Summer 1982, Interstate 75. Somewhere between Detroit and Sanduski, Ohio, roughly 80 cars flying down the freeway, 100 mph. Corvettes, Mercedes, all brand new, all purchased in bulk, same dealership, same day, cash. The drivers wear flat top straw hats, John Dillinger style, red and white jackets.
Young Boys Incorporated colors, red for blood, white for China, white heroin. They’re headed to Cedar Point Amusement Park. Not to hide, to be seen. This is Young Boys Incorporated at their peak, controlling 80% of Detroit’s heroin trade, making $8 million a week, half a billion dollars in the year 1982 alone.
Milton Butch Jones later bragged about this convoy in his autobiography. Quote, “There were roughly 80 cars headed down the freeway. When we got to the freeway, we was holding the west side down, baby. Man, we was flying down the freeway with those flat top John Dillinger hats on like we owned the motherucker.
” They did own it for a while, but in 3 months, Butch will order the execution of one of his own founders. Shot in the head, broad daylight, corner of Columbus and Lton. In 4 months, the feds will indict 41 people, the entire hierarchy. And by 1987, Young Boys Incorporated will be dismantled, convicted, scattered, dead.
But here’s what makes this different. This isn’t just another drug gang story. Young Boys Incorporated pioneered something America had never seen. They used children 8 years old, 9, 10, 11, 12, delivering heroin on 10-speed bicycles selling on elementary school playgrounds while little girls jumped ropes singing their product names.
Quote, “Starlight, Hoochie Khan, Rolls-Royce, Round and Round.” They broke free from the Italian mafia, sourced directly from the Golden Triangle, built a corporate structure on street corners, created the blueprint every drug organization in America would copy. This is Young Boys Incorporated.
The first, the most innovative, the most brutal. This is what went down. 1976 Bernie Elementary School playground, Detroit’s west side. A group of teenagers meet up. Late teens, not for basketball, for business. Dwayne, wonderful Wayne Davis, Bernard, Boneman, Boykins, Regginal, Nut, Chestnut, Charles, Choicy, Chuck, Lindsay.
Shortly after, Raymond Baby Ray People’s joins. They start small. A bar on the corner of Prairie and Puritan. Individual crews sharing a common source. Then February 1978 arrives. Everything changes. Milton Butch Jones gets parrolled. Four years down for manslaughter. But that’s not Butch’s first body.
At 15 years old, he got hired to murder someone. Contract killing. Walked up. Multiple shots, fatal, collected his money, disappeared. Butch doesn’t want to just sell drugs. He wants to build an empire. The Italian mafia. Lacosa Nostra. Controls Detroit’s drug supply. Every dealer pays tribute, follows their rules, kisses the ring.
But Butch has a different vision. He’s been inspired by Henry Marzette, the black godfather, Detroit’s first dealer to oppose mob control through John Milwaukee Jack Maze. They connect with Sylvester Seal Murray, the largest black heroin dealer in Michigan, one of the biggest in the Midwest.
Now they’ve got Independent Supply, Direct from the Golden Triangle, No Mob Middleman, No Tribute. The four key players are set. Dwayne Davis, Raymond Peoples, Mark Block Marshall, Butch Jones. They split into three crews. Pick a name. Young Boys Incorporated. The word incorporated is deliberate.
They’re not a gang. They’re a company. But here’s the real innovation. The one that changes the American drug game forever. Children. Butch has the idea. Use kids, not 16, 17 year olds, younger, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 years old. Michigan’s juvenile laws are lenient. If a kid gets caught with drugs, he can’t be prosecuted like an adult.
Slap on the wrist, back on the street. The adult stay insulated, protected, untouchable. Federal law enforcement would later testify to Congress, quote, “Because most of the members of the organization were minors, efforts to penetrate and disband the group met with little success, kids on 10-speed bicycles, taxi cabs paid for by YBI, elementary school playgrounds where children sailed to other children, handwritten coupons plastered across housing projects, advertising sales, new products, corporate America applied to street corners. By late 1978, Young Boys Incorporated is fully operational. Three crews, independent supply chain, child labor force. Federal agents would describe it as quote, “a militarylike organization chart for narcotics conspiracy. Young Boys Incorporated is about to take
over Detroit.” 1978 through 81, 3 years. That’s all it takes for Young Boys Incorporated to go from a westside operation to complete dominance. About 2 years after formation, they control the entire heroin trade in Detroit. Sales estimated at $300,000 per day, every single day.
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At the top, the four founders. Butch Jones quickly becomes the de facto leader, the enforcer. Baby Ray and Wonderful Wayne are hustlers, smooth operators. Butch and Block straight thugs, itchy trigger fingers. Butch creates the Wrecking Crew. His and Block’s personal enforcement army. Beneath them, the A team led by a teenage hitman Curtis Kurt Mcgherk Napier.
Mcgherk’s been doing hits since 15. Street informants describe him as quote a bloodthirsty psychopath. Then there’s the finance crew led by Seal Murray. The products get branded, marketed like consumer goods. They test each batch, then slap on catchy names. Atomic dog, Purple Haze, Hocus Pocus, Starlight, Whippers Snapper, Rolls-Royce, Hoochie Con, Butcher’s Personal Concoction, Checkmate.
These names become so embedded in Detroit culture that little girls jumping ropes sing them. Starlight, Hoochie Khan, Rolls-Royce, Round and Round. Children singing heroine brand names while jumping rope. Wonderful Wayne sends lieutenants to Boston. James Pep Cooper follows the YBI blueprint perfectly. Within a year, Pep’s crew takes over the vast majority of Boston’s heroin trade.
Sales peak at $50,000 per day. The organization now operates in two major cities. Federal agents described the structure as quote a military-like organization charted for narcotics conspiracy. Most teenagers in the gang can’t just leave. The wrecking crew makes sure everyone understands you’re in until we say you’re out.
The federal government stops paying attention. Congressional hearings focus on Detroit. quote, “Kids are gun carrying criminals who will kill to protect their individual street corners.” By 1981, YBI controls 90% of drug trafficking within Detroit city limits. But there’s a problem brewing. Internal greed, jealousy, power struggles.
Late 1980, Baby Ray and Block have a falling out over a woman they’re both seeing. Early 81, after heated arguments, Baby Ray shoots Block. Block survives, flees to California. One of the four founders is gone. Around the same time, Wonderful Wayne starts to chafe under Butch’s heavy-handed leadership.
Wayne feels stifled, so he splits. First Seattle, then Massachusetts, where he seizes control of Boston’s heroin market. When Wayne returns to Detroit in early 82, he’s triumphant, independent. He starts his own offshoot. The H2O crew technically still YBI, but Wayne refuses to kiss Butch’s ring.
The empire is fracturing and blood is about to spill. 1981, 1982, peak YBI. The money is flowing like a river. And they’re not hiding it, they’re flaunting it. The cars come first. Two dozen or more Mercedes and Corvettes purchased at the same time. Same dealership cash. Then they form massive caravans.
100 person convoys heading to Cedar Point Amusement Park. Kings Island in Ohio, sporting events, concerts, anywhere within a day’s drive where they can be seen. Butch Jones brags about it in his autobiography. quote, “There were roughly 80 cars headed down the freeway. When we got to the freeway, we was holding the west side down, baby.
Man, we was flying down the freeway with those flat top John Dillinger hats on like we owned the motherfucker.” They wanted people to notice, and people did. The fashion is deliberate. Max Julian jackets known on the streets as young boy jackets, Adidas sportsear and shoes, fur collared jackets, derby hats, and always the colors.
Red and white, red for blood, white for china, white heroin when they show up to events is 20 to 40 deep. All matching, all coordinated. Even the young runners, the kids selling on street corners can afford expensive cars, jewelry, clothes. Success in YBI is celebrated, not hidden.
But the founders are living on a different level entirely. Butch and baby Ray aren’t satisfied with the west side anymore. Too ghetto, too visible. They move to the suburbs. Ritzy Oakland County. Butch builds a custom house in Oak Park. indoor pool, everything topofthe line. Baby Ray goes even further north. Troy, a three-story residence in a leafy, secluded, newly developed subdivision.
The money they’re making is almost incomprehensible. Federal authorities later estimate that in the 1982 calendar year alone, YBI cleared close to half a billion dollars in cash. Half a billion. In one year, when the DEA announces the indictment in December 82, they tell the press YBI is making close to $8 million a week pushing heroin. 8 million every 7 days.
The seizures tell the story. When they raid Seal Murray’s luxury penthouse on the top floor of the Jeffersonian downtown, they find nearly a million dollars in cash just sitting there. One of the young men arrested is wearing $100,000 worth of diamond encrusted jewelry on his body. But there’s another side to all this wealth.
Another player whose corruption enables everything. Sergeant Rudy Davis. Davis runs the narcotics crew in Detroit Police Department’s 10th precinct. But he’s not arresting YBI. He’s protecting some dealers, the ones who bribe him and robbing their competitors. one of those competitors, Butch Jones.
Butch writes about Davis in his autobiography. Quote, “Whenever I would see or even hear that Rudy Davis was riding around the hood, I would close down because that was one guy that did intimidate me. Here was this guy that had the law behind him, a gun, and was also crazy as hell. So, hell yeah, that fool scared me.
” Davis robs Butcher’s dope houses multiple times. Just walks in, seizes the dope, guns, money. Quote, “Just walked out the door like it belonged to him.” Eventually, Davis gets caught convicted. Butch’s reaction. Quote, “Getting rid of him was the best thing that the police department could have ever done.
Man, did they do me a big favor.” Summer 1982, height of the empire. But internal tensions are building. Wonderful Wayne’s H2O crew is moving into YBI territory, Lton Avenue, Northwest Detroit. In Butch’s mind, all of Lton belongs to YBI. When Wayne’s lieutenants, many of them recent Boston transplants, start pushing a new heroin mix called Freak of the Week in the area, Butch takes it personally.
Mother’s Day 1982. Baby Ray Peoples takes a shot at one of Wayne’s associates outside a Hallmark store. The guy was just buying a Mother’s Day card on his way to dinner with his mom. The war is heating up and it’s about to turn deadly. March 29th, 1982, Woodward Avenue and Lester Court.
Ambassador Convolescent Center. Detroit police officers William Green and Eric Buyers are on patrol looking for curfew violators. Kids out past 1000 p.m. They spot a group of six male teenagers stopped to question him. While talking to the group, they notice another teenager across the street.
They call him over. Carrie Goowens, 17 years old. Goens walks over then pulls out a gun. Fires point blanket officer William Green. Fatal shot. Green drops. Goens turns, shoots Green’s partner, Eric Buyers, in the shoulder, then runs. Officer William Green is dead, killed by a teenager in front of his partner over a curfew check.
Goens is caught quickly, confesses, says he threw the gun in a parking lot. Police never find it. When interrogated, Goins claims he thought the officers were trying to hurt his friends. says he didn’t identify them as police. There are reports that Goens is a highranking member of YBI.
Detroit Police Chief Hart says there’s no definitive information linking him to the gang, but the timing is suspicious. The audacity of shooting a cop in broad daylight. That’s YBI level boldness. November 1982, Goens goes to trial. charged as an adult. Murder, attempted murder. The evidence is clear. He confessed.
Witnesses saw everything. The jury deliberates for 2 hours and 40 minutes. When they come back, involuntary manslaughter, not murder. The jury foreman later states there was quote a lot of doubt in their minds about Goen’s intent. A cop is dead, shot in the head by a teenager who confessed and he gets manslaughter.
The federal government sees this and realizes Detroit has a problem that local police can’t handle. 6 months later, the second murder. September 28th, 1982. Corner of Columbus and Lton, Detroit’s west side. Broad daylight. Dwayne Wonderful. Wayne Davis is having a conversation when two asalants approach.
One of them shoots him. Point blank. Fatal. In front of witnesses. Wayne drops. One of the four founders of Young Boys Incorporated is gone. The word on the street is immediate. Butch Jones ordered the hit. Wayne had been pushing boundaries for months. His H2O crew was dealing on Lton Avenue, Butch’s territory.
His Boston transplants were selling freak of the week, competing with YBI’s branded heroin. He refused to pay tribute, refused to kiss the ring. And when Kurt McGherk reported that Wayne said that guy about Butch, that was the final straw six years later, 1988, Butch, Kurt Mcgherk, Keith Kathon the Terrible Green, and Morris Mohart Gibbs are charged with the murder, but the charges get dropped.
Nobody talks, nobody testifies. The code of the streets holds. Butch walks. Wayne’s murder sends shock waves through Detroit. This isn’t some rival gang. This is YBI killing. YBI founder killing founder. The empire is eating itself, but there’s more blood. August 1982, Philadelphia Street, Raymond Baby. Ray Peoples is standing outside a residence.
He’s in a violent confrontation with the woman he’s been dating, Cherish Jones. During the confrontation, someone shoots Baby Ray. Some informants tell authorities the shooting is connected to the YBI infighting. Cherish Jones was also seen a member of Wayne’s H2O crew. Was this retaliation a warning? Nobody knows for sure because Cherris Jones is found shortly after.
Shot fatally, her body dumped by railroad tracks near the city’s new center area. Baby Ray survives his gunshot. Cherish doesn’t. December 7th, 1982. Three months after Wayne’s murder, the feds dropped the hammer. A multi-count 41 person federal racketeering indictment. The entire hierarchy. Butch Jones, Raymond Peoples, Seal Murray, Kurt Mgherk, 37 others.
The empire built over 5 years is crumbling in months. But Butch Jones, he’s not done because prison isn’t going to stop him from running Young Boys Incorporated. December 1982. The 41 person indictment is just the beginning. When federal agents start executing search warrants and making arrests, they’re not just taking down street dealers.
They’re exposing an entire ecosystem of corruption. The main target initially, Sylvester Seal Murray, the largest black heroin dealer in Michigan, one of the biggest in the Midwest, YBI supplier, the money man, the Detroit Police Department, DEA, IRS, and Michigan State Police, combined forces, informants, undercover agents, financial investigation, electronic surveillance.
When they move on Murray, the seizure is massive. Nearly $2 million in cash and jewelry discovered across his properties. But Murray’s just one piece. The indictment names the entire leadership structure. And as federal agents dig deeper, they discover something shocking. It’s not just gang members. It’s cops.
It’s lawyers. It’s county officials. Deputy Wayne County Sheriff Henry Duval indicted for embezzling $2,000 in bail money from the Wayne County Jail. He was supposed to be enforcing the law. Instead, he was stealing bail money deposited by drug dealers. Retired Highland Park Police Officer Ralph Jackson charged with racketeering and filing false income tax returns.
Another cop, another betrayal. But the biggest surprise, W. Otis Co Pepper. Co Pepper is a well-known Detroit attorney, locally famous for defending drug ring figures and murder defendants. High-profile, respected in certain circles, feared in others, the feds discover that Butch Jones has been paying Co Pepper in more than cash.
According to indictments, Butch provided him with narcotics, properties, vehicles, including a 1976 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow. The attorney defending drug dealers is being paid in drugs and luxury cars by the very people he’s representing. Co Pepper gets indicted for tax violations linked to Young Boys Incorporated.
The message is clear. Everyone connected to YBI is going down. 32 individuals are eventually convicted. The trials drag on for months. The sentences vary, but one thing is consistent. federal time, real time, not the slap on the wrist juvenile sentences that made YBI possible in the first place. But here’s the thing about Butch Jones.
He’s strategic. Always has been. Butch gets sent to federal prison in Texas, far from Detroit, isolated. Most people think that’s the end of his reign. They’re wrong. His wife, Porsche Jones, is on the outside. And she’s not just Butcher’s wife. She’s his partner, his lieutenant.
Meanwhile, the streets of Detroit are changing. With YBI leadership locked up, other groups see an opportunity. The Pony Down crew, led by Leroy Gun Butram, makes a move for citywide influence. Pony Down operates differently. They’re named after the expensive designer pony shoes they wear.
Like YBI, they’re flashy but less organized, more family-based. Leroyy’s inner circle includes his brother Tony the Snake Buttrum. And Tony’s got a reputation. When a smaller rival gang kidnaps his daughter, Tony doesn’t call the police. He doesn’t negotiate. According to press reports, he drives to the location, gets out of his car with a gun, shoots down the kidnappers, takes his daughter back.
The police allegedly do nothing. That’s the level of power drug gangs hold in Detroit. They can commit murder in front of law enforcement and face no consequences. Federal agencies investigating Pony Down note they use older runners than YBI. More violence, less organization, more internal conflict. The landscape is shifting.
YBI’s downfall created a power vacuum and everyone’s rushing to fill it. Butch, he’s watching from Texas, planning, organizing, because being in prison doesn’t mean you stop being a boss. And Porsche Jones is about to show Detroit that Young Boys Incorporated isn’t finished yet. 1983, Butch Jones is in federal prison in Texas, over a thousand miles from Detroit, locked away.
But Young Boys Incorporated keeps operating. How Porsche Jones, Butch’s wife, isn’t just waiting for him to come home. She’s running the organization. Butch communicates from prison. Letters, phone calls, coded messages through visitors. Porsche executes his orders on the streets of Detroit for about a year. They pull it off.
The operation is smaller, more careful, but still moving weight, still making money, still YBI. Then Troy police get a tip. Homicides have occurred. Victims connected to YBI. They obtain a search warrant for Porsche Jones’s house. When officers execute the warrant, they find evidence, drugs, money, records.
The kind of documentation that proves this isn’t a dead organization. It’s a living, breathing criminal enterprise being run from a prison cell. Troy police contact federal law enforcement. The investigation restarts 1986. While still serving his sentence in Texas, Butch Jones is indicted again for continued involvement in drug trafficking from behind bars.
According to federal documents, Porsche isn’t just running drugs. She’s allegedly involved in three killings. August 1987, the feds dropped the second wave. 26 affiliates indicted. Nine of them were also named in the 82 indictment. They got out, went back to the game. Now they’re going back to prison.
But before the second wave, Butch wanted to quote, “tidy some things up.” May 12th, 1983. Same afternoon, two separate locations. Two of Baby Ray’s top henchmen are targeted. Joseph Wamp Brown is on the corner of Conquered and Benson. Kurt Mcgherk walks up, shoots him. Brown dies on that corner.
Meanwhile, Gregory Special K. Kendricks is on the corner of Boanne and Erskin. He gets ambushed, but Kendricks survives. The hitmen Kurt Mgherk and Morris Mo Hart Gibbs, Butch’s first cousin. After the Brown killing, Kurt Mcgherk goes underground. September 1983, Mcgherk takes aim at two uniform police officers with a sawoff shotgun.
Shoots at cops in broad daylight. Shortly after, he allegedly sends a death threat to Gil Hill, Detroit Police Department’s chief of homicide. A citywide manhunt ensues. The 19-year-old hitman is declared public enemy number one by the Wayne County Sheriff’s Office. November 1983, Mcgherk is finally apprehended after a high-speed chase starts in Pontiac onto Interstate 75, ends on someone’s lawn.
He pleads guilty to the Brown murder. By 1987, the dismantling is complete. The core 50 people who ran YBI convicted scattered dead. Butch Jones eventually cooperates with federal authorities. The man who built YBI, who ordered hits, who ran it from prison, he flips. But there’s one more murder the feds can’t prevent.
August 10th, 1985, less than four months after his release from prison, Raymond Baby Ray Peoples is behind the wheel of his car, idling at a Westside Detroit street corner. Then the shots ring out. Baby Ray is murdered, shot dead in his car. Nobody is ever charged. Nobody talks.
The street stays silent. By 85, three of the four founders are gone. Wayne murdered in 82 block fled to California. Baby Ray murdered four months out of prison. Only Butch remains deep in the system cooperating with the feds. Butch Jones served 12 years in federal prison. When he got out, he was a different man or maybe just a smarter criminal.
Either way, he flipped, became an informant, testified. Some see it as survival. Others see it as the ultimate betrayal. But the legacy of YBI that doesn’t die with arrests and murders. Carl Taylor, the Michigan State University sociology professor who researched them, put it plainly.
Quote, “Yi was the first real iconic criminal organization to emerge out of the city since the old purple gang of the prohibition era. They crafted the mold for all who came after them in the game. After YBI’s downfall, other black Detroit drug cartels copied their organizational structure. The Chambers brothers, Best Friends, Black Mafia Family, Pony Down, YBI system of organization impacted drug gangs nationally.
During the 1980s and 90s, street corners across America started looking like YBI corners. Young kids on bikes, brand names, vertical integration. The story became legend. Hundreds of newspaper articles, dozens of documentaries, two published books, Black Entertainment Television featured them in the American Gangster documentary series.
But perhaps the strangest twist, some YBI members never left the game. 2017, 35 years after the original indictments, Daryl Terrell, a former YBI member, is arrested again. Federal prosecutors allege he built a cocaine empire involving his relatives and a soul food restaurant called Cafe Sunshine.
The restaurant becomes a money laundering front. Over $422,000 deposited in 20 months. The checking account pays for 32,000 in airline tickets and 92,000 in hotel purchases. The children who jumped ropes singing Starlight Hoochie Khan, Rolls-Royce, Round and Round are adults now. Some became parents, grandparents, some went to prison, some died young.
And somewhere in America, there’s a street corner where a teenager is selling drugs for adults who stay in the shadows using a system perfected in Detroit on playgrounds in the 1970s by Young Boys Incorporated. The faces change, the cities change, the drugs change, heroin to crack to fentinel, but the blueprint that stays the same because YBI didn’t just sell drugs, they sold a system.
And that system is still operating today.
