself. “They’re going to pick me up on a BMB indictment.”

BMB, the Big Money Bosses, was a gang that operated around White Plains Road, a bustling thoroughfare. Their rivals, the 2Fly YGz crew, were based in a nearby housing project, Eastchester Gardens, in the area known as the Valley. The two neighborhoods have a rivalry that goes back generations. Most BMB and 2Fly members grew into that conflict.

“It got to the point where it didn’t make sense anymore,” said Aaron Rodriguez, 26, a 2Fly leader. “We just out here doing what we doing, not expecting no results. Not fighting towards anything. It was just more, ‘OK, you from over there. We’re going to see if we can kill you.’ ”

Cops arrested Rodriguez that morning in Harlem, where he lived with his girlfriend and their 3-month-old son. After spending a decade as part of 2Fly, rising through the ranks, Rodriguez was trying to leave gang life behind him.

“I just had to separate myself more, because either I was going to be dead or I was going to be in jail,” he said.

It was too late for him to avoid prison. Cops were also looking for his younger brother, Lloyd, who had moved to Virginia to become a corrections officer. And for Anthony Letterio, who had been recruited by local clergy to work as a violence interrupter.

They arrested Kraig Lewis in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he lived since he was 18, and was one semester away from getting an MBA. And they got 48-year-old Damon Parrish, the father of one of the gangs’ leaders.

“Who knows if we'll ever see something of that scope again,” said Jason Wilcox, chief of detectives in the Bronx. “Because it was so, I think, important to that neighborhood and to the Bronx.”

The takedown was unusual in its size, but the police department has adopted the tactic as a crucial crime-fighting tool that has contributed to a decrease in crime to levels not seen since the 1950s. It’s part of the NYPD’s precision policing strategy – using data and intelligence to identify a small number of people who are committing the majority of violent crime.

Between April of 2016 and April of 2018 alone, the police conducted 117 gang and crew takedowns and arrested 1,429 people. They say these groups are responsible for around 30 percent of the murders and 40 percent of the shootings in the city.

But some critics say gang takedowns are just the latest method of targeting young black and Hispanic men, ensnaring not only the criminals but those who associate with them.

For years leading up to this decade, the New York Police Department had been stopping hundreds of thousands of black and Latino New Yorkers to search them for guns on flimsy evidence.

By 2012, a massive civil rights lawsuit was making its way through the courts. That’s also when Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says he noticed a significant portion of the crime in the city was being committed by young people he didn’t know much about.

“They didn't fit the classic definition of gang or gang members,” said Kelly. “They were more loosely organized. They were younger than people in our gang database.”

Kelly said the data showed that around 30 percent of the shootings and murders were being done by these groups of young people — crews. He launched Operation Crew Cut, and doubled the number of gang investigators, who started gathering intelligence and following them on social media.

Then in 2013, a federal judge found the NYPD had violated the constitutional rights of black and Hispanic New Yorkers with its stop-and-frisk policy. The number of stops and frisks dropped to around 200,000 from almost 700,000 just two years earlier. When Kelly left office, the NYPD had 34,000 names in its gang database.

That number has come down since Bill de Blasio became mayor, but the department has intensified its focus on roughly 300 city gangs and crews.

“That kind of precision policing is what's going to keep New York City on the right track,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill said during a press conference last year. “We're picking them off one by one, or in many cases dozens by dozens.”

In 2014, cops zeroed in on two gangs in northeast Bronx.

“My very first day here I was dealing with the escalation in violence as it relates to the Big Money Bosses and the 2Fly crew,” said Deputy Chief Ruel Stephenson.

When he took over the command of the 47th precinct in April of 2014, gang-related shootings had spiked from three the previous year to 13, according to NYPD data.

“We identified the core members within the gang,” he said. “These are the alpha males, the individuals who were calling the shots. And we started looking very closely at them.”

Stephenson says the violence in the area led to a 16-month investigation that started with around two dozen higher-level guys.

“As the investigation got more in-depth, we started seeing connections with more individuals to these targeted members,” he said. “And so the number increased.”

Cops persuaded federal prosecutors to take the case. The Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Department of Homeland Security all came on board.

In April of 2016, a federal grand jury returned an indictment against 120 people — 63 members of BMB and 57 members of 2Fly, mostly young men of color in their early 20s. They faced racketeering conspiracy charges, narcotics conspiracy, narcotics distribution, and firearms charges. The feds were using some of the most powerful weapons they have.

During a press conference on the day of the takedown, law enforcement officials said the two crews “terrorized” the neighborhoods they lived in, killed at least eight people, most in their teens and early 20s, and earned between $1 and $1.5 million between 2014 and 2016 selling cocaine and marijuana.

“We bring these charges today so that all New Yorkers, including those in or near NYCHA public housing, can live their lives as they deserve: free of drugs, free of guns, and free of gang violence,” said Preet Bharara, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District.

In the northeast Bronx, some residents welcomed the takedown and said they were happy to see a quieter neighborhood, where kids can play freely without worrying about getting shot. Others said they were worried by the magnitude of the takedown, convinced that some of the 120 people shouldn’t have been arrested. Ten days after the takedown, cops came into the heart of 2Fly’s territory, a community center at the Eastchester Gardens housing project, to answer questions from residents.

“This has happened in some places in Brooklyn, Hunts Point in the South Bronx, Queensbridge. This only happens really in the black communities, in the minority communities, in Hispanic communities,” said a young man named Joshua Whittlock. “The feds … they must love us that much. They love us so much that the only people they want to protect is the black community by incarcerating most of the black community.”

Listen to Part 2 of the radio series: 

 

This kind of resentment has deep roots. Most recently, in 2011, at the height of the stop-and-frisk era, cops made 8,000 stops in the 49th precinct, which includes Eastchester Gardens — rupturing police-community relations for yet another generation. The tactic mostly isn’t used anymore, but some experts, such as CUNY Law School professor Babe Howell, say it’s been replaced with gang and crew takedowns because they don’t outrage the public.

“When you say this is targeting gang violence, then they [the public] become complacent and wiling to say, oh well, you should target gang violence,” she said. “What the NYPD is doing is … calling most brown and black kids gangs or crews because they're associated with the people on your block.”

She thinks young people who commit crimes should be held responsible as individuals but not as members of a crew.

“The way a child ends up in a crew is very much — especially in public housing — ‘I grew up in this building, on this block,’ ” she said. “You are not agreeing when you join the Thompson Avenue Boys to commit any sort of target crime.”

When cops brought Butler to a police precinct for processing, he asked one of his friends what charges they were facing.

“We getting RICO, racketeering,” the friend told him. “I'm going, ‘What's the RICO?’ He barely even knew what it was. He like, ‘The RICO is what John Gotti got.’ ”

RICO is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. It was passed by Congress in 1970 to allow prosecutors to dismantle the Mafia by holding members responsible for any crime committed in the name of the family. But 20 years later, when New York City was plagued more than 2,000 murders a year, federal prosecutors decided to use the statute to prosecute gangs.

 “It was almost stumbled upon,” said Steven Cohen, who worked as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District through the late 1980s and early '90s.

Instead of doing one-off cases, Cohen and his colleagues began using RICO to hold gang members responsible as a criminal enterprise that conspires to commit a series of crimes. It allowed them to bring various acts of violence, typically murders and shootings, into single indictments. In plainest terms, it was an effective way to tell a story of how a gang wreaks havoc on a community by shooting and killing people and selling drugs.

“It took a while for us to get comfortable and frankly to get the judges comfortable with the idea that we could use the racketeering laws against, as we would sort of euphemistically joke, six guys hanging around the street corner who happened to have guns and decided to go kill somebody,” Cohen said.

Rasheid Butler’s version of the role he played in BMB’s actions diverges entirely from the version offered by prosecutors. He says he knew some of his friends sold drugs and had beefs with 2Fly, but claims he didn’t commit any crimes and was arrested just for hanging out with the people he grew up with.

Prosecutors said Butler sold pot, stashed a gun for BMB, and took part in an attempted murder at a party he attended. On top of racketeering, he faced drug and gun charges, which carry mandatory minimum sentences upon conviction. If a jury found him guilty, he’d get at least 25 years. By the summer of 2016, his friends and co-defendants started pleading guilty, and he started to get worried.

“I'm not trying to be one of the last people to cop out,” he said.

He made a calculation. Rather than risk his chances at trial, he decided to plead guilty to RICO.

“I tell my lawyer like, try and get me the best cop out you can because it don't look like I'm going to be able to go home,” he said.

In exchange, the prosecutors dropped the drug and gun charges, and Butler hoped the judge would show him leniency. In the federal system, the length of a sentence is largely determined based on a defendant’s criminal history and the severity of a crime. Butler had only one juvenile conviction, but due to the seriousness of the crimes he admitted, he faced between 13 and 15 years. The judge could go above or below that, and Butler was hoping for seven or eight years.

Dressed in a two-piece blue prison suit and in shackles, he brought those hopes with him into a federal courtroom on a chilly, cloudy day in April of 2017. Things took a bad turn for him immediately. The prosecutor, Rachel Maimin, described the party in 2014, where she said Butler played backup to a BMB leader who shot and wounded a gang member and an innocent bystander, a 16-year-old girl who was waiting for a bus.

“That just illustrates what this gang does to the community,” Maimin said. “It's not an abstraction. It doesn't just exist on Facebook. It's real. And as tragic as it is when rival gang members get shot, there is something different when an innocent person is shot.”

Listen to Part 3 of the radio series: 

 

Butler’s defense lawyer, Michael Gold, said Butler was just following in the footsteps of his older brother, who was part of BMB and cycling in and out of prions and was also arrested in the takedown.

“When one is surrounded by crime and criminals, when one's role model is a gang-related and gang-affiliated member, when that is what you see and that is what you learn, it is almost inevitable that that is what you become,” he said.

Then the judge handed down the sentence: 133 months.

“Wow, she just gave me 11 years,” Butler thought.

He said he didn’t really process the information until he got back to the federal detention facility in Manhattan and called his mom.

“She broke down,” he said. “I haven't cried all bid, my whole bid, but when I got on the phone, tears fell out of my face.”

In the 1970s, around 15 percent of criminal defendants in the federal system went to trial. But in the high-crime era of the ‘80s, Congress increased mandatory minimums and passed other laws, and the number of guilty pleas increased even further. Today, fewer than three percent of the cases make it to trial.

This case followed the same pattern: 111 people who faced charges in the case pleaded guilty; two took their cases to trial and a jury found them guilty; and in three cases prosecution was deferred. (It is unclear what happened in the remaining four cases from publicly available documents, and prosecutors declined to comment.)

Some experts, such as Jed Rakoff, a veteran federal judge in the Southern District of New York, say that’s highly problematic.

“A trial is the one place where the system as a whole gets tested and where you find out what the truth is,” he said. “Instead what we have is a system where everything is negotiated in secret in a prosecutor's office and you never find out what the truth is or whether the system was working or not working.”

Despite his guilty plea, Butler still claims he’s innocent. A few months after his sentencing, at a medium security prison in Maryland, while geese ate grass outside on a perfectly manicured lawn, Butler talked about his plans to get his GED in prison and certificates in plumbing, electricity and carpentry, and earning money legitimately when he gets out.

He’s now 21, after celebrating two birthdays in prison. He’ll be eligible for release in January of 2026. Statistically, the odds are stacked against him – more than 70 percent of people who are younger than 21 when they get sentenced in the federal system get re-arrested when they get out.

“I don't regret anything because honestly everything was fun while it lasted,” he said. When I go home, I just know not to affiliate myself with certain crowds.”

 Listen to Part 4 of the radio series: 

When witnesses won’t talk, some murders go unsolved for years. But when federal prosecutors bring racketeering charges and people face heavy prison time, they start to cooperate. In six out of the eight murders the prosecutors laid at the feet of 2Fly and BMB, no one had been charged before the takedown.

“When you're dealing with a community that, whether out of fear or distrust of the police or hostility to the police, isn't ready to produce the eyewitnesses, the way those murders end up getting pursued is probably through somebody who is in dire jeopardy,” said Daniel Richman, who worked as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District.

Many of the 120 alleged gang members who got arrested were in dire jeopardy. But two parents living down the hall from each other on the 20th floor of a building in Co-op City know just how different the outcomes can be, even after a massive gang takedown happens and federal prosecutors get involved.

In March of 2012, 16-year-old Alexander Walters Junior, known by the initials A.J., got off the subway at Gun Hill Road on his way home from school and got involved in a large fight. Someone stabbed him in the chest, puncturing his heart and lungs. EMTs rushed him to Jacobi Hospital, where he was put on life support.

When his father Alexander arrived at the hospital, he knew his happy-go-lucky kid — a football player and a subway dancer — was gone.

“The way that they looked at me, that the surgeons looked at me, it was like they were just doing a job, going through the motions,” said Walters, 54. “Like they knew at the end of it that he was going to pass.”

When A.J. got stabbed, his friend Donville Simpson was with him. The two lived on the same floor of a building in Co-Op City. They started hanging out in 2010, when Donville moved there with his mom, Godeen Walters (no relation to A.J.’s dad).

Godeen was also raising her son alone, and the mother and son clung to each other. They rode their bikes together, and played tennis and basketball.

“After he was 13, he was just knocking mommy down,” she said.

He was 6 feet 4 inches tall, and no matter how many of his favorite dishes Godeen cooked — oxtails, fried dumplings, Jamaican bread — he was always skinny.

In October of 2013, a year and a half after A.J.’s murder, Donville hugged his mom and went out to celebrate his 17th birthday. He left around 10 p.m. and went to Eastchester Gardens, about three miles from his home. It was hostile territory for the gangs in his neighborhood, but Godeen says he was just meeting a friend to have a drink. While he waited in the courtyard, a bullet hit Donville in the head, fractured his skull and injured his brain. He died on the spot.

“The next thing I received was a phone call from the police that they coming over,” Godeen Walters said.

A year after Donville was killed, cops arrested Jaquan McIntosh, a 2Fly member. McIntosh spent 19 months in Rikers Island while local prosecutors tried to pin Donville’s murder on him.

In A.J.’s case, Bronx prosecutors didn’t get that far, because no one wanted to talk.

“They brought a man, arrested him, but then they couldn't indict him,” Alexander said. “They had no real hard evidence.”

An Assistant Bronx District Attorney called him to their office and explained that the case wasn’t strong enough to bring to a grand jury.

“They said just lay back and let them try to get evidence on him,” he said. “Maybe he’s going to crack. Say something on his phone or, you know, give stuff away. So we've been waiting for that to happen, but that never happened.”

In April of 2016, when the NYPD and the feds arrested 120 members of 2Fly and BMB, they said the gangs were responsible for both Donville’s and A.J.’s murders.

Once the feds stepped in, McIntosh pleaded guilty to shooting Donville.

On a hot, humid day last July, Godeen put on a white silk shirt, black pants and a blonde wig and walked into a federal courtroom in lower Manhattan to confront her son’s killer. Her hair had fallen out while she waited for this moment.

She saw her son’s killer sentenced to 23 years.

“That's all you can give to your child who's gone: a little justice,” she said.

But the takedown hadn’t given the same kind of closure to A.J.’s dad. The prosecutors said 2Fly is responsible for A.J.’s death, but they haven’t identified the person who killed him, and they won’t say why. Alexander says no-one has been in touch to explain it to him.

Last summer, he and Godeen came to a basketball court in Co-op City for a memorial tournament for their sons, for the fourth year in a row.

A.J.’s dad refereed the game. It was a good day. Dozens of family members and friends came to honor his son. But he’s still haunted by the failure to identify his son’s killer, even after the massive takedown.

“Hopefully one day I get a closure,” he said. “Until then, I just have to wait and see what happens.”

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 Listen to Part 5 of the radio series: 

Cops say crime is significantly lower in the northeast Bronx following the takedown.

“I have slim to no violence up there now, really no crime per se,” said Deputy Inspector Thomas Alps, the commander of the 49th precinct, which includes Eastchester Gardens. “It has allowed me to focus on other violent areas of the crime.”

The stats show the number of shootings has decreased in the two years since the takedown compared to the previous two years in the 47th and 49th precincts, where the gangs were based.

But this year, the number of homicides in the Bronx, fueled by gang violence, went up, showing how fragile those gains can be. Cops say they’ll continue taking down gangs even as they use other strategies, such as neighborhood policing.

At Eastchester Gardens, where the 2Fly crew used to roam, Police Officers Juan Sanchez and James Graham are walking the beat. They spend about an hour and a half a day addressing problems — anything from graffiti to drug sales to noise complaints, building relationships with residents that they hope will lead to tips, including those about possible gang re-emergence.

“We're not just pulling up in a car, taking a report and leaving,” Graham said. “We're talking with residents, we're spending time with them, and they're talking to us.”

They’re also keeping tabs on those who were arrested in the takedown and are now coming back home, like Kraig Lewis, 27, who moved out of the Bronx at 18 to study at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.

He got a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice and was enrolled in an MBA program when he got arrested at his off-campus apartment as part of the 2Fly gang. He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to sell marijuana. He says he only sold to his friends when he was a teenager. Instead of finishing his MBA, he served 20 months in federal prison.

“I lost everything: my degree, my house, my whole livelihood,” Lewis said. “My life, like I knew it, the minute I got locked up, it was over.”

Now he’s back in the Bronx, trying to make it in the music business. Another young man with a felony conviction, Lloyd Rodriguez, is back in the neighborhood too. He’s the younger brother of Aaron Rodriguez, the 2Fly leader, who pleaded guilty to racketeering and is serving a 13-year sentence at a maximum security prison.

Lloyd, 22, returned to the neighborhood after he pleaded guilty to racketeering conspiracy for selling marijuana and served 10 months. Before the takedown, he had moved to Virginia to become a corrections officer. After he got back, he was washing dishes at Applebee’s.

Sixty percent of working-age-adults in Eastchester Gardens are unemployed and the project is surrounded by low-performing schools. Rodriguez says the violence won’t go away until these deeper problems are solved, and he hasn’t seen any changes since the takedown.

He said the community needs more after-school activities and places where kids can play sports, or they’ll continue doing the same things he and his friends did.

“After a while the kids who was playing basketball in the park, start smoking in a park,” he said. “The kids who started smoking in the park, they start shooting in the park and that’s just the cycle. The cycle don't stop.”

 

Editor: David L. Lewis

Sound engineers: Wayne Shulmister, William Moss, Merritt Jacob and Rick Kwan

Additional research and reporting: Sean Carlson and Eryn Mathewson