It’s 1987 in South Jamaica, Queens. A 28-year-old man named Kenneth McGriff is about to go to federal prison for drug charges. But before he leaves, he has some final orders to give. He tells his nephew Gerald, a young enforcer everyone calls Prince, to take over the family business. Not a restaurant or a corner store, an entire housing project.
1,057 residents, five eight-story buildings, and the most profitable crack cocaine operation in the borough of New York. What happened next would become the stuff of street legend, inspire an entire generation of rappers from Nas to Jay-Z to 50 Cent, and leave a trail of bodies across Queens that would take the FBI years to fully uncover.
This is the story of the Supreme Team and the war they waged to take over the largest housing project in Queens. If you’re new here, welcome to the channel. We cover the most notorious gang stories from American history. And trust me, you don’t want to miss what’s coming. Hit that subscribe button and let’s get into it.
To understand how the Supreme Team took over the Baisley Park, you first need to understand where they came from. Kenneth McGriff was born in 1959 and grew up right across the street from the Baisley Park Houses in the South side of Jamaica, Queens. Both his parents worked for the New York City Transit Authority.
They wanted their son to go to college and get a respectable job. That dream died somewhere around the time Kenneth was 10 years old. That’s when he discovered a quasi-religious movement called the Five-Percent Nation, also known as the Nation of Gods and Earths. The Five-Percenters believed that black men were the original gods of the universe and used a coded system of numerology called Supreme Mathematics to communicate hidden knowledge.
Kenneth dove deep into the movement. By the time he was a teenager, he was greeting his friends with the words peace, God, and studying the Supreme Alphabet like scripture. His crew called themselves the Peace Gods, but there was nothing peaceful about what they were planning. Southeast Queens in the early 1980s was a powder keg waiting to explode.
The neighborhood was carved up different drug lords and their territories. Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols controlled one section. Tommy “Tony Montana” Mickens ran another. The Corley brothers had their piece. And a hustler named Ronnie Bumps had his own operations running out of the Hollis section of Queens.
Kenneth McGriff started at the bottom working as a stash house guard for Ronnie Bumps. He watched and learned. He memorized the supply chains, the distribution networks, the enforcement tactics, and most importantly, he noticed something that none of the other drug operations were doing. In 1981, McGriff made his move.
He gathered a group of young Five-Percenters, mostly teenagers, and formed what would become the Supreme Team. Their headquarters would be the Baisley Park Houses, the massive public housing complex his parents’ home looked out onto. But here’s what made the Supreme Team different from every other crew in Queens.
McGriff recruited Latino members alongside black members. In a drug game dominated by racial divisions, this was revolutionary. The Latino members had direct connections to Colombian cocaine distributors, which meant the Supreme Team could bypass middlemen like Fat Cat Nichols and plug directly into the source.
The timing couldn’t have been better. In the early 1980s, crack cocaine was just starting to flood American cities. And the Supreme Team was positioned to ride that wave all the way to the top. Speaking of waves, if you’re enjoying this deep dive into American gang history, do me a favor and smash that like button.
It really helps the channel grow and lets us keep bringing you stories like this one. Now, let’s talk about the man who would become the Supreme Team’s most feared enforcer. Gerald Miller was Kenneth McGriff’s nephew, but he was only 2 years younger than his uncle. They grew up more like brothers than uncle and nephew.
Where Primo went, Prince followed. First into the Five-Percenters, then into the streets. But while McGriff was the businessman, the one who built alliances and negotiated with suppliers, Prince was something else entirely. He was the enforcer, the one who made sure nobody stepped out of line. And by 1987, that distinction would matter more than ever.
The Supreme Team’s operation in Baisley Park was unlike anything the neighborhood had ever seen. They didn’t just sell crack, they built a corporation. They established multiple drug spots throughout the projects. Each one identified by different colored vials. Yellow tops, orange tops, day red tops, blue tops.
Each color represented a different lieutenant’s territory. Workers selling crack at the handball courts would wait behind painted lines on the ground. When a crackhead entered the park, they’d call out which color they wanted, and the worker for that color would step forward. No stealing each other’s customers. No fighting over territory.
It was crack cocaine with customer service. The Supreme Team communicated using the Five-Percenters Supreme Mathematics as a coded language. Numbers and phrases meant nothing to outsiders, but carried precise instructions to crew members. They deployed lookouts with two-way radios across the projects.
And most impressively, they stationed armed sentinels on the rooftops of the Baisley Park Houses watching for police and rival crews from eight stories above the streets. By 1986, the Supreme Team was generating around $30,000 a day in crack sales. But McGriff wanted more. And that’s when the war really began.
In 1987, the Supreme Team was allied with Fat Cat Nichols, who supplied them with powder cocaine that they cooked into crack. It was a profitable arrangement, but it was also a vulnerable one. McGriff didn’t like depending on anyone, and the alliance came with obligations that went beyond business. That year, Fat Cat was sitting in jail when he asked for a favor.
Two men named Henry and Isaac Bolden had allegedly robbed his organization, and Fat Cat wanted them dead. He reached out to Prince Miller for help tracking them down. Prince didn’t just agree to help. He corrupted two New York State Parole Division employees to get the job done. A parole officer named Ena McGriff, no relation to Kenneth, had become romantically involved with the Supreme Team’s security chief, Ernesto Pinella.
Prince paid her and another parole secretary $3,000 for the Bolden brothers’ home addresses. Handwritten notes with those addresses were later recovered during police raids. The notes included Henry Bolden’s address in the Bronx, where he was shot, and Isaac Bolden’s mother’s address near where he was shot and killed.
This wasn’t just drug dealing anymore. This was murder for hire, facilitated by corrupt government employees. And it was just the beginning. When Kenneth McGriff was arrested on federal drug charges in 1987, Prince Miller took full control of the Supreme Team. And the violence escalated dramatically. According to federal prosecutors, during 1987 alone, Miller and the incarcerated McGriff ordered at least eight homicides to maintain their grip on the Baisley Park drug trade.
The killings weren’t random. They were strategic. Anyone suspected of cooperating with police disappeared. Rivals who encroached on Supreme Team territory ended up in the ground. And crew members who showed disloyalty learned quickly that Prince didn’t give second chances. At their 1987 peak, the Supreme Team’s daily receipts exceeded $200,000.
That’s $200,000 in cash every single day from street-level crack sales. They were selling 25,000 crack vials a week. The operation had over 100 members and employees organized into layers designed to insulate the leaders from the hand-to-hand transactions. Prince Miller walked the projects like a general surveying conquered territory.
His security force grew larger. His bodyguards stayed armed and his reputation spread far beyond the borders of Queens. If you’re finding this story as wild as I am, consider subscribing so you don’t miss our next deep dive into American organized crime history. We’ve got some crazy stories coming up.
The same connections that helped the Supreme Team kill their enemies would eventually contribute to their downfall. In late 1987, Ena McGriff gave Pinella copies of parole division documents showing that Supreme Team member James Page was cooperating with authorities. Kenneth McGriff, who had just been arrested on federal charges, ordered Page killed from prison.
Pinella arranged the murder. But the walls were closing in. In November 1987, while Prince Miller was incarcerated on state charges, a joint task force of NYPD officers and FBI agents executed search warrants across multiple Supreme Team locations. Stash houses, drug outlets, and residences all got hit at once. Someone inside the organization had tipped them off.
The Supreme Team managed to move 11 kg of cocaine and $200,000 in cash before the raids, but authorities still seized weapons, narcotics trade equipment, surveillance gear, photographs, documents, and instructional manuals on criminal conduct along with 1 kg of cocaine and thousands of dollars.
Kenneth McGriff pleaded guilty to a continuing criminal enterprise charge, what the federal authorities call the kingpin statute. He was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison. The Supreme Team’s golden era was over. But Prince Miller wasn’t done. When he got out of prison in spring 1989, he immediately began rebuilding the Supreme Team’s operation.
The crew regained control of their most lucrative retail spots in Baisley Park. And the violence returned with a vengeance. In the summer of 1989, the Supreme Team made a decision that would haunt them forever. Instead of buying cocaine from their Colombian suppliers, they decided to rob them.
Two Colombian drug traffickers named Fernando Suarez and Pablo Peralaza arrived at a Baisley Park apartment expecting to make a sale. Instead, crew members held them at gunpoint, bound them with tape, and tied plastic bags over their heads. As the two men suffocated, a Supreme Team member beat their heads with a baseball bat.
Their bodies were loaded into a car and dumped in separate locations across Queens. When Suarez’s wife called looking for her husband, crew member Wilfredo Arroyo told her that Suarez was supposed to meet him but never showed up. The bodies were never identified, but the brutality of the murders sealed the Supreme Team’s fate.
Federal prosecutors built a massive RICO case against the organization. In 1993, Prince Miller and several co-defendants were convicted on racketeering charges tied to their crack cocaine operations and the violence used to protect them. Prince received six consecutive life sentences. He remains in federal prison to this day, more than three decades later.
Kenneth McGriff got out in 1994 and tried to go legitimate in the hip-hop industry. He connected with producer Irv Gotti and the Murder Inc. record label, hung out with Jay-Z, and produced a straight-to-video film. But the streets kept calling him back. In 2007, McGriff was convicted of murder conspiracy for ordering the 2001 killing of rapper Eric “E-Moneybags” Smith.
He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Today, both founders of the Supreme Team will die behind bars. But their legacy didn’t die with their freedom. The Supreme Team’s influence on hip-hop culture is impossible to overstate. When the crack era was exploding in the 1980s, a new musical genre called hip-hop was rising right alongside it.
And in Queens, the Supreme Team were the kingpins that aspiring rappers looked up to. Kenneth McGriff used to pay Russell Simmons before he founded Def Jam Records to book acts like Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys for parties he threw. He paid them $1,000 a night to perform. The style, the swagger, the gold chains, and designer clothes that the Supreme Team wore became the template for what hip-hop artists would emulate for decades.
Nas immortalized them on his classic album Illmatic, rapping about how fiends scream about the Supreme Team, a Jamaica, Queens thing. 50 Cent detailed the crew’s inner workings on his controversial track “Ghetto Quran”, reportedly earning him nine bullets when McGriff allegedly ordered him shot for revealing too much.
Jay-Z, Biggie, Ja Rule, and countless other artists built careers on street narratives that the Supreme Team helped write in blood. The movie New Jack City, with its portrayal of a drug crew taking over a housing project, was allegedly inspired by the Supreme Team’s takeover of Baisley Park.
Their story became the blueprint for how American cinema depicted the crack epidemic. The Baisley Park houses still stand today in South Jamaica, Queens. The buildings look the same as they did in 1987. But the empire that once controlled every corner, every stairwell, every rooftop is gone. What remains is a legacy written in prison sentences and rap lyrics, a cautionary tale about what happens when young men choose violence as their path to power.
The Supreme Team has been romanticized and glorified in hip-hop for decades. But the truth is simpler and darker. Most of their members are dead or serving life sentences. The money they made is long gone. And the communities they terrorized are still healing from wounds inflicted 40 years ago. That’s the real story of the 1987 war that let the Supreme Team take over the largest housing project in Queens.
Not a tale of triumph, but a tragedy that’s still echoing through American culture today. If this story hit different for you, make sure you subscribe and turn on notifications. We’ve got more deep dives into American gang history coming soon that you definitely won’t want to miss. I’ll see you in the next one.
