The Man Who Built Detroit’s Most Violent Blood Sets | C-M*rder 

 

 

 

July 14th, 2014, morning. The Lawton Parole Office on Detroit’s West Side, a man named Billy Arnold walks into the office for his scheduled meeting with his parole agent. Across the waiting room, he spots two faces he recognizes, twin brothers Michael and Martaze Davis, rappers who went by 42 Twins, both with armed robbery convictions, both checking in with their own parole agent.

 The Davises were members of the Hustle Boys, a rival gang operating on Detroit’s East Side. They were not Seven Mile Bloods, they were on the wrong side of a line that had been drawn in blood across zip code 48205.  The Davises left the office and got into a car with two other men, including a 22-year-old named Juwan Neff Page.

Arnold made a call. He dialed a Seven Mile Bloods member named Corey Bailey, known in the streets as Cocaine Sunny, and told him where the car was going. What followed was a drive-by shooting that killed Juwan Page with fatal injuries. He was 22 years old, and that killing, carried out on a summer afternoon in Detroit, was the trigger.

What came after it was one of the most documented and most violent gang wars in the history of a city that had been watching its East Side bleed for decades. Hit lists appeared on Instagram. Rivals posted names and photos of targets. Murders and attempted murders multiplied across the 48205 zip code in a pattern so public, so visible on social media, and so relentless that the federal government eventually named the whole investigation after the platform the gang used its violence, Death by Instagram. At the

center of it, one of the men who had built the Seven Mile Bloods from a neighborhood crew into the dominant criminal organization in what prosecutors called the deadliest part of America’s most violent big city, Corey Bailey,  Cocaine Sunny, 31 years old when he went to prison for the rest of his life.

 And this is his story and the story of the red zone he helped create. To understand the Seven Mile Bloods, you have to understand what zip code 48205 is, what it was, and what the city of Detroit decided to do with it over the second half of the 20th century. That decision, more than any individual choice made by any individual man, is the foundation of everything that followed.

 48205 sits on the east side of Detroit, bounded by Seven Mile Road to the south, Eight Mile Road to the north, Gratiot Avenue to the west, and Kelly Road to the east. Six and a half square miles of urban Detroit that by the time the Seven Mile Bloods were operating at their peak had become  what federal prosecutors described as a killing field.

 The gang members who controlled it had a name for the territory, the red zone, for the color of blood, for the color of the Bloods. They called the zip code appeared in their rap lyrics, in  their social media posts, in the music videos they shot on the street corners where they also sold drugs and planned murders.

 It was pride  and threat in equal measure. The demographic data tells a structural story. The median household income in 48205 runs well below both the state and national averages. The unemployment rate runs significantly above both.  Nearly two-thirds of residents have never been married. The home owner vacancy rate, a measure of how many properties sit empty, runs above 30% in some data sets, meaning roughly one in three properties in the zip code is unoccupied.

 A physical manifestation of decades of population flight from a city that shrank from nearly 2 million people at its 1950 peak to under 700,000 by the early 2010s. The schools serving the area carry ratings at or near the bottom of Detroit’s already struggling public school system, which ranks last among large urban districts in the country for reading and math proficiency.

 Fewer than 10% of adults in 48205 hold a college degree. Detroit as a whole has the highest poverty rate of any large American city, a city that was once the wealthiest municipality in the United States, where four workers in the 1950s earned wages that were twice the national median and where home ownership was higher than almost anywhere else in the country has been in managed decline for over 60 years.

 The auto industry that made it shrunk, automated, and moved.  The white middle class that built its neighborhoods left for the suburbs and took the tax base with it. Factories closed, population bled, and the East Side of Detroit, already the poorer side of an unequal city, absorbed the heaviest concentrations of what got left behind.

 That is the world that produced Corey Bailey and the Seven Mile Bloods. Not in the sense that the neighborhood made them violent, but in the sense >>  >> that it made the gang the most visible and most immediate structure of opportunity available to young men growing up in a community where the legitimate economy had largely already left.

 Carl Taylor, a professor emeritus at Michigan State University, who has studied Detroit’s gang culture for decades, put it in the plainest possible terms when asked why the threat of life sentences did not deter gang members in places like the red zone. Why would it impact them or make them stop? They are living moment to moment.

 They are not scared. What else is there for them? That question does not have a comfortable answer, but it is the right question to ask before anything else. The Bloods arrived in Detroit later than they arrived on the coast. The first Blood affiliated sets on Detroit’s East Side began forming in the early 1990s with groups like the Mad Dog Bloods and PDQ put them down quick among the early formations.

 By the early 2000s, the 55 7 Mile Bloods had established themselves as a dominant force in the 48205 corridor developing what became known as the red zone identity that blended national Blood symbolism with the specific geography and conflict patterns of Detroit’s East Side. The name 55 7 Mile Bloods reflected multiple layers of local identity.

 The 55 came from the repeated five in the zip code 48205 combined with the five-point symbolism of Blood identity. 7 Mile referenced East 7 Mile Road, the corridor that anchored the gang’s territorial claim. The Bloods designation connected the set to a national network of Blood affiliated gangs with roots going back to Los Angeles in the early 1970s when the Bloods formed as a counterweight to the Crips in South Central.

 But the 7 Mile Bloods, as federal prosecutors and the gang’s own members were clear about, were a Detroit originated formation shaped primarily by local dynamics rather than organizational direction from Los Angeles. They were Blood by affiliation and identity. They were East Side Detroit by everything else. Among the men who built the 7 Mile Bloods into what they became during the 2000s and 2010s, prosecutors identified two figures as central, Billy Arnold and Corey Bailey.

 Arnold was the man the government eventually sought the death penalty against, charged with two murders and nine attempted murders. Bailey was the man who drew two life sentences in the first wave of the federal prosecution. Together  and separately, they represent what the 7 Mile Bloods were at their most organized and most violent.

 Corey Bailey was born in Detroit. He was 31 years old when he was sentenced to two consecutive life terms in October 2019, which means he was born somewhere around 1988 coming of age on the East Side through the crack epidemic years of the late 1990s through Detroit’s deepening fiscal crisis in the 2000s through the bankruptcy in 2013 through all of it with the Red Zone as his geography and the Seven Mile Bloods as his organization.

 He had multiple aliases: >>  >> Sunny, Cocaine Sunny, C-Murder. That last one was not just a nickname for law enforcement records. It was the name he used in the rap videos that the Seven Mile Bloods shot on their own street corners. Videos that the federal government would later use as evidence against them.

 Gang members posted their lives on YouTube and Instagram with a visibility that eventually helped prosecute them, but that reflected something real about the world they lived in. The street was the stage, the product was real, and the performance and the reality were the same thing. >>  >> The Red Zone during the Seven Mile Bloods’ peak years was, as the Detroit News described it in his death-by-Instagram investigation, part pharmacy, part shooting gallery, and part rap studio.

 All three of those things operated in the same physical space often simultaneously. Gang members sold crack cocaine, heroin,  marijuana, OxyContin pain pills, and prescription cough syrup on the same corners where they made music and planned their next moves against rivals. The money they made was spent on cars, on $50,000 diamond-encrusted Breitling watches, on $600 belts, at Detroit strip clubs.

 The unexplained wealth that federal prosecutors identified in the RICO indictment was both very real and very visible. The OxyContin pipeline is the detail that distinguishes the Seven Mile Bloods from most street gangs in terms of their actual reach and their actual damage. This was not just a Detroit operation.

 By 2009, gang members had identified a market for pain pills in Charleston, West Virginia, the epicenter of the national opioid crisis, and they built a supply chain to serve it. They acquired prescription pills in Detroit from individuals willing to sell them and transported those pills to Charleston by car and by Greyhound bus using female couriers described in court documents as stuffers and sold them in West Virginia for $60 each.

 The Federal Drug Enforcement Administration documented the pipeline’s gross revenues at over $80,000 a week. That number needs to be read in the context of what it represented. The opioid crisis killed tens of thousands of Americans during the years the Seven Mile Bloods were running their pill pipeline. Charleston, West Virginia, was among the hardest-hit communities in the country.

 The people who died of overdoses in West Virginia bought product that started in the red zone. The Seven Mile Bloods >>  >> were not just a Detroit problem. They were a nationally connected drug trafficking organization that fed one of the worst public health catastrophes in American history.

 More than 100 Detroit residents were arrested on drug-related charges in Charleston during the 10-year span. One man was killed there in 2014 on orders from Seven Mile Bloods members.  The gang war that consumed the East Side of Detroit between 2014 and the federal arrest was not the first conflict the Seven Mile Bloods had been involved in, but it was the most documented, the most public, and the most directly traceable to specific decisions  made by specific people.

 The immediate spark was the parole office encounter, Arnold calling Bailey after spotting the Hustle Boys twins, the drive-by that killed Juwan Page, but the underlying conflict had been building for years across a landscape where multiple gangs were operating in close proximity on Detroit’s East Side, all competing for the same territory and the same markets.

The Seven Mile Bloods had rivals including the Hustle Boys, Six Mile Cheddar Grove, Max out 220, the Gutter Boys, and the Gangster Disciples. Any of those rivalries could produce violence. On that July afternoon in 2014, one of them did, and then the retaliation logic took over. Hit lists appeared on Instagram within weeks of the Page killing.

 Photographs of rivals with their real names, addresses, and in some cases the specific method of death wished for them posted publicly on social media accounts that investigators were already monitoring. The FBI and the Detroit Police Department Gang Intelligence Unit have been watching the Seven Mile Bloods for years by that point.

 The social media escalation gave them a real-time window >>  >> into a gang war that was killing people on Detroit’s East Side at an accelerating rate. Between 2014 and the federal arrest in 2015 and afterward, the Seven Mile Bloods were involved in at least 14 shootings, four homicides, and 11 attempted murders. Bailey’s specific role in the escalating war was documented in the trial evidence.

 It was Bailey who received Arnold’s call from the parole office. It  was Bailey who was part of the operation that killed Juwan Page. Federal prosecutors built their case against him through a combination of social media evidence, cell phone location data, witness testimony, and the YouTube rap videos in which gang members has their own world with a candor that the government eventually turned into exhibits.

 SAC Stephen D’Antuono of the FBI’s Detroit Division said it without diplomatic cushioning, “Mr. Bailey and Mr. Shye did not give a second thought to the lives they took, the harm they caused, or the terror they created in the community.” The trial that produced Bailey’s conviction ran for 10 weeks in front of US District Judge George Caram Steeh.

 The jury deliberated for approximately 7 days before returning guilty verdicts. Bailey was convicted on four counts, RICO conspiracy, murder in aid of racketeering, attempted murder in aid of racketeering, and possession of a firearm in furtherance of a crime of violence. Judge Steeh sentenced him to two life sentences and three concurrent 10-year sentences in October 2019.

 He was 31 years old. The other men convicted alongside Bailey and afterward in the Seven Mile Bloods prosecution reflect the full scale of the federal government’s dismantling of the organization. Arlandis Shye, 30 years old, known as Grimy, was sentenced to 18 years on the RICO conspiracy count. Robert Brown II, 37 years old, known as Aro, described by prosecutors as a founding member of the Seven Mile Bloods, received  40 years in federal prison without parole for RICO conspiracy, attempted murder in aid of racketeering, and use

of a firearm during a violent crime. Keithon Porter, 32 years old, known as KP, was convicted of RICO conspiracy, murder in aid of racketeering, attempted murder in aid of racketeering, and firearm charges. Eugene Fisher, known as Fast, received 90 months for two counts of felon in possession of a firearm. Billy Arnold, described by federal prosecutors as the overall leader of the Seven Mile Bloods and the man who had the longest and most violent record in the gang, was the last major defendant to go to trial. His case was the one the

government initially sought the death penalty in, a designation that made it the first federal death penalty prosecution in Detroit under the Trump administration. The death penalty was eventually dropped after the Biden administration took office in 2021. Arnold was convicted in December 2023 on racketeering conspiracy and murder charges and faced a sentencing hearing in 2024, where prosecutors asked for life plus 100 years.

 The judge imposed life in prison. By the time Arnold was sentenced, the federal government had secured convictions of more than 19 people charged in the Seven Mile Bloods case and more than 100 people total through the broader Detroit One Initiative that combined multiple gang prosecutions under the RICO framework across the Eastern District of Michigan.

Bailey’s aunt, Orselene Peterson, spoke to Local 4 News in Detroit after her nephew was sentenced. She said she could not believe what he had gotten himself into. She said the trial tore her apart. She said the sentencing hearing tore her apart. That statement is worth sitting with for a moment, not to diminish what Bailey is charged with doing, but because it is the human reality on the other side of every federal press release that announces gang members sentenced  to life in prison.

There is a family. There is an aunt who loved her nephew. There is a woman who watched a 31-year-old man she cared about receive two life sentences in a federal courtroom in Detroit and who described it as something that tore her apart. The Seven Mile Bloods case did not produce a clean story about monsters who materialized from nowhere to terrorize a neighborhood.

 It produced a story about young men who grew up in the most economically distressed zip code in one of America’s poorest cities, who found in the gang the only available structure that offered income, belonging, protection, and status,  and who used that structure to traffic drugs, fight rivals, and kill people in ways that destroyed their own community and sent them to federal prison for the rest of their lives.

 Billy Arnold’s defense lawyers in their sentencing memorandum submitted an exhaustive biography of their client’s childhood. His father, a Vietnam veteran, was addicted to heroin and alcohol and sold food stamps to buy crack. He died of cancer when Arnold was nine. His family lived below the poverty line every year from 1986 to 2004, except for 2 years in the mid and late 1990s, and never earned more than $29,000 in a year.

 He moved between four homes in four years as a child. He found family, the sentencing memo said, in the friends who became the Seven Mile Bloods, kids who were trapped on the east side of Detroit, poor and hungry, for whom the gang was the source of the unconditional acceptance that every other institution in their lives had failed to provide.

 None of that is an excuse. The people the Seven Mile Bloods killed are dead. The people they paralyzed are still in wheelchairs. The families on the east side of Detroit who spent years afraid to let their children go outside because of the gang war that the Seven Mile Bloods were fighting on their streets are still carrying that.

The people in West Virginia who died of OxyContin overdoses from pills the gang transported across state lines are gone. The human cost of what the Seven Mile Bloods did is real and not hypothetical and not canceled out by the poverty that produced them, but the poverty is also real and the conditions that produced the Seven Mile Bloods have not been addressed by the RICO prosecutions that dismantled the gang.

 The red zone is still the red zone. Zip code 48205 is still zip code 48205. The unemployment rate, the poverty rate, the school ratings, the vacant properties, all of those things are still what they were when Corey Bailey was a teenager learning the rules of the Eastside. The next generation of young men growing up in 48205 today is growing up in the same conditions that the Seven Mile Bloods grew up in.

 The prosecution removed the specific organization. It did not  address what produced the organization. The social media dimension of the Seven Mile Bloods case is worth understanding in its own right because it changed how federal prosecutors in Detroit and eventually across the country built gang cases. Before 2014, social media was already present in gang activity but had not been systematically weaponized by prosecutors to the degree that the Seven Mile Bloods case demonstrated was possible.

 What the Detroit FBI office and the Detroit Police Department Gang Intelligence Unit recognized as they watched the Instagram hit lists appear in the summer and fall of 2014 was that the gang members posting those lists were simultaneously committing acts that were relevant to the RICO conspiracy they were already investigating and documenting themselves doing it in a form that was admissible in  federal court.

 The YouTube rap videos that Bailey, Arnold, and other Seven Mile Bloods members made and posted publicly were used in the trial as evidence of the conspiracy, of the gangs activities, and of the relationships between the defendants. The Instagram posts, the hit lists, the taunts directed at rival gangs, the photographs of weapons, the references to specific crimes, all of it became part of the federal record.

 The gang’s own media presence was its prosecution. Christopher Graveland, one of the assistant US attorneys who worked the case,  described the strategy plainly. They used the gang’s own words, their own music, their own Instagram against them. That approach, pioneered in Detroit in the Seven Mile Bloods prosecution, became a model for federal gang prosecutions across the country.

 It is also, in the long view, a sobering commentary on what it  means when the only public record a community leaves is the one its most violent members create on social media. The schools in 48205 are rated D. The rap videos from the red zone traveled across YouTube. There is one more thing that makes the Seven Mile Bloods story different from the typical gang RICO prosecution, and it is the opioid pipeline.

 Most street gang prosecutions focus on crack cocaine or heroin, the drugs  that have defined inner-city drug markets since the 1980s. The Seven Mile Bloods dealt in those too, but the OxyContin pipeline to West Virginia placed the gang at the intersection of two separate American crises, the ongoing crack and heroin epidemic in Detroit’s inner-city neighborhoods >>  >> and the prescription opioid epidemic that was killing people in rural and suburban America at rates that the country had not seen since the crack

years. The gang exploited the price gap between Detroit and West Virginia. Pills obtained in Detroit could be resold in Charleston for several times their original cost, creating enormous profit margins. The math was simple and the margin was enormous. The Detroit News reported that the pipeline generated over $80,000 a week at its peak.

 That is more than $4 million a year from a single out-of-state drug market. On top of the crack, heroin, and marijuana revenues from the red zone itself, the OxyContin pipeline made the Seven Mile Bloods a genuinely significant regional drug trafficking organization, not a street gang in the popular sense, but an enterprise with multi-state reach and documented cartel-level revenues from a single product line.

 The human wreckage that pipeline produced in West Virginia is documented and ongoing. West Virginia had the highest drug overdose death rate in the United States during the years the Seven Mile Bloods were running their pills there. The state still has one of the highest rates in the country. The specific role of the Seven Mile Bloods in that crisis is a line item in a broader indictment of the pharmaceutical industry, the prescription practices of American doctors, and the inadequacy of the federal response to the opioid epidemic.

But, it is a line item that exists, and it is connected by a Greyhound bus route to a street corner in zip code 48205. Corey Bailey is in federal prison, likely for the rest of his life. He was 31 years old when he was sentenced. Two life terms, three concurrent 10-year terms, all running together in the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

 The man his aunt described as someone she loved, a 31-year-old man who left behind a community in 48205 and the people who knew him there is now a federal inmate number. US Attorney  Matthew Schneider said at the sentencing that Michigan has no tolerance for the senseless murders and violence  spread by gang members.

 That statement is the statement that closes every gang prosecution press release, and it is true in the sense that the federal government will continue to prosecute gang members. And those prosecutions will produce sentences like the ones handed to Bailey and Arnold and the rest of the Seven Mile Bloods who are now in federal prison.

 What it does not address is the tolerance Michigan has demonstrated over decades for the conditions that produce gang  members. The tolerance for a zip code with vacancy rates above 30% unemployment well above the state average, schools rated D, and a median household income  that puts families below poverty.

 The tolerance for a city that went bankrupt in 2013 with $18 billion in long-term debt while the neighborhoods on its east side continue to deteriorate without meaningful investment. The tolerance for a world where, in the words of a Michigan State University professor who has studied Detroit’s gang culture his entire career, the young men growing up in the red zone are living moment to moment.

They are not scared. And the honest answer to what else is there for them is one that the sentencing memorandum cannot provide. The Seven Mile Bloods are dismantled as an organization. More than 19 of their members and associates have federal convictions. The Instagram hit lists are deleted or archived.  The OxyContin pipeline to West Virginia was cut off.

 DeJuan Page’s family did not get him back, but the men who killed him will not be coming back to the red zone, either. 4820 die is still the east side of Detroit. The conditions that produce Cocaine Sunny are still producing the next Cocaine Sunny right now today in the same streets where Bailey grew up in a zip code that the rest of Detroit has been content to leave to its own devices for longer than Corey Bailey has been alive.

 That is the full sentence, not the two life terms in federal court. The full sentence that the Red Zone has been serving since before the Seven Mile Bloods existed, written in the demographics of a zip code that nobody in power ever decided was worth the cost of saving. Corey Bailey is 31 years old, and he will never come home.

 The neighborhood that made him is still there, and that is both the end of his story and the beginning of the next one. The Detroit News investigation titled Death by Instagram, published in 2018 as a serial narrative, is the most comprehensive public account of how the Seven Mile Bloods prosecution came together. The reporting documented how federal prosecutors in Detroit’s  Eastern District had been using racketeering laws to secure nearly 100 convictions of violent criminals across the city, building a methodology that the Seven

Mile Bloods case became the defining example of. The investigation showed in granular detail how gang members had essentially prosecuted themselves, how the Instagram posts and YouTube videos and text messages created a documentary record of organized criminal conduct that would have been nearly impossible to build through surveillance alone.

What that reporting also did, in the best tradition of the kind of journalism the case deserved, was show the neighborhood, the streets where people were afraid to sit on their porches, the families who had watched the gang war turn their block into a war zone, and who had no capacity to leave because they did not have anywhere else to go.

The elderly residents of the Red Zone who  had been there for decades, and who described watching the neighborhood change around them while the institutions  that were supposed to maintain it either failed or disappeared. The schools, the churches, the businesses that had closed, the houses that sat vacant because the people who might have bought them did not want to live inside a gang war.

 The Red Zone became Detroit’s deadliest area in the summer of 2011 as the Seven Mile Bloods rose to their peak. That designation was not a designation any neighborhood seeks. It was the outcome of a specific set of conditions, a specific absence of investment, a specific concentration of poverty operating in a specific zip code of a specific city that had been making specific choices about which neighborhoods to prioritize for long enough that the consequences were no longer surprising to anyone who had been paying attention. Corey Bailey 

and the Seven Mile Bloods did not create 48205. They operated inside it and they made it worse and the people who lived there paid for that in fear and violence and death. Both of those things are true simultaneously and have to be held together if you want to understand what happened in the Red Zone between 2008 and the federal prosecutions.

  The federal government’s Detroit One initiative, the coordinating structure that brought together the FBI, the DEA, the ATF, the Detroit Police Department Gang Intelligence Unit, the Michigan State Police, US  Border Patrol, and Homeland Security Investigations into a single prosecutorial framework secured more than 100 convictions of violent criminals in Detroit through the RICO statute.

 Former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick was prosecuted under the same framework. Motorcycle gangs, methamphetamine distributors, the Seven Mile Bloods, all of them prosecuted together under the same conceptual model. Identify the enterprise, map the hierarchy, connect the crimes to the conspiracy,  and bring the full weight of federal racketeering law to bear on the whole structure at once.

 It worked in the sense that it produced  convictions and sentences. It worked in the sense that the specific men who were running the red zone when it was the deadliest zip code in the deadliest city in America are now in federal prison and are not coming back. It did not work in the sense of addressing what produced those men and what will produce the next iteration of the same organization in the same geography.

 Khallid Taylor’s question is the one the sentencing hearings cannot answer. Why would it impact them or make them stop? They are living moment to moment. They are not scared. What else is there for them? Corey Bailey is in federal prison. He went in at 31. The red zone is still the red zone. The answer to Taylor’s question is still the same answer it was when the Seven Mile Bloods were running their pills to West Virginia and posting hit lists on Instagram and shooting each other in the streets of 48205.

Until that answer changes, the story does not end with any conviction. It just pauses between generations, waiting for the next young man to do the same math and come up with the same answer that Cocaine Sunny did.