Whitey's Payback by T. J. English

the Gullymen’s Vassell, organized gangsterism must have seemed like a natural career move. After spending many months shooting up rival campaign rallies and delivering votes with the barrel of a gun, he fled Jamaica after the 1980 elections. Upon his arrival in New York, all he had to do was adapt his skills to America’s criminal marketplace, where prospects for advancement were vastly superior to anything back home.
    At five feet eight inches tall, with a scrawny ghetto physique, Vassell was not physically intimidating. Soft-spoken, with short, neatly coiffed hair, he had a broad, toothy smile that made him look years younger than he was. Because of his diminutive stature, he knew the value of surrounding himself with physically impressive strong-arm men.
    In Brooklyn, Vassell made contact with a group of Jamaican killers called the 98th Street Men, a resident gang near Crown Heights. With this group of trained hit men, Vassell targeted a section in the neighborhood then controlled by a small group of Panamanian nationals. “The Panamanians themselves were no slouches when it came to violence,” says a New York detective formerly assigned to the Gullymen’s turf. “But the Jamaicans just shot them right off the block.”
    Once he had established a base of operation, Vassell’s drug business followed a pattern similar to that of other posses across the United States. Guns and henchmen flowed easily back and forth between Jamaica and the States. Violence was used not as a last resort but as a calling card. The Gullymen staked their claim through drive-by shootings—the gangland equivalent of a leveraged buyout.
    Despite his lack of formal education, “Brooklyn Barry,” as Vassell became known on the street, possessed an undeniable business acumen. By the late 1980s, his operation included some forty Gullymen who were reaping combined profits of more than $60,000 a day. Business was so good that in 1988, Vassell sent Paul Moore, his brother-in-law, to Texas to explore the possibility of expanding their operation to include the sale of crack. Two murders and many assaults later, the Gullymen were the largest crack dealers in Dallas.
    To a bunch of young ruffians weaned in a Kingston ghetto and only recently arrived in America, it must have seemed like a dream. They pulled up in a sleek, new BMW in front of their headquarters on Schenectady Avenue, the Crown Heights Soccer & Domino Association, dressed “spree-style,” with gold jewelry on their fingers and around their necks.
    One of the few Gullymen who refrained from indulging in opulent displays of wealth was Vassell himself, who preferred to explore other benefits of the trade. He would take his pick of the beautiful women gathered at the rude boys’ favorite Brooklyn dance halls and have them taken to his apartment. Apparently, his reputation was hard to resist. As of last December, Vassell is said to have fathered nineteen children from thirteen women, or “baby mothers,” as he prefers to call his ladies.
    Having established himself as a prominent figure in criminal circles in America, Vassell found that his reputation was growing back home in Kingston. Like many posse leaders, during trips to Jamaica, he took money, clothes, and lavish trinkets to the sufferers, which he handed out in annual “treats,” or street festivals. Brooklyn Barry was welcomed in McGregor Gully as a renegade hero who had returned to help redistribute the world’s riches. Beauty pageants were held in which budding baby mothers were sponsored by Vassell and other members of his gang. For the adults, Vassell often took guns—“vote getters,” as he sometimes called them—that he had purchased in Florida and Texas, packed inside television sets, and shipped via air freight.
    The reigns of the Gullymen might have lasted indefinitely were it not for their tendency toward unpredictable acts of violence, which, as their business became more profitable and more unwieldy, inevitably