March 1988 in Philadelphia. A man sits in front of a television camera, his face blurred out. He’s wearing a gold ring with three letters pressed into it in diamonds. JBM, Junior Black Mafia. He looks at the camera and says his crew was built specifically to remove one group from Philadelphia’s streets. The Jamaican Shower Posse.
He says his people are better armed. He says they’re not afraid. And then he declares war on live television. In front of the entire city of Philadelphia. What nobody knew that night was who actually sat behind that blurred face. What nobody knew was whether the war he was declaring was even real. And what nobody knew was that by the time it was over, the Shower Posse would be finished in Southwest Philly.
And Aaron Jones would sit at the [music] top of a cocaine empire moving up to 300 kilos a month through the city of brotherly love. This is the story of how a single year of street warfare handed an entire city to one man. Before we get into it, we want to say if you’re new here and you enjoy gangland history like this, hit subscribe right now.
We drop stories like this regularly and you don’t want to miss the next one. By the mid-1980s, Philadelphia’s drug trade had a new problem. The Shower Posse had arrived. The Shower Posse started in Tivoli Gardens, Kingston, Jamaica in the early 1980s. Their name came from exactly what you think it came from. They showered enemies with bullets.
Led in Jamaica by Lester Lloyd Coke, known on the street as Jim Brown. And expanded to the United States by Vivian Blake. The Shower Posse had rapidly carved out drug networks across the East Coast. Miami, New York, New Jersey, and eventually Philadelphia. In 1985, a man named Donovan Clark set up a Shower Posse cell in Philadelphia.
Anchoring their operation in Southwest Philly and extending their reach into South Jersey counties. The Jamaicans moved cocaine and marijuana with the same method they had used everywhere else. Violence, speed, no room for negotiation. A Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms report later estimated [music] that by 1989, Jamaican posses across the country had been responsible for roughly 1,000 murders between 1985 and that year alone.
They weren’t coming to Philadelphia to play around. In Philadelphia’s black neighborhoods, the Shower Posses set up shop fast. Southwest Philadelphia became their stronghold. A base they worked out of aggressively. Outgunning and outmaneuvering local dealers who weren’t organized enough to push back. Philadelphia had an old black mafia that operated through the 1970s, but by 1984, it had collapsed.
What was left was a fractured street scene with no single group holding power. The Shower Posse walked right into that vacuum. But there were men watching from the sidelines, men who had grown up in that street culture and who saw exactly what was happening. One of those men was Aaron Jones. Aaron Jones grew up running errands for Robert Mimms, one of the original Black Mafia’s lieutenants in the 1970s.
He attended Temple University for a stretch before the streets pulled him back completely. By his mid-20s, he was obsessed with one film, The Godfather. He watched it again and again, studying it. Don Corleone’s control, his structure, his insistence that the family operated as one unified machine.
Jones wanted that for Philadelphia. In 1985, Jones sat down with two men he had grown up with on the streets of West Philly. Mark Casey, 23, who people said was the brains of any operation he touched, and Leonard Patterson, 27, who Jones saw as his Sonny Corleone. The three of them agreed on a simple premise. Philadelphia’s cocaine market was wide open and getting wider by the day as crack spread through the city’s neighborhoods.
They were going to build a structure to take it. They called themselves the Junior Black Mafia, the JBM. From the start, the JBM operated differently from the crews the Shower Posse was used to facing. They didn’t just sell drugs, they organized. Every member of the JBM had to control their own drug network, moving serious weight. They formed a board of commissioners made up of the founders, with Aaron Jones quickly consolidating control.
They wore gold rings with JBM etched in diamonds. They had a motto that spread through every Philadelphia neighborhood they touched. Get down or lay down. That meant exactly what it sounded like. You either bought your cocaine from the JBM or you dealt with the consequences. Dealers who refused were shot.
Corners that resisted were taken by force. And Aaron Jones watched over all of it. His Louis Vuitton-wrapped Mercedes sitting outside neighborhood after neighborhood as his lieutenants delivered the message. By 1987, the JBM had networks in North Philly, Northwest Philly, West Philly, and were pushing into Southwest Philly.
That put them directly on a collision course with the Shower Posse. Now, here’s where it gets complicated. The war that most people know about, the one that gets cited in Crime Commission reports, the one the newspapers ran breathless headlines about, was sparked by that television appearance in March 1988. A man with a blurred face, a JBM ring, and a mouth [music] that declared open warfare on the Jamaicans in front of the whole city.
But, Aaron Jones told his lawyer, James Cole, that he had no idea who that man was. He said, when Cole called him to ask if it was one of his boys who went on TV, Jones asked him, dead serious, if Cole believed in the Easter Bunny. >> [music] >> That was his answer. Cole later said he believed Jones. The ring was the giveaway.
Police had previously taken the ring off co-founder Leonard Patterson, known [music] as Basil, during a car stop in Mount Airy. Jones said he did not understand how the man on television had one. Federal investigators later connected the television appearance to [music] a DEA informant named Youngblood and his handlers.
The theory, supported by JBM members and their associates in later interviews, was that the feds deliberately engineered the moment to create friction between the JBM and the Shower Posse. Divide and conquer. Throw a match into [music] a room full of gasoline and let the two groups destroy each other while law enforcement watched. Real or staged, the war became real.
The Shower Posse operated out of Southwest Philadelphia with a man named Tony Black running their operation in the city. Tony Black later said of the JBM, plainly, calling them clowns. He said some of his former guys had beef with them after branching off on their own, and he believed one of those guys killed a JBM leader at some point.
His attitude was dismissive. The JBM were amateurs to him. The JBM didn’t see it that way. From the spring of 1988 through the summer of 1989, Philadelphia authorities placed the body count from the street violence at over two dozen in 14 months. Both groups lost men. Both groups buried their people. The Shower Posse came heavy, the way they always did.
Vivian Blake’s crews across the East Coast were known for riding in Volvos, armed with baby Uzi’s, spraying entire corners. They had done it in New York. They had done it in Miami. Southwest Philly was not going [music] to be different. But the JBM had something the Shower Posse underestimated. Organization. While the Shower Posse fought like the hardened garrison soldiers they were, the JBM fought like a corporation protecting its interests.
Every section of the city had a JBM leader. Every leader answered to Jones. When the Shower Posse hit a corner, the JBM didn’t scramble. They responded with structure. They also had weapons. Tec-9, Mac-10, Mac-11, 9-mm handguns. The arsenal that ran through Southwest Philly during those 14 months was staggering.
And they had enforcers who didn’t hesitate. Anthony Reed, known as Big Toe, was one of Jones’s primary muscle men. In July 1988, Reed shot and killed a local figure named Mark Lisby in front of his own home over a cocaine debt of $100. $100. That was the message the JBM sent to everyone watching. The debt did not matter.
The principal did. You owed JBM, you paid JBM. In that same stretch, the Shower Posse’s operations in Southwest Philadelphia were taking hits they hadn’t prepared for. The JBM’s ability to hold and defend territory, while simultaneously expanding, meant the Jamaicans were being squeezed on multiple fronts. They couldn’t just overwhelm Jones the way they had overwhelmed unorganized dealers in other cities.
Meanwhile, the federal indictments were coming down on the Shower Posse from multiple directions. In September 1988, a federal grand jury in Miami indicted 34 Shower Posse members, including Jim Brown and Vivian Blake themselves. A month later, 53 more Shower Posse members were arrested in New Jersey on drug distribution charges.
The organization that had looked untouchable 2 years earlier was suddenly fighting legal battles on the East Coast from top to bottom. While the Shower Posse’s leadership was burning courtroom hours and legal fees, the JBM kept pushing. By 1989, the JBM gained complete control of the Southwest Philadelphia drug trade.
The Nelson brothers, who had shared control of drug activity in that section with the JBM up until that point dissolved their organization after Richard Nelson went to prison and his brother Wayne was killed. The last competing structure in Southwest Philly was gone. The Shower Posse’s foothold in that territory had been broken.
If you’ve been watching this long, you already know how good this channel is at digging into stories like this one. Subscribe right now so you get the next video the moment it drops. This one’s far from over. By the time the dust settled in Southwest Philly, the JBM’s cocaine operation had grown into something Philadelphia had never seen from a black organized crime group.
The Pennsylvania Crime Commission later reported that the JBM controlled networks moving between 100 and 300 kilos of cocaine per month. They had 50 core members and up to 300 associates on their payroll. They laundered money through 33 legitimate businesses including car washes, barber shops, auto dealerships, delis, and video stores.
Aaron Jones drove a Mercedes with Louis Vuitton wrapped interiors. He wore Gucci. He bought his mother’s neighborhood. He was called the black John Gotti by people who watched him operate. And that comparison wasn’t an insult. It was accurate. Jones had done what he set out to do. He built his Philadelphia Godfather.
The JBM also worked with the Italian mob. A 1989 Pennsylvania Crime Commission report alleged that JBM members were in the cocaine business alongside members of the Bruno Scarfo family, including a young Joseph Merlino, who would eventually become the boss of that organization. The JBM’s connection to the Italian underworld came through Lieutenant Benny Goff, who ran several [music] legitimate businesses as fronts.
That partnership gave JBM a steady product supply and a layer of protection that most street organizations could never access. What the Shower Posse had been to Philadelphia before 1988, the JBM was after it. But nothing on these streets lasts forever. And the JBM’s undoing came not from outside competition, but from inside their own walls.
Aaron Jones had handpicked a lieutenant named Leroy Davis, known as Bucky, to run Southwest Philly while Jones dealt with mounting legal cases against him. Bucky was 22 years old, a former amateur boxer, vicious and loyal. But loyalty in the JBM was always conditional on fear. And when Jones found out from prison that Bucky was planning a palace coup, taking over the organization for himself, Jones acted.
At 2:30 in the morning on May the 14th, 1990, Bucky Davis walked up to a row house on Craton Street in West Philadelphia after a night out. He had a gun in his ostrich skin boots. He didn’t get to reach it. Gunmen cut him down on the porch. He was shot dead on Jones’s orders, the man he had served loyally for years. That murder, meant to protect the JBM from internal collapse, started the actual collapse.
Without Bucky stabilizing Southwest Philly from the ground level, the organization began to fracture. Murders within the group followed. Informants who had been watching the JBM for years >> [music] >> started to flip. The DEA had been building their case through wiretaps and surveillance across multiple Philadelphia neighborhoods.
And on October the 2nd, 1991, the federal indictment landed. Aaron Jones and 24 of his men were arrested in a single sweep. In April 1992, Jones was convicted on drug and racketeering charges. He was also convicted of the murder of Bruce Kennedy, a JBM lieutenant who had been shot dead behind the counter of his own store in West Philadelphia after Jones suspected Kennedy of romancing his girlfriend while he was locked up.
Jones was sentenced to death. He remains on Pennsylvania’s death row to this day, still fighting his case, still insisting he was framed by unethical agents [music] and informants who lied. The Shower Posse never rebuilt in Southwest Philadelphia. After the federal waves of 1988 and 1989, and with their leadership locked down in extradition battles and federal cases, the Philadelphia operation faded.
Tony Black’s dismissal of the JBM as clowns aged [music] badly. The organization he called Clowns took everything his people had built in that city [music] and kept it. What started with a blurred face on a television screen in March [music] 1998, a ring that may or may not have belonged to the man wearing it, and a federal agent pulling strings from behind the curtain, ended with one of the most complete territorial takeovers in Philadelphia’s street history.
The JBM got the city, not just because they were violent, though they were. They got it because they were organized. They were patient. And they understood that a drug empire was just that, an empire. Something you build block by block, corner by corner, murder by murder, until there was nothing left to take.
Aaron Jones built his Godfather story. He’s just been living the last chapter of it behind bars for over 30 years. If you made it to the end of this one, you’re exactly [music] the kind of person this channel is made for. Hit subscribe right now. We cover the real stories from Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles.
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