by Paul Bass & Nicolás Medina Mora Pérez | Jun 1, 2012 1:04 pm

(12) Comments | Commenting has been closed | E-mail the Author

Posted to: Legal Writes, Media, Dwight

Biggs put a video starring his alleged Tre Blood buddies in the “Klean Up Krew” on the Internet for all to see. The Man was only too happy to watch.

The video is called “Addicted to Money.” It shows dozens of alleged members of New Haven’s deadliest street gang cavorting with a noted New York rapper and celebrating the thug life. They all wear “Klean Up Krew” T-shirts.

That YouTube video—and others—hit the screens of federal and local law-enforcement agents conducting what would become the largest sweep of alleged drug-dealing killers in Connecticut history. The investigation had a name: Operation Bloodline. It culminated last week in 105 indictments and sweeps of New Haven neighborhoods. (Read about that here.)

Meanwhile, Facebook offered a cornucopia of leads that can take months for detectives to accumulate. No warrants required, just Internet access. This Facebook page, for instance, offers some 400 photos and identities and links to 2,742 Klean Up Krew “friends” from the organization’s “CEO.”

That “CEO” is Biggs, the alleged local Tre Bloods ringleader (a role he and his family denied). Biggs and another main defendant known as “Wiley Don” are both involved in the New Haven rap scene. They seem to have gone out of their way to help the agents gather evidence against them through their prolific use of social media. Biggs, whose real name is Jameel Wilkes, has pleaded not guilty. His family calls the Klean Up Krew a help-the-youth organization; the feds call it a deadly subset of the Tre Bloods conducting the kind of crimes celebrated in videos like “Addicted To Money.”

The Youtube videos and Facebook pages, a selection of them culled in an Independent web search, also provide new links to an as-yet-unresolved part of the Operation Bloodline case: the Tre Bloods’ connections to prominent New York-based rapper French Montana.

More traditional crime-fighting tools like federal court-authorized wiretaps and years of methodical face-to-face intelligence gathering inevitably played the most important roles in Operation Bloodline. But according to three people familiar with the New Haven gang probes say the videos like “Addicted to Money” came to investigators’ attention early on and played a role, too.

“Every Blood in the city was there! All you had to do was freeze-frame it” to connect the dots among suspects, noted one. “They said, ‘We’re a gang. We’re going to glamorize it. We’re going to publicize it.’ That’s what helped bring them down.”

“It assisted in the investigation, by all means,” Assistant New Haven Police Chief Archie Generoso said of Biggs’ videos and the Tre Bloods investigation which the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) conducted in conjunction with city cops and some suburban departments.

“These guys are always on [sites like YouTube] and Facebook,” Generoso said of the gangs. “They’re always out there on the Internet. A lot of people don’t realize everybody is watching, not just them.”

The role of social media in the investigation reflects a curious trend in American gang culture: tough guys allegedly sophisticated enough to deal warehouses worth of crack and plot bump-offs of their foes have for some reason embraced the spirit of documenting and bragging about their exploits or supposed exploits, complete with photographic and video clues, in the public domain of the web.

And you don’t need police powers to mine that vein and draw conclusions. For instance, click here for an in-depth look, drawn in part from Facebook and from extensive in-person reporting, at New Haven gang tensions that broke out into the open at a Toad’s Place shooting. The author, Alan Sage, has posted extensive interviews with local rappers, including some caught up in the latest federal sweep, on his own website, called Middleman.

Whatever the reasons for this gang-self-exposure phenomenon, investigators are racing to take advantage of it.

Generoso said New Haven cops are ramping up the monitoring of social networking sites. “We’ll use every tool we can to investigate crimes, to gain intelligence,” he said.

They’ve started doing it in real time. Last week, minutes after someone shot a man to death on Gibbs Street, a photo the victim’s bloody corpse appeared on Instagram, then drifted to other social-networking sites. Generoso said the cops contacted Facebook to have the photo removed.

“Why did they take a picture of the guy lying in a pool of blood before police got there?” he asked. “Do we want a mother or a father to find out that’s [their son] was shot?”

Ibrahim Shareef (pictured) offered an explanation for why that photo shot onto the web so fast.

“It’s the sensation,” he said. “You got a dead body. Everybody gonna be talking about it. People were sick; people who got the post [of the corpse] were sick. It was ugly and denigrating.”

But understandable, in a way, especially considering the ubiquity of the new media, Shareef said. He recalled walking by the newly slain body of Tyrell Trimble in the heart of Tre Bloods territory on Elm Street by Kensington Street a day before the Gibbs Street slaying.

“His eyes were in the back of his head,” Shareef recalled. “I started to grab my camera.” Then he thought better of it. “How disrespectful can that be?”

Shareef, who’s 46, knows about the street activity at that murder site. He spends his days looking out on that block from inside Precision Wash & Dry Laundromat. Shareef manages the laundromat. He also runs a rap music promotion business, Prestige Communications LLC, from inside a booth at the laundromat. He organizes concerts. He produces and sells underground CDs by local rappers.

Including several, he said, who were among the alleged Tre Bloods arrested in last week’s sweeps.

“They’re all rappers,” he said.

Ski Mask Explained

Ibrahim clicked on his iPod to play a number by the Klean Up Krew featuring Wiley Don, one of those arrested last week. Meanwhile, he cautioned against authorities reading too much into the flood of seemingly incriminating videos, against confusing marketing or artistic expression with literal information.

“That doesn’t make them the life just because they put it up there,” he said. “The things they say in the music doesn’t mean that’s what they about. They just want to make money.”

“Some of us never saw Wiley Don deal drugs,” Ibrahim continued. “I’m not saying he did or he didn’t. I just never seen it.”

Click here for a story about Wiley Don (at right in above photo) confronting New Haven’s mayor last year about police tactics. Wiley Don complained to the mayor that he’d seen a cop on a raid wearing a ski mask. He called that inappropriate, a way of sowing bad feelings in the community. It turned out that the Bloods investigation had just gotten underway—and the agent with the ski mask was protecting his identity on a smaller raid because on other days he was allegedly buying drugs from Wiley Don, among others.

Click on the play arrow to watch a video of him performing at Toad’s Place.

When rappers and promoters make videos, “everybody just comes on. Everyone knows you’re shooting videos. They wanna be seen. It’s the fad in the hood now—to be in the videos and talk all outrageous. Half the time they’re not doing all the things they’re talking about. Or they’d be in jail. Or dead.

“I’m in a few of those videos. I’m in their videos because I’m a promoter. That doesn’t mean I’m in the Krew, or everything that’s going on.” Ibrahim says he has a separate group of people who quietly try to keep poorer neighborhoods “clean and straight” without seeking public attention or “squealing to the police.”

Greatest Hits

To investigators, the videos’ value lies less in claims of criminal activity than in the mere photographic identification of networks of associates. Early on they used the videos to identify and isolate initial suspects, then start making connections to other associates. Investigators were well aware that many of the young people in the videos were not necessary involved in crime, said one person familiar with the probe; but the videos proved a gold mine of genuine suspects.

The videos certainly don’t lack for “confessions,” aka boasting, whether real or imagined.

“I’m a problem in the hood for the government,” boasts Wiley Don in one “Klean Up” video that has attracted over 118,000 views.

In “Do it! (The Leak)” (at left), Wiley Don parties with Biggs, among others.

Many of them make a double “L” sign with two hands, a symbol on many Klean Up Krew T-shirts. (“Clean up” is street slang for shooting people.)

Choice lines:

“Kill these niggas. Murder these faggots. They ain’t ready for you.”

“Cool with the Blood and the Crip, nigga / no matter what you got it ain’t this, nigga.”

Much of Biggs’ video oeuvre appears on a channel registered to fatboy065133, apparent references to Wilkes’ weight and the ZIP code of Fair Haven. Biggs lays out the Klean Up Krew philosophy in a video entitled “Big Meech Speaks.”

This video shows Detroit gang Black Mafia Family leader Big Meech describing the perks of belonging to his gang. Through captions, Biggs makes explicit comparisons with the Klean Up Krew.

For example, Big Meech states on the video: “We got our own cars, we got our own hoes, we got our clothes.”

Wilkes writes: “Klean up Krew.”

“We pay,” says Big Meech. “Lotta niggas don’t like to spend their money. We like to spend our money.”

Wilkes leaves the “Klean Up Krew” caption on the whole time.

In Biggs’ lower-budget “Good Weed,” he shows some marijuana buds over a dollar bill. The stoned-sounding narrator doesn’t appear on screen.

“You niggas ain’t be smoking nothing like this weed,” he boasts.

“Yo, I be too high out this shit! Shout out to the weed, man! For the chill nigga.”

Remarked one YouTube commenter: “NEW HAVEN got the FIRE!”



The “money” video for investigators may have been “Addicted To Money.” (It appears at the top of this story.)

Biggs and many other young men appear with popular rapper French Montana throughout the video in “Klean Up Krew” T-shirts. Montana shot it in Farnam Courts and in the Dwight-Kensington neighborhood, the heart of Tre Bloods territory.

In introducing Montana at the start of the video, Biggs also welcomes people to “New Haven, Connecticut. You come out here, you won’t leave, nigga.” He appears later in the video alongside the rapper.

French Montana In New Haven

One intriguing theme in these videos is the emerging connection between NYC rapper Montana and the alleged Tre Bloods leaders caught up in the sweep. (Montana could not be reached for comment before this story went to press.)

Montana has been a regular visitor to town. A promotional visit by Montana to a St. John Street bar called Everybodeez ended with a shooting back in 2009. (Read about that incident here.) Biggs’ and Wiley Don’s videos document and play up their relationship with him.

“FRENCH MONTANA out in NEW HAVEN CT with B.I.G from FAIR HAVEN!” (at left), for instance, shows shows Biggs and Montana partying together in New Haven. They hang out in a parking lot, then go to a Denny’s and order food. Montana and Wilkes talk to each other in familiar terms. Several other members of the Klean Up Krew are also present.

Biggs emphasizes the Klean Up Krew’s and French Montana’s alleged underworld prowess in a video entitled “Miami Crackheads.” (Click on the play arrow to watch.)

The video shows several unidentified drug addicts in a Miami gas station. It was shot from inside a vehicle. Biggs doesn’t appear, but his voice is audible. He is trying to convince one of the supposed “crackheads,” an older man with a beard, that he should beat up the other addicts for money. He makes the man repeat after him.

“Say Klean up!” says Biggs.

“Klean up,” repeats the “crackhead.”

“Say coke boy!” says Biggs.

“Coke boy!”

“Say French Montana, what it is, my nigga.”

“French Montana what it is my nigga.”

The “crackhead” then asks Biggs for a couple of dollars. Wilkes doesn’t give them to him.

“Say: French Montana, I’m the shot-caller here,” says Don. The addict repeats after him.

Like any video narrative, it must be read as fiction by the lay viewer. Whether it holds meaningful clues to real-life gang-banging is for law-enforcement investigators to explore—on the ground, and in cyberspace.