On the meanest streets of East Flatbush, where gang feuds often turn bloody, respect is measured by the harm one inflicts on a rival. Now, a fledgling group led by a former gangbanger has put down stakes here, in an effort to keep the peace.

On the meanest streets of East Flatbush, where gang feuds often turn bloody, respect is measured by the harm one inflicts on a rival. Now, a fledgling group led by a former gangbanger has put down stakes here, in an effort to keep the peace.

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 15, 2015 The kids never really know why the beefs start. They’re just trapped in the middle of them, and never more so than right now. It’s Friday the 16th of October, and they're fighting in the streets of Brooklyn. Three members of a crew called Eight Trey KGC Crips — Eight Trey for short — are jumped while rounding the corner of Kings Highway onto Church Ave. in East Flatbush. They’re outnumbered by about four to one. It’s an ambush. The rival crew is Folk Nation, or Folk, which holds down a stretch of turf between Church and Clarkson Aves., about 20 blocks to the west. The neighboring gangs have a long history of violence against one another, a dynamic that has resulted in multiple deaths on both sides. “Only in New York we got beef,” says Jordan, a Crip whose name, as well as those of most of the gang members mentioned in this story, has been changed for his protection. “Crip and Folk everywhere else are cool.” Traffic on Church Ave. comes to a standstill as the melee spills into the street. Punches are thrown. One kid’s face is gashed after getting whacked in the head by a guy wielding brass knuckles. Teens race out of a nearby McDonald’s and look on in terror as they see their friends under siege. Fada, another Eight Trey, is in the middle of it, soon joined by a couple of his Crip brothers. They were stalked as they left Kurt Hahn School — one of three schools that comprise the former Tilden High School — just a seven-minute walk from here. Seeing what was about to go down they tried to break away, but too late. They got as far as Church and — boom — it was on: “They rained down,” Jordan says, describing Folk members who appeared on all sides, looking to brawl in broad daylight. Fortunately for Fada and his friends, it occurred directly in front of the place where many of them go to find their way out of the violent trappings of gang life — a street haven called Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes. The rehabilitated gang members who work for this neighborhood nonprofit, commonly known as GMACC (pronounced G-mac), put down stakes in the area in April to help curtail the gun violence that’s escalating among youth crews.

James Keivom / New York Daily News

One of those men, Daron (D-Maqq) Goodman, watches the fight unfold from inside GMACC’s front room and runs into the scrum to protect the kids who’ve been frequenting the center. To talk with Goodman, you’d never know he’d done nearly 15 years for robbery, weapons possession and attempted murder. He’s open and earnest, with a giddy giggle that sounds anything but menacing. In his younger years, he was looking to take lives on these streets, but now he’s an outreach worker, trying to save as many kids as he can by sharing his story and helping them get their GED, find a job, whatever they need to get off the streets. But today, he suddenly finds himself doing an altogether different kind of work. Things escalate when more Folks roll up. Some converge at the corner on foot; others hop out of three cars. Goodman hadn’t noticed them at first, and he didn’t anticipate the scene in which he is now embroiled. It’s teetering on mayhem, and it’s about to get worse. At least six of the guys moving in are carrying guns. Now it’s a frenzy as Goodman hurries as many as he can into GMACC’s front room, which looks onto the street. A narrow corridor — no more than 10 feet wide at its broadest point — lines the glass storefront, and about two dozen boys and girls scramble inside, crowding the space and running for their lives. A decal runs the length of the shop’s frontage bearing a directive to CURE VIOLENCE, along with a plea that obscures the view into the storefront office’s plate-glass windows: DON’T SHOOT. I WANT TO GROW UP. The sign was installed so that kids visiting GMACC could do so in private. The sign is barely visible to those on the inside looking out, and the glass isn’t bulletproof, but right now it’s the only thing separating them. The gunmen, most in their early 20s, approach as those inside crowd the front room. Goodman orders everyone down the hall to the stairs that lead to the basement fitness room, a dead-end destination from which there’s only one way out: back the way you came. He sees gunmen take aim at the glass, their vision obstructed by the sign, which is now serving a purpose that was never intended. No one inside knows this at the time, but the gunmen are looking for Fada. Kids scurry into the basement in panic, Fada among them. They’re terrified, some crying. Goodman follows until he hears a loud thud coming from the front door. One of the Folks is trying to kick the glass door down. He’s not carrying a gun, but he’s surrounded by others who are.

“I think if they had a clear shot at (Fada), they wouldn’t have cared (who else was shot),” Goodman says. “As long as you get the person you came for. There are always casualties in war.”

Goodman, a large man who regularly trains kids in GMACC’s gym, heads back to the front room and throws his weight against the door, barricading the office. Roughly a dozen men are outside, some brandishing guns, some banging on the glass, all trying to get in. They want to put a bullet in Fada. After a few harried minutes, sirens rumble up the block as police cruisers from the 67th Precinct make their way to the corner. Folk members split in an instant and, just like that, it’s over.

On this day, no one is shot. Fada is safe in the basement. Looking back, he says he never felt the terror others felt. “I’m just used to it,” he says. Recalling the fracas days later, Goodman says his only concern was to get the kids away from the window. “I think that if they could have seen (Fada) through the glass and had a clear shot at him, they wouldn’t have cared (who else was shot),” he says. “As long as you get the person you came for. There are always casualties in war. “At the end of the day,” he continues, “I feel I’ve lived enough life, and if I could save one of the kids’ lives they have at least another 20 or so years until they get to where I’m at.” In the weekly meeting at GMACC on the Tuesday following the brawl, tensions run high as the group rehashes the incident. Voices are charged and F-bombs are dropped with precision. They’ve been at this location only six months, but nothing like this has ever happened before. “They had enough respect to not violate this place of business,” says Aaron (Sledge) Jones, another rehabilitated gang member who works at GMACC. “Because of where we come from.” The work now is to understand why this happened — and what can be done to prevent another attempt on Fada’s life or an Eight Trey retaliation. This is why they are here.



Shanduke McPhatter began building GMACC in his Fort Greene apartment three years ago, nurturing it until he was able to open the East Flatbush headquarters earlier this year. This once-brutal career criminal now works his channels as a counselor of youth deemed to be at-risk, meaning they face a high probability of failing in school and becoming ensnarled in gang violence. “We want to captivate them, catch their attention,” he says. “And how do you do that? By being of them.” McPhatter has a sturdy build from his stint as a fitness trainer, a cropped cut and a goatee that drifts off his chin like a pharaoh’s. The look is devilish. His voice reaches every corner of this office. His glare can peel the paint from the wall. “You tell a young person” — and here his voice turns vanilla, like Eddie Murphy impersonating an academic wonk — “ ‘I went to Harvard, got my bachelors degree in psychology, and I don’t think you need to live like that because based on the book I’ve read there’s help for you.’ Versus, ‘Look, homie, I done did two bids, carried the guns, sold drugs and listen, that ain’t for you. It ain’t for none of us.’ What do you think they’ll listen to more?” McPhatter should know. He went by Trife Gangsta once, still does. It’s a tag that will always stay with him. Trife had a reputation for violence running the Gowanus streets with the Gangster Killer Bloods — an offshoot of L.A.’s infamous Bloods — back in the ’90s, when it was one of the most notorious crews in NYC. “I had a hand in it,” he says plainly.

James Keivom / New York Daily News

These days, you’ll likely find him talking to inmates at Rikers about their lives, or advising teens in East Flatbush, or appearing on TV discussing how gang violence is spiraling out of control. Or you might see him at the scene of a shooting joined by his team, bullhorn in hand, blasting his message through a portable amp, hounding passersby about the harsh realities of gun violence. They call it a shooting response. He did one just the other day at the corner of DeKalb and Flatbush Aves., 24 hours after 16-year-old Armani (Rocky) Hankins was shot to death outside Applebee’s Restaurant in one of Brooklyn’s most bustling areas at 6 p.m., one of the busiest times of the day. McPhatter marches his crew across the street and straight into Junior’s Restaurant, repeating his rap and handing out information on gun violence and incarceration rates while patrons cut into their cheesecake. “I’ll be back for the rugelach,” he barks on his way out.

“You gotta do pain to get recognition,” McPhatter says. “If I shoot someone, that’s pain. If I beat someone up, that’s pain, if I stab someone, that’s pain. That’s my résumé.”

The goal of this very public display isn’t to ruin people’s dinner, but to awaken those who may be oblivious to the gun violence that’s ravaging families and communities in their midst. The numbers are staggering. Violent crime may be down across the city but gang violence is surging. According to the NYPD, through the end of November, half of the 1,042 shootings and 40% of the 318 murders in the city this year are connected to gang activity or involved gang members. A retaliatory shooting at the Red Hook Houses in August killed the unborn child of a 19-year-old resident, Special-CaiJae Houston, who was five months pregnant at the time. She was shot five times. And in September, an aide to Gov. Cuomo, Carey Gabay, was an unintended casualty of gang warfare, felled by a stray bullet during the J’Ouvert celebration in Crown Heights. The currency of the day is a commitment to violence, kids looking to top one another, escalating incidents of senseless brutality, boasting about their exploits on Facebook and Twitter. Retaliations inevitably follow.





GMACC’s East Flatbush office is wedged between a used car lot and a Caribbean grocery. This swath of central Brooklyn, once an Italian and Jewish enclave and the birthplace of former mayor Rudy Giuliani, is now more than 90% black, with 68% of its residents hailing from Jamaica, Haiti and other islands in the West Indies. More than 20% of its children were living below the poverty line in 2010, according to data from the Citizens' Committee for Children of New York. The office location is essential, considered neutral territory, with Crips and Bloods in both directions: Gang members can walk to GMACC — whose staff includes members of both groups — without fear of crossing into rival turf, and beefs can be mediated here, sometimes one-on-one, sometimes in groups. It’s important to get the parties face to face. The rise of social networks has helped to broadcast the slights and spread the feuds throughout the neighborhood. As McPhatter puts it, “If we beefing on social media and all over the place and we don’t have nowhere comfortable that we can talk this out, what’s going to happen?” The office’s glass window looks out onto Church Ave., a stretch of ungodly blocks that Detective Robert Thybulle of the 67th Precinct describes as a “hot zone” for gang violence. East Flatbush is where police officers shot and killed 16-year-old Kimani Gray in March of 2013, sparking small-scale street riots and a deep-seeded distrust of law enforcement. “These guys just don’t care whether the police are there or cameras are there,” Thybulle says. “They’re out to do what they do.” GMACC shares a common objective with the police: stopping gun violence. But they’re not looking to turn kids over to the authorities if they learn a crime has been committed. If they did, kids would never trust them. One police officer who responded to the scene of the Church Ave. fight characterized those he questioned at GMACC as being uncooperative, but GMACC is not in the business of solving crimes. While felony assaults in the precinct are down by just under 20%, there have been 16 murders recorded so far this year, up 60% from the same period in 2014, and police say nearly half of these are gang related. One recent murder took place just a few blocks from GMACC during an armed robbery of the Deli Grocery and Grill on Oct. 27 when a customer tried to talk the gunman down, only to be shot in the stomach for his efforts. He later died. Tomorrow isn’t promised to anybody, but in East Flatbush even the ensuing seconds aren’t assured. This is the world through which these kids must navigate, assimilating a routine of daily survival skills until they’re ingrained. Across from GMACC’s office, three teens stand in a McDonald’s drive-thru alley, their backs to the wall, their eyes trained on the street. Standing a good 20 feet off the curb, they wait for the bus. “It’s the safest place,” one of them says. The office is sparse, with a main room off the front entry caked in uninspiring dark green paint and mirrors that cover half the walls from ceiling to floor. There’s a hole in one hallway at kicking height, that would fit a shoe perfectly, as would a mirror that is shattered by the front door. The map of the area surrounding the office hangs on a wall, pocked with color-coded pushpins charting the locations of violent incidents and designating those in which a beef is known to be roiling: Red for murder by shooting. Yellow for nonfatal shooting. Green for brewing conflicts. Blue for altercations without weapons. Black for murder by stabbing. White for altercations with weapons. It’s a chilling reminder of the war zone that exists just outside the front door. Outlined in red is an area called a “catchment,” a stretch of blocks in which GMACC targets its efforts to catch at-risk kids before they do something that will end either in prison or death. The 12-block-long district spans the area between Linden Blvd. to the north and Snyder Ave. to the south, running east from E. 46th St. to Kings Highway. The catchment is divided into quadrants and patrolled by a team of three violence interrupters, or V.I.s, who canvas the streets just after sundown, talking to anyone they see, hoping to resolve disputes before they lead to more bloodshed. The bitterness of the recent ambush remains fresh. The objective now is to stop the next one. “The war is so big that we want to get our area under wraps,” says Jones, a Blood who supervises the V.I.s, flashing a gold grill every time he opens his mouth. Gangs aren’t about violence and lawlessness, he insists; that narrative drowns out the true purpose. The cops aren’t looking out for them, the city isn’t looking out for them, so gangs develop to fill that void. “We’re supposed to take care of people,” Jones says. “That’s a real Blood. It’s about taking care of your family; it’s about anti-oppression. The whole gang makeup — Blood, Crip, Folk — it’s always supposed to be about the people. But you take this power shit and people get numbers, and it turns into this monster mess we have right now.” Jones works the northeastern quadrant. As he explains it, conflicts frequently begin when one gang member believes he’s “losing face” to another. And when it happens in a public setting, as it did on that recent Friday, retaliation is the likely outcome, unless the parties can come together and work out their differences. “I’ve done over 100 mediations,” Jones says. “That means that I’ve saved over 100 lives.”









GMACC focuses on boys and girls aged 14-24, some younger, some older. The counselors want to know where a kid is growing up, what his home life is like. Every case is different, McPhatter says. To assume otherwise is tantamount to failure. “The times are changing drastically,” he says. “So you cannot continue to have the same types of programs. You don’t give everybody the same services, the same help, regardless if they’re in the same area or come from the same gang.” He feels the kids out by asking direct questions: What is causing you to be part of this? What are you looking for in life? Why are these the decisions you want to make? He wants to determine if they might be open to change, whether they might be looking for a way out. There’s no judgment; that would halt the conversation right there. All involved have done bad things. According to McPhatter, the “shoot ’em music” kids listen to and the images they see in movies add to the toxic brew, leading impressionable tweens and teens down dark paths. “If I’m 12, 11, 10,” he says, “and I’m seeing nothing but this you think, This is what I’m supposed to be doing. Violence is a learned behavior. What are we doing to unteach that violence?” McPhatter likes to talk to them about the school-to-prison pipeline, a system by which at-risk youth are efficiently funneled into the prison-industrial complex, winding up at Rikers. “Zero-tolerance” policies grease the rails to suspensions, expulsion and eventually a life of incarceration at rates that are three times higher for students of color than their white counterparts, according to the ACLU. According to a study conducted last year by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights, 16.4% of the country’s black high school students were suspended, on average, compared to 4.6% of white students.

“Ending the school-to-prison pipeline means prioritizing black lives over white feelings,” Modiano says. “Their real crime is offending white authority.”

The phenomenon is not limited to high schools. Black children represent 18% of the country’s total preschool enrollment, yet 48% of black preschoolers receive more than one out-of-school suspension; in contrast, white students represent 43% of preschool enrollment and only 26% of those children wind up being suspended more than once. In New York City, the numbers are stark: Blacks comprise 26% of the student population, yet they accounted for 53% of the suspensions handed out in the 2013-14 school year, according to the New York Civil Liberties Union. By comparison, whites make up 16% of the student population but drew just 6.7% of the suspensions. “Good teachers expect kids to misbehave the same way doctors expect to see blood. Bad teachers need cops to shield their incompetence,” says Chuck Modiano, a 20-year child advocate who travels the country as a youth career-skills specialist. “The subjective and racially disproportionate charge of ‘insubordination’ can’t be separated from our larger police state. Their real crime is offending white authority. Ending the school-to-prison pipeline means prioritizing black lives over white feelings, and ending draconian zero-tolerance policies.” The system is rigged, McPhatter maintains. Just as he was never offered a program to help break his cycle of abuse, these kids are given little hope. In an era of mass incarceration, blacks make up 53% of New York State’s prison population despite totaling only 16% of the statewide population. The goal, McPhatter insists, is getting kids under state control — don’t even think about getting them help. And once you’re there, he says, the odds are pretty slim that you’ll be able to pull yourself out and steer clear of a life on the streets. “It’s a business,” McPhatter says, “and every business needs what? Consumers. If you take that prison out of Elmira, you take that prison out of Clinton, how many jobs do you lose? How many families live up there — white families? They raise their families running the facilities, from corrections officers to the counselors to the medical staff. I decided I no longer want to be your customer. And that’s what we teach.”

Eric Barrow/ New York Daily News MEMBERS ONLY GMACC targets at-risk youth, between the ages of 14 and 24. (Clockwise from above) Outreach worker Ledrell (Bread) Johnson gives hands-on instruction in the fitness room; reviewing notes following a guest speaker’s presentation; Fada, the intended target of a recent ambush, is looking for a new direction in life.

The GMACC office has become a place for kids to do more than simply sidestep trouble. After school, they squeeze into the main meeting space to listen to guest speakers, who volunteer their time to help teach them skills ranging from money management to how best to present oneself in the labor force. There’s also a lab with six Apple computers in a narrow side room for doing homework and helping with job searches, though many of the kids just clown around. One afternoon, McPhatter hears a loud ruckus and runs into the room just as a couple kids plow into one of the shelf-like desks that support two $2,000 Macs. He’s enraged. “What did I tell you about the horseplay in here?” he bellows. “Are you gonna pay $4,000 for new computers? I don’t think so.” He sends everyone home. Whether they get anything out of the workshops, the computers and the gym, it’s a place to stay off the streets, stay out of trouble and be surrounded by mentors with like experiences who value them. The case workers stay on top of kids’ schoolwork and check their report cards. To attend, the kids are required to maintain a passing average; if you get suspended from school, you’re suspended from GMACC. And there’s work here, too, as some earn minimum wage doing clerical tasks, promotional work and attending shooting responses. One 16-year-old girl who’s been coming to GMACC since it opened and has a history of violence and a reputation for getting into scrapes at school has watched her grades rise and her anger subside. She imagines working for child services some day. Another girl discovered a talent for math and now wants to be an accountant, while another says she wants to be a nurse. One of the boys plans to study criminology; Jordan says he’s eyeing a career in construction. “I feel safe here,” says Kevin, a 24-year-old Blood who has a 2-year-old daughter at home and was locked up a year ago for taking part in a fight in a club. “This is like a second family for me.”



We don’t give a fuck.” That’s what the kid said: “We don’t give a fuck.” McPhatter is recounting a recent conversation with a teenage prisoner at Rikers. A gang member who runs with the 6-Deuce Wild clique gave the coldest answer you will ever hear when McPhatter asked him the oldest guidance-counselor question in the book: What is your goal? “We don’t give a fuck.” “You just don’t give a fuck?” “No.” “About what?” “Nothing.” “So just shoot, kill?” “Yeah, that’s just our goal.” How is that your goal? McPhatter wondered to himself. Another gang member tells him he can’t leave his gang-banging life, not after all he’s put into it. “I done put in too much pain,” he says. McPhatter understands. “You gotta do pain to get recognition,” he says. “That’s what it’s about.” It’s not enduring pain, or sacrifice, they’re talking about; it’s inflicting pain. “If I shoot someone, that’s pain. If I beat someone up, that’s pain, if I stab someone, that’s pain,” McPhatter says. “That’s my résumé. It’s not about, ‘I went to this junior high school, I went to this high school.’ ” That’s what these kids need to do to get what they want out of life: recognition and respect. “You’re only respected by your level of violence,” McPhatter says.

“(Prisons) are a business,” McPhatter says, “and every business needs what? Consumers. I decided I no longer want to be your customer. And that’s what we teach.”

McPhatter visits Rikers regularly, a couple times a week, meeting with 16- and 17-year-olds at the Robert N. Davoren Complex, also known as Building 2, the housing block for youth offenders. That chilling conversation resonates as he makes his way back on a dismal Thursday in November. It’s pouring rain, the late-afternoon skies giving way to black, as his gray Escalade passes an industrial wastewater refinery before crossing the 4,000-foot causeway that leads to this bleakest of islands. For many, this is the last place they’d ever want to set foot, but for McPhatter it’s like home. In fact, many years ago this track actually was home. Goodman and another GMACC outreach worker, Ledrell (Bread) Johnson, accompany McPhatter today. The trio pass through the metal detector, then greet correctional officers like old friends; bro hugs and laughs swell in the lobby. They traverse a long corridor from the main entrance, through two massive doors that swing open to the facility’s inmate housing, comprised of South and North wings, each with three floors, and head upstairs to 2 Upper South, their day’s first destination. They’ll visit four other houses before the night is over. Two Upper South is also where McPhatter stayed when he was inside. It was a Blood house then, he says. A guard post mans the entrance to this block of about 30 7-by-9-foot cells, each containing nothing but a tiny sink, toilet and cot. Inked tags covering the walls mark the presence of residents over the years; dried toothpaste is the medium of choice for the windows. Rikers recently reduced the number of inmates per house from 30 to 15 to cut down on the many fights, so at least half the cells sit empty. According to newly minted warden Clement Glenn, Building 2 has moved from a system of punitive segregation to an incentive-driven platform to better manage the teens. But problems still exist. Housing kids with gang affiliations and bubbling feuds is a balancing act: Too many of one gang can strengthen them; too few and they may become victimized. Only seven teens are bunking in 2 Upper South this evening. To the right, opposite the guard post, is the Day Room, a sort of concrete living- and dining room where kids hang out when not in lockdown; their behavior determines the amount of time they can spend here. There’s a small flat-screen TV encased in thick plastic, and four table-and-stool combos are bolted into the floor. Sounds bounce off the walls, mashing together in an inharmonious cacophony. This has to be the most unwelcoming living room in the city. When McPhatter and company arrive in the Day Room, the din rises. GMACC is one of the only organizations in the city that regularly visits here and kids constantly ask when they’re coming back, says Capt. Sherry Peake, who usually follows these visits, standing off to the side. Kids dressed in their correctional browns (the adults wear beige) peek out and slowly inch toward the Day Room in slippers. One teen needs some coaxing so McPhatter talks with him privately by his cell. After a few minutes he emerges and follows.

Eric Barrow/ New York Daily News G-MEN Having been in gangs themselves, members of GMACC’s executive staff are known as “credible messengers.” (Clockwise from above) Violence Interrupter Supervisor Aaron (Sledge) Jones; Violence Interruptor Christopher (Coley) Lee; Outreach Worker Supervisor Reginald (Wink Loc) Purgis.

These are all new faces on this floor, so the GMACC trio start by breaking the ice, asking each about their case, and their experience here. Seated around the tables, the teens open up quickly, speaking a common slang that’s hard for even the guards to pick up. But McPhatter and his team are fluent. McPhatter gives one of the kids a tutorial on the workings of a grand jury. No one really seems to understand the process at all. He tells them all to use their time wisely, whether they’re working on their cases or preparing themselves for harsher facilities. Inmates recently were exposing themselves to female guards here. “If you do that upstate,” he tells them, “that guard has family there and they will put their hands and feet on you.” He also implores them to understand that what they do here in Rikers has a bearing on their immediate future. “If you’re fighting in here,” he says. “They’re going to say, ‘He’s violent,’ and that’s going to determine where you go upstate.” One of the kids on 2 Lower Main recently stabbed a fellow inmate, what they call “poking,” sending him to the hospital. McPhatter shakes his head. “I had to handle it,” the teen says. “It makes no sense,” McPhatter replies. “And now you have a new case. You already have a reputation for this.” You start with a two-year sentence, McPhatter tells them, and next thing you know you’re here for life. The kids nod, and whisper yeahs that echo around the room. He stresses preparedness for life, whether it’s after Rikers or life in a maximum-security prison upstate. “Find something that makes sense to you,” he tells them. “Set a goal before you get out. Your life isn’t over — even for you,” he says looking at a teen charged with second-degree murder. He’s 17 years old. One kid tells Goodman he turned to parkour to lose weight when he was younger but later used his free-running talents to climb into open windows. “How did they catch you if you know parkour?” Goodman asks, unable to contain his laughter. The others laugh, too. The kid says he wanted to be a fireman once, but now he has a felony on his record. McPhatter suggests he consider a career as a stuntman.

“The whole gang makeup — Blood, Crip, Folk — it’s always supposed to be about the people,” Jones says. “It’s about taking care of your family.”

On 2 Lower South, the mood is more grim. One teen is churning. Sitting on top of a table, his hand stroking what little stubble he has, he stares straight out into nothing. While four kids play a raucous game of spades across the room, he sits alone, suspended between rage and tears. McPhatter moves in and a dialogue quickly begins. “I’m just going through something,” he tells McPhatter. Before long, his story spills out. In September he was shot at point-blank range in Far Rockaway. He removes his shirt and shows the scars where one bullet entered his back and exited his chest. Another bullet seared his shoulder, grazing him. But a week after the shooting — and just days after being released from the hospital — he and some friends in a car were stopped by police. They each had guns and he was arrested. He is charged with one count of criminal possession of a firearm in the second degree and one count of second-degree assault, both felonies. When asked if he and his friends were out looking for his shooter, his face turns hard. Looking straight ahead, he goes silent. His troubles are compounded now as he just heard news that one of his friends has been shot. “And he’s dealing with all of that,” says McPhatter, who plans to reach out to people in Far Rockaway to help tamp down tensions. Often, McPhatter explains, kids in the middle of these wars will reach out to someone from the outside to intervene. McPhatter asks him if he would like to speak to someone at Rikers about all that’s been going on with him. “Yeah,” he replies, before McPhatter alerts Peake that he strongly believes this teen is in desperate need of therapy. Peake takes out a pen and makes a note. There’s no post-traumatic stress here; it’s ongoing. Most psychiatric cases are handled in-house, but kids in dire need of therapy are sent to Bellevue for treatment. The last stop of the night is in the North Wing. Two kids get McPhatter’s attention and call him over for a private conversation out of earshot of others. There’s a beef brewing between two major sets in the city, they tell him. At least one of the boys is in one of the cliques. It soon becomes clear to McPhatter that it’s a conflict that started in a prison upstate and has now trickled down to Rikers. It’s just a matter of time before it hits the streets. “That’s a war waiting to happen,” he says before heading out.



New crews pop up like Chipotle restaurants — there are now more than a dozen sets in East Flatbush, police say, and more than 300 citywide. McPhatter picks up a pack of Skittles and pounds it on his desk, demonstrating how easily these crews can form. “We tired of it. We’re going to be the Skittles Gangstas,” he says, imagining a scene that could be happening in some corner of the city this very second. “And we just gonna kill and anybody who fucks with us, we just going to get. That’s it. “Everyone wants to be the predator,” he adds. “No one wants to be the prey.” McPhatter was one of those predators. His first arrest came when he was 16, a strong-arm mugging of a white woman. “In our mind back then, that’s where the money was,” he says. “Rob a white lady or a white guy.” He pulls out his rap sheet, a rundown of his run-ins with the law, without the slightest recoil. He first faced jail time a few years later, charged with robbing a store, one he says he never set foot in. Facing 15 years at trial or a three-year plea deal, he pleaded out, and went to prison for a crime he maintains he didn’t do. That first night in jail, he cried. “And after that,” he says, “I lost all feeling.” Inside, he was determined to build up his rep. That’s all that remained. He turned Blood in 1994 at Rikers Island. Additional stretches followed: Elmyra, Clinton, Attica. One maximum-security lockup after another. In prison, gang riots were as common as a cot and three squares a day, especially in Clinton, where he’d heard talk of inmates buried underneath the jail. These weren’t correctional facilities, he says. Anything but. “All those arrests, why wasn’t I ever offered a program?” McPhatter asks, his voice rising. It still stings. “I’m 37 years of age and I’ve never had a program — no outpatient program, no inpatient program, no program for violence, nothing that was an alternative to incarceration for me.” What he did receive was an education in the drug trade, a doctorate in dealing; inmates circling, talking about how to do things better when they got out, how to be sharper, do things cleaner, make more money, and above all, never get caught again. He thought he found a way out once, a good job working as a security guard for Baitul Nasr Security. His toughness earned him high praise and so impressed his superiors that they promoted him to site manager to oversee several residential complexes. Things seemed promising until 2001, when Baitul Nasr was found in violation of state regulations forbidding convicted felons from working as security guards. Looking to clean house, they showed him the door, along with any others with a felony record, regardless of their performance. With few options — and now a father of twin boys — he went back to the street, doing the only thing that paid: selling drugs. “That was my motivation,” McPhatter says. “I had to provide for these babies, so what do I do? Go back to what I know. And that was it. My life was me being Blood, me living in the streets.”

Eric Barrow/ New York Daily News WORD ON THE STREET Following a shooting, GMACC members gather at the scene of the crime, to raise awareness of gun violence. (Clockwise from above) The GMACC crew at a recent shooting response; McPhatter delivers his message outside a downtown Brooklyn Applebee’s; and later, gives patrons inside Junior’s a piece of his mind.

He sold marijuana, crack and heroin outside his Wyckoff Gardens housing project in Gowanus, Brooklyn. In 2003, he was arrested for murder, a charge that was later dropped when the actual gunman came forward. But by 2005, he was back upstate, this time at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, busted on weapons-possession charge. He was 27, having been in and out of prison his whole life, arrested 18 times, 12 of them felony charges, 10 violent felonies. And now he was facing three more years. During that first year, McPhatter’s cycle of drug peddling and prison finally started to break when he witnessed a reunion of sorts, between an older prisoner who was in the middle of a 25-year stretch, and his son, who was beginning a 35-year stint and new to the yard. The son was bouncing, on top of the world. He’d made it and wanted to share the moment with his father. McPhatter noticed the elder’s eyes welling up. But they weren’t tears of parental pride. McPhatter can still recall overhearing what the father told his son. “ ‘You don’t get it,’ he said. ‘You tryin’ to live like me, glamorizing this life, and you have more time than me, and at a much younger age than me.’ “And as I’m watching this,” McPhatter now tells me, “I said, Is this a sign for me? Do I want to see my son walk up to me in a prison and having the same conversation?” Witnessing that warped homecoming was a seismic shift for McPhatter. When once he couldn’t care less about being sent to prison, now all aspects of the experience curdled. The yard irritated him. The isolation irritated him. His life irritated him. “That began to shape my mind,” he says. “I started thinking about what I did to get myself in this predicament. And how I can work to get myself out.” McPhatter began to wonder, How can I use my experience to help others? How can I use all the times I was released from prison in a way that will effect change? How can I think just of my own kids, and not the ones who might one day harm them? So he pulled back, finding a spot in the prison yard off to the side, a place to keep to himself. Sitting on a tiny bucket, he’d observe the yard, plotting his next move. It was therapy for a life of pain, his own and for those with the misfortune of being on the wrong side of him. Staring out, he saw generations left to rot. He saw a system of mass incarceration that he’d participated in for most of his life. He would change, that was sure, but that wasn’t enough. He began to outline his life after prison, formulating his plans, scribbling Gangstas Making Astronomical Community Changes on a scrap of paper in his cell. And just before he was released, in April of 2008, he received a going-away present from a Corrections officer, a handwritten note that read:



Have a pleasant

journey to your

hometown scumbag

see you on your next

bid which won’t be

long McPhatter still keeps the note as a reminder. He’s never gone back. Returning to Brooklyn in 2008, McPhatter — who earned his GED behind bars — set about turning his jail-yard revelation into a viable youth program. At the time, there was nothing novel about enlisting rehabilitated gangbangers — called “credible messengers” — to speak with troubled youth. In Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities, similar programs had been in place for decades. But he had to start somewhere. He began attending anti-gun rallies, becoming a regular voice against gun violence. He met Brooklyn Councilman Jumaane Williams, co-chairman of the Gun Violence Task Force. The two spent a summer walking the streets of East Flatbush together after dark, speaking to anyone they came across. They call it Occupying Corners. One night, McPhatter watched as Williams talked down a man with a gun right in the middle of the street. “It could have escalated,” Williams recalls matter-of-factly.

“It’s difficult to hire people who used to be in gangs and try to turn them into social workers,” Butts says. “If you do it correctly, a program like GMACC can be far more cost-effective than traditional law enforcement.”

Williams was one of the first to advocate for McPhatter’s program, one that so mirrored the Cure Violence model already in use across the city that when funding became available, the GMACC program was well-suited for inclusion. The organization conducts its own fund-raising and currently receives $500,000 from Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office, which this year committed $12.7 million to triple the Cure Violence program’s reach across the city. “It’s difficult to hire people who used to be in gangs, and used to be incarcerated, and try to turn them into case managers and social workers,” says Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, who has analyzed the citywide impact of these programs. “(They) come into that situation with a lot of deficits. If you do it correctly, a program like GMACC can be far more cost-effective than traditional law enforcement. But the challenge is: Can you actually take that human capital and turn it into something effective?” McPhatter, who earns $85,000 annually (GMACC outreach workers make $30,000; V.I.s, $28,500), keeps a tally of their progress and makes quarterly reports, charting such data as: the number of shooting incidents (one in August); the number of shootings that were fatal (none); the number of stabbings (none); the number of new disputes he’s learned of (two in September); number of completed mediations (one in August), etc. In this boxscore of tragedy, some quarters are better than others. This was a good one.





Kids start arriving around 3 o’clock, after getting out of school. This day, Jordan is one of the first. He’s been coming to GMACC since he got out of Rikers four months ago. He jokes with just about everyone, the girls especially. In front of a camera he mugs for a few photos before snatching it up and snapping off a bunch of his own. It’s easy to forget he’s just 16 when he discusses his life, but watching him now it’s obvious. He talks about being a Crip, his second family that he has no interest in ever leaving, in monetary terms. “It’s about making dollars. Top dollars,” he says. “I’m supposed to have your back and you have mine, and we get money with that motto.” Drug dealing, along with the gun violence that shadows it, may have been the enterprise of choice for street crews back in the heroin-fueled days of the ’60s and ’70s or the crack-ridden ’80s, but not so much now. Grand larceny is up more than 30% since the late ’90s, about half of those attributable to I.D. fraud, which is fast exploding in East Flatbush as crews have gained easy access to card-skimming devices and other tools to carry it off. It’s a business, McPhatter says, a straightforward way to generate revenue by means other than selling drugs or committing robberies, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise that city kids have developed the technological know-how to make it work. Jordan spent eight months in Rikers and juvenile detention for burglary. “It was really a home invasion,” he says, noting that he just picked a random house. “Whatever I wanted, I took it.” Jordan fought in jail, not every day, but most. “It’s fun to fight in there,” he says. “After you’ve been in there for a while, you’re just going to be tight. You’re going to wake up mad, cause you don’t want to be there, and anybody who says something crazy to me I’m going to have to wrap ’em. You’re going to fight for the smallest thing and feel good after that.” He says he’s changing at GMACC, he knows he needs to now. He was shot recently, in his hand. He reenacts the searing pain he felt and gets laughs from everyone. “You really are a gangsta,” says one of the girls. Every time he hears about a shooting, the fear he has builds. “That’s a fact,” he says, “My life is on the line.” He’s not alone. Fada walks into the computer lab and greets Jordan. Their right hands meet as clenched fists with their middle and index fingers loose, as though they’re about to pull the trigger of a gun. Their knuckles dovetail, lock, then begin an elaborate dance of clenches and turns, all in a flash.

“You have to watch your back wherever you go,” Fada says. “Nowadays, people don’t know how to handle beefs with just the fists and get it over with. They want to be killing each other over nonsense.”

Fada is slender with a face and smile a girl could easily crush on, but he’s already been locked up three times in his short life, once for assault and twice on gun charges. The life is taking its toll and, at 18, he’s reached the stage when juvenile-detention facilities morph into maximum-security prisons. “It’s hectic,” he says. “You have to keep watching your back wherever you go. Nowadays, people take it too far. They don’t know how to handle beefs with just the fists and get it over with. They want to be killing each other over nonsense.” Life never got more real for Fada than on March 26 of this year when his older brother Jamal, 25, was targeted, shot and killed in Trinidad, where he was visiting his daughter. Beefs may start here in East Flatbush, but they aren’t limited to these corners. These are beefs without borders. He still can’t talk about his brother, except to say they were close and that he knows his murder originated in East Flatbush. A year before he was gunned down, Jamal, a Crip, pleaded with his brother to leave the gang life. His murder opened the door for Fada to start seeking help. He knows that five years from now he’ll either be in prison or dead. He has a lot of friends in jail right now, too many to count. None of his friends outside this office knows he’s looking for a way out. “I don’t talk to nobody about it,” says Fada, who finds some solace on the court as a point guard on his high school’s basketball team. “I want to live my life. It’s why I come here. Were it not for basketball and this GMACC thing, I wouldn’t even be here,” he says, his eyes fixed on the ground.



The mediation between Fada and his Folk rival took place in the middle of the street near Tilden about a week after the fight. Jones, the violence interrupter supervisor, took the lead on this one, following a prior sit-down with Fada. “He knows that he’s in a terrible situation,” Jones says of Fada. “He lives around the corner from his enemy. He can’t go to school without looking behind his back. He can’t go to the store without watching his back. He can’t do nothing regular no more.” Jones recalls telling the teen, “If you retaliate, how much worse do you think it’s going to be? Not only will you have your enemy looking for you, I’m pretty sure the police will be looking for you, too, because everybody knows.” He counseled Fada to think of his mother: “You just lost your brother. Are you ready to throw your life away? Your mother’s already hurting.”

James Keivom / New York Daily News

Jones tracked down Folk Nation kids who go to Tilden. From there, he was able to do something that no police officer could ever accomplish: reach out to the individuals involved. “It’s Crip and Folk, so naturally there was something historic beyond Fada,” Jones says. “One crew killed his brother, and it kind-of like trickled down the line: You kill my brother, I’ll kill you. This story is complicated. It’s on American soil, here, and on the islands.” Jones won’t reveal much about the meeting other than to say that members from both Crips and Folk Nation attended; that it was a misunderstanding that went unchecked between two kids who had been friends, who were led astray, and they needed to work it out face to face. No small talk was necessary. “We just spoke,” Fada says. “It was good. Resolved. Mediated.” They all slapped hands and agreed to a truce. “It’s a mutual respect thing; those are the terms,” Jones says. “We agree to keep it mutual, because there’s a lot at stake.” Every week Jones meets with both crews to maintain the peace agreement. While this beef is squashed — at least, for now — others roil. As Jones puts it, it’s crucial to make everyone understand that, at street level, such beefs lead in only one direction: mutually assured destruction. “If you harm me, you’re going to jail. If I harm you, I’m going to jail,” he says. “Let’s just put our problems aside and move forward.” As for McPhatter, he will be back at Rikers again soon enough, speaking with the kids who don’t give a fuck, the ones who talk about doin’ that pain, hoping that something he has to say will make them care about their own lives and those of others. Hoping that something he has to offer will help them put down that pain — that someone will have a goal other than robbing and dealing and killing. Hoping he can do something about that war waiting to happen.

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