It’s March 2021, in Woodside Queens, a 37-year-old Gudelia Vallinas, an immigrant from Ecuador, and a mother of two, is walking home from the grocery store. However, what she does not know is that the curb she’s on has effectively become a war zone, and at that same moment, a teenager named Dashawn Williams is taking aim at a rival from a competing [ __ ] set nearby.
He fires five shots and misses his target, but one of those bullets hits Gudelia Vallinas in the head. She’s rushed to the hospital where she’s later pronounced dead. But this death wasn’t random or teach some fluke event that nobody could have seen coming. This was the result of a gang that has spent over a decade making enemies with everyone around them, adding conflict on top of conflict, losing control of their own members, and turning Brooklyn streets into a permanent war zone that eventually spilled across
borough lines and swallowed an innocent woman whole. To understand how Brooklyn turned into an active war zone, and how a mother of two turned into collateral, you have to understand Eight Trey. The story of the Eight Trey Crips in Brooklyn doesn’t start in Brooklyn. It starts thousands of miles away in South Central Los Angeles in the mid-1970s when two teenagers named Stanley Tookie Williams and Raymond Lee Washington decided to unite their neighborhood street crews into something bigger.
They called it the Crips. By 1978, there were 45 [ __ ] sets operating across Los Angeles, and the name had taken on a weight that went far beyond any individual neighborhood. It became an identity, portable, transferable, something that could travel. The roots of that identity run deeper than most people realize.
Black gang activity in South Central had been building since the 1950s, fed by a post-World War II economic decline, racial segregation that excluded young black men from mainstream organizations, the collapse of black nationalist movements that had briefly offered an alternative political structure, and decades of concentrated poverty that had no legitimate outlet.
The Crips didn’t emerge from nothing. They emerged from a system that had already failed the communities they came from. Williams recalled in his memoir that the original Crips formed as a fighting alliance against other street gangs. Nothing more, nothing less. But the thing about fighting alliances is that they tend to expand.
By 1980, the Crips were at war with the Bloods and increasingly at war with each other. Different sets choosing sides and waging large-scale conflict across South Central and eventually into other cities. The Eight Trey Gangster Crips, the specific set that would eventually seed what happened in Brooklyn, emerged in that context, one of dozens of sets forged in the furnace of LA’s gang wars, gaining a reputation for being particularly ruthless with people who opposed them.
And then, the name traveled. Through the late 1980s and into the 1990s, as West Coast migrants and returning prisoners moved across the country, [ __ ] culture started appearing in cities where it had never existed before. Brooklyn was one of them. The Eight Trey identity made its way into Flatbush, where it settled in and put down roots that had nothing to do with California.
A 2017 federal indictment would later confirm it plainly. The Eight Trey Crips was founded in Los Angeles, but based locally around the Flatbush Gardens housing complex in Brooklyn, operating entirely independently of any West Coast hierarchy. That detail matters because it tells you something about how this crew was structured from the very beginning.
They borrowed the name, borrowed the blue, borrowed the mythology, but there was no real organizational connection to the original set. There was no chain of command running from Flatbush back to South Central. What existed in Brooklyn was something raw and more localized, built out of the specific conditions of one particular housing project and the young men who grew up inside it.
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Flatbush Gardens, which older residents still sometimes call Vanderveer or just Veerside, is a massive complex in Eastern Flatbush. Over 2,500 apartments stacked together, built for a different era, aging badly, packed with families navigating poverty and overcrowding, and schools that were chronically under-resourced.
The crack era had already reshaped the neighborhood’s relationship to violence and drug money across the whole city, and when the large drug organizations of that era collapsed or got dismantled by law enforcement, what filled the vacuum wasn’t something more organized. It was something more fragmented.
New York magazine documented this shift closely in 2008, noting that many gangs had proliferated across Brownsville, East Flatbush, and Crown Heights, and that these crews were defined less by drug market control than by personal beefs and neighborhood loyalty. The violence they found was often more stylistic than organizational.
That phrase, more stylistic than organizational, is one of the most important things you can understand about what Eight Trey was and what it would become. Because the young men who joined this crew weren’t enlisting in a disciplined criminal enterprise with leadership structures and defined territories and strategic planning.
They were joining something that gave them protection when they walked home from school, gave them an identity when traditional institutions had failed to offer one, and gave them access to income when the legal economy had nothing for them. Sheff G, the rapper born Michael Williams, who would become the most famous member of this crew, said it himself in interviews.
He joined the 83 Gangster Crips at 12 years old. Not because he wanted a career in crime, but because he was around violence and he needed to be protected. He never imagined rapping. He just needed to survive Flatbush. That’s the foundation, protection, identity, community, and the particular kind of community that forms when everything else, family stability, school quality, economic opportunity, is absent or insufficient.
Many members came from families where older siblings or cousins had already been involved in street life, where the generational pull was strong enough that leaving felt impossible. Others came in through friendship, through proximity, through the simple fact of where they happened to grow up. Sentencing documents from the federal cases that would eventually follow showed a consistent pattern.
Defendants who had dropped out of high school, obtained GEDs if they were lucky, and entered the street economy because the mainstream one had no particular use for them. One member’s court documents noted he left school early and later got a GED, and that pattern repeated across defendant after defendant, case after case.
The hustle inside Eight Trey was primarily crack and marijuana sales, robberies, and extortion, the same basic economic activity that had defined street crews in this part of Brooklyn for decades. By the early 2000s, the set had participants selling drugs and committing crimes under a loosely coordinated framework with older members directing younger ones, and everyone operating under the general umbrella of the Eight Trey name.
It was never a sophisticated organization. It was a neighborhood crew that had dressed itself in the mythology of a West Coast brand, and it held together through proximity, loyalty, and shared enemies more than through any real institutional structure. The man who emerged as the clearest early leader of Eight Trey’s Brooklyn chapter was Larry Biz Lock Pagett.
Born and raised in Flatbush, Pagett organized local youths around Caton Avenue into what became known as Caton Eight Trey. Under his direction, members committed robberies and sold drugs. A cooperating witness would later testify to this in federal court. He was the closest thing the set had to a centralized figure, the one person whose name appeared across multiple court filings and federal indictments as the architect of the operation.
But here’s what you have to understand about the structure Pagett was running. It wasn’t really a structure at all. It was a cluster of semi-independent cliques orbiting a loose, shared identity. Prosecutors would eventually identify distinct subsets. Caton eight, Trey, 40s eight Trey, and East Flatbush 80s if Flossy, and Canarsie, and an affiliate crew called Nine Ways operating further into East Flatbush.
Each of these operated with its own shot callers and its own agenda, sometimes pooling resources to fight shared rivals, but often acting entirely on their own without coordination or permission from anyone above them. There was no central command issuing orders and expecting accountability. There was just a name, a color, and a general understanding of who the enemies were.
Another key early figure was Maleek Squingy Ramsey, who operated as an enforcer, the muscle that got deployed when the leadership needed something handled that couldn’t be handled in public. We’ll come back to Ramsey because what he orchestrated in 2009 tells you everything about where eight Trey’s internal culture was already heading even in those early years.
Within the gang, roles were loosely defined but consistently present. Old heads provided guns, bail money, and institutional knowledge. Younger crash outs carried out the shootings, the robberies, the street level enforcement. Earners moved drugs and financed the operation. Crystal Williams, Sheff G’s sister, would later be named among the Nine Ways conspirators, demonstrating that the network extended in directions prosecutors hadn’t initially anticipated and that family connections were woven
throughout the crew’s fabric. And that lack of structure, that decentralization, was not a bug in the design. It was the design. Or more accurately, it was the inevitable result of how this kind of street organization forms when there’s no external model to follow, no mentorship from a functional criminal hierarchy, just young men in a housing project building something out of necessity and identity and whatever came to hand.
You don’t build a tight hierarchy when you’re teenagers running a housing project. You build loyalty circles, clique by clique, block by block. You don’t have discipline because discipline requires authority and authority requires trust, and trust is hard to maintain when people are constantly getting locked up, killed, or paranoid about who’s talking to police.
This is the setup. This is what eight Trey looked like before everything got worse. A fractured, localized, loosely organized collection of cliques sharing a name and a general orientation toward violence operating in a neighborhood that had produced exactly the conditions needed to make a gang like this feel necessary.
And that lack of structure, the thing that made them feel loose and adaptive and impossible to fully suppress, would become the exact reason everything eventually spiraled. There’s a moment in the life of a street organization when the violence shifts from being a tool to being a culture. When it stops being something you do to protect what you have and starts being something you do because it’s who you are.
Because the violence itself has become the point, the proof, the product. That shift happened with eight Trey somewhere in the late 2000s, and once it happened, there was no going back. The first major enemy, or at least the oldest documented one, was the Gangster Disciples, and the origin of that beef is one of those stories that lives somewhere between documented fact and street legend.
According to what circulates in Brooklyn forms and street lore, the long-standing alliance between Crips and GDs in New York, known on the streets as the eight ball, shattered on August 23rd, 2008. The story goes that an eight Trey member known as KO robbed a 63 GD at Flatbush Gardens.
The GDs retaliated by killing him on the rooftop of Veer, and from that moment, the alliance was dead. The threads where Brooklyn residents break down this history describe it as the moment 15 years of war started. Whether every detail is accurate or not, it doesn’t appear verbatim in court filings. The story circulated widely enough that it shaped how both sides understood each other for years.
In street politics, the story that everyone believes often functions as powerfully as documented fact. What is documented is that by the early 2000s, eight Trey and Folk Nation affiliated Gangster Disciples were at open war across Flatbush. And this wasn’t a quiet war. It was the kind of war that moves outdoors, that follows people to celebrations and crowded spaces, that doesn’t distinguish between a combatant and a bystander.
The most devastating proof of that came at Jouvert in 2015. Jouvert is the pre-dawn street festival that kicks off Caribbean Carnival in Crown Heights. Tens of thousands of people pouring into the street before sunrise, one of the most joyful events on Brooklyn’s calendar. In 2015, eight Trey members moved into what prosecutors described as Folk Nation territory near the Ebbets Field Houses and confronted rivals.
A gun battle erupted. Dozens of shots were fired into a dense crowd of people who had come out at 4:00 in the morning to celebrate. A man named Carey Gabay, a Harvard-educated attorney who worked as an aide to Governor Andrew Cuomo, was struck in the head. He had no gang affiliation whatsoever. He was at Jouvert because it was his neighborhood, because it was a celebration, because no one wakes up before dawn to attend a street festival and expects to take a bullet.
He was in a coma for nine days, then he died. Carey Gabay’s death made national news in a way that most gang violence doesn’t, because of who he was and because the optics of a government official cut down at a public festival were impossible for politicians to ignore. Three eight Trey members were eventually sentenced in connection with his killing.
But what that death also represented, and this is the part that matters for understanding eight Trey’s escalation, was a preview. A preview of what happens when a crew takes an ongoing war and fights it in public spaces with complete indifference to who else is standing there. This wasn’t an ambush that went wrong.
This was two gangs firing at each other in a crowd and a man with no connection to either of them dying for it. Two months later at the Buddha Hookah Lounge in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Larry Pagett walked up to a Folk Nation member named Crispine Drop of Philip and shot him multiple times at close range.
Surveillance video captured the entire execution. An innocent bystander was wounded in the same attack. The reason Pagett did it, according to prosecutors, was that he believed Philip had been involved in the killing of an eight Trey member in Trinidad, meaning the conflict had already gone international, had already crossed oceans, and was now being settled in a packed Brooklyn club where anyone could have caught that bullet.
Pagett was eventually convicted of murder in aid of racketeering and sentenced to life in federal prison. But the war he’d helped ignite didn’t die with his freedom. It metastasized. Because here’s where things shift, and this is where a bad situation becomes an uncontrollable one, the drill era.
Starting around 2015 and accelerating hard through the late 2010s, Brooklyn drill rap rewired the relationship between street violence and public image in a way that no previous era of gang culture had quite managed. Music had always existed in the same ecosystem as gang life, but what drill changed was the speed and visibility of provocation.
Now you could post a video taunting rivals the same afternoon someone got shot. You could put a dead man’s name in a lyric and have tens of thousands of people hear it within hours of upload. You could celebrate a hit and broadcast the celebration to the whole city in real time, turning violence into content and content into clout and clout into currency.
Sheff G’s 2017 track No Suburban, a direct response to rival rapper 22 Gz’s song, is a perfect example of how these dynamics worked. The music was coded, but the message wasn’t, and it circulated in an ecosystem where the audiences on both sides of the beef understood exactly what was being said.
But Sheff G wasn’t just a rapper who happened to come from this neighborhood. According to prosecutors, he was an active and directing participant in the crew’s violence, using earnings from his music to pay for guns and compensate shooters, offering money and expensive jewelry to members who carried out attacks.
He would later plead guilty to attempted murder and conspiracy. A Brooklyn DA press release was direct about what he had done. He used his fame and financial resources to fuel gun violence in a deliberate, organized way. That last detail is important because it describes something that had become fundamentally true of Eight Trey by the early 2020s.
Violence was no longer primarily strategic. It wasn’t being deployed to protect a drug corner, settle a market dispute, or eliminate a specific threat to the operation. It was being deployed for image, for clout, for the performance of being the most dominant crew in Flatbush. And when you celebrate a shooting at a lavish dinner, which is what prosecutors said Chef G and other Eight Trey and Nine Ways members did after the October 2020 Hawthorne Street Massacre, gathering together and hosting a meal to mark the
occasion, you are no longer operating in the logic of a criminal organization making calculated decisions. You are operating in the logic of a brand that needs to be maintained, an audience that needs to be served, an identity that demands constant reinforcement through increasingly extreme acts.
The Hawthorne Street shooting itself is worth slowing down on. On October 21st, 2020, a gunman named Kamondre Dekattu emerged from the sunroof of a white Infiniti on a residential Flatbush street and open fire while other shooters fired from the driver’s side windows simultaneously. The target was Theodore Senior, known as Sniper Blicsky, a Folk Nation-affiliated rapper who had been trading disses with Eight Trey associates and whose music had become part of the ongoing performative conflict between the crews.
He was killed. Five other people were wounded in the same attack. Surveillance footage placed Chef G as the getaway driver. About an hour after the shooting, prosecutors say he sent text messages to associates confirming the kill and shared photos of the victim along with the news article about the crime.
Read that last sentence again, slowly. He sent photos of the dead man and a news article about his death to other members of the crew. This is the texture of what clout violence actually is when you strip away the abstract descriptions. Not a strategy, not a calculated war, but a performance that needed to be documented and shared and celebrated.
The murder wasn’t just the end. The documentation of the murder was the point. And now, because this is the part where it keeps getting worse, add the ICG Babies, the Insane [ __ ] Gangster Baby is were a subset operating out of what they called the Castle, a cluster of six-story buildings on East 21st Street in Flatbush, a walk from Eight Trey’s core territory.
They were mostly teenagers and young adults, an aggressively local crew with their own identity and their own set of wars already in motion. Their conflict with Eight Trey was one of those situations that didn’t start as an all-out war, but became one through the pure mechanical momentum of retaliation cycles.
On June 30th, 2020, two Bobby Eaz members, Tristian Williams and Timothy Spence, left the Castle and walked to 50 East 18th Street, a known Eight Trey stronghold, and opened fire on a group of men standing outside, wounding an Eight Trey associate. Surveillance footage caught them fleeing. Within a short window, there was a retaliatory shooting targeting Bobby Eaz members outside their own building.
And then again, and then again. The 2021 Brooklyn DA indictment of 14 Bobby Eaz members listed 11 shootings across roughly a year, and those shootings weren’t contained to one conflict. They spread to Structure Gang, to Bergen Fam, to anyone whose territory overlapped with the Bobby Eaz war zone. Then in April 2021, someone fired shots at a mansion in Short Hills, New Jersey, a rental where Chef G was staying.
The shooting was linked to Bobby Eaz affiliates who had apparently obtained the address from someone inside Eight Trey’s own network. The retaliation that followed involved multiple shootings and a brutal internal assault on the Eight Trey member suspected of leaking the location. This is the moment that crystallizes everything, an outward conflict with rivals simultaneously generating an inward purge based on paranoia about who had talked.
The crew was now fighting on multiple fronts at once, against the Bobby Eaz in the streets, against Folk Nation everywhere, and against his own members in private. That internal violence had been present since the beginning. The murder of Nashwa Johnson in 2009 is the clearest early proof of it.
Johnson was an Eight Trey member who prosecutors believed was cooperating with federal investigators looking at Pagett. Pagett publicly identified Johnson as a potential informant, and Malik Ramsey orchestrated what followed. Two Eight Trey members, Rodney Musket and Anthony Braithwaite, were dispatched to Georgia and killed Johnson on a highway. He was one of their own.
The logic was brutal and simple. The gang’s survival required eliminating its own members when they became liabilities. But the effect was to turn loyalty into a form of fear and to create a culture where snitch paranoia wasn’t just present, but viral, spreading into every relationship and every interaction.
Members who were suspected of cooperation got beaten. Younger members got assaulted based on suspicion, not evidence. The internal violence fed the external violence, and the external violence fed the paranoia, and the paranoia fed the internal violence, and none of it had a stopping point. By the early 2020s, the older leadership that might have imposed restraint was systematically gone.
Pagett had been federally charged in 2015 and would eventually receive life in prison. Ramsey had been prosecuted. Other figures had rotated in and out of incarceration. What remained was a network of younger members, people observers and prosecutors both describe as crash outs, who had been raised in this culture of performative retaliation, who had seen violence as the primary language of the crew their whole lives, and who now had nobody above them to say stop.
At some point, it stopped being a gang and started being a collection of shooters with no direction, no strategy, and no ceiling on what they were willing to do. By 2021, Eight Trey wasn’t just fighting one enemy. They were fighting the Folk Nation GDs, the ICG Bobby Eaz, Structure Gang, Bergen Fam, their own people, and because the conflict had spread out of Brooklyn entirely, rival [ __ ] sets in Queens.
They had made enemies in every direction, and with each passing month, the circle of people they were willing to shoot kept expanding, and the circle of people they were capable of protecting, including innocent bystanders who happened to be standing nearby, kept shrinking to nothing. Which made what happened in Woodside in March 2021 not a shock.
It made it the inevitable conclusion of everything that had come before. Woodside is not Flatbush. That’s the first thing to understand about where the story ends up. Woodside is a Queens neighborhood built around a public housing complex called the Woodside Houses, towers overlooking the elevated train lines on Roosevelt Avenue, a community of working families and immigrants who had nothing to do with the wars playing out in Brooklyn.
But by 2021, Eight Trey’s reach had extended beyond Brooklyn’s borders. Affiliates and subsets had formed in Queens, the Woodside Eight Trey Crips on one side, the Astoria Rolling Crips on the other. And those subsets brought their conflicts with them into neighborhoods that had never asked to be part of any of this.
On that day in March 2021, Daquan Williams, an 18-year-old affiliated with the Woodside subset, stepped outside with a gun and went looking for a member of the Astoria Rolling Crips, also known as the Hip Hop Boys. This was a Crip-on-Crip conflict, one of the many inter-Crip wars that had proliferated as different sets splintered and developed local rivalries with no connection to the original LA hierarchy.
Williams fired five shots. He missed his target. One of those bullets traveled and found Gudelia Valinas, who was crossing the street to buy milk for her children. She was struck in the head. She was taken to a hospital. She didn’t survive. Queens D.A. Melinda Katz described what happened plainly when announcing the charges against Williams.
An innocent mother buying groceries killed by a bullet that was fired at someone else entirely. Gudelia Valinas deserved to walk home. She should have been able to buy milk for her kids and make it back through the door. The fact that she couldn’t, the fact that March 2021 ended the way it did on a Queens sidewalk with a grocery bag at her feet is the clearest possible proof of what happens when a street organization loses any connection to accountability, to discipline, to the basic recognition that other people’s
