Ex-gangbanger helps rid Dorchester of his shooter

Ex-gangbanger helps rid Dorchester of his shooter

VALIANT: Tramane Smith struggles to maintain his emotions inside Suffolk Superior Court yesterday prior to the sentencing of Donald Williams, inset.
Photo by Patrick Whittemore
By Peter Gelzinis  |   Saturday, April 23, 2011  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Columnists

The good people of Dorchester will not have to worry about Donald Ray Williams haunting the Greenwood Street area for the next 35 or 40 years.

Should he survive prison to return one day, the gang leader called “Mann” will be nudging 70. By then, maybe he will have outgrown the desire to shoot people in the back, the way he did to Tramane Smith.

“I know there is no honor among thieves,” Smith wrote in his victim impact statement, “but what you did to me was beyond that. I loved you like a brother.”

The 24-year-old Smith declined to read those words aloud yesterday. He opted to remain in the back of a Suffolk courtroom, confined to the wheelchair that Mann, once his best friend, put him in.

Though Tramane was two years younger and a bit shorter than the skinny friend who ruled over the Greenwood Street Packers, he functioned as Mann’s true muscle.

“(Tramane) was a tough kid who could handle himself,” one cop noted yesterday. “Williams couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag. But he’d shoot you in a second.”

“Everywhere I was,” Smith said, during two full days on the witness stand, “he (Mann) was.”

On the night of Nov. 24, 2007, Tramane Smith told Mann he was leaving the gang. To prove it, he returned the .40-caliber pistol his friend had given him.

For a couple of hours, Tramane thought he’d actually made it out, until the moment he heard a shot and couldn’t feel his legs. Mann fired two more bullets into his friend’s back, then moved in closer. Just before shooting him in the face, Mann sneered over the friend he thought was about to die, “(expletive, expletive) ... that’s what you get.”

All of 20 at the time, Tramane Smith managed to grab his cell phone and call his girlfriend to say he was dying. He then instructed her to get a message to his brother: “Tell my brother that Mann shot me.”

It’s not every day that Suffolk DA Dan Conley and Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis sit side-by-side at a sentencing hearing. But then, it’s not every day a paralyzed ex-gangbanger helps rid the city of a one-man crime wave.

Conley called it a “watershed moment,” one that could help change the landscape of intimidation that has held places like Greenwood Street hostage.

Davis suggested that perhaps Tramane Smith’s resolve went beyond his paralysis. Before he was gunned down and left for dead, his cousin, Charles Bunch, was killed.

Two weeks earlier, Bunch had stepped out of a car Smith was sitting in, walked a block to randomly gun down the first person he saw on rival turf — and wound up shooting innocent 13-year-old Steven Odom. Tramane Smith told this jury that he was disgusted with his cousin’s act, calling him a “kid killer” to his face.

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Davis sighed, “if that was one of the prime reasons this kid wanted out of the gang life. He’d had enough.”

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1332716

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Brothers for Boston march to fight crime and violence

Brothers for Boston march to fight crime and violence

Marchers pause in front of the Quick Stop on Warren Street where Tahitia Milton was killed.

by: Richard Caesar, Baystate Banner

The Brothers for Boston marchers make their way down Blue Hill Avenue. (Richard Caesar photos)
There are still concerned men in our community who care about making a difference. This was the message Brothers for Boston aimed to send with their march through Roxbury last Saturday.

FULL STORY HERE
http://www.baystatebanner.com/local15-2011-04-07

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PACT initiative for tackling gang violence could be new 'Boston Miracle'

PACT initiative for tackling gang violence could be new 'Boston Miracle'

Posted by Cara Bayles March 24, 2011 11:57 AM
By Cara Bayles, Town Correspondent

Boston Police Superintendent Paul Joyce has gone on a talking tour around Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury, the neighborhoods he says are the heart of Boston's violence hot spots, where 90 percent of the city's shootings take place.

On Wednesday night, he visited the Greater Four Corners Action Coalition, a group created in response to drug violence in the early 90s, to give his update on the Partnerships Advancing Communities Together program, better known as PACT, which is up for its eight-month review. Joyce said it was his 155 community meeting since July 1, 2010.

PACT combines the efforts of police, street workers, the courts, and education and job programs to target 240 Boston gang members, who are considered responsible for the majority of the city's violence. The program represents a collaborative technique reminiscent of the "Boston Miracle" of the late 1990s, when a partnership between community groups, clergy and police helped to significantly reduce gang violence.

FULL STORY HERE
http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/dorchester/2011/03/pact_initiative_for_tackling_g.html

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Hard times at Dartmouth jail Officers struggle with gang violence, even behind bars

Hard times at Dartmouth jail
Officers struggle with gang violence, even behind bars

Photo by Peter Pereira/The Standard-Times (File)
By Brian Fraga / The Standard-Times  |   Sunday, January 30, 2011  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage

DARTMOUTH — There is one place where rival gang members find themselves under the same roof, living a tenuous coexistence.

Jail.

"You have your Bloods, your Crips, Latin Kings, Gangster Disciples, your Asian gangs, all in here," said Steven Souza, assistant superintendent of security, jail and detention at the Dartmouth House of Correction.

Gangs are a reality in just about any detention facility in the United States.

The Mass. Department of Corrections has identified 52 different gangs — also known as security threat groups — within the state prison system.

In Dartmouth, there are 203 confirmed gang members, representing about 14 percent of the overall population of 1,465 inmates, said Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson.

Since the facility instituted its Gang Intelligence Unit almost two years, more than 800 confirmed gang members have been processed at the Dartmouth House of Correction, Hodgson said.

"The gang issues we see in the streets, especially in urban areas, we see in our prisons," Hodgson said.

The security staff screens all inmates and pre-trial detainees for gang affiliations. Correctional officers monitor gang members, but officials said those efforts are hindered by a manpower shortage and the fact that most of the facility’s cells are unlocked.

"The facility, with its modular units that don’t have toilets and sinks in the units, was designed by the state in the 1960. It’s not our decision to have non-locking cells," Souza said.

Despite the security staff’s efforts, gang-related violence is inevitable. A week ago, at least two members of the Asian Boyz, a gang affiliated with the Crips, armed with a shank, stormed into an unlocked cell and tried to cut off a tattoo from a Blood gang member’s arm, officials said.

To read the rest of this story, go to www.southcoasttoday.com

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1313031

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Fugitive Apprehension Team profiles

Fugitive Apprehension Team profiles
By O’Ryan Johnson  |   Friday, November 26, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage

‘WE RELY ON THEM’: Fugitive Apprehension Team members officer Steve Ridge, left, and team leader Sgt. Detective Brian Albert, right, have taken down some of Boston’s most notorious and dangerous fugitives.
Photo by Mark Garfinkel

EDDIE HERNANDEZ

Officer Eddie Hernandez learned Spanish from his grandmother. He says he likes to blend into the background when the team enters a Spanish-speaking home, listening quietly in case anyone inside thinks they can get something past the cops.

The lifelong Dorchester resident said getting up early to work for his father, a contractor, gave him a strong work ethic that is tested during round-the-clock stakeouts.

STEVE RIDGE

Boston police Officer Steve Ridge developed the ability to spot a liar while working as a U.S. Customs Agent at Logan International Airport. He said he learned how to detect who was carrying drugs or smuggled goods by recognizing the mannerisms of deception, skills he declined to share.

He said the knack comes in handy when confronting friends and loved ones of violent felons who may try to conceal a fugitive’s whereabouts. But he said it’s ruined crime TV for him — the skills used by Hollywood cops who pretend to spot liars are a little laughable.

BRIAN ALBERT

Two decades ago, Sgt. Detective Brian Albert led Marines from behind a Humvee-mounted .50 caliber machine gun during Operation Desert Storm. After the Marine Corps, he worked as a Suffolk sheriff’s deputy guarding prisoners, a job that taught him how to search a room and a person, as well as how to talk to people from different backgrounds.

Now a Boston cop and head of the Fugitive Apprehension Team, he carries a much lighter .40 caliber Glock. After being tapped while a member of the BPD gang unit to organize the fugitive squad, Albert handpicked his team members.

He said he chose cops with people skills, since most of the job involves talking people into opening doors and telling them where the bad guys are.

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1298946

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Elite cops track Boston’s most wanted fugitives Bad boys, whatcha gonna do?

Elite cops track Boston’s most wanted fugitives
Bad boys, whatcha gonna do?
By O’Ryan Johnson  |   Friday, November 26, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage

Sgt. Detective Brian Albert, right, leads the Fugitive Apprehension Team, which has taken down some of Boston’s most notorious and dangerous fugitives.
Photo by Mark Garfinkel

These Hub cops have tracked down and slapped cuffs on the city’s most notorious fugitives, including the Craigslist Killer and Edward Corliss, the man accused of killing Jamaica Plain clerk Surendra Dangol. Their latest collars? The two men charged in the Mattapan massacre.

“I would like criminals to know if you commit a crime, the police are going to be looking for you,” said Sgt. Detective Brian Albert. “It doesn’t matter if you go out of the city, out of the state or out of the country. You’re better off turning yourself in to face the music.”

Albert commands the Fugitive Apprehension Team, a 12-member joint squad of Boston cops and U.S. Marshals that has been to at least 14 states, as well as Trinidad and Canada, in pursuit of wanted men and women, using some of the most advanced technology available to capture suspects on the run for murder, rapes and shootings in Boston. The team was formed in 2007, handpicked by Albert largely from BPD’s gang unit.

During the round-the-clock hunt for the suspects in the Sept. 28 Mattapan murders, cops zeroed in on Kimani Washington’s Manchester, N.H., hideout. The team got the floor plan to the apartment building, cleared out the units beside Washington’s and had local SWAT teams with eyes on the apartment before they hit the door.

They declined to discuss the arrest of murder suspect Dwayne Moore, saying it remains a grand jury investigation, but they described the kind of rigorous preparation they use in each case to keep cops safe and put crooks behind bars.

After a tip pointed to a possible Roxbury hideout earlier this week, officer Steve Ridge keyed in the license plates of cars around the building.

“We know who owns the house, how much they pay in taxes, how they vote — Democrat. We know the square footage. We should have the whole layout of the place before we go in,” Ridge said, eyeing his laptop screen. That house turned out to be a dead end.

That’s not always the case.

Last March, a tight huddle of plainclothes cops stood in a Dorchester parking lot at dawn, passing around photos of Schuyler Oppenheimer, 19, a convicted drug dealer — each showing a different hairstyle. Oppenheimer was wanted for a shooting in Cambridge.

Team members pulled up to the home — already under surveillance by U.S. Marshals John Bianci and Joseph Norton — and formed up to go in while other officers took up well-rehearsed positions around the house. Boston police officer Eddie Hernandez and transit police Detective Charles Collins moved to the back.

A woman reluctantly let a group of officers in the front door. Moments later, there was a commotion at the back, and a disheveled Oppenheimer was escorted out by Hernandez and Collins.

It is one of hundreds of arrests the team has made this year. Boston police Commissioner Edward Davis credits them with helping to drive down overall crime numbers — though murders are up sharply for the year — by quickly nabbing “impact” players.

“They’re so effective and so fast at finding people,” Davis said. “The great thing about the fugitive unit is that they have connections outside the criminal justice world that help them do their job, They’ve had really good luck with running down people in other countries. We rely on them.”

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1298947

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Cops: Gang war sparked JP shootout 3 dead shatters calm at pizzeria

Cops: Gang war sparked JP shootout
3 dead shatters calm at pizzeria
By Richard Weir  |   Tuesday, November 23, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage

Photo by Angela Rowlings
An apparent grudge match between warring gang members left three men dead, police and friends said yesterday as a usually tranquil Jamaica Plain neighborhood reeled in the wake of the pizza-parlor blood bath.

“We have not seen this kind of violence around here for a long time. I have not seen it ever in the center part of JP,” said state Rep. Liz Malia, a 40-year Jamaica Plain resident, as she sat at a table yesterday inside the popular Same Old Place pizza shop — scene of Sunday’s deadly rampage.

The outbreak of violence in the family-friendly Centre Street area spurred vows of a quick response by law enforcement.

“That type of incident is unusual in a typically quiet neighborhood. However, incidents like that are not acceptable on any street in the city,” said BPD spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll, adding that any “individuals who associate with these three should anticipate a significant amount of aggressive enforcement coming their way.”

Gangs have long warred in the Jackson and Egleston Square areas of Jamaica Plain, but the neighborhood’s gentrified downtown has been immune from shootouts.

That changed around 7:30 p.m. Sunday, when members of rivaling blocks stumbled across each other at the scruffy, 37-year-old pizzeria, police said.

One slug left a spider’s web of cracks in a mirrored wall, another bullet pierced a wall separating the dining area from the kitchen and a third shattered the restaurant’s window.

That bullet — or shrapnel — grazed the wife of Boston labor lawyer Alan Shapiro, who happened to be walking nearby with two other women.

She’s fine,” said Shapiro, adding his wife — whose name is being withheld by the Herald at the request of her family — was grazed but treated and released from Faulkner Hospital.

Pizza shop owner Fred Ciampa, who was not working, said his staff told him they did not know the three men involved in the fight before.

“Nothing like this has ever happened before,” he said. “We’re like an institution here. Everybody knows us.”

Boston police released few details yesterday on what triggered the outburst, other than that all three male victims had arrest records and were involved in gangs.

“The altercation began inside and made its way outside,” Driscoll said. “One individual pulled out a knife. The other individual pulled out a gun and was able to shoot the two other individuals.”

The 20-year-old who wielded the knife, identified by his friends and a police source as Johnnel “Bo” Cruz Nova of Jamaica Plain, managed to fatally stab his 20-year-old foe before that man fatally shot him and mortally wounded his 28-year-old friend.

Eric Vila, 21, a tattoo artist, said he bumped into Cruz Nova as the two friends ordered pizza at Same Old Place moments before the shootings. They talked about expanding the tattoo of a .38 snub-nosed revolver on his friend’s right arm.

“He told me, ‘I’m trying to do my whole arm. I want to put ‘Money, respect, power, with a whole bunch of gunsmoke. Can you do that?’ I told him no problem. See me tomorrow. ... I said, ‘You be careful,’ ” recalled Vila, who left the pizzeria to go to a 7-Eleven, only to get a phone call minutes later that his pal had been shot.

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1298288

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Sweep busts top gangs of North Shore

Sweep busts top gangs of North Shore
By O’Ryan Johnson  |   Saturday, November 6, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage

GUN SHOW: Some of the 34 guns seized in a gang bust on the North Shore.
Photo by Patrick Whittemore

A swarm of 500 police officers, state troopers and FBI agents from New England fanned out yesterday across the North Shore, where they rounded up dozens of thugs and seized high-powered firearms in order to stamp out violence in gang-ravaged Lynn and Lowell.

The sweep, dubbed “Operation Melting Pot,” targeted members of several street gangs in Lynn and Lowell responsible for out-of-control violence, including murders of rivals, said U.S. Attorney Carmen Ortiz.

“The people of Lynn deserve a safe community in which to live and raise their children,” she said. “Unfortunately, there are a few individuals, often belonging to violent street gangs, whose illegal activities diminish the quality of life for all.”

Three years ago, an FBI roundup crippled Deuces Wild, the most powerful gang in Lynn, leaving a power vacuum, FBI agent Jeffrey Wood — the man in charge of the agency’s North Shore Gang Task Force — wrote in an affidavit.

“Similar to other experiences, however, the dismantling of the leadership of these gangs eventually emboldened remaining gangs to step into the void,” he added. “The result has been a dramatic increase in gang-related murders, shootings, stabbings and other violence in Lynn.”

Woods’ chilling document details three years of increasing bloodshed, and includes the shooting of a 16-year-old girl, knife fights inside one Lynn school, a gunfight outside another and the shooting of a teenage girl in January whose willingness to testify left her paralyzed by gunfire. Wood states that in September the FBI wire-tapped a hotel room where gang members discussed plans to attack during a baby’s christening.

Standing in front of two folding tables covered end to end with illegal firearms, police chiefs Kenneth Lavallee from Lowell and Kevin Coppinger from Lynn said the arrests and seizures take dangerous tools away from reckless criminals who have the potential to inflict untold tragedies upon their neighborhoods.

“Every time we can take a gun off the street, we prevent a potential tragedy, we prevent a potential death,” Lavallee said.

The operation targeting several warring gangs has lasted the past 18 months and has resulted in 61 arrests. Yesterday the leadership of those gangs were hauled away, which Coppinger said will send a powerful message to any gangbangers in Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, Haverhill and Chelsea.

“If you think you can come into our communities, we will target you,” he said. “We will follow you, build cases against you and prosecute you to the full extent of the law.”

The investigation was a wide-ranging probe into leaders and members of the Avenue King Crips, the Bloods, the Gangsta Disciples, the Deuce Boyz and the Latin Kings in Lynn and Lowell. Coppinger said while the gangs may carry the names of nationally recognized gangs, they are at best loosely affiliated.

“They aren’t taking orders from L.A.,” he said, though he added with the massive firepower they wielded, they were no less deadly.

Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1294383

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Police launch South End gang, guns sweep

Police launch South End gang, guns sweep
By O’Ryan Johnson  |   Thursday, October 28, 2010  |  http://www.bostonherald.com  |  Local Coverage

A crackdown on a violent South End drug gang should serve as a warning to anyone who uses a gun for crime, Boston police Commissioner Edward Davis said, after a sweep picked up nine suspected gang members on drug charges.


Davis said cops noted increased firearms activity in the South End in July and August of this year and attributed that spike to the gang.


“Let this serve as a message to any individuals engaging in violent activity in our community,” Davis said. “We will continue our ceaseless efforts to hold violent perpetrators accountable.”


Police said the gang is suspected in shootings and related drug violence, robberies, break-ins and street crime around the area where they worked. Davis said the sweep was dubbed Operation National League and noted that several members of the gang wore Pittsburgh Pirates hats while dealing drugs. He said the group tried to intimidate anyone who walked through the area of the Villa Victoria projects and were trying to establish an “open air drug market.”


“We will not allow that to happen,” Davis said.


Eight of the suspects were charged with distribution of crack cocaine in a school zone. A ninth person was arrested on a federal indictment for distribution of crack cocaine. The investigation started when fed-up residents complained to police about crime in the area of Dade Park.


He said police carried out a monthslong investigation and then fanned out across the neighborhood, home to some of the city’s priciest real estate and finest restaurants, yesterday to make the arrests.


Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1292061

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