The South Bronx, 1987. Crack cocaine has been on these streets for less than 3 years, and the neighborhood already looks like a war zone. Burnt-out apartment buildings line the streets of Soundview and Crotona Park. Addicts move through rubble where residential blocks used to stand.
The police barely bother anymore, and somewhere above all of that, someone is getting very rich. Local crews have carved the Bronx into territory, blocks, buildings, corners, each one claimed by men who built their operations from nothing. They have product, they have soldiers, and they have the kind of street-level credibility that takes years to establish.
But in 1987, men began showing up who didn’t know any of those rules. Men who had grown up in a place where political murders were routine, where gunning down a rival wasn’t a last resort, it was simply Tuesday. These men came from the slums of Kingston, Jamaica, and they were not interested in negotiating.
They were interested in taking. What followed was one of the most brutal and overlooked gang wars in New York City history. This is the story of how the Jamaican posses won the Bronx. To understand what the posses walked into, you have to understand what the Bronx looked like before they arrived. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter had toured the South Bronx on foot and declared it the worst urban slum in America.
He stood in rubble that had once been residential blocks. Buildings burned constantly, landlords torching their own properties for insurance money, and nobody left with anything to lose caring enough to stop it. Between 1970 and 1980, the South Bronx lost 300,000 residents. The people who stayed were largely poor, black, and Latino, and they were left to build whatever economy they could from scratch.
Then crack arrived. Crack cocaine hit New York streets around 1984. It was cheap, instantly addictive in a way that powder cocaine simply wasn’t. And the margins were extraordinary. A single vial could sell for $5 on a South Bronx corner. Turn 1 kg of cocaine into vials, and you cleared profits that no legitimate job in a neighborhood that had just lost its entire industrial base could match.
The Bronx was flooded with opportunity, and local crews were ready to take it. Some of those crews had roots in the old gang structures that had briefly unified under the 1971 Hoe Avenue peace meeting before crack tore those truces apart in the early 1980s. By 1986, well-organized operations were running out of abandoned apartments in Soundview, Morrisania, and the Bronx River Houses, moving thousands of vials a week.
Real money. Territory worth dying for. The problem was that none of those crews had any idea what was heading their way. If you are new here, and you want to see the full story of how the Bronx crack wars played out, including what happened after the posses consolidated control, hit subscribe right now. We cover US gang and organized crime history every week, and there’s a lot more in this pipeline.
Now, back to 1987. To understand the posses, you have to go back to Kingston, Jamaica, in the 1970s. Jamaica’s two main political parties had been locked in a bitter cold war for decades. The Jamaica Labour Party and the People’s National Party both used the same strategy in Kingston’s slums. Pay gang leaders to get your neighborhoods voting, and keep the opposition’s neighborhoods from voting at all.
When necessary, have your enforcers handle anyone who stepped out of line. The gangs that grew out of that arrangement became some of the most battle-hardened criminal organizations in the Western Hemisphere. The most powerful of them operated out of a West Kingston neighborhood called Tivoli Gardens, a JLP stronghold that would eventually produce a gang known as the Shower Posse.
The man who built the Shower Posse was Lester Lloyd Coke, known on the street as Jim Brown. Coke was methodical and brutal, consolidating power in Tivoli Gardens by eliminating rivals and making sure everyone in the neighborhood understood what betrayal cost. The 1980 Jamaican general election was the bloodiest in the country’s history.
Over 800 people were killed in political violence in the months surrounding it. The Shower Posse was deep in the middle of it. When their candidate, Edward Seaga of the JLP, won that election, the gang emerged with more power than ever before, and with a network that already stretched across borders.
Because while Coke was running Tivoli Gardens, someone else had already been building the American side of the operation. That someone was Vivian Blake. Born in West Kingston, but educated on a private school scholarship above his circumstances, Blake moved to New York City in 1973 and started distributing marijuana.
But Blake was thinking much further ahead than weed. When crack emerged in the early 1980s, Blake recognized it immediately for what it was, a product that would sell itself at massive scale in exactly the kinds of neighborhoods he already had access to. Blake built the Shower Posse’s American operation piece by piece.
He established cells in Miami, New York, Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles. He recruited soldiers fresh off the gang wars of Kingston, men who had been killing since their teenage years, and who had no particular fear of American street crews. In the Bronx specifically, Blake’s network zeroed in on Soundview, Crotona Park, and the Bronx River Houses.
These were areas with large West Indian immigrant communities where the posses could blend in, find safe houses, and build customer bases. According to a New York Daily News column published after Blake’s death, he was credited with flooding those specific Bronx neighborhoods with tons of cocaine and crack cocaine, personally overseeing the operation.
By 1986, the Shower Posse had product, shooters, and a strategic map of the Bronx that the local crews had never drawn up, because they had never had to think about someone coming for all of it at once. The war didn’t start with a massacre. It started at corners. The posses’ initial approach was calculated.
When they identified a profitable crack spot run by a local crew, the first move wasn’t always violence. Sometimes, it was an offer. “Work with us. Supply through us. Move our product at the prices we set.” The Jamaicans had direct wholesale cocaine access through their Colombian connections in Miami, which meant they could undercut any local supplier on price while delivering a cleaner, more consistent product.
Some local dealers took the deal. Those who refused found out very quickly where the Shower Posse’s name came from. The gang got that name because they showered their enemies with bullets, and they meant it literally. Posse members were notorious for their willingness to fire into crowds, shoot up occupied buildings, and bring automatic weapons into spaces where most Bronx street criminals still drew lines.
The ATF would later document that Jamaican posse members had a strong preference for automatic firearms, the TEC-9 mm pistol being among the most commonly recovered weapons. In 1987, an automatic pistol purchased in Florida for $350 could be resold in Jamaica for $1,200. The posses knew how to move guns in both directions.
In the Bronx neighborhoods where the crack war played out through 1987, the violence was relentless. Local crews who pushed back found themselves outgunned by men who had grown up in environments where machine gun battles between rival gangs were a feature of daily life. This wasn’t about toughness or heart.
It was about experience. The posses had been through a real political war with real casualties before most of the Bronx crack dealers they were displacing had ever held an automatic weapon. Soundview, Crotona Park, the Bronx River Houses, block by block, the local operators were removed from the equation.
The ATF would later report the Jamaican posses were responsible for approximately 1,000 murders across the United States between 1985 and 1989. The Shower Posse alone would eventually be linked to as many as 1,400 killings. Not all of those were in the Bronx, but the Bronx was where some of the most concentrated territorial violence happened.
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Subscribe so you don’t miss any of it. All right. On October the 19th through 21st, 1987, the federal government made its move. Operation Rum Punch was a nationwide crackdown coordinated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms alongside the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. Over 150 gang members were arrested simultaneously across New York City, Miami, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Houston, Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit,
Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C. It was one of the largest synchronized law enforcement actions against a single criminal network the country had seen at that point. In New York, Shower Posse and Spangler Posse soldiers were swept up in the raids. The ATF had spent months building cases. Wiretaps, informants, the arrests were real and significant, but they did not change who controlled the Bronx drug corners.
The local crews who had been displaced by the summer of 1987 were already gone. The turf was already lost. Arresting Posse members in October didn’t return a single corner to anyone who used to run it. By the end of 1987, the Bronx crack trade looked fundamentally different from what it had been 2 years earlier.
The posses advantage was never just about violence, though the violence was constant and decisive. It was about supply. Vivian Blake had built a chain that ran from Colombian cocaine producers through Miami to New York with his network sitting at the top of it. Local Bronx crews had been dependent on middlemen who were dependent on other middlemen.
The posses were the middlemen, or they cut them out entirely. Even dealers who hadn’t been directly displaced by gunfire found themselves dealing through Posse connected supply because that was simply where the product came from. By 1988 and 1989, Jamaican posses controlled an estimated 35 to 40% of the crack cocaine market across the United States, according to ATF figures.
In the specific Bronx neighborhoods they had targeted, their grip was considerably tighter than that. Then came the federal response. In September 1988, a grand jury in Miami indicted 34 members of the Shower Posse, including both Lester Coke and Vivian Blake. The following month, 53 more members were arrested in New Jersey.
Blake’s two half-brothers, Tony Bruce and Errol Hassing, who ran the Shower Posse’s New York operation, were among those taken. It looked like the end. Blake walked onto a cruise ship in Miami bound for Ocho Rios, Jamaica, and disappeared. He would eventually receive a 28-year sentence on drug charges, but served only 9 years.
He died of a heart attack in 2010, largely a free man. Lester Coke’s ending was different. In 1992, while sitting in a Jamaican prison awaiting extradition to the United States, he died in a prison fire. The official ruling called it an accident. Almost no one who knew anything about Jamaican politics believed that.
His son, Christopher Dudus Coke, stepped in to lead the Jamaican side of the operation and would eventually become one of the most wanted men in the Western Hemisphere before his own extradition to the United States in 2010. The neighborhoods the posses had fought for in the Bronx in 1987 never came all the way back.
The crack epidemic ground on through the early 1990s. The violence that came with it ground down the communities caught in the middle. And the men who had come from Kingston to fight for those corners were, for the most part, either dead, imprisoned, or long gone from the neighborhood. The story of the 1987 Bronx crack war is one of those chapters in American gang history that barely gets told.
Most of what people know about the crack epidemic focuses on Los Angeles, on the Bloods and the Crips, or on the South Side of Chicago. But the Bronx, where the epidemic hit some of its hardest early blows, had its own war. And the men who won that war came from 6,000 miles away from a political conflict most Americans had never heard of, and brought a level of organization and a willingness to use extreme violence that the local crews had no real answer for.
The Shower Posse did not take the Bronx through luck. They took it because they were better armed, better supplied, and less constrained by the community ties that slowed their competition down. The Bronx that came out the other side was poorer, sicker, and more broken than the one that went in. If this is the kind of content you want to see more of, subscribe right now and click the video on screen for more US gang history.
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