Two in Butler, register number 2685250. Age 46. Located at Pittsburgh, RRM. Release date August 13th, 2027. Federal Bureau of Prisons. Public record. Look it up yourself. The man who ran the first blood set on the east coast who took a collection of broke street crews in one of the most forgotten cities in New Jersey and turned them into something the United States government compared to La Kosa Nostra is 2 years from walking out.
He went in at 27. He comes out in his late 40s. Nearly half his life behind federal walls. And while he was in there, he wrote two books because that’s who Tuhan Massacre Butler is. The government is still moving him from facility to facility because they’re scared of what happens when he talks.
The set he led still being fedally indicted in 2025, 32 years after it started. This is Hood Archives. Today we’re going to East Orange, New Jersey, what the people there call Illtown, home of the double eye. East Orange, New Jersey. Four square miles, 65,000 people. Do that math real quick.
That’s one of the densest small cities in America, where everybody knows everybody’s block, everybody’s cousin, and everybody’s business. The people there don’t call it East Orange. They call it Illtown. And that name is not a coincidence. It’s a declaration. is what you call a place when the official name doesn’t capture what it actually is to live there.
Ill, raw, real, a city with its own identity that the rest of Jersey never gave it credit for now. Here’s the thing about Illtown that the news never tells you right. By the early 1990s, this city was in freef fall. Not just poverty, not just crime, a full systemic collapse and the numbers to prove it. Those numbers came from Joseé Cordderero himself, the former NYPD commander brought in specifically to take over the East Orange Police Department.
When he arrived, he described violent crime rates multiple times that of New York City and Detroit combined. And here’s the detail I want you to hold. That same Jose Cordderero is named in the federal indictment press release against the DoubleEy Bloods. The following year, the man brought in to clean up the city is documented in the same government papers as the prosecution of the gang the city produced.
That’s the city the double eye was born into. And what happened next, nobody could have written because the double eye didn’t start the way most people think it started. It wasn’t a Chicago transplant. It wasn’t a prison export. It started with a rap group coming home from tour. And it started in 1993. By 1993, Naughty by Nature were not a local secret. They were international.
OP had gone platinum. Hip Hop Hooray had Spike Lee directing the video and cameos from Easy E and Run DMC tours across Europe and Japan. Grammy nominations, Tre, Vin Rock, DJKG, three kids from East Orange Campus High School who had made it out or at least made it out in the way the music industry means when it says that.
That summer, coming back from a west coast leg of their tour, they returned to Illtown with two men from Inglewood, California, who had served as their road crew and bodyguards. Street names love and true Queen Street Bloods. What the feds would later document as the QSBG Queen Street Bloods gang out of Englewood.
Now, here’s where I need you to slow down with me because Tre has talked about this himself on camera. Drink Champs, episode 389, November 2023. He was not being ky. He said it plain. We didn’t go to Cali looking for bloods, crips, or anything. We just wanted a West Coast group. They could have been from the Bay or anything.
But the Road Dogs just so happened to be from Inglewood, and they was doas. So when they came back, they just told stories in the hood and everything else. So that’s why everybody always say Double Eye, Inglewood, Illtown was the first set on the East Coast with original West Coast backing. Read that back. They went looking for rap acts, not blood members.
The people they came back with just happened to be Damas. And when those men told stories about Englewood, about what they were from, what they represented, the young people of East Orange were listening like it was scripture. That’s the origin, not a corporate franchise expansion, not a deliberate gang export, an accident of music, touring, and proximity that turned into 30 years of federal prosecutions.
From that foundation, the crews who had already been running things in East Orange on their own terms. Several local organizations unified under the new banner. The Gutter Rats, the Drama Lords, the Steel Click Crew, the Chain Gang. Different sets, different histories, same streets. They consolidated and chose a name that said everything you needed to know.
Double I, two I’s, Englewood, illtown, pronounced double I, not a coincidence. A declaration encoded in geography. The exact same summer, 1993, the United Bloods Nation was being founded inside a cell at Riker’s Island. Omar Porti, known as OG Mack and Leonard McKenzie, created the UBN on July 16th, 1993. originally as a prison gang to protect black inmates from the dominant Hispanic factions.
From that one cell, it spread to the streets of New York, then up and down the entire East Coast. Two blood structures born the same summer, completely independent of each other. One formed in a prison cell, one formed because a Grammy nominated rap group went on tour. They would eventually align. But right now in that summer, what mattered was that Illtown had something it had never had before.
A name, a code, and real West Coast backing. And Naughty by Nature never fully stepped away from the association. They launched Illtown Records in the mid90s. In 2002, Tre and Vinrock released their album as a duo and titled it Icons. two eyes, double eye, right there on the cover of a record in every music store in America.
Most people bought it without knowing what they were holding. There was a teenager in East Orange who understood exactly what all of this meant. His name was two and Butler and he was about to be offered a way out of ill town that most people in his position would have taken without blinking. He said no. Chu and Butler grew up on the border of East Orange and Newick, deep in Illtown.
By all accounts, he was not supposed to end up where he ended up. Standout student athlete, charismatic in a way that made people listen. The kind of person who had options. At 16 years old, Quincy Jones’s Quest Records put a record deal on the table. Quincy Jones, the man who produced Michael Jackson, one of the most powerful figures in the history of the music industry, saw something in this kid from Illtown and extended his hand.
Butler said no. Walked away from the deal and he went all in. He would become the 101 of the double eye set bloods parliament for the leader. And the hierarchy he ran was documented line by line in the federal indictment because it was that structured. OG at the top, Butler at 101, 102, second in command. 103, Minister of Defense, 104, Minister of Information.
105, Quadri Trouble Smith, Five-Star General, all the way down to 110, the Baby Gangster, also called the Blood Drop. That is not a corner crew. That is an org chart. And United States Attorney Chris Christie said as much in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2003. The double eyes are highly structured, methodically disciplined, and extremely violent.
His office working with Ruckers University as the official research partner had identified the DoubleEy Bloods as the largest and most violent street gang in the state of New Jersey. Not the city, the state. Here’s what gets lost in how these stories usually get told. Butler wrote about his own life inside federal prison, two books.
His memoir opens with, “I share in this book, My Past, in the hope that you recognize it is our future.” He wrote that from a special management unit, Beyond Maximum Security. 23 hours alone per day, one phone call a month. I’m not asking you to feel sorry for two and Butler. Just know who you’re dealing with before we go further.
A 16-year-old who had a way out and didn’t take it. Now, let’s talk about what he ran. East Orange was divided into drug distribution zones. Dealers who wanted to operate in those zones paid a block tax to double eye leadership. Heroin was the engine. Large quantities sourced from New York City, transported to East Orange, broken down and pushed on the streets by a workforce large enough that Butler and Smith had to create shifts, actual shifts, like a job, because that’s what it was.
Now, here’s where it gets genuinely cinematic. And I mean that in the most literal sense, because the attorney general of the United States held a press conference about this. The Gun Pipeline, the Hole in the Wall Gun Store, Zenia, Ohio, a small federallylicicensed firearms shop a few miles from Wilberforce University, a small historically black college in Green County.
According to federal indictments, students and former students at Wilberforce were recruited as straw buyers. They walked into the hole in the wall, filled out the paperwork in their own names, and purchased weapons that were then moved out of Ohio and handed off to the Double Eye in New Jersey. Approximately 76 guns total made that trip.
The owner of the shop, James Dillard, was charged alongside Cuadri Smith in December 2003. Attorney General John Ashccraftoft stood at a podium and announced the case, calling it the first time federal charges had been brought in one state against a licensed gun dealer in another state for a gununn conspiracy.
Of those 76 weapons that were recovered by law enforcement, every single one had been used in a crime. Everyone. Shootings, drug trafficking carried by convicted felons. These weren’t guns sitting in a safe somewhere. They were in the streets immediately doing exactly what the people who ordered them needed them to do.
Smith admitted in court that he purchased dozens of weapons through this pipeline, including semi-automatic assault rifles. Dozens through college students in Ohio. Back in East Orange, the Double Eye was also consuming itself from the inside. The United Bloods Nation ran on a strict no snitching code. 31 rules governing member behavior with cooperation with law enforcement sitting at the absolute top of the prohibited list.
In their code, if you were suspected of talking, even suspected, not proven, you were labeled food. And what that meant was that force against you was authorized. Christy described a recent case to the Senate. A member suspected of cooperating had been attacked with a razor in a prison commons area just for being suspected.
Not confirmed, suspected. Here’s what I think about when I hear that paranoia is not a protection strategy. Paranoia is a liability because every internal killing the double eye carried out left a trail. ballistics, witnesses, fear, more people willing to talk because the violence had touched them directly.
The code designed to protect the organization was quietly building the prosecution’s case for them. Long before the feds made their move, the double eye was writing its own indictment through the bodies it left behind when it turned on itself. By October 2004, Christiey’s office had charged and jailed 42 double eye members in 18 months.
He stood up and said, “We are using the gang sophistication against them. They organized themselves as the mafia did decades earlier. The same racketeering statutes that brought down the mob will bring down these gangs.” And he was right. Whether that should make you feel good depends entirely on what you think justice looks like. September 21st, 2006, five members of the Double Eye Bloods stood in a federal courtroom in New Jersey and entered guilty p.
Not because the feds had a weak case, because the feds had 76 guns, an Ohio gun shop owner, an embedded informant, and enough bodies in the indictment to bury every single one of them under the weight of the evidence. These are not allegations. What follows are admissions. Men speaking to a federal judge on the record in their own words. two and massacre.
Butler, the 101 of the double eye, took his turn before the judge. He admitted to approaching a man named Thompson from behind, covering his face and shooting him, killing him at close range. Then he said this, “I was the chain of command. There is no one above me.” Cuadri Troublesmith, five-star general, the 105, stood up next and said, “I was the chain of command.
” his admission. On April 29th, 2000, he shot and killed Bryant Williams, known as Dirty O, in a dispute over money. He also confirmed in open court that he had acquired dozens of weapons through the Ohio pipeline, including semi-automatic assault rifles. Samir Moses, 22 years old, admitted that on April 17th, 2004, he and other Double Eye members were driving through East Orange when they spotted who they believed to be Crips gang members.
They opened fire. Moses got out of the car with a gun and shot 16-year-old Anthony Copelan. Copelan died from his wounds. 16 years old. Amir Win admitted to hunting down a man named Laquan Brooks, a father who had complained to Double Eye members that they were bothering his eight-year-old son. In Blood’s Parliament, that made Brooks guilty of disrespecting them.
When found Brooks, called him into the street, and shot him. Laquan Brooks died where he stood. His 8-year-old son was there to see it. On April 18th, 07 United States District Judge Katherine S. Hayden imposed sentences that told you exactly what the federal government thought of what it had uncovered.
Two and Massacre Butler, 27 years old at sentencing, 30 years. Cuadri Trouble Smith, 26 years old, 30 years. Samir Moses, 22 years old, 28 years. Amir Win, 24 years old, 34 years. the longest of the group for the murder of a man who was protecting his child, 66 counts, two RICO charges, 35 racketeering acts. I’m not going to sit here and editorialize this. I don’t have to.
The math speaks for itself. Butler was 27 when the judge gave him 30 years. That means he doesn’t even see the outside world again until he’s 57, if he serves it straight. And at the same time, the people who died are still dead. The father who begged them to leave his eight-year-old is still gone. Those facts don’t balance each other out.
They just sit there in the same story at the same time. the man who prosecuted two and Butler, who built the case that sent him and his codefendants to federal prison for decades, who stood at podiums comparing the double eye to the mafia and calling it one of his top priorities from the moment he took office.
That man was Christopher James Christie, United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey, appointed by George W. Bush in 2002. In 2009, Christy ran for governor of New Jersey. He won. He ran on his prosecution record, convicting more than 130 public officials and criminal defendants without losing a case. The doubleeye prosecution was part of the foundation of that record.
He served as governor of New Jersey from 2010 to 2018. He ran for president of the United States in 2016. He ran again in 2024. Now, here is two in Butler in 2012, 5 years into his 30-year sentence. He’s in the special management unit of a United States penitentiary, beyond maximum security, confined 23 hours per day, one phone call a month, one family visit by teleconference per month.
He is being transferred from USP Lewisburg in Pennsylvania to USP Pollock in rural central Louisiana, a high security facility so remote and volatile that shortly after Butler’s arrival, the entire prison went on lockdown following inmate violence, meaning 24-hour cell confinement, zero visits. He is writing a memoir from inside that cell.
And in that memoir’s published description, Butler names Christy by name. He describes himself as having been prosecuted by then US attorney and New Jerseyy’s current governor Christopher J. Christy. He wrote that from solitary. He could see exactly what trajectory his prosecutor’s life had taken while his own was suspended in a federal cage.
I’m not saying Christy did anything wrong by prosecuting a violent criminal enterprise. I’m genuinely not. The double eye was responsible for murders, for flooding East Orange with heroin for arming themselves through a pipeline of straw buyers at an Ohio gun store and putting every one of those weapons to use in the streets.
But I think it is worth naming clearly. One man in this story went from that prosecution to the governor’s mansion and two presidential campaigns. The other went from the courtroom to a special management unit in Louisiana. That’s two different Americas documented in the same case file on two completely different roads out of the same courtroom. Make of that what you will.
In 2007, the FBI announced it had dismantled the double eyes set. They were wrong. You cannot arrest a name. You cannot indict an identity. You cannot prosecute the idea of belonging to something in a city that has given people very few other things to belong to. Because in April of 2025, the New Jersey Attorney General held a press conference.
26 people charged, 194 total charges. The same name, the same set, the same territory 32 years after it started. April 22nd, 2025, New Jersey, Attorney General Matthew Plen announced charges against 26 individuals for their alleged roles in the Double Eye, Queen Street Blood gang. The alleged ring leader was not who you’d expect.
Her name is Rabia Sori, 43 years old from Elizabeth, New Jersey. Street name twin. She faces 35 criminal charges, first-degree raketeering, conspiracy, weapons offenses, assaults, drug offenses. According to the charging documents, she was not a peripheral associate. She was the top of the chain. She allegedly directed supervisors, advisers, distributors, and enforcers across an open air drug market at the 200 block of North 9th Street in Newark, what prosecutors called the Newark set.
Now, let me give you some context on how unusual this is because I don’t want it to just slide past. Federal research from the Office of Justice Programs consistently shows that women make up roughly 5 to 6% of major gang membership and hold top leadership positions almost never. The criminological literature on blood set specifically puts female top leadership close to zero.
Sorry wasn’t a female gang associate. She wasn’t an auxiliary member. She was allegedly running the whole Newark operation with male supervisors, enforcers, and shooters beneath her. 32 years after two men from Englewood stepped into Illtown, the double eyes Newark set was allegedly being run by a 43year-old woman from Elizabeth who went by twin.
The operation she allegedly ran was not low profile. The charging documents read like surveillance footage because that’s largely what they’re based on. April 19th, 2023, a road rage incident in Irvington captured on surveillance camera. An argument escalates. Two men pull up in a vehicle. Sorry allegedly orders them to open fire. Two victims.
One is struck. July 21st, 2023. Newark police respond to a shooting near 4th Avenue and North 9inth Street. A woman identified in the documents only as IH had been shot. She was a known double eye associate. How do they know why she was shot? Because investigators later found text messages between Sori and IH on a codefendant’s phone.
Allegedly, the conversation confirmed that IH had been shot because she owed Sori drug proceeds over a drug debt. April 21st, 2024, electronic surveillance catches Sori in a domestic dispute on North 9th Street. The altercation spills into the street. Sori allegedly obtains a handgun from a codefendant, points it at a group of bystanders watching the fight, and fires it into the ground.
July 22nd, 2024, Sori and codefendants allegedly shot a man on North 12th Street. Investigators linked the same Springfield Armory XD30 subcompact handgun to multiple shootings across the operation. It was later recovered from a vehicle. When investigators executed a search warrant at Sor’s Elizabeth home on March 24th, 2025, they found 91 g of raw heroin, $17,000 in cash, drug packaging materials, heroin stamps bearing the brand names Exit 5, Route 21, body bag, and Passion.
A separate search at a U-Haul facility linked to the operation turned up an assault rifle, a 9mm Luger highpoint semi-automatic rifle loaded with a 21 round magazine inside a black bag that had been moved there on Sor’s alleged orders. 194 charges, 26 defendants, the name that the FBI said was dead in 2007, alive and running an open air drug market in Newark in 2025.
The double eye did not end. It evolved. Go back to the BOP record. We opened with Pittsburgh RRM residential re-entry management, a halfway house program. He is no longer in a penitentiary. He has transitioned out of the cell where he wrote his books, out of the facility in Louisiana where they locked the whole prison down after he arrived, out of the special management unit and is 23 hours alone each day.
He is in re-entry in Pittsburgh. two years from walking out. He went in at 27. He comes out in his late 40s. He wrote two books from inside federal custody. The second one started because someone he loved asked him a question he couldn’t answer. How do you survive prison? He had no words, so he wrote them instead. Here’s where I land.
Honestly, this isn’t a clean ending, and I’m not going to pretend it is. The FBI declared the double eye dead in 2007. In 2025, 26 people were charged for running the same name on the same streets. What massacre built outlasted him, outlasted the prosecution, outlasted the declaration of its own death. August 13th, 2027, that’s when he walks out.
And the name he gave everything to in Illtown is still alive in a federal charging document in Newark. That is the double I. That’s the whole story. Englewood, Illtown. Two eyes, one eye looking west, one eye looking east. It started because a rap group came home from tour with the wrong or the right, depending on your perspective, people.
It ran for over 30 years through heroin shifts, block taxes, an Ohio gun pipeline, murders admitted to in open court, and a woman named Twin allegedly running enforcers in New York in 2025. It survived a 66-count RICO indictment, a 30-year sentence, and an FBI press release declaring it finished. The two eyes are still out there.
