July 16th, 1993, Riker’s Island, the George Mochan detention center on the east side of the complex. Two inmates, Omar Porti and Leonard McKenzie, are making a decision that will reshape the gang landscape of New York City for the next 30 years. Port goes by OG Mack. McKenzie goes by Dead Eye.
They are both black men in a facility where by every account from that era, the dominant organizational force is the Latin Kings, a predominantly Latino gang that has controlled the New York City jail system for years and has been using that control to target black inmates with violence and extortion. The George Moshin Detention Center was used specifically to segregate problem inmates from the rest of the facility.
It housed the most difficult cases, the people the administration could not manage elsewhere, which meant it housed in a concentrated form the most organized and most dangerous figures from every gang operating in New York’s jail system. Port and McKenzie were two of them. And on July 16th, 1993, sitting in 8×10 ft concrete cells and a facility that held over 17,000 inmates at its peak, they decided that the answer to the Latin King’s dominance was an organization of their own.
which they called it the United Blood Nation. They modeled it on the Bloods Street gangs of Los Angeles, which both men knew by reputation rather than direct affiliation. The red color, the fivepoint star, the opposition to [ __ ] gangs, the specific terminology and codes. They took all of it and adapted it to the east side of Riker’s Island.
And within months, they had built something that neither the Latin Kings nor the New York City Department of Correction had seen coming. A unified, structured, rapidly growing organization of black inmates that could fight back. The war that started on Riker’s Island in 1993 is still going. It moved from the jails to the streets of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and parts of Queens.
It survived multiple federal RICO prosecutions of both organizations. It survived the arrest of both founders and most of the first generation of UBN leadership. It survived gentrification, over policing, community intervention programs, and 30 years of law enforcement pressure from the NYPD, the FBI, the DEA, and the US Attorney’s offices in both the Eastern and Southern Districts of New York.
It is still going today, primarily inside the jail system, which is where it started, and which is where the underlying conditions that produced it have never been adequately addressed. This is the story of how it started, how it grew, and why it has never stopped. To understand what happened on Riker’s Island in 1993, you have to understand what the Latin Kings were by that point and how they got to New York.
The Latin Kings originated in Chicago. The precise founding date is disputed in the historical record with the gang’s own manifesto placing it in the Illinois prison system in the late 1940s as a self-help group for Latino inmates, while community organizers and researchers traced the street version to a group called the Latin Angels in the 1950s that became the Latin Kanges during the 1960s.
What is clear is that the gang was founded in the Humbult Park neighborhood of Chicago by Puerto Rican immigrants who were facing violence and discrimination from established ethnic gangs in the area and who organized initially for protection. The gang’s early stated purpose was community defense and mutual support for Puerto Ricans navigating a hostile urban environment.
The Latin Kings were founded in the Humbult Park area of Chicago in 1954 by Ramon Santos as the Imperials, a Puerto Rican progress movement with the goal of overcoming racial discrimination. With the Latino community facing constant violence from Greek and Italian greaser gangs, the Imperials merged with various other Puerto Rican and Mexican street gangs to form the Latin Kings.
Whatever the precise origins, the organization evolved from its defensive beginnings into a criminal enterprise that used the language of community identity and ethnic solidarity as a recruitment and cohesion tool while operating a drug trafficking and extortion network across Chicago and eventually across the country.
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The Latin Kings arrived in New York through the prison system. The gang first appeared in New York City in the 1980s after a tribe was formed at an upstate New York state prison. The New York chapter, known as the Bloodline, was founded in 1986 by Luis Felipe, who went by King Blood. Felipe was already incarcerated when he founded the Bloodline, and he ran it from behind bars for years, issuing orders by letter through the New York State Correctional Mail System.
The state department of corrections was copying and storing those letters without initially understanding their significance until a federal task force was formed that included NYPD homicide investigators and federal prosecutors. By the early 1990s, the Latin Kings were the most powerful gang in the New York City jail system.
Their membership was predominantly Latino. Their organizational structure was hierarchical and disciplined and their presence at Riker’s Island had made them the dominant force in the jail’s informal economy and power structure. They called themselves the almighty Latin king and queen nation. Their internal terminology was elaborate and specific. Leaders were called kasiks.
The organization was the nation or the tribe and members operated under a set of rules called the king manifesto and constitution that governed behavior, discipline, and the handling of internal disputes. The sophistication of the Latin Kings organizational structure was and remains one of the things that distinguishes them from most street gangs.
They had a governing document, a chain of command, a system of discipline, and a mythology of ethnic pride and brotherhood that gave membership a meaning beyond simple criminality. That sophistication also made them formidable and dangerous in an institutional setting like Riker’s Island, where organizational capacity translates directly into the ability to project force and establish control.
Omar Porti had been involved in armed robbery as a teenager before he ended up at Riker’s Island. Leonard McKenzie had his own history with the criminal justice system. Both of them had seen the Latin King’s dominance up close and understood it operationally. The UBN they founded was explicitly modeled on what they observed.
A structured hierarchical organization with clear membership criteria, internal discipline, and the capacity to coordinate violence when the organization required it. The formation aimed to unify disperate smaller Bloods affiliated groups which lacked cohesion and were outnumbered by dominant Hispanic prison gangs such as the Latin Kings and Netas.
That is the institutional context. The UBN was not founded as a drug trafficking organization. It was founded as a mutual defense organization for black inmates who are being targeted by organized Latino prison gangs in a jail system that housed over 17,000 people in facilities designed for significantly fewer.
That origin matters for understanding why the Bloods Latin Kings rivalry has been so persistent and so specifically racial in its character. It was not initially a dispute over drug territory or criminal revenue. It was a dispute over physical safety and institutional power inside a jail. When you are an inmate at Riker’s Island in 1993 and the most powerful organization in the facility is targeting you based on your race, the response is not to call a lawyer or file a complaint with the administration.
The response is to build an organization that can protect you. Port and McKenzie built one. Within months of the UBN’s founding on July 16th, 1993, it has spread from the George Mohan Detention Center to other facilities on Riker’s Island. Its membership grew rapidly as black inmates who had been unaffiliated or affiliated with smaller, less organized groups recognized the protection it offered.
The organization adopted the West Coast Bloods visual identity, the red clothing, the five point star, the hand signs, but its actual roots were in New York and its structure was developed independently of any direction from Los Angeles. The UBN was the East Coast offshoot of the California-based Bloods, but it was operationally and organizationally distinct from its West Coast counterparts, organized for the specific environment of New York’s jail system rather than the territorial street gang landscape of South Central
Los Angeles. The Latin Kings response to the UBN’s rise was predictable and violent. Both organizations had the capacity and the will to use violence as an organizational tool. And the geography of Riker’s Island, where rival gang members were housed in proximity in a facility without adequate space or supervision, created constant conditions for confrontation.
Riots, stabbings, and slashings, became regular features of life in the jail during the years that the UBN and the Latin Kings fought for dominance. The razor blades that both organizations used as weapons, easily concealed and distributed, gave the conflict a particularly brutal physical character. The Bloods, once established as the UBN, were described by the press as a razor toading gang wreaking havoc inside the city’s jails.
By the mid 1990s, the UBN had usurped the Latin Kangs as the strongest of the 52 prison gangs operating in New York City. That transition in institutional power was achieved through violence, through recruitment, and through the organizational capacity that Port and Mackenzie had built deliberately and structured carefully.
It was also achieved through the specific cultural moment of the mid 1990s when the Blood’s identity carried a national prestige connected to hip-hop culture, to West Coast rap, and to a street credibility that made UBN membership attractive to young black men in New York’s burrows in a way that accelerated recruitment beyond the jail walls.
When UBN members were released from Riker’s Island in the state prison system, they brought the organization with them into the streets of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and parts of Queens. Several of the leaders of this recently created prison gang formed eight original blood sets to recruit in their neighborhoods across New York City.
The gang that had been founded as a prison mutual defense organization became in the mid to late 1990s a street gang with territorial ambitions, drug trafficking operations, and the capacity for violence that it prison origins had built into its structure from the beginning. The New York City streets into which the UBN expanded were already organized by existing gang structures, drug markets, and territorial boundaries that had been established over decades.
The Latin Kings had street operations in the same neighborhoods where the UBN was trying to build its presence. East Harlem, the South Bronx, Bushwick in Brooklyn, and parts of Queens. The conflict that has started in the jail over institutional dominance translated directly into street conflict over drug territory and neighborhood control.
The crack epidemic that had reshaped New York’s gang landscape in the late 1980s had created drug markets in the city’s poorest neighborhoods that were enormously profitable and violently contested. By the early 1990s, crack revenues had funded the expansion of multiple gang organizations and had made control of specific drug selling locations worth killing over.
The UBN entered this landscape with the organizational structure, the recruiting capacity, and the willingness to use violence that its prison origins had developed. And it moved aggressively into markets that existing organizations, including the Latin Kings, were already running. The Federal Eastern District of New York documented what the Latin Kings Bushwick operation in Brooklyn looked like.
At its peak, Alatin King’s crew controlled the drug trade in the area of Jefferson Street and Central and Irving Avenues in Brooklyn through fear and intimidation for years, distributing up to $2,000 of crack cocaine per day. That is the scale of operation that both organizations were fighting over in New York’s neighborhoods through the 1990s and into the 2000s.
The drug market revenues justified the violence required to control them, and the organizational capacity of both the Latin Kings and the UBN made that violence systematic rather than random. The federal government’s response to the growth of both organizations through the late 1990s and 2000s was a series of major RICO prosecutions that targeted the leadership of both gangs and produced the most significant convictions in the history of both organizations.
Omar Porti, the co-founder of the United Blood Nation, was convicted in 2003 on federal racketeering charges. He was sentenced to 50 years in federal prison for orchestrating murders, assaults, and other crimes that fueled the gang’s expansion. His co-founder, Leonard McKenzie, was also prosecuted federally.
The prosecution described the UBN as one of the most violent gangs in the country with membership estimates by the early 2000s, ranging from 7,000 to 15,000 people across 21 states. That expansion from a prison organization founded by two men in a jail cell in 1993 to a nationwide gang network in less than a decade is one of the most rapid organizational expansions in the history of American street gangs.
The Latin Kings faced parallel federal prosecution. Luis Felipe King Blood had been convicted in federal court in 1994 for ordering murders from his prison cell through the letter system that the Department of Corrections had been monitoring without understanding the significance. He was sentenced to life in prison and eventually placed in solitary confinement at a maximum security federal facility in Colorado which effectively removed him from operational control of the bloodline.
Subsequent prosecutions dismantled multiple Latin Kings chapters across New York City. Carlos Gil, identified as the warlord or enforcer of the Sunset Park, Brooklyn Latin Kings chapter, was convicted in 2007 on federal murder charges for ordering the killing of a fellow Latin Kings member who had violated the gang’s rules by associating with a rival organization.
The Eastern District of New York’s press release on his sentencing noted that Gil had handed a gun to a 16-year-old junior member of his tribe and ordered him to kill. The junior member pulled the trigger. Gil received life in prison without parole. That case is a window into how the Latin kings maintained internal discipline.
The gang’s rules were enforced with lethal consequences, including for members who violated them, and enforcement of those rules was one of the warlord’s primary functions. The pattern of federal prosecutions across both organizations through the 2000s removed multiple generations of leadership from both the UBN and the Latin Kings.
But it did not dismantle either organization for the same reason that dismantling the Seven Mile Bloods in Detroit or the Booby Boys in Miami did not address the conditions that produced those organizations. The people went to prison. The conditions that made membership attractive remained exactly where they were.
The specific racial and ethnic dimensions of the blood’s Latin kings rivalry deserve direct engagement because they are the feature of the conflict that makes it most resistant to the kind of truce building and community intervention that has had partial success in other gang rivalries. The United Blood Nation was founded specifically because black inmates were being targeted by Latino gang members at Riker’s Island.
The organization’s founding logic was racial self-defense in an institutional setting. The Latin King’s founding logic, going back to Chicago in the 1940s, was similarly racial. Puerto Rican immigrants organizing for self-p protection against violence from other ethnic groups. Both organizations carry in their DNA the specific history of ethnic minority communities in American cities, finding that the institutions that were supposed to protect them, the police, the courts, correctional system, were either indifferent or actively
hostile and organizing for their own protection through the only means available. That shared origin in ethnic self-defense has not produced any natural basis for solidarity between the two organizations. Instead, it has produced a conflict in which the racial and ethnic dimension of the rivalry reinforces the territorial and economic dimensions in ways that make each individual dispute feel like an extension of a much larger grievance.
When a black UB member fights a Latino Latin king over a drug corner in the Bronx, neither of them is just fighting over that corner. They’re fighting inside a conflict that carries the weight of everything the founding history of both organizations contains. FBI assistant director in charge of the New York field office said at the time of one of the Latin Kings prosecutions, “They are not primarily about ethnic pride and identity.
They are about drugs, turf, and the violence used to intimidate rivals.” That statement is partly true and partly incomplete. The drug trafficking and the violence are real. But the ethnic pride and community identity that the Latin Kings and the UBN invoke as organizing principles are also real and they serve real functions in recruiting and retaining members because the communities those organizations recruit from are communities where legitimate institutions is have consistently failed to provide the protection and the economic opportunity that gang
membership offers as an alternative. The Riker’s Island Jail complex remains one of the most violent and most mismanaged correctional facilities in the United States. A federal monitor appointed after a series of lawsuits documenting the systematic violence and civil rights violations at the facility has been overseeing Rikers for years without producing the transformational change that the oversight was intended to produce.
Riots between UBN affiliated inmates and Latin Kings affiliated inmates have continued through the 2010s and into the 2020s. Slashings, stabbings, and organized confrontations between the two organizations inside the jail remain documented features of the facility’s daily life. The New York City Board of Correction and multiple investigative journalism outlets have documented the ongoing gang activity inside Riker’s Island in detail.
Gang membership maps drawn by the Department of Correction show the two organizations competing for institutional dominance in the same facility where Omar Porti and Leonard McKenzie founded the UBN in 1993. The specific gang sets and the specific individuals have changed across three decades.
But the organizational conflict has not. The UBN and the Latin Kings are still fighting inside Riker’s Island for the same reasons they started fighting there. Institutional power, physical safety, control of the informal economy inside the jail and the racial and ethnic solidarity that both organizations use as the basis of their identity.
The city of New York has announced plans to close Riker’s Island and replace it with smaller burrow-based jails. Whether that closure actually happens and whether smaller burrow-based facilities would reproduce the same organizational dynamics that produced the UBN Latin Kings rivalry are questions that remain unanswered. What is clear is that as long as New York City operates a jail system that concentrates thousands of people in overcrowded facilities with inadequate supervision and inadequate programming, the conditions that produced the
original Riker’s Island gang war in 1993 will continue to produce new iterations of the same conflict. On the streets, the rivalryy’s intensity has varied over time in geography. The heavy policing of the 2000s under Commissioner Ray Kelly and his stop and frisk policy, which was eventually ruled unconstitutional in Floyd versus City of New York in 2013, disrupted street level gang operations in the neighborhoods where both the UBN and the Latin Kings were most active.
Gentrification in Brooklyn and parts of the Bronx has changed the demographical composition of neighborhoods that were previously Latin Kings and Bloods territory, displacing the communities that both organizations recruited from and reducing the available pool of potential members in the highest value real estate corridors.
But neither development has ended the rivalry or dissolved either organization. The UBN remains active across multiple states. The Latin Kings have tribes in all five burrows of New York City and in multiple cities and states across the country. Their estimated combined membership runs into the tens of thousands nationally.
The rivalry between them continues to be documented in DOC incident reports, federal indictments, and the accounts of community organizations working in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, where both gangs operate. The most significant ongoing dimension of the rivalry is inside the jail system, which is also the dimension that receives the least public attention.
What happens to inmates at Riker’s Island is not a story that generates sustained media coverage unless a specific event, a death, a riot, a lawsuit creates a hook that editors recognize as newsworthy. The ongoing daily institutionalized violence of the gang dynamics at Rikers is background noise to most New Yorkers.
It is daily life to the people who are locked inside it. Omar Porti is serving 50 years in federal prison. He would not be coming out. Leonard McKenzie faced his own federal prosecution. Luis Felipe carrying blood is in solitary confinement at a maximum security federal facility in Colorado. The men who founded both organizations in New York are either dead or in federal custody serving the sentences that their crimes produced.
What they built, however, is still running. The United Blood Nation has membership estimated at 7,000 to 15,000 people across 21 states. The Latin Kings have tribes in every burrow of New York and estimated membership of 7,500 in the New York Bloodline chapter alone. Both organizations have survived the prosecution of multiple generations of leadership.
Both organizations have adapted to the specific environments of the East Coast, the street geography of New York’s burrows, and the institutional geography of the jail and prison system that connects the street operations to the incarcerated leadership. They are also both in ways that law enforcement focused accounts of their history consistently underemphasize organizations that persist because they provide things that the communities they recruit from need and that legitimate institutions have failed to provide. The Latin Kings were
founded because Puerto Rican immigrants in Chicago needed protection from ethnic violence and had nowhere else to turn. The United Blood Nation was founded because black inmates at Riker’s Island were being targeted by organized gang violence in a jail where the administration was not protecting them. Both organizations have evolved into criminal enterprises that cause enormous harm to the communities they claim to represent.
Both of those things are true and understanding both of them simultaneously is necessary if you want to understand why the Bloods Latin Kings rivalry has persisted for 30 years and why the prosecutions that have put both organizations founders in federal prison for the rest of their lives have not ended it. The conditions that produced the rivalry on July 16th, 1993 and a concrete sale at the George Motion detention center on Riker’s Island are still the conditions of that facility and of the communities that feed it.
The poverty rates in the South Bronx and Brownsville and East Harlem that made those neighborhoods the Latin Kings and the UBN’s primary recruiting grounds have not materially changed since the 1990s. The jail that produced the founding confrontation is still operating, still overcrowded, still violent, still the primary institutional connection between the street operations of both gangs and their incarcerated memberships.
Porti and McKenzie founded the UBN to answer a specific problem. organized Latino gang violence against black inmates in a jail where the administration was not providing protection. 30 years later, the UBN is still at Riker’s Island. The Latin Kings are still at Riker’s Island. The violence between them is still documented in DOC incident reports, and the city of New York is still trying to figure out what to do about a jail system that has been reducing the same outcomes for 30 years without meaningful change. The most violent gang rivalry in
New York City history started in a jail. It continues in a jail and the jail that produced it has never been fundamentally reformed. Those three facts are not coincidental. They are connected and until the third fact changes, the first two will continue to be true. The specific geography of the street rivalry matters because understanding where both organizations have been most active and most destructive helps clarify what the conflict looks like outside the jail walls.
The Latin Kings in New York concentrated their street operations in neighborhoods with large Latino populations, primarily Puerto Rican and later Dominican communities. East Harlem, known as Elbario, was one of the earliest Latin King strongholds in New York, reflecting the gang’s Puerto Rican origins and the concentration of Puerto Rican New Yorkers in that neighborhood going back to the postwar migration waves of the 1940s and 1950s.
The South Bronx, which had experienced catastrophic population loss and building abandonment through the 1970s and which housed some of the most concentrated poverty in the country, became another major Latin Kings territory. Bushwick in Brooklyn, where the Eastern District prosecutioner documented the $2,000 per day crack operation on Jefferson Street, was a third major hub.
Each of these neighborhoods shares structural characteristics. Concentrated poverty, high unemployment, inadequate schools, housing stock that range from deteriorated to abandoned, and a relationship with law enforcement characterized by heavy-handed policing of the kind that produced the stop and frisk era without generating the community trust that might have created alternatives to gang membership.
The Latin Kings did not thrive in those neighborhoods despite those conditions. They thrived because of them. The United Blood Nation street expansion followed a parallel geography with heavier concentration in predominantly black neighborhoods. Brownsville and East New York and Brooklyn, the South Bronx alongside the Latin Kings and parts of Harlem and Queens.
The competition between the two organizations for drug market territory and neighborhoods that they both claimed produced the street level violence that the NYPD and federal law enforcement documented throughout the late 1990s and 2000s. One of the most specific documented flash points of the street rivalry was the competition over drug corners in the overlap zones between Latin Kings and UBN territory in the South Bronx and parts of Brooklyn.
These were no abstract territorial disputes. They were disputes over specific locations where crack and later heroin and other drugs were being sold, where daily revenues ran into the thousands of dollars, and where control of the corner was worth defending with violence because the economic stakes were real and immediate.
The NYPD gang division’s intelligence files on both organizations through the late 1990s and early 2000s documented dozens of shootings and stabbings attributables to the rivalry in those overlap zones. The path forward from the Bloods Latin Kings rivalry, if there is one, runs through the same analysis that applies to every gang conflict documented in this series.
The prosecutions have been real and the sentences have been serious. Omar Port will die in federal prison. Luis Felipe will die in solitary confinement in Colorado. Multiple generations of both organizations leadership have been removed through RICO prosecutions in the eastern and southern districts of New York.
But the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation has tribes in all five burrows of New York City. The United Blood Nation has membership across 21 states. Both organizations are still recruiting in the same neighborhoods from the same population of young men who face the same structural conditions that made gang membership attractive when the organizations were founded.
The jail that produced the original founding confrontation is still operating on the same island in the East River. Still documented as one of the most violent correctional facilities in the United States. Still producing the institutional conditions that drove Omar Porti and Leonard McKenzie to organize in 1993.
The Bloods and the Latin Kings did not create the conditions of Brownsville or the South Bronx or East Harlem. They operate within those conditions and exploit them and make them worse for the people who live in them. But the conditions preceded both organizations and will outlast any prosecution of either. That is the lesson that 30 years of the most violent gang rivalry in New York City history has produced if anyone in a position to act on it is willing to read it honestly.
The jail is not the problem. The jail is a symptom. the poverty and the concentrated deprivation and the institutional failures that produced the Latin Kings in Chicago in the 1940s and the United Blood Nation at Riker’s Island in 1993 are the problem. July 16th, 1993, 8×10 ft concrete sales. Two men making a decision that would reshape New York’s gang landscape for three decades.
The decision they made was rational given the circumstances they were in. The circumstances they were in were produced by decisions that other people made about which communities in New York deserved protection and investment and which did not. Omar Porti is in federal prison. The conditions that put him in that jail cell in 1993 are still out there.
