The Mammoth Book of Hard Bastards (Mammoth Books) (15 page)

The Sex, Money, Murder crew were handcuffed and transported to the local police station, where they were booked under their alias names. A few hours later, after posting bail, Pistol Pete and his crew were released, but their van had been impounded and was still being searched. This meant they had no wheels and, after posting bail, no money. The bulk of their money was in the second stash box in the van.

Yaro Pack wanted to get out of town as fast as possible, because he knew that when the cops discovered the other stash box – which also contained guns and coke – the game was over. He made a suggestion. “I ain’t liking the way this feels. Let’s get the fuck outta here, go on over to Charlotte. From there we can catch a plane back to Zoo York.”

“Fuck that shit,” said Pistol Pete. “We’ll hang here until the van is released. Get our shit back.”

“Man, didn’t you see them po-lice taking our van apart?” asked Yaro Pack. “Sooner or later, they gonna’ find our shit. Then they gonna’ put our ass in a sling. We need to blow this Ma and Pa town, man.”

“Sheeit,” scoffed Pistol Pete. “These country-ass po-lice so stupid they ain’t findin’ nothin’, man.”

Pistol Pete was wrong. Even as he and Yaro Pack were arguing, the police found the second stash box. This one wasn’t empty. It contained the guns and coke and a pile of money.

The SMM gangbangers walked to a pay phone and made a collect call to New York, informing their members back home of their predicament. While they were on the phone, the police arrived and arrested them again. This time their bail was high. The gangbangers made their phone calls and lingered in jail, waiting to be redeemed.

A few days later, George Wallace, who was a friend of Pistol Pete, and Yaro Pack’s cousin arrived with bail money. Once they were released, the gangbangers got out of town as fast as possible. There was no way they were hanging around this podunk town to face the music. Sooner or later the police would match their prints to their real names, which meant their problems would escalate geometrically.

Pistol Pete decided not to take any more risks. He stopped taking trips. Instead, he stayed in New York and ran his empire from there, telling his crew where to go and what to do.

His tendency to resolve business disputes with his pistol caught up with him in late 1995. Karlton Hines, who was a basketball star at Syracuse University, owed Pete some money for drugs. Karlton decided not to pay what he owed. It was a bad choice. One day, Pete spotted Karlton standing outside a stereo shop on Boston Road. Karlton was with a friend of his named Carlos Mestre. They were waiting while Karlton had a new stereo installed in his car. Pistol Pete opened fire at the two men, killing Karlton and wounding Carlos. Pete didn’t mean to hit Carlos, but his policy was to spray lead everywhere, which meant Carlos got hit because he associated with the wrong people.

Two months later, Pistol Pete finished the job on Carlos Mestre. Pete had nothing against him personally, but Carlos’s status had changed. Now he was a witness to the murder of Karlton Hines, which meant Carlos had to die. As Carlos walked out of a Bronx hip-hop store called Jew Man, Pistol Pete gunned him down.

The police got a tip and arrested Pete for murder a few days later. The tip came from David Gonzales, Pete’s old drug-running buddy, who was pissed off at Pete because he had been shaking him down for money. When Pete was arrested, as usual, he had a gun on him. Possession of a gun demanded a mandatory eight-month jail sentence, which Pete served at the Rikers Island Correctional Facility. When the eight months were up, his mother bailed him out so he could walk free while he awaited trial for the murder charge.

Because there were no witnesses to the murder of Carlos Mestre, Pistol Pete was acquitted. However, instead of walking out of court a free man, he was remanded to custody. Gonzales had fixed Pete’s wagon but good. While Pete was sitting through his murder trial, Gonzales had told the Feds about Pete’s activities in North Carolina, back in 1994. After Pete beat the murder rap, a federal narcotics indictment out of the Western District of North Carolina was waiting for him. The “country-ass po-lice” indicted Pistol Pete for the guns, coke and money they had found in the stash box of the van.

Pistol Pete was moved to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg County Jail in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he would be held until his next trial began.

It was 1996. He was twenty-three years old.

Pistol Pete kept up a good front. He had a rep to live up to, so he pretended like he didn’t care. “A true player will accept the hand he is dealt simply because he did not live a lie,” said Pete.

The Feds went all out in their case against Peter Rollack, aka Pistol Pete. They hit him with the RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act), charging him with drug
trafficking
, conspiracy to distribute drugs and ongoing conspiracy. The charges portrayed Pistol Pete as an interstate high-profile
drug-trafficker
, who was the leader of a Bloods gang involved in
drug-smuggling
and murder.

During the trial, it came out that Darius Covington was an informant for the Rockingham Police Department. Covington
testified
that he had been a paid informant for years, and that he had purchased drugs from Peter Rollack, watching as Rollack removed the drugs from a secret compartment in the Nissan van.

The jury was informed that after impounding the van, the Rockingham Police Department had thoroughly searched the vehicle. The search process had involved completely dismantling the van. When the police finally opened the second stash box, they discovered unregistered guns, two kilos of cocaine and $250,000 in cash.

Yaro Pack and David Gonzales also testified for the prosecution. Both men stated that Pete accompanied them on the trip to North Carolina, and that the primary purpose of the trip was to deliver drugs and pick up money due for past deliveries of drugs. Yaro Pack stated that Pete acted as the group’s enforcer. In return for their testimony, both men received immunity. As soon as the trial concluded, Pack and Gonzales entered WITSEC, the federal witness protection programme. This was necessary to protect their lives. During the trial, Pistol Pete had put out death contracts on both men. He had written letters in Bloods code from his prison cell, ordering the members of Sex, Money, Murder to kill Yaro Pack and David Gonzales. According to Pete, they were snitches and deserved to die.

One of Pistol Pete’s letters ordered SMM members to kill David “Twin” Mullins and his brother Damon Mullins, along with Efrain Solar. Pete believed the twin brothers and Solar posed a problem. They could testify against him, and even if they didn’t, the
possibility
was enough to require their deaths. Sex, Money, Murder carried out the order from their boss. They killed David Mullins and Efrain Solar. However, the connection between the letter and the murders was not made until after Pistol Pete’s trial.

As the trial progressed, Pete’s letters were introduced as evidence. Pursuant to a federal search warrant, all Pete’s mail had been
intercepted,
examined, copied and then allowed out through the mail. A handwriting analyst testified that the letters had been written by Peter Rollack. The letters validated the testimony of the government witnesses and indicated Pete’s active participation in an ongoing conspiracy.

As one SMM member said, “The letters that they got fucked Pistol Pete up. A lot of shit rode on the weight of those letters.”

On 9 January 1998, the jury found Peter Rollack, aka Pistol Pete, guilty of conspiring to possess with intent to distribute a quantity of cocaine and cocaine base, and of knowingly using and carrying a firearm, and of aiding and abetting such conduct in relation to a drug-trafficking crime.

He was sentenced to forty years in prison.

One month later, on 10 February 1998, the headline of the
New York Times
read: “Imprisoned Gang Leader Ordered Killings at Neighbourhood Football Game, US Attorney Says.”

It happened like this. On 27 November 1997, thirty people from the Soundview and Castle Hill projects were enjoying a game of touch football in a local park. A group of men, allegedly SMM gangbangers, swaggered into the park. Pulling weapons, they opened fire. Dozens of shots rang out. Then the gangbangers left, reloading their weapons as they walked away. Five blood-soaked bodies lay on the ground. David “Twin” Mullins and Efrain Solar were dead. Three other people were seriously wounded.

Sex, Money, Murder members Robinson “Mac 11” Lazala and José Rodriguez were arrested and charged with murder and attempted murder. As the Feds investigated the case, they
discovered
other murders that SMM had allegedly perpetrated. The emerging pattern of evidence pointed directly back to Pistol Pete. The pattern included racketeer activity, drug sales, robberies, acts of intimidation, acts of violence and murder.

In February 1998, Pistol Pete and ten other SMM members were indicted for nine murders and for trafficking in cocaine and crack in Pennsylvania, New York and North Carolina. A separate indictment against Pistol Pete charged him with narcotics trafficking, RICO violations, five actual murders, two conspiracies to commit murder and witness tampering, and with committing these acts for the purpose of maintaining or increasing his racketeering enterprises. The witness tampering charge referred to the murders of David Mullins and Efrain Solar.

The Feds were asking for the death penalty against Peter Rollack aka Pistol Pete.

And the prosecutors had plenty of witnesses lined up, including Yaro Pack and David Gonzales, along with SMM members Brian Boyd and Emilo Romero.

Pistol Pete’s attorney argued that “the witnesses are willing to admit anything and say anything. If they don’t, they will go to jail for a very long time. The government’s case rests solely on the uncorroborated testimony of cooperating witnesses.”

The jury didn’t buy the attorney’s argument.

The Feds case looked like a slam-dunk. Pistol Pete must have thought so, too, because he agreed to a plea bargain. Pete pleaded guilty to federal racketeering and the murders of six people. In return, the Feds agreed not to seek the death penalty.

To this day, Pistol Pete maintains that the only reason he pleaded guilty was because the Feds threatened to incarcerate his mother for receiving drug money. In other words, as Seth “Soul Man” Ferranti put it, “The Feds put some shit in the game.” Only the Feds and Pistol Pete know the truth of the matter.

In 2000, Peter Rollack aka Pistol Pete, age twenty-seven, was sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus a further 105-year sentence, for the murder of six people and drug-trafficking in three states. Conditions of his sentence were draconian. He was to be placed in special restrictive confinement and prohibited from communication or receiving visits from anyone other than his lawyers or his family members. And even these individuals had to be pre-approved by the court and the prison.

Even though Pistol Pete was out of business, SMM was not. Its members kept on banging.

In 2002, Tommy Thompson, who was the leader of SMM in Jersey City, New Jersey, established himself as a headliner. He was the biggest of the Big Wheels, moving drugs all over the East Coast and killing anyone who got in his way. Only his run didn’t last very long. On 14 November 2004, an eighteen-count RICO indictment charged Tommy Thompson with conspiracy, racketeering,
conspiracy
to murder, robbery, conspiracy to commit robbery, conspiracy to distribute heroin and cocaine, and nine counts of violent crimes in aid of racketeering.

In short order, the Feds put Tommy Thompson out of business too.

Next to step up and try their hand at becoming the top dogs of banging were Antonio Merritt and Bobby Williams of Trenton, New Jersey. Merritt and Williams were the co-leaders of the Trenton set of SMM. Their thing was drug-trafficking, and they were good at it. From 2005 to 2007 they flourished and got “hood rich”. Just like their predecessors, violence was their standard operating procedure. They killed anyone who got in their way. Which was their undoing. In 2007, the New Jersey State Division of Criminal Justice indicted them for first-degree racketeering and two counts of murder.

Merritt and Williams went out of business too.

Nevertheless, SMM continued to grow in numbers. SMM soldiers kept banging and moving heroin, cocaine, crack cocaine and crystal meth. To protect their “shit”, SMM relied on unleashing hell – a rain of blazing gunfire. Sooner or later, most of them ended up in prison. In response to SMM’s growth and activities – and that of the other sets of the East Coast Bloods – New York’s Department of Corrections started a Gang Intelligence Unit. The focus of the unit was to identify and mitigate the activities of the different Blood sets, including Sex, Money, Murder, the Gangsta Killers, the Concepts of War and the Nine Trey Gangstas. So far, the Gang Intelligence Unit has had little impact. In fact, staff officers of the unit have begun getting “popped” without warning, usually in drive-by shootings.

Today, Peter Rollack is incarcerated at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. He attained legendary status during his brief career. Even though SMM flipped from the NYG Alliance, the Alliance still throws up the number seven hand sign (gun) in his honour. And SMM uses the number code 252 or 252 per cent to represent twenty-five years to life in prison – in homage to the life sentence that Pistol Pete is serving.

SMM has extended its reach into the hip-hop world. Various rappers are known members of SMM, including Hocus, S-ONE, Lord Tariq, Peter Gunz, Took and Hussein Fatal of the Outlawz.

Today, SMM members refer to themselves in verbal shorthand as “Murder Gang” or as “Blazing Billy”, because, like Billy the Kid, when it comes down to it, they blaze away with their guns. A new Pistol Pete may be in the making.

W
HAT HAPPENS WHEN
a fairly ordinary person doing an ordinary job on a normal day gets caught up in an
extraordinary
and terrifying situation? Can this turn someone who is not particularly tough into a tough, hard bastard? This is exactly what happened to William Coss, a thirty-two-year-old single father in Arizona, USA, who was living the life of a solid citizen when he had the chance to find out what he was really made of.

At just five foot eight inches and 165 pounds, average-looking with brown hair and brown eyes, Coss had joined the US Army as a paratrooper when he was a youngster. After his discharge in 2000, he returned to Arizona to live a regular life as a construction
superintendent.
Other than the army stint, Coss had lived in the desert city since the second grade at school when his parents had settled there. He married, became a doting father and then divorced. When the housing market bottomed out, Coss left construction and found a new career in pest control, becoming certified in “The Sting of the Scorpion”, “Mosquitoes – Their Biology and Habits”, “Small Fly Control Strategies” and many other components of battling bugs. In 2008 he put his new skills to work at a local pest management company where he worked a night shift alone, doing a route of commercial properties with a truck full of poisons and sprayers.

Just as Coss was starting his new career as a bug exterminator, a chain of eateries based in the western United States was enjoying phenomenal growth and announced plans to open ten new
locations
in the Phoenix area within six months. A few months later, on 22 March 2009, the expansion of the food chain suddenly became quite important to the former paratrooper. It nearly killed him. “Almost Out of Time”, written specially for this book by Camille Kimball, is the story of how.