Simple City: How Cartels Changed Crime in D.C.

Here is the goal of this article. I want to convince conservatives that all their talk of pervasive “social disorder” is silly: when you say “disorder,” you really mean the cartel.  I want to convince liberals that when you ignore “social disorder,” you are really ignoring the cartel. The changing nature of crime in D.C. is the result of the growing influence of the cartels on gang operations in the DMV, which has resulted in more homicides, carjackings, and retail theft, all of which are related to cartel operations.

The cartel has infiltrated the United States to an unprecedented degree over the past five years. The Biden administration’s historical incompetence with the border allowed 8 million people that we know of to cross our border illegally. They all arrived within less than four years, and all of them had to rely on the cartel to cross. There is no way to cross the southern border without the cartel. At a minimum, 1.7 million more have crossed the border without our knowledge. In total, nearly 10 million illegal immigrants have entered the country in less than four years. Over 1 million were from Venezuela, which is governed by the dictator Nicolas Maduro, who, according to the Trump administration, works in concert with the transnational cartel Tren De Aragua to traffic drugs, assassinate political opponents, and migrate gang members to the United States. Mass migration to the United States has spread the cartel across American cities.

Understanding crime in the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C., requires that broader context. D.C., situated between Virginia and Maryland, has been hard hit by the influx of cartels. Cartel members have been arrested attempting to distribute cocaine in Virginia suburbs and across the region. Members of MS-13 have been arrested in Alexandria, southeast Baltimore, Fairfax, and Dale City. MS-13, the Sinaloa cartel, and Tren De Aragua (TdA) networks now suffuse America’s northeast megalopolis, or Acela Corridor, which starts in the southern suburbs of the DMV in Dale City and stretches far to Boston’s North Shore. Over 50 million people inhabit this part of the United States, the beating heart of America’s political and financial life.

When you say “disorder,” when you think “crime,” you really mean cartel. Debating statistics is a pointless misdirection. Instead of debating why we have so many carjackings, why shampoo is behind plexiglas, why and how drugs are getting into the country, we debate whether we are having less or more crime than last year.

Statistics portray these crimes as separate and distinct, when in reality, they all measure the presence and impact of the billion-dollar corporations we call “cartels.” Carjackings, retail theft, violent crime, and homicide: cartels are ultimately responsible for crime across all these categories. “Less” or “more” crime misses the point: a mafia has moved into our cities, and mafias want to be, until they have full political control of a territory, invisible. There is now a parallel world to our own that statistics alone do not capture. We can understand that world by understanding how cartels interact with D.C.’s black gangs, who they rely on to function.

D.C.’s Gangs as Corporate Subsidiaries

Washington, D.C. is two cities, as any visitor or local knows. The federal city and the city-city, that is to say, the white-collar, west and north, and northern Virginia (NOVA), and the mostly black part of the DMV, southeast D.C. across the Anacostia River, and in the uptown and eastern parts of the city, stretching from Potomac Avenue to Colombia Heights, east D.C.’s Deanwood neighborhood, on north to Baltimore and New York, through the Acela Corridor. Shaw Howard sits happily on the Western border of the second city, straddling Columbia and the Federal district. I have lived in D.C. for years, in Deanwood across the Anacostia, in the northwest, and the southeast. I’ve lived in Virginia, near Fairfax and Springfield. When I first moved here, a neighbor of mine, an older black woman, told me where the hood was, located by 21^st Street and Minnesota Avenue.

Dotted throughout the DMV are gangs. Gang members are black men and boys, some as young as thirteen or twelve. Young boys are used as child soldiers because they are prosecuted less harshly by a permissive justice system. Older gang members, knowing this, have transformed crime and punishment into ritual murder and initiation, manipulating blacks’ and whites’ empathy for young black children to bring black children into violence, perpetuating the gang’s existence, via the transformation of punishment into a recruitment practice. A very common tattoo is on the stomach, showing gang affiliation and the number of kills. Serving time is both respected and honorable.

For a long time, these gangs were nearly defeated, retreating to their hoods. That has changed. Fox 5, which emerged from 37^th Street, which is D.C.’s most violent, prevalent, and vicious gang. They have used automatic weapons during their assaults and have committed multiple homicides. Their gang formed just before the pandemic in 2019. Their home base is on 37^th street in east D.C. There’s the Glizzy Gang, which mostly produced rap music, including drill and crank, ran from 2012 – 2023, and engaged in shootouts with the Wellington Park Crew, which split from Glizzy over a music beef, reportedly related to Shy Glizzy’s relative popularity. There is the Simple City gang, which has been at war with the 27^th Street gang and Fox 5. According to rap forums, their neighborhoods have been beefing since the ’90s.

Simple City is Benning Terrace, which was once held up as a model of recovery from gang violence. They still call it “Baby Vietnam” now.  

There are many other gangs. There’s the Melon Street gang, the Clay Terrace gang, the 42 Gang, 21 Street, and Blow God. They rise and fall like infant kingdoms. Some are more violent than others—some mostly rap. Most kill. Some kill for music, some kill for drugs, some for initiation. Some sell drugs to children. Some shoot children. Some recruit children to shoot some other children. A child was shot in front of my house a month ago, which is why I wrote this article. Some keep MS-13 out, some invite them in, and most get on the payroll. D.C.’s gangs have always relied on cartel connections to thrive.

In 2014, the Obama administration launched a clemency initiative, which allowed federal inmates to have their sentences commuted or reduced by the President. Two D.C. locals pardoned under this scheme, in December of 2016, included:

“Nathaniel Law – Washington, DC, Offense: Narcotics conspiracy; maintaining a residence for the purpose of manufacturing, distributing, and using a controlled substance; distribution of five grams or more of cocaine base (five counts); distribution of cocaine base within 1,000 feet of a school; possession with intent to distribute five grams or more cocaine base; distribution of cocaine; District of Columbia, Sentence: Life imprisonment; 12 years' supervised release (April 19, 2005) Commutation Grant: Prison sentence commuted to a term of 240 months' imprisonment.

And,

Kevin Wise – Washington, DC, Offense: Unlawful distribution of five grams or more of cocaine base; District of Columbia, Sentence: 262 months' imprisonment; four years' supervised release (May 11, 2001) Commutation Grant: Prison sentence commuted to expire on April 18, 2017.

Their sentences illustrate two things. First, often left out of discussions of crime is that D.C.’s high murder rate and crime during the ’90s was the result of the cartel fueling a gang war. Now that the cartel has a bigger presence in the United States, we should not be surprised to see a corollary rise in crime. Second, permissive attitudes towards crime enable further crime. Barack Obama’s clemency initiative was animated by the idea that black people convicted of non-violent drug offenses, including those related to crack cocaine and marijuana, were unfairly convicted because of their race. In the rush to boost pardon numbers, a large number of people who had taken plea bargains for lesser sentences were released despite committing violent offences in the past and doing far more than selling marijuana. Men like Kevin Wise and Nathaniel Law, who both had cartel connections, were released back into D.C.

Some of these pardoned individuals, including others like Robert Gill and Hilario Nieto, reactivated their dormant connections with cartels and returned to drug dealing. Though part of the requirements for clemency was that persons not have ties to cartels, the decisive factor in their release was whether they had legal advocates or not, and men like Hilario Nieto did. Though the supermajority of those granted clemency did not return to crime, in my own discussions with D.C. locals, rumor has it that certain individuals who received pardons returned to crime, or may have allegedly shared their connections with Latin American cartels to others in D.C. Though part of the logic of clemency was that the drug war was over and it was time for the prisoners to be released, the cartels were never gone. They were waiting for money-hungry allies to be back on the streets. Like the blood feuds of the ’90s that carry on in Benning Terrace today, none of this really ends.

D.C.’s gangs are mostly centered around neighborhoods and rap groups, public housing, and blocks. They each have a small amount of territory. For almost twenty years, from 2001 to 2018, they remained confined to the hood, excepting brief spikes in violence in 2003 and 2008.

You know the story. This is the story:

White America and black America have tolerated this for years. We accept the notion that out there somewhere in America, young black men kill each other, hoping that gladiatorial combat will win them the favor of music studios.

That story has changed because the cartels have moved back in. Like the escalating violence of the ’90s, the current crime wave and violence are the result of cartel activity. Though some crimes, such as burglary, assault with a dangerous weapon, sex abuse, and theft have declined either prior to or since 2020, other types of crime, especially those related to cartel violence and gang wars such as including homicide, motor vehicle theft, and robbery, have risen.

Certain long-time black residents of D.C. take great pride in the idea that there are no gangs in D.C. They consider these gangs instead, on their terms, “crews” or “neighborhoods.” Black D.C. locals are very proud to insist they’ve never had gang problems like Los Angeles, Chicago, or Detroit. This is partially true, as despite a few long-running gangs, most of these are neighborhood and block-based groups that do not have a regional impact, large memberships, and have not historically engaged in organized crime at scale.

At the same time, they are in denial. Locals are reluctant to accept the changing dynamics of crime. Consider that Glizzy Gang, which has around 30 members, is responsible for a few murders, and is funded through heroin distribution. Glizzy Gang began with music, with crank and diss tracks, which evolved into shootouts. Are they a gang? Maybe not so much like the Fox 5 gang, which is a well-organized, active, large gang that engages in large amounts of car theft, drug distribution, and shootings; they are the archetypal cartel subsidiary. Fox 5 functions like the caporegime of the mafia, and though violent, is far less violent than the cartel. On the small scale, you have Blow God and the 42 Gang, both of which have murders under their belt, traffic drugs including cocaine, heroin, fentanyl, and PCP, and have committed carjackings. Blow God is allegedly responsible for Edward Coristine’s ("Big Balls") beating.

Black residents in D.C. deny gangs existence for three reasons. First, they do not want a police response. They fear that if they admit that gangs exist, it will justify tough-on-crime policies, and innocent people or petty thieves will end up in prison. Second, D.C. gangs are small and in areas with extreme poverty. Residents consider gangs to be a result of poverty, rather than poverty being a result of gangs. Third, D.C. is a corrupt city. Both cities, the marble city of Congress and the simple city of the mayor, are corrupt. Lucrative community programs to save troubled youths from the streets provide livelihoods for a large number of people. These programs, which have largely failed, are nonetheless appealing because they promise a path to a life of peace and redemption for young black men who have committed acts of violence. They appeal to the deep religiosity of the black community, which corrupt black locals in politics and NGOs use to secure themselves lucrative positions. Black residents know the city is corrupt, and they believe whites and Congress are corrupt, so they feel entitled to be corrupt themselves. That’s why they re-elected the expelled D.C. City Councilman Trayon White, who took tens of thousands of dollars in bribes. D.C.’s black elite profit from corruption, NGOs and “community engagement,” and middle-class black locals are in denial of the crime problem. They largely live separate from the hoods. They are closer to hoods than whites; there are nice houses on Minnesota Avenue in east D.C., but they are still separate.

Poor blacks in D.C., particularly those in housing projects, are effectively unrepresented and do not participate in politics. When they do, it is because men like Trayon White quite directly act as their patrons, just as gang members can act as patrons in local communities: politicians and gang members are the only people in poor black communities with liquid capital.

A strong crackdown on gangs beginning in the late ’80s and stretching through the ’90s led to the arrest of many of D.C.’s local kingpins, including men like Rayful Edmond, who worked with Colombian cartels to traffic drugs. A relatively weak period followed from the early 2000s to 2013 until social media, COVID-19, and mass migration recreated the conditions for gangs to emerge in D.C. Residents are in denial because residents would prefer to avoid this uncomfortable and harsh reality. Who wants to return to the ’90s? Who wants to accept that after thirty years of progress, BLM, and billions on NGOs and social services, gangs are back because a force beyond their control, the cartel, is fueling the gang resurgence?

Fatalism animates local denial of the gang problem. When well-meaning black conservatives or liberals discuss solving the gang problem, they reference things like fatherlessness or poverty to justify community engagement. Fatalism blinds them to the actual reality, which is that fatherlessness and poverty are the results, not the cause, of gangs. What is the actual cause?

D.C.’s gangs rely on cartels like MS-13, the Sinaloa, and Tren De Aragua for drugs, and in turn, cartels rely on them for drug distribution. Generally, cartels in the United States do not sell directly to people; they use intermediaries. The relationship between gangs and cartels is abusive, violent, and split starkly on ethnic lines. Black drug dealers sell to black people, Native American drug dealers sell to Native Americans. The black market is racially segregated. Racial loyalty maintains the peace. Cartels and gangs do not fight over each other’s people, and generally, loyalty—the refusal to snitch, the willingness to take a bullet—extends only to one’s blood. Most ICE arrests of cartel members in the area happen around, but not in, D.C. city limits. This is because D.C. is gang territory. The cartels rely on gangs to distribute drugs within city limits and rely on local Hispanic gangs and indebted illegal aliens to traffic drugs in neighboring Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland.

D.C.’s poor, like any poor people in any American city, are a ready audience for the fentanyl, tranq, and heroin that cartels provide. D.C. gangs act as intermediaries, receiving the drugs directly or ingredients essential for manufacture from cartels. The DMV is a critical East Coast hub for drug distribution, and has been so for decades. The reason is practical. The DMV is the southernmost tip of the Acela Corridor; the drug trade from the south thus begins here and then moves north. The drug trade is transcontinental, more than you likely think or know. Despite the cartel’s reputation as drug dealers, they also regularly engage in retail theft and carjacking. These have been some of the primary impacts of the cartels on the DMV and, in particular, on D.C.

Retail theft, which can range from the full-on ransacking of airport terminals to petty theft and looting of stores like CVS, is critical to cartel economics. Stolen goods are often sold in open-air markets, on the streets, and in online stores. Illegal aliens that enter the United States may be in debt to cartels that trafficked them, and are expected to repay their coyote’s fees via operating on behalf of the cartel in organized theft rings. This is not extensively coordinated: imagine a coyote texting an alien settled in New York that they owe them money by a certain date, threatening to have their operatives in NY kill them if they don’t pay. That person then may rob stores in NY and sell goods on the streets—ideally, stores that won’t pursue charges against them, or goods that are low-risk to steal.

Long-time, low-scale levels of shoplifting and theft escalated out of control only after the COVID-19 pandemic, when mass migration created a nationwide, hungry market for stolen goods. Stolen goods, stolen by illegal aliens for cartel members or by black kids, were bartered or sold to cartels for cash and drugs. Open-air markets, such as those now in New York or seen near the Columbia Heights metro in D.C., are a result of the rise in retail theft. Thieves may steal goods and drive them hundreds of miles to new markets in bulk. Home Depot, CVS, clothing stores, and pharmacies are all targets of retail theft. Migrants have nothing to lose, and in sanctuary cities, they will likely not face prosecution for theft. Stores and retailers responded to this nationwide crime wave by installing new anti-theft systems, including omnipresent plexiglass containers and locks at CVS, Home Depot’s new cages, and grocery store cart-lock and receipt-scanning systems. High-trust stores, such as Home Depot, have been transformed into low-trust stores due to mass migration. While theft of high value goods, such as power tools, is often lucrative, low-scale theft and petty theft can be useful. Theft leaves no digital record and can serve as a gateway to more serious crimes.

The black community in D.C., especially young black kids struggling financially during COVID, became embroiled in this illicit economy. For years, you’ve been able to walk around D.C. and see young and old black men sitting outside metros selling clearly stolen goods, which never resulted in the mass adoption of anti-theft measures because those measures are responding to a crime wave caused by mass migration, not latent petty theft and black crime.

COVID-19 caused havoc in the local economy. At the same time, black kids were left alone more than ever. Black parents were more likely to be classified as essential workers, so their kids were alone for huge periods of time, with little capacity to monitor or supervise them. Kids in gangs now would have been 9, 10, or 11 during the lockdowns: completely alone, without parental supervision. Their entertainment was gang music and video, as at the same time, D.C.’s extremely violent drill scene was exploding in nationwide prestige and popularity due to the gang war between Simple City and the 37th Street gang, centered on the song Truth. Immediately after lockdown ended, crime started to increase as stores were unprepared for theft and as the public had little appetite for policing in the wake of BLM and the George Floyd riots.

Soon after, mass migration would introduce financial opportunities for petty thieves who took advantage of 2022’s soft-on-crime policies. Petty theft escalated because cartels and the massive growth of the illegal alien population financially incentivized retail theft. At the same time, Democratic city governments were refusing to police petty crimes. The crisis of non-enforcement collided with the crisis of open borders, giving rise to the 2023 crime wave. Social media influencers have exaggerated this trend through filming theft, and poorly socialized poor children have happily taken to participating. But make no mistake, you do not get nationwide retail anti-theft crackdowns without first, the state refusing to enforce the law, and second, the emergence of a nationwide black market for stolen goods, both of which have more to do with mass migration than black America. Non-enforcement of immigration law and a refusal to police petty theft opened the doors to the cartel in the early 2020s.

The second illicit industry spawned by mass migration is essential for both drug trafficking and the sale of stolen goods: carjacking. Cars are essential for the transcontinental and transnational nature of cartel operations. Stolen cars can be bartered for drugs like fentanyl or sold to foreign cartels for cash. Though this piece focuses on southern cartels, West African cartels also operate in the United States and have engaged in the purchase and sale of stolen vehicles. Like the Sinaloa cartel, they rely on illegal immigrants from Western Africa. Stolen cars can be cloned to match Vehicle Identification Numbers, ensuring they appear legitimate on paper to the police, regular buyers, or various databases that may attempt to track cartel operations. Many illegal aliens enter the country without vehicles and may not be able to legally purchase them, so these stolen vehicles find another ready market. D.C. carjackings increased 547% in five years, from 148 to 957. D.C. is a city with nice, middle-class people, the perfect target for car theft, as their nicer cars are great for reselling abroad, for trade with cartels, or for domestic resale. Nicer cars are less likely to be stopped by cops, so they ease the nationwide transport of drugs, goods, and people, which is critical for cartel operations. Local D.C. gangs regularly engage in carjackings on behalf of cartels and for the cartel market. Carjackings are the result of a certain population not being able to acquire cars legally; carjackings do not quintuple in five years for no reason.

That is why, on August 5^th, Blow God was trying to steal a car and found Edward Coristine and his girlfriend. The individuals who allegedly beat Mr. Coristine are 14 and 15; they would have been 9 or 10 when they were during the pandemic. Their entertainment was violent drill, and when they emerged post-lockdown, the city was essentially not punishing petty theft. Soon after, cartels moved in. What began as a unique combination of circumstances that made petty theft low risk for black kids rapidly became much more serious and organized crime after the influx of cartels into the country.

Long live the men

Two shootings have animated this story. One nationally recognized case where a young D.C. staffer was shot in a turf war between gangs and killed; the other, in front of my house, where two people shot at each other, one 18, one 14. They did not get national news stories. One was dragged out of his house in front of me, bleeding, shot in the stomach. The liberal thing here is to say, “Wow. What a double standard, the media is so racist.” This is actually a silly thing to think and to say. The shooting of a staffer is far rarer than black kids shooting each other, and the media reflecting that fact is not strange or abnormal.

What is actually happening is infinitely worse.

There’s an old business near Capitol Hill. It’s called Peter Bug’s Shoe Repair. Peter Bug’s is a black-owned and operated business in D.C. that has trained generations of black men in the fine art of shoe repair. The business has run for 46 years and does all the things a nice black business should do: the owner, “Peter Bug,” trains students, mentors young men, and his business has even been designated a historical landmark.

The African American Heritage Preservation Foundation has even given Peter Bug a grant to restore his building.

He did not have the money to do so himself. That is because shoe repair, as a fine craft, is a dying industry, competing with both much more reputable European cobblers, especially those from Spain and Italy, and consumer brands like Nike, Yeezy, and Jordans, for the black dollar. Peter Bug’s shoe repair, like the black church around the corner, is a relic of another time.

In the past two decades alone, Capitol Hill’s Black population has decreased by 47 percent, according to a 2022 report by the Politico media company. At its inception, the academy was neighbored by a playground, a multipurpose sunken court and condos and townhouses filled with Black families. Today, the academy and the sunken court are the only remnants of the neighborhood’s past, now surrounded by new luxury residential developments and a growing White population. 

Gentrification is not bad or good, and gentrification is not the thing destroying D.C.’s black community. Gentrification occurs when locals lack the capital to maintain their own buildings, purchase homes in their own neighborhood, or start businesses in their own community. Once, black locals did have that money, that capital, and that opportunity. For gentrification to happen, black society must be destroyed. What crack and the Colombian cartel did in the ’90s, Venezuelans are finishing today.

Elderly black locals are in denial. They clutch the threads of a black society that did not reproduce itself. They proudly wander the streets of D.C. on Sunday, dressed in fine church clothes, trekking past boarded-up businesses to reach their houses of worship. For black America, these are not the hopeful days of Barack Obama. Black Americans are politically and culturally homeless. They are more conservative than their Democratic allies, more corrupt than white Americans, and more alone than ever. Like white Americans, black Americans are in a country changing rapidly, in a way that no one asked for, as a result of the Democratic Party leaving America open for four years to demographically engineer electoral victory.

There are programs in abundance for black women, and the federal government was a lucrative employer of black women for many years. Similar to white men, black men are displaced: economically, socially, and politically. Does the average gang member think about all this? No.

That is not how people work. But there is something about the fact that we were talking about gang violence 30 years ago and will likely be talking about gang violence 30 years from now that inspires a certain suicidal, short-term, fatalism of the id. If you believe fatalism as a theory of violence is waxing poetic, you have never met a person who has killed, or been to a war zone, or spoken to someone who survived an actual race war. That was my job for a few years. Fatalism and cynicism matter. When we accept that there is nothing beyond blood and money, beyond the shedding of blood for money, beyond blood-kin and blood feuds, we devolve, we descend, we slaughter.

Why say it myself? Fox 5 said it for me.

They form groups to control what is essentially lawless and ungoverned territory, as police are held back by black local government, and as communities will react strongly and negatively to most law enforcement. International gangs move in, representing at once the greatest threat and opportunity of their lifetime. They dream that they, maybe, can work with these cartels for a time, and rap their way to a record label. In the meantime, they’ll defend their territory from other crews and gangs, who all work in concert and against each other—sometimes as allies, sometimes as enemies—to make money, survive, and thrive in a world they cannot escape, which no one promises an escape from anymore.  

It’s all money and murder, all the way down, forever.

Once, people promised an end to gang violence. The idea was that clemency, progressive prosecutors, legalization of marijuana, restorative justice, and community engagement would save the black community. One can imagine the enormous hopes and enormous denial behind these dreams, and the enormous cynicism that followed once another generation of young men formed gangs. In D.C., that cynicism directly manifested in the reelection of a corrupt councilor to the city council. The thinking goes: if the world is all money and murder, allow us to get ours.  

I am hopeful about Trump’s crackdown. To the extent that his administration is able to defeat cartels abroad and incarcerate criminals at home, he will succeed for a time in improving D.C. However, if the cartels survive, gang violence will return in time, especially if an alternative to Democratic city government does not emerge. Democratic permissiveness is an open door for cartel return. Until that changes, black society will continue to wither, torn apart by regular episodes of cartel-fueled gang resurgence, until all that is left of black Washington is a city of Starbucks dotted by islands of violent housing projects: the literal, physical fragmentation of black society. Their churches and businesses will remain as memorials alongside an ever-greater number of gravestones.

Between gentrification and Tren De Aragua, there is nothing for poor blacks. Like Peter Bug’s Shoe Repair, the last fragments of black Democratic politics are threadbare and historic. They are dying for the same exact reason that Peter Bugs’ Shoe Repair is dying. People no longer repair their shoes. Instead, they buy new ones. Democrats do not improve people’s lives anymore; they import new people.

And the new ones come from Venezuela.

The Simple Truth: Cartels

When we say “ambient social disorder,” we really mean the cartel, and when we specify the cartel, we mean that the problem is not black people. Black kids loot stores to sell loot to cartels, they make drugs for cartels and sell drugs for cartels, they kill each other for cartels, and sometimes, yes, for diss tracks, in fights over reputation, cartel relationships, customers, and territory. CVS has shampoo behind plastic because of cartels, because of their mass retail theft, and a general consensus that emerged in 2019 amongst Democrats that enforcing the law is more criminal than actual crime. Black fatalism animates both their enduring loyalty to a party that has failed them and the continuity of the appeal of life in gangs. The songs of Fox 5 make fatalism heroic, make the hood Vietnam, make boys into men, and make murder opportunity. This is crazy; they know this is crazy, they even say when they sing, “When I sit back and think 'bout this shit really crazy.” Yet, they kill nonetheless.

Is crime up? Is crime down? These are the wrong questions to ask. Crime has changed. If you were to run up a list of D.C.’s ten most prolific killers and drug dealers, every single one, upon investigation, would have some tie to cartels. America is not a racist country, but watching people debate black fatherlessness and the efficacy of community programs when a dozen billion-dollar corporations called cartels have made it financially lucrative for black kids to murder each other is quite something. Of course, the infiltration of existing gangs by cartels relied upon there being gangs in the first place.

The last “normal” gang war in D.C., normal in the sense that the war was confined to the hood and did not take the life of federal employees, or rarely crossed the Anacostia, was the 2019 gang war between Simply City and the 37^th Street gang, before it became Fox 5, which was fueled by the rise of the D.C. drill scene. I know this because everything is online, documented, and readily available. Simply City and the 37^th Street gang engage in wars to elevate their content. It is an existing culture that the cartels have infiltrated. Killing people for neighborhood credibility, out of an inchoate fatalism, and for your music is really the same if it’s for a music studio or a cartel. There is no fundamental difference, except for the scale of violence, crime, and the type of victim. In fact, one is good for the other: as gang wars escalate over territorial drug beefs, gang music rises in popularity, which in turn increases the pressure to uphold reputation, incentivizing collaboration with cartels. Our society accepts, implicitly, that music studios financially rewarding black gang violence is uncontroversial, and we extend this polite racism to black gang violence on behalf of cartels. Any story about “less” or “more” crime needs to begin with what type of crime we are talking about, and we are not talking about ambient social disorder: we are talking about cartels taking advantage of a two-tier system of policing that creates a permissive environment for cartel infiltration.  

The problem is not black fatherlessness. The problem is not social media. The problem is not black people or “youths.” It is a dozen billion-dollar corporations called cartels, which, due to the vicious combination of cynicism and naivete behind Biden’s open border policy, allowed these corporations to interface with poor black communities already in chaos and decline between COVID-19 and the collapse of black society. Mass migration created financial incentives for kids to form corporate subsidiaries we call gangs, which engage in retail theft, the drug trade, and carjacking, and which have shot and beaten members of the federal government. The crackdown is fundamentally about the fact that the fragile peace of the two cities, of the federal city and the city-city, has been shattered by the presence of organized crime, which, unlike petty theft and low levels of gang violence in the 2000’s and 2010’s, has transformed day-to-day life in the city for the worse, for both federal government employees and locals. The cartel needs nice cars. Federal employees have them, poor blacks mostly don’t, and God forbid, if Blow God were to steal a car on 37^th Street, they’d ignite a gang war. As mostly white civilians, federal employees are a perfect target: violence against them will ignite no gang war.

Or so the gangs thought. For years, from Obama’s pardons of drug dealers to the structure of gang initiation, they have believed they can literally get away with murder and cooperate with the cartels. For years, this worked.

Until the cartels gave them a reason to venture beyond the hood.

We are not going to destroy organized crime with conservative media, and we are not going to destroy organized crime with community outreach or NGOs. We are not going to do it if we act as if organized crime is simply a pervasive sense of social disorder. After all, pervasive social disorder arises in the context of a permissive society, and the permissive attitude we take towards black crime is fundamentally more about our acceptance of gangs than about acceptance of petty theft. When gangs get off with little punishment, a message is sent to everyone else, who may not join gangs, but may engage in petty theft for them: there is a two-tier system for you.  

From D.C.’s southern suburbs to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, cartels have made themselves a new and terrible fixture of American life. We have always had a low level of social disorder, and during the Bush and Obama years, much less gang violence. That has changed. Less or more is the language of yesterday.

We are talking about the cartel.

Imagine you are trying to describe the Italian mafia to a farmer from Montana in 1953. Imagine what they’d say. In 1923, no one was ready to talk about the mafia, even though the next fifty years of New York would be determined by the war with the mafia. In 1953, most Americans believed the mafia was a conspiracy. “D.C. Crime is at a thirty-year low.” This is the statement of a Montana farmer in 1953. Imagine the farmer’s laughter when you say the word caporegime. Imagine the disbelief in their eyes when you tell them about the blood oath, the clutched candle, the pricked lip, and that Sicilian thing, or Brusca and the acid bath. Bombing Milan. Imagine explaining that they secretly control the police, the court, trash collection, and regularly rig elections. The farmer would laugh.

Are you laughing?

Crime in D.C. changed because the cartel infiltrated black communities under Biden. This is not a conspiracy or partisan lie. This is a fact, a terrible one, because in the city I call home, someone is preparing an acid bath.