What’s up everybody? Welcome back to Hood Archives. Y’all been in the comments heavy lately and one name kept coming up over and over. Detroit. More specifically, the crew that came right after Young Boys Incorporated and took everything they built to a whole different level. Today we getting into the Pony Down Crew.
One of the most calculated, most ruthless drug organizations the Motor City ever produced and still one of the most overlooked stories from that whole era. Now, before we get into it, drop a comment and let me know who you want me to cover next. I read every single one. That’s exactly how we ended up here today.
Appreciate y’all watching for real. Now, nobody talks about what Detroit looked like before the gangs, before the bodies, before the federal indictments. Nobody talks about the version of Detroit that existed right before everything fell apart. 1979, Chrysler is hemorrhaging money. Congress arguing about whether to save them while the factories are already going dark.
close to 40,000 jobs gone. Detroit had nothing to fall back on. One industry, one product. When that one thing started dying, the whole city started dying with it. The people who felt it first were always the same people. 20 years before Chrysler even started struggling, nearly 20% of black auto workers in Detroit were already out of work.
6% of white workers. Same city, same union cards. When the plants relocated to the suburbs, black families were locked out of following them. Investment dried up. The city kept collecting taxes and stopped delivering anything back. What fills a vacuum like that? Not community centers, not job programs, not city council meetings.
Young Boys Incorporated figured it out first. By 1981, YBI controlled roughly 90% of Detroit drug trade. The DEA confirmed they were pulling close to 8 million a week, more per month than the nearly bankrupt Chrysler Corporation. The legitimate economy collapsed. The street economy did not.
Leroy Butram saw the opening and he moved. Leroy Butram, they called him Gun, was almost 30 years old when he founded Pony Down, 30. That distinction matters more than it might seem. He was not a teenager chasing status. He was a man making a calculation, and he had been making calculations since he was 14 years old. 1964, Leroy But is 14, catches his first arrest for burglary.
That’s where the record starts, but it does not stay there long. Before he is 16, he has charges for autotheft and assault with intent to commit murder. He is 15 years old, facing attempted murder charges. Whatever Leroy Butram grew up around, whatever the northwest side of Detroit looked like to a young black boy in 1965, with no factory waiting for him, it made him hard and fast. 1970.
He catches a conviction. Assault with intent to commit armed robbery. 5 years sentence. He serves three, gets parrolled in 1973. And this is the part that hits me every time. He tried to go straight. After that parole, after the juvenile charges, after the prison time, Leroy Butram came back to Detroit and started a home improvement business, rehabbing houses, helping fix up the same neighborhoods the city was letting fall apart.
The man who would eventually build one of the most powerful drug organizations Detroit had ever seen was for a few years literally rebuilding homes with his hands. I don’t know exactly what made him stop. I don’t know what moment the calculation changed. But somewhere in the late 1970s, Leroy But looked around at what was left of his neighborhood.
The closed factories, the abandoned buildings, young men with nothing to do and nowhere to go. And he decided to build something different. By mid 1980, Pony Down was operational. And look who he brought into that room. This was not a loose collection of corner boys. This was a family operation built on blood and loyalty from day one.
His best friend, Robert Lantine, known on the street as Bobby. His brother Walter Buttrum. His brother Larry LB Butram. His brother Tony the Snake Buttrum. and scattered among them several one-time young boy soldiers who had already seen how the best operation in Detroit worked and were ready to build something new.
Everything Pony Down became the scale, the branding, the territorial strategy started in that room with those people, a grown man who had done the time, tried the legitimate route and chose differently in 1980. And yet, somewhere between the hammer and the heroine, he looked at what Young Boys Incorporated had proven was possible, and he made a choice. You can call it a bad choice.
It was. People died because of it. That’s not debatable, but you cannot call it a surprising one. Here’s the thing about Young Boys Incorporated that you need to understand before we go any further. YBI didn’t just sell drugs. They built a system, a franchise. They pioneered a specific model used minors as their frontline distribution workers because juvenile offenders face fundamentally different legal consequences than adults.
Young teenagers working the Dexter Davidson neighborhood while the actual leadership stayed insulated from prosecution entirely. It was airtight. It was brutal in its logic. And from Leroy Butram’s perspective, it was a blueprint worth copying. He copied it almost exactly. And then he added one thing YBI never had, an ultimatum.
When Pony Down came for YBI’s Corners, they didn’t just show up and take them. They sent a message first. The message was simple. Pony down or pack up and leave town. join us and turn your back on YBI or get out of the business entirely. That was the offer and the name of the organization was the offer.
Every time someone said the words pony down, they were speaking the threat out loud and then they made sure you could not miss who owned what. YBI’s handwritten flyers advertise a new drug brands in housing project hallways got ripped down and in their place three words spray painted on every wall, every door, every surface that YBI used to control. I pony down. That wasn’t ego.
That was a property deed. By 1982, according to Detroit Police Chief Hart’s own records, Pony Down was one of only two dominant gangs in the entire city, not a junior organization, a peer and still growing. Then December 8th, 1982 happened. The federal government dropped a 41 person racketeering indictment on the entire hierarchy of Young Boys Incorporated.
Butch Jones, Raymond Peoples, Seal Murray, Kurt Mgherk, all of them. The DEA confirmed the scale at the press conference. The organization that had controlled 90% of Detroit’s drug trade lost its entire leadership structure in a single day. Leroy Butram mobilized immediately. He unleashed his people on corners that had been considered untouchable.
He recruited YBI’s own enforcers, their runners, their street salesmen, made them offers they could not refuse without consequences. Many didn’t have a real choice. But some of YBI’s people stayed loyal, and that loyalty cost somebody their life. June 17th, 1983, a dealer named William Hunter, they called him Chili Willie, was killed on Detroit’s west side.
and YBI affiliate. One casualty in a string of shootings that had been building for months as the two organizations went to war over the same blocks. He wasn’t the first, he wasn’t the last, but his name deserves to be said out loud because behind every one of these incidents is a person who made choices in a world that gave them very few.
By the end of 1983, Pony Down had seized two of YBI’s most important former strongholds, the Herman Gardens housing project and the Brewster Douglas projects, both now under the pony down flag. The takeover was complete enough that the October 2nd, 1983 edition of the Detroit Free Press ran a piece with a headline that said it plainly, “Heroin ring grows to fill young boys shoes.
” That’s when the mainstream world noticed 3 years after Pony Down started operating. And then there was the moment that told you exactly what kind of organization this had become. When a rival gang kidnapped Tony the Snake Buttrum’s daughter, Leroyy’s brother, one of the founding inner circle, Tony did not call the police.
He did not negotiate. According to accounts preserved in the University of Michigan’s historical archive of Detroit’s drug era, Tony Butram drove to where the kidnappers were, handled the situation himself and took his daughter back without a police report ever being filed. No police, no report, no waiting.
In their world, they were the government. They handled their own. October 1983. While the Detroit Free Press was just figuring out Pony Down existed, the organization had already outgrown what anybody meant by the word gang. Three drug distribution zones across Northwest Detroit. Dealers operating inside those zones paid into the structure above them.
The hierarchy ran from the top, the Butram family, through lieutenants, through workers down to the juvenile runners at street level. Approximately 300 soldiers and associates at operational peak. That is not a corner operation. That is a workforce. And the product had names. GQ, Shotgun special, Papa Smurf, Nod City, Devil’s Dust. Now hold on.
I need you to stay with me on this part. Papa Smurf. Somebody in that organization in 1983 Detroit took street heroin and gave it a name like that and it worked. It sold. Why? Because this wasn’t random. This was branding. If you were buying on the Northwest side, you knew the Pony Down names. And you knew what those names meant.
Quality, consistency. Authorities and later chronicers estimated Pony Down was generating around $100 million a year at their peak. 100 million all on heroin before crack ever touched Detroit. An MSU sociologist named Carl Taylor began studying pony down and YBI back in 1980. He spent years inside these communities, embedded in a way that most academics never get close to.
His 1990 book, Dangerous Society, published by Michigan State University Press, documented what he found. And what he found was not disorganized criminals. It was corporate structures, hierarchy, territorial logic, product discipline. He wrote that these gangs had developed organizations with what he called quote a concern for the bottom line.
The bottom line in northwest Detroit while the auto industry was collapsing around them. Pony down was not simply YBI with a different name. YBI was centralized, disciplined, vertically controlled. Pony down was familyrun, faster, and more volatile. That combination made them dangerous. It also made them combustible.
And then very quickly the walls closed in. Everyone knows Pony Down fell. Nobody asked when the win is everything. 1985 federal agents close in on the organization. Leroy Butram Willis Jr. The man who, in the words of assistant US attorney Wally Pistchowski, organized and managed Pony Down, is arrested. His brother Larry, the chief lieutenant who controlled distribution, is arrested.
By August 1986, 32 Pony Down members have been swept off the street since the previous November. On August 9th, 1986, Larry Butram, 30 years old, Chief Lieutenant, appeared before US District Judge Horus Gilmore in the Eastern District of Michigan, and pleaded guilty to distributing heroin and cocaine, 6 and a half years in federal prison.
Gilmore recommended a facility with drug counseling. Pischowski told reporters he definitely helped call the shots. Leroy Butram Willis Jr. had already been sentenced in May 1986. 12 years in federal prison, $100,000 fine. 12 years. The alleged second in command, Robert Latine, was still a fugitive at time of publication.
The government said they had eliminated the major structure of the ring, but they could not find the number two man. Think about what that means. 32 members arrested. The founder in prison for 12 years. The chief lieutenant taking six and a half and the person right below the top of the org chart still out there.
That is a loose end the size of a highway. Whether Latine was ever brought in, whether he cooperated, whether he rebuilt something or simply vanished, that answer is still buried in court records that have not yet been fully surfaced. Now, here is the timing piece that reframes everything. Crack cocaine first surfaced in Detroit sometime in 1984 or early 1985.
The same window the federal case against Pony Down was being constructed. By the summer of 1985, crack was spreading rapidly across the city. On January 5th, 1986, the Detroit News ran a front page headline that read, “Addictive new crack cocaine sweeps Detroit.” Leroy Butram was already in federal custody when that headline ran.
He built his entire empire on heroin. He never pivoted to crack. He never got the chance. The feds arrested him at the exact moment the Detroit drug market was undergoing the biggest transformation in his history. He missed the whole era. What came next made everything he built looked like a rough draft. By 1987, 2 years after Butram’s arrest, Detroit recorded its highest homicide rate per capita ever, around 64 murders per 100,000 residents.
The crack wars had consumed the city and by 1989 a US attorney’s office report found Detroit ranked first in crack cocaine abuse in the entire country. First for the nation’s sixth largest city by population. Who was doing that damage? The Chambers brothers, who rose using the same corporate blueprint YBI had built and Butram had refined, were at their peak, generating an estimated $3 million per day.
Pony Down at its height was doing roughly $274,000 a day. If you spread the annual estimate out evenly, the Chambers brothers were doing more than 10 times that. Same blueprint, different product, different scale, different era. Leroy Butram built the operating system. He just never got to run it on the new hardware. One more detail. Leroy Butram Jr.
, the son, later faced drug trafficking charges in Ohio, state charges, because the feds had already had his father decades earlier. The pattern does not ask permission to continue. 1990 Carl Taylor’s book lands dangerous society Michigan State University Press Taylor spent years inside this world and he writes something that reads now 35 years later like a precise prediction he wrote that even as Young Boys Incorporated and Pony Down were unraveling they were being in his words quickly and silently replaced by far
more sophisticated and highly secretive business operations. He wrote that while Butram was still inside a cell. He was right. That model did not die when Leroy Butram went to prison. It spread. It got applied to crack. Exponentially more addictive, exponentially more profitable. The organizations that inherited the blueprint made Pony Down look like a proof of concept, which in a sense is exactly what it was.
The phrase Pony Down entered Detroit Street language and never left. Urban Dictionary defines it right now, present tense, as named after the early 1980s Northwest Detroit gang, meaning to take decisive charge of a situation. The organization ran five maybe six years. The phrase is still in circulation 40 years on. The organization is gone.
The phrase survived. Leroy Gun Butram served his sentence. Got out, went quiet. No book, no interviews. He just existed in the same city where he had once moved 300 people through a hundred million dollar operation. He watched the crack era. He watched the Chambers brothers rise and fall. He watched the BMF era.
All of it from outside a cell in Detroit. He died in September 2019, 70 years old. Natural causes. The prosecutor called him someone who organized and managed one of the most significant narcotics operations in Detroit history. He died at 70 quietly in his city. Make of that what you will. They built the blueprint.
