Can a Former Gangster Rapper Stop Belize's Deadly Bloods vs Crips Wars?
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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. Late December 1999, New York City at the appropriately named Club New York in Midtown. Jamal Shine Barrow is 21 years old and he's living the dream.

He's at the pinnacle of his or really anyone's existence. It's a few months away from his debut album's release, and the streets are buzzing. He's been anointed Brooklyn's heir apparent to its most beloved rapper, the murdered Notorious B.I.G., by none other than the Puff Daddy, then arguably the hottest producer in rap and the king of New York. Tonight he's with Puffy in the club, accompanied by Puffy's then-girlfriend, the superstar actress Jennifer Lopez. They're the it couple in Hollywood.

Also with them is Puffy's bodyguard, Anthony Wolf Jones, a man with a fearsome rep, and they've hit the club to celebrate. 2000 is going to be Barrow's year. Global superstardom, tens of millions of dollars, and only 15 years earlier, he was just a poor kid struggling to get by after immigrating from Belize with his mom. Since, he's gotten a bit of a rep in the streets, shot when he was only 15 years old, but had just been discovered only a couple years earlier freestyling in a barbershop.

He'd also lived that life in his flatbush, and his songs reflected it. Hard, gritty, take-no-prisoners East Coast 90s gangster rap. The thing about those neighborhoods in New York in the 90s, though, is that it's hard to escape them, even when you're with the A-list. These clubs in the 90s, the ones like Club New York in Manhattan and Like the Tunnel, they had these big hip-hop nights, and they weren't for the faint of heart.

Sure, you had the ballplayers and the rappers, but you also had gangsters and grimy stick-up crews from everywhere converging on one spot. South Jamaica, East Flatbush, Harlem, the Bronx. Things could pop off at any second over anything. You had to be on your guard, and you had to have your gun in the club, which was easy to do if you were famous. But even being famous wasn't enough. Sometimes, it could make things worse. In the club that night, Puffy bumps into a thug named Matthew Scar-Allen.

A man who had his own rep in the streets of East Flatbush and spilled his drink. Scar elbows him and the crews exchange words with Puffy and threats. And then someone throws a bunch of money at Puffy. All of a sudden, gunshots ring out. A few people get hit and chaos ensues. Witnesses will later describe Barrow literally holding a smoking gun.

Puffy runs out of the club with J-Lo, and they're both arrested soon in his Lincoln Navigator. A gun is found, and it's a huge scandal all over the front page of newspapers. Barrow would keep his mouth shut at the trial as part of his gangster code. But what later tell interviewers, he knew Scar from the streets, and he knew what he was capable of. A lot of people did. And when Shine heard the threats, he reacted. He would be convicted and serve nine years of a 10-year sentence, then be deported back to his birthplace of Belize.

Ten years later, after a whirlwind life that saw him spend a few years in Jerusalem studying the Talmud as an Orthodox Jew, he is now one of the most powerful politicians in Belize, expected to potentially be the next prime minister.

And he's also representing a district with some of the worst urban violence on earth, with a vicious gang war between various blood and crip factions that threatens to plunge the tiny Central American country into anarchy. In fact, the murder rate in Belize is one of the highest in the world, going from 9 in 1995 to 30 in 2006 to 45 in 2017.

But if anyone can reach the young gang members of Belize City killing each other over nothing, it might just be this reformed gangster who can speak from personal experience about the damage done when letting shots fly over nothing. This is The Underworld Podcast. ♪

Welcome back to the podcast where two journalists, myself, Danny Gold, and my co-host, Sean Williams, take you through organized crime stories from around the world and ask the important questions like, what are you going to do when shit hits the fan? Pray to God, go hard or lay up in the morgue. Shit, man. I think all this 90s rap beef research has gone to your head.

That's actually, I mean, that's from one of Shine's first albums. That's a really good song. People should look that up. It's called What You Gonna Do. It's tough. This guy's life sounds amazing. Yeah, yeah, it is pretty, it's pretty incredible. We'll talk a little bit more about it. But as always, we have the bonus episodes up as well as scripts, sources, and all that at patreon.com slash the underworld podcast.

And hey, you know, even if you don't want any of that stuff, it's Giving Tuesday, or at least giving to me and Sean Tuesday. So make it happen for the price of a single coffee. And as always, feel free to reach out to us at theunderworldpodcast at gmail.com if you have any questions, concerns, or complaints about Sean. Yeah, I mean, I've got a filter to spam out anything about jokes or cricket, so you better not miss if you're coming at me.

Now, Belize's gang war between the Bloods and Crips and how the Bloods and Crips ended up in Belize, driving the murder rate to astronomical heights. We're going to get there. But we had to start with a shine anecdote because, I mean, his life is just crazy, right? Megastar rapper serving nine years in prison, going to Jerusalem to convert to Orthodox Judaism and studying Torah, only to go back to Belize and become the top opposition figure in the government who is expected to be prime minister.

And this is all before he's 45 years old. That's just, I mean, it's insane. I mean, you're doing this documentary, right? You have to do that when he becomes prime minister. I wish. I mean, is there a story like more tailor-made for me than this story right here? This is the most underworld podcast story I've ever heard on this thing. So Belize itself, it's a small Central American country. I mean, people know it basically, I think, from the beautiful beaches there. And it's a great vacation spot from what I've heard.

It's right up north from the triangle of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. It also borders Mexico, and it's only really the size of Massachusetts, so pretty small and very sparsely populated. I think in 1995, there was only 225,000 people there,

But the numbers have gone up now to somewhere around 350,000, actually with a lot of like refugees and migrants coming from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador and settling there. And Belize also has a significant part of its population that has left at various times over the last six decades for the states, especially LA, and then also New York and Chicago. But we'll get to that and how that sort of affected things.

Unlike El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, you know, which are really plagued with gang violence as well between MS-13, 18th Street, you can go back and listen to our El Salvador episode where I've reported on a bunch and talk about it. Belize has never had a civil war or any of the political upheaval associated with those other countries. And it also hasn't had any really serious cartel action like Mexico.

Though it is a popular trench shipment point for cocaine, and they used to grow a lot of weed there. In fact, it was actually known for somewhat being like an island of stability in a really rough neighborhood. Belize was originally called British Honduras, and it was a British colonial outpost where they brought slaves to there for locking operations. The country actually only got its independence in 1981. But yeah, the British, it was a colony. They sent slaves over from Africa for mahogany camps.

Here's a quote from a paper that was called Forms of Violence in Past and Present, El Salvador and Belize in Comparative Perspective. Shout out to the gods at Sci-Hub for just helping with all this. Quote, Belize developed as a frontier zone between Guatemala and Yucatan. For a long time, its economic structure was based on slavery, forestry, and the export of primary products, first logwood, then mahogany.

By the end of the 19th century, a well-established forestocracy, never heard that word before, but it's awesome, controlled almost the whole country because of its access to the land. The forestocracy led the overall majority of inhabitants' independency, whereas no independent peasantry emerged. The main families engaged in forestry, services, and export had a mutually beneficial, though from time to time, oppositional relationship towards the forming state.

But yeah, I mean, if you want more history, you know, we're not the guys for that. Read a book. Actually, with any podcast, if you want to learn more, like go read books, seriously. But anyway, slavery ends. Obviously, the lasting legacy of it is still with us. The economy transitions to citrus and sugar. I'm thinking mahoganocracy sounds a bit better, actually. And like, are we going to go back to shitting on Britain in this episode? Because we, you know, I mean, all because we helped shape the murderous slave industry and...

deforest Central America and cause civil wars and kill millions of people. I mean, like, when is it, when is it too soon? Like people are going to get over this stuff. Buddy, you can work these issues out, you know, with, with your therapist and our sponsor better help. But anyway, nice post-slavery basements.

Basically, the newly freed black slave communities were left with nothing and then given nothing, so they stayed poor and continued to get less resources. And you have to imagine the things that keep people united are better, like family structures, tribal structures, village structures. Those things were completely decimated. I found an old GeoCity site set up by a Belizean development trust that talked about the development of Belize City, where most of the violence is concentrated.

And it mentioned how all the power and resources were focused on the capital city, which again, wasn't huge, maybe 30,000 people back then, but it really ignored the rural areas. So people from the rural areas flocked to the city, these slums, unplanned communities developed. Well, I'll quote from them because I found that interesting, this breakdown of structures. Quote,

As the city grew from a small, rural-type ex-colonial capital, and the population living there permanently became estranged from their rural relatives. After several generations of this, a new poverty class developed in the old colonial capital of Belize City and was different than any other poverty class of before times. The new poverty level had no real estate, had no security of homes, no place to grow food, and had lost contact with their rural relatives. Adding to those troubles...

Belize is unfortunately right in like the hurricane war path. And in 1961, Belize City gets absolutely leveled by Hurricane Hattie. Tens of thousands of Belizeans decide to head to the US with most going to LA and then New York and Chicago. And this is going to be some real like butterfly effect shit right here.

Yeah, I mean, didn't they move the capital to some little rinky-dink town in the interior after that? All that stuff kicked off, right? Yeah, yeah. Belize City is not the capital. No, it's Belmapan. I became obsessed with knowing all the capital cities in the world. That's one of the coolest things about me. Yeah. Weird dude, man. Weird dude.

So yeah, Hurricane Hattie, there's like, you know, jobs are lost, infrastructure destroyed, poverty, homelessness increased at really exponential levels. And the poorest people in Belize City, they gather in the south side on these swampy marshlands and they start the buildup of these unplanned slum neighborhoods, these shantytowns really. And even though this was a rough area, you didn't see a ton of violence there or hardcore gangs at the time. According to Adam Baird, who...

has written a ton of papers on Belize. Like, we use a ton of his research in this episode. Quote, Until the 1980s, Southside did not have gangs to speak of. Rather, base boys who would sell locally grown Belizean breeze marijuana on street corners or bases. Base boys, like Bad Johns in Trinidad, were historically evolved.

It's interesting, too. A lot of these papers compare Belize and Trinidad, and I report a lot in Trinidad. We have a great Trinidad episode up if you guys want to go back and listen to that.

Also, side note, like reading academic papers that talk about gangs and stuff like this is kind of hilarious at times. I mean, they're filled with like fascinating research and insights, but also like listen to this soundbite. Quote, the habitual struggle to make ends meet in Belize and in Trinidad is often called hustle. Or perhaps more representatively, a young Southsider said, we grind it. You got to hand it to someone who's found their writing voice like that.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of adorable. But back to these Belizean kids who immigrated in the 60s. They're coming of age in the 70s and 80s in poor neighborhoods in Los Angeles. And during this time, in those neighborhoods these Belizeans were in, you know, it's the Crips and the Bloods really rising up.

So a lot of these wayward youth end up joining these gangs. The illustrious Don Diva magazine actually had a YouTube video up from it a while back that shows the lasting impact. Quote, these days, practically every gang from Venice to Florence between Vermont and Crenshaw is predominantly Belizean.

Gangs that boast heavy Belizean membership include the Fruittown Brims, Rolling 30s Crips, 52 Hoover Gangsters, Trouble Gangster Crips, Van Ness Gangsters, Rolling 20s Bloods, Rolling 40s Crips, and Black P-Stones. Okay. P-Stones, that just sounds like a bad illness. That's not a good one. But Fruittown Brims, I like that. That sounds like a sort of old-timey barbershop outfit. I'm going to be gunning for them to make our top 10 gang names of 2021 list.

And I actually do want people to message us with their favorite and worst gang names. So yeah, like send us some, send us some stuff on the Gmail there.

Bro, I'm not saying anything about the Black Pistons or the, you know, rolling 40s. That's all Sean. I don't want to get any Black Pistons. That's on Sean, not on me. If you guys listen to the MS-13 episode, you'll notice a similar pattern, right? Except in the case of El Salvador, Salvadorans fought a civil war in the 80s and then mostly started their own gangs after they were picked on by the Mexican and black gangs in their neighborhoods. With Belizeans, it seems like it's a little different too because while some started their own sets, others joined already existing gangs.

And we've talked a lot about on the show, going back to the Berlin Klans episode, you know, one of our first, how when immigrant groups come in, especially poor ones, refugees, all that, if they're marginalized, if they're not afforded resources, if they're in dangerous areas, this is a natural response. Mm-hmm.

With both groups, though, Salvadorans and Belizeans, the next step is the same. Gang members were caught, arrested, sentenced, and then deported back to their quote-unquote home countries, which were not even close to ready to deal with these hardened gangsters coming in. And from there, the gang life and culture only spread in these countries.

With Belize also, even into the 90s and 2000s, you had young people that became gang members in the States that were born in the States, could travel freely, and went back and forth spreading the culture, the lifestyle, all that. Which is how Belize had this crack epidemic of sorts in the late 80s into the 90s and 2000s. Baird talks about this gang member named Angel. He's one of the first real gangbangers to set up shop in Belize.

He became the first leader of the Majestic Alley Crips. He had been deported in 1981 after being convicted in a drive-by shooting in LA. And he gets off the plane in Belize, expecting to serve out the rest of his time there in the central prison. But he just walks off the plane. No one's there. He gets on a bus and he goes to a family member's house in Majestic Alley in Belize City. And that's where he starts the first Crips set, the Majestic Alley Crips. I mean, that is a perfect scene for the story you're going to do about Belize like next month, right?

It's just a really good metaphor, I think, for how these gangs were able to grow so much and just the lack of oversight they saw in these countries who just didn't have the resources and weren't ready for it. Though first, these gang members, they're just really fighting each other with sticks and machetes and really over nothing, maybe selling a little weed. Guns only really started becoming more prevalent in the 90s, a lot actually coming in from Guatemala, which had a ton because of the Civil War.

Besides the guns, like I said, crack emerges in the late 80s. And of course, that's going to have an effect on the growth of the gangs and the violence. But there's something else that a whole bunch of sources mention having a profound effect on gang life and the growth of it. And that's television, which came to Belize in 1983. 1983, that is some Albania level technological lag. I mean, I love Albania, of course, by the way. It's my favorite country. Yeah.

So I want to say quick things about the sources, too, which we always publish on the Patreon. We used a lot of work of Adam Barrett, as well as this reporter, Nathaniel Janowitz, who has done some great reporting. And of course, all the local Belize news sites and inside crime. So yeah, TV, exported American culture, what's it called? Soft diplomacy, all that.

That was right around the time gangster rap was emerging, which I mean, you know, we can pretend it doesn't have an effect on kids and teens wanting to be in gangs, but like, let's be real. It definitely does. And I say that as someone who loves the music and all that. Yeah. I mean like the, that Auckland gang, the killer bees who we profiled last week, they were directly influenced by LA gangster rap. I mean, yeah.

I mean, I'm not going to say Marilyn Manson did Columbine, but music is definitely influential. Yeah, I mean, just look at, we should really do some stuff on the drill scene and how that's playing out. But yeah. But also another thing mentioned by name in numerous papers and articles, interviews with gangsters, all that, is the movie Colors.

You haven't seen Colors. It came out in the late 80s. It's directed by the god Dennis Hopper, stars Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. And it's about two LAPD cops up against the gang wars of LA. I think there's like a made-up gang in there as well as Bloods and Crips. And it's a great movie, like hugely influential. I still remember an old MTV True Life documentary, I think it was in the 90s, when MTV had this really great programming like that about the spread of gangs and gang culture in the U.S.,

And they had these gang members in like Iowa talk about how they wanted to join a gang after they saw color. Seriously. And multiple sources say it had the same effect in Belize City. By 1989, these little blood and crip gangs are starting to come up and make their presence known, though they're not taken very seriously at first. The LA Times has this great article from then of a reporter hanging with this gang member who calls himself Big Russian. Quote,

We're going to die for our color, man, said Big Russian, 18, a self-avowed former drug runner in Los Angeles. Blood not scared to die. Police don't sweat me, man. If they mess with me, it'd be like messing with an ant's nest. The accent, the jargon, the mixture of bravado and nihilism, the talk of gangs, street fights, drugs, and muggings, all recalled the mean streets and troubled neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

But the scene was the sleepy Caribbean port city in a country that has been a bastion of tranquility through years of war, economic dislocation, and social unrest in the rest of Central America.

Bloods, crips, and crack cocaine have come to Belize, and authorities seem powerless to do much about it. Yeah, I mean, that is, that's pretty bad news for most Belizans, but, I mean, just a tiny point, maybe say hornet's nest instead of ant's nest, but yeah, I mean, I get his point. It's really bad and people are dying. It's more important. I just assume they have, like, the really fierce ants down there, you know? Is that, like, the soldier ant that's supposed to be able to kill you or something? I don't know, man. I don't want something to do, I don't want anything to do with it.

any ants or horns or something like that. - Not into the ant chat. - No, no, no, no, no. So Big Russian, he had sold dope in the US for two years after his cousins brought him into a blood set in LA, and then he comes back to Belize in 1987. At the time, the article also talks about how law enforcement in Belize kind of dismissed these guys as just like graffiti spraying wannabes who watch too much TV, they're not real gangsters, and a police official estimates that there's only like 75 gang members in the country at the time,

but crack houses are starting to spring up. Quote, these young fellows, they copy everything off American television, said police commissioner Bernard Bevins. We haven't really looked at it as a real law and order problem.

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Learn more at cbp.gov slash careers. It's not a problem now, but it's becoming one, said former Home Affairs Minister Carl Thompson, who was in charge of internal security in the outgoing government. These gangs are becoming more dangerous because of drugs. But yeah, big Russian, though. He claims there's over a thousand gang members. And I think the city has a population like 50,000 at the time, which is, you know, that's insane. And that membership did grow a lot.

after Belizeans who were parts of gangs came back, and after the movie Colors played to pack theaters. The article also mentions how Belize had been a big-time marijuana exporter, I think the fourth largest to the U.S. in the 80s, before an eradication program encouraged by the U.S. shut it down. And when that slowed down, that's when the crack trade emerged. And the co-trafficking, that's going to start up around the same time, at least using it as a trend shipment point to head up north to the states. And of course, with that comes protection being paid in product and guns,

But there's a really interesting point on that that we'll get to a little bit later. By 1995, the total population of Belize is only 225,000. There's 45,000 residents in Belize City, and sources put the number of gang members as somewhere between 800 and 1,500, which again, even on a low estimate, that's an insane amount of gang numbers. I don't understand how that could be real. And there's also 40,000 Belizans in LA at the time.

There's a 1995 LA Times op-ed by a state senator that talks about how 15% of Belize's GDP is remittances coming from LA. And it also brings up how half of the population there in Belize is under 16, with most of the rest over 50, since many of working age have left, and that leads to the breakdown again. Family structure, no guidance, excursions.

You know, these are all building blocks that make it easy for gangs to sort of rise up. I like the idea of blaming Dennis Hopper for this entire thing as well. That kind of, that's a good move. But I mean, is this, this is such a crazy, weird country. Like, is it ethnic European or African or Taino or like...

What? Just some tiny little form of slave port? It just sounds like a bonkers place and everyone's living outside and they're all sending back money from elsewhere. Do they speak Spanish or English? What's going on?

It's English speaking. I think half the population is mestizo. We talk about, I'll talk about it a little bit more. And then you have Creole, you have something called Garifuna, and then you have indigenous people as well. But yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. It's a really small country and not that populated, but it's got this interesting history.

It wasn't just LA though, and it wasn't just a one-way street of gangsters being sent to Belize. There's a huge bust in Harlem in 1995 where 24 members of the Rolling 30's Crips are picked up in one sweep. And at one point there's like 63 of them jailed at one time. They were just a massive, massive crack gang during the height of the crack era. They'd come over from Belize six years earlier, and it was three brothers who

And they had taken on the name while in Belize City after meeting gang members from LA that had been sent back. They did $4,000 a day in street sales and were wanted in connection with like 20 shootings and unsolved homicides. And of course, a lot of these guys locked up are deported after or during their sentence.

And during this whole time, these Bloods and Crip sets are popping up all over Belize City, concentrated on the south side where the slums are. Janowitz, who I mentioned earlier, he has a breakdown of some of it in an article he wrote for Vice. He quotes a famous imprisoned Crip, this guy named Pipes, who says, quote, the deportees from that it started and it never stopped. Just keep at retaliation, retaliation, retaliation, one after the other, said Pipes.

So the other guys get deported and that just strengthens it more and men adapted like cells more and more. Then they start to learn about extortion, robbery, selling drugs. It just got out of hand from there. I mean, are there any cops in this country? There can't be as many as there are gangsters. You know, the police force there is like severely underfunded and under-resourced. And again, we're going to talk about that in a bit.

Pipe goes on to describe some of the OGs who got deported early, a Blood named Heathcliff Reyes and a Crip named Fett Frederick Lynch, aka Diggy Dapp, who hated each other and brought their beef from LA to Belize. Reyes formed the George Street Bloods, and Diggy formed the Pink Alley Crip Set. And that's how the first real war got started. And from there, other blocks, other neighborhoods formed their own sets, formed their own cliques, adapted colors, and just ran with the whole Crips and Bloods things.

Now, almost all this takes place on the south side of Belize City, which is wild, right? It's like North St. Louis, south side Chicago, but just completely concentrated because the city is so small. The area is also predominantly Afro-Caribbean people, which have remained poorer than the others. We talked about the effects of slavery before. As one of the Adam Baird papers says, quote, "...the country has decidedly mixed heritage, with sizable Mayan, Spanish, Mestizo, and Garifuna, which are Afro-Indigenous mixture populations."

The Creole minority of African descent makes up 15% of the national population, but accounts for the majority of Southside's residents. That is a story old as time. I remember I really wanted to go to Belize on a family holiday when we were going to Yucatan, and all the signs were that it was too dangerous to go to at the time, and that was like five years ago. So it must have been pretty, pretty bad.

So I don't think it's actually that dangerous for tourists, right? It's dangerous concentrated on the south side of Belize City. But if you go to the beaches, I mean, I wanted to go on vacation there along for a while, but it's expensive to fly down there. I've heard amazing things. It's got loads of Maya ruins and shit like that as well. Yeah, and just beautiful beaches. I was actually pitching this story too over the summer and connected to Shine, but I couldn't sell it because, you know, people don't like commissioning interesting stories. Anyway, yeah.

This Southside area, it's economically depressed, very little jobs, they get less resources, and Belize's law enforcement, like I said, they're severely understaffed and underfunded and just don't really have a ton of capabilities.

And you've got these badass thugs coming back from the States, you know, dressing cool like how the kids see on TV, talking different, flashing cash, drugs. It's easy to see how young teens can be convinced to join in these neighborhoods, right? But this is no different than any other hardscrabble poor neighborhood when it comes down to it, really. I mean, it's essentially the plot of Goodfellas, right? At least the first quarter of the movie. Yeah, the good bit.

A paper for the UN Institute for Disarmament put it like this, quote, the low-income communities in eastern Port of Spain and south side Belize City are affected by a collection of local level vulnerabilities generated by colonialism and slavery, later economic policy that accentuated inequalities and ongoing socioeconomic constraints.

If transnational crime operates at a macro level, at a community level, these social terrains are particularly vulnerable to violence epidemics when exposed to the influence of drug and gun trafficking. Fucking nerd speak, but you guys get it, right? Yeah. I mean, like, what are we thinking? UN disarmament institute, the most useless part of the UN? It's got to be out there. I mean, that's a tough call when it comes to uselessness in the UN, to be honest with you.

See, this kind of thing, the effects of gun trafficking and drug trafficking, it's kind of a tricky thing to get into a bit because Belize is a big transshipment point, especially as recently as 2011. The military had like no radar, no helicopters or updated comm systems at all. This is from an AP article around then, quote, today, 37% of the cocaine smuggled to the US travels through Belize and gang members are often recruited by major drug traffickers as security in the drug trade.

Their involvement has given rise to the illegal importation of high-powered rifles and short arms by drug traffickers who from time to time receive less – who receive these weapons as part of a payment for work done in Belize in support of the drug trade. We also talked about that, I think, with the Trinidad episode. And it's interesting. A lot of the stuff written on Belize compares it to Trinidad just because I think there's smaller populations and have – Are they close? Yeah.

They're relatively close, but Trinidad is officially in the Caribbean. Belize is a part of Central America, even though they compare it a lot to the Caribbean.

And anyway, cocaine starts really passing through Belize in the 90s when the other route through Jamaica in the Caribbean gets squeezed. The cartels are active there. The drugs come in. The guns come in to protect those drugs. And all that crime filters outwards to these gangs. Or does it? Again, similar to El Salvador's gangs, these guys, these Bloods and Crips factions, they're not major traffickers. They do...

They do street dealing and all that, but they're not really big players at all on an international level. Besides, I guess, the ones that come into the States and have their own little street gang situations here. Baird did a study on this, and he says the effect that it had, the trafficking of guns and drugs on the gangs in Belize is actually overstated. Quote, drugs transshipment played a secondary indirect role at best in the establishment and rise of gang violence in Belize. Furthermore, gun smuggling does not necessarily share the same political economy as drugs transshipment networks.

Gangs are destinations for guns and ammunition, and flows of drugs to the streets are fragile and unpredictable. This is partly because the vast majority of tranship drugs actually avoid street gangs in Belize on their way to more lucrative destination markets in the USA and Europe. And again, that's another thing we've talked about

with MS-13 and all that is like the cartels don't see them as a reliable partner. You know, they don't want to take this risk with these guys that are chaotic, you know, that are messed up all the time, that like don't really have a sense of really uniform control and are seen as being unreliable.

Why would they risk like tens of millions of dollars shipments on that? But that's like the 37% of the Coke trade thing going through Belize is absolutely massive. That's thousands of kilos of Coke.

I mean, I don't know if that's still the case. That was 2011. And I don't know how much faith I put in that number. But the point, you know, still kind of, you know, these drug number, these drug game numbers are, it's always hard to tell what's nonsense and what's not. But I think the point stands that it was, you know, a place that serious amounts of cocaine were moving through on the way to the U.S. And here's the crux of Baird's argument. And this is from a 2020 paper. So it's pretty recent. Quote,

On Southside, drugs are not central to the gang economy. Drug transshipment through Belize tends to involve current and former village fishermen and tight-knit drug trafficking families along the Caribbean coastline from San Pedro in the north to Punta Gorda in the south. A member of one of these families stated that trafficking routes are connected to influential spheres in the police, business, and politics.

Drugs rarely take the maritime route into Bully City, where the vast majority of street gangs are located. Wet-drop cocaine bales are collected offshore, passing unperceived through popular tourist resorts on their way up to Mexico.

This is a distinctly low-key, highly organized process connecting fish and families to overland trafficking networks for shipment to Mexico and accounts for the vast majority of drug transshipment in Belize. These clandestine networks deliberately avoid street gangs, generating no discernible violence. Okay, so this is like not a million miles away from the kind of system they do in Guinea-Bissau, right? Which we spoke about a few weeks ago where they get all these fishing families to use the islands and the coastline and they just kind of like...

shifted around silently without anyone getting involved but I guess here there isn't even the power from the politics or the police to like really make them big either it's just the cartels like cutting out the local areas completely

Well, I think there is obviously going to be some involvement with politicians and corruption. You know, I did mention that. I didn't see a lot of it, and I didn't focus on it because we're doing this, you know, focusing on the Bloods and Crips. But it doesn't seem to have the same, like, overpowering corruption effect that it did in Guinea, like that, you know, in Guinea-Bissau. Yeah, because that's like a whole... It's like the whole thing turned up on its head in Guinea-Bissau, but here it seems...

I don't know. It seems like the locals are treated as bumpkins a little bit. Yeah, I think so. Something along those lines. I mean, it's not a... I don't have a great understanding of it. And wet-dropping is basically leaving kilos of coke tightly wrapped and waterproofed in hidden ocean spots or lagoons for the next chain of traffickers to kind of pick them up and take them back to the U.S. until they finally get to a bathroom stall in Bushwick. And according to a 2014 Vice article...

this has led to some violence, you know, because you have gangs looking for the wayward package there and some of the fishing families getting into conflicts with each other. You know about like the white lobster stories, right? No, but I want to know. I mean, isn't this also the plot of Bloodline? That was an amazing show. I remember that, something like this happening there. Yeah, I mean, it's a thing. You see articles pop out about it, I think, every once in a while over the last decade or two. It's basically the stories of like

fishermen or people on beaches, I think in Nicaragua and parts of Belize, Mexico, all that, of just like people finding like giant bales of cocaine or like a wayward kilo worth like tens of thousands of dollars. And then what happens when these people find it? They call it white lobsters. And there's like, I think almost part of it's Nicaragua. And people go out like looking for these, there's so much coming through. People go out fishing for these white lobsters as like a profit sort of situation. But-

I'm kind of of the belief that, I think the understanding is if it's one or two, the drug traffickers don't go entirely insane looking for it. But you still kind of, you want to be, the Only World Podcast can't condone that sort of action in terms of safety issues. I just want to say that. I can't think of many better allegories for late capitalism than pearl divers or fishermen going actually looking for massive bales of cocaine off the coast.

Yeah, I mean, it's a wild story and probably has led to some really good times for some fishermen out there. I hope so. Yeah. Anyway, something else starts to happen too around this time, you know, the 90s into 2000s. And that's these bloods in these crypt sets, especially the big ones, they start to fracture. The whole idea of a unified blood versus crypts thing, that's never really been the case for decades, even here in the U.S.,

You have plenty of bloodsets fighting other bloodsets, plenty of cryptsets fighting other cryptsets. You know, you have blood and crypt allies that fight other. It's just like, you know, it's not as uniform as I think people would expect it with superficial knowledge. And what happens in Belize is that you have a breakdown. You have a situation where the OGs, the generals as they call them, they get killed or locked up

Things fracture further. You have younger and younger people taking control and younger people tend to be more impulsive. Things continue to fracture and you end up with like dozens of cliques running around now warring with each other.

Belize City had only 47 murders in 2000. 2009 had 97. And in recent years, it's been like in the 130s and 140s. Actually, I think that's Belize overall, but it's very concentrated in Belize City. Yeah, that's still an unbelievable number. That's like midsummer plus levels for those British listeners out there. Well, I don't know what the joke is, but I'm sure some people do. Complain, guys. Yeah, like...

Like, you know, you're talking about murder rates are usually calculated per the 100,000s and you're talking about only a couple hundred thousand people in the country. Yeah, it's it's pretty nuts for sure.

The government's tried a few approaches to get things in order over the past few decades. They've definitely tried the Mano Dora thing like El Salvador, which is really aggressive, hard-hitting policies. Certain police units have a rep for extrajudicial killings that they've never really tried for. They've also at various times tried the tactics of negotiation, intrusions, ceasefires, all that. Even getting the prime minister to sit down with gang leaders is

Which is kind of always a bad sign. Yeah, I mean, that reminds me. When are we going to get your Bukele profile?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. People have done some good work on him, and I was kind of there when he was rising up and campaigning. It was just funny the way people talked about him. He's a great Twitter presence. Don't know if I'd ever want him in charge of my country. He's a pretty good poster. You know, really, when you're the president of a country saying, okay, boomer, to like six-year-old economists, it's kind of like...

I don't know, man. I don't know. Yeah, you gotta upload that. In 2011, the murder rate for the city was at 105, which is just monstrous, like five times Chicago. In September of 2011, the government actually initiates one of these gang truces, which works for 100 days. I think there's only nine murders during that time. An article from a local news site lays out the beginning, quote,

In this spirit, the government welcomed the confirmation by the George Street Gang and its affiliates, Sioux Falls Street, Ghost Town, and Gill Street, that they will cause no trouble during Belize's September celebrations. The people of Belize deserve to enjoy the national celebrations peacefully and free of crime, and all Belizans agree that this should be the case all year round.

This plan involved a work scheme where they put 200 gang members from 13 gangs to work doing stuff like neighborhood cleanup, you know, parks work, stuff like that. And they got paid, which actually, you know, it sounds like a pretty useful program. But all the comments I found online were just super angry, accusing the government of pampering the gangs, of paying them off. Insight called it paying them not to kill each other. This is actually a program that has been done in a couple U.S. cities. I think it was somewhere in the Bay Area, maybe San Francisco.

I'd actually pitched it a couple of times. Couldn't get traction because again, as me and Sean make quite clear in this podcast, most editors are morons. That's, uh, yeah, that's your, that's, that's, that's, uh, your message there. But I mean, our, our Patreon is basically the same thing, right? But it's just paying us not to kill ourselves. Yeah, basically. Then in April of, I think 2012, after that, uh, that, that, uh,

Peace Treaty had been going on. Three high-ranking gang members were killed in five days. And in the two weeks that followed, 10 more were killed. The treaty cost $20,000 a week. And again, the government of Belize does not have a ton of resources. So it ends in 2012 because they just run out of money. And that's been a big debate whether the government should negotiate these treaties in El Salvador too.

They've had these truces. Their truces are done in secret. And the people, the people in the country get really pissed off because they see it as legitimizing the gangs and just conferring power on them, like real power. And a lot of people think the gangs just take that time to sort of rebuild, you know, to get more guns, to sort of extend their power. I mean, that's kind of what happened in Haiti, right? To some extent as well. We did that episode recently. Yeah.

I don't think that the treaties were as established as they are in El Salvador. El Salvador has a huge extortion problem like Haiti. I didn't see much talk of extortion in Belize, which is interesting because you have to wonder if they're not doing big drug transshipments, if they're not extorting, it's like they're probably not making that much money. You know?

Obviously MS-13 and 18th Street don't make a ton of money in El Salvador too, but they've got such a big extortion play that they're bringing in decent money. Whereas here, it's like, how are they getting paid? There's another treaty in 2014, another ceasefire and peace talks led by the police.

But, you know, ends up with like seven killings in 10 days. And from reviewing these things, it seems like they just have these brutal spates of violence every few months or years with dozens killed in like a couple weeks or months. And these retaliation cycles just setting off. I think there was one recently as well. And it seems to alternate between ceasefires, states of emergency, and

and just brutal killings. But anyway, also in 2012, police officials said that 85% of all murders in Belize had to do with gang rivalries in Belize City.

So yeah, who are these gang members? Well, nearly all of them are from the South Side, as we've discussed. They join between the ages of 13 and 16. Most have a family member in the gang. You know, we're seeing multi-generational units now. According to the 2019 Belize City Community Assessment, the violence is also heavily concentrated in three neighborhoods, Colette, Lake Independence, and Mesopotamia, where Shine now represents. Eight gangs are set to make up the majority of the violence.

though they count 36 gangs total and somewhere between 900 through 1400 members. Quote, the gangs with the greatest longevity are the George Street Bloods, Majestic Alley Crips, Ghost Town Bannock Crips, Bannock maybe, Back of Town Bloods, Back of Land Crips, and Jerusalem Crips. The gangs with the youngest members on average are the 103 New Road Bloods, Riverside Boys, and Gaza New Generation Bloods. It is likely that these are the most recently created gangs.

so you got gaza and jerusalem in there i mean is it each gang just like 40 or 50 guys just controlling the street now it seems like they're just splitting off into tiny little factions yeah i couldn't get a good read on it maybe a couple dozen i think some of the bigger ones have more people but yeah the gaza thing comes from i mean that's jamaica you know uh gaza and gully are two of the main things in jamaica so it comes from it comes from there i so i guess you have not just the influence of of the

the Bloods and Crips, but you have an influence of the Jamaican gangs as well, which are, you know, have been generating headlines in the Caribbean for, internationally for 60, 60 decades. And again, we do have those episodes eventually coming up when I get Stop Being Lazy and dive into it.

So the main gang in Belize City, the one that has set off the most murderers and gets mentioned the most, is this George Street gang, the George Street Blood set. And I was able to piece together a bit of an origin story from Nathaniel Janowich's work and a 2013 editorial from Amandala, which is a local site. The gang really comes up in the 2000s. It's led by the Tillett brothers, Sheldon Pinky Tillett and Gerald Shiny Tillett Sr.,

And their main beef was with a blood set called the Taylor Alley Gang, led by Arthur Young. Amandala called Arthur Young, quote, a brilliant, fearless, and charismatic gangster. They were based only a few blocks away. And you got to realize how close this is, how small these neighborhoods really are.

Things ratchet up a notch in 2012. The other powerful gang then is the Ghost Town Crips, and they're on the verge of an alliance with the George Street Bloods. And this would give them like unprecedented control in the city, maybe too much power. And the only person standing in their way is Arthur Young.

Sheldon Pinky Tillett, the leader of George Street, he gets popped in 2012 outside a gas station. And Young is the suspect in Tillett's murder because he was thought to be the only one who could pull it off. I think Amandala said that he was, quote, literally the only one with the cojones. Weren't these like, weren't some of these guys the folks that John McAfee was hanging out with back in the day? I mean, like...

It's incredible that bloke lasted as long as he did. But I remember there's that story at Vanity Fair or Rolling Stone, maybe, about his setup out in Belize, right? I mean, he was hanging out with gangsters, I think. I didn't even look into it, man. I just stayed away from McAfee. But I think he probably was one of the more beach towns. And I'm sure he paid for protection or something along those lines or kept some of them on the payroll. It makes a lot of sense to do that.

Here's a side note from that Amandala editorial, quote,

Nine days after Pinky's execution, though, Arthur Young was captured by police in the Vista Del Mar area. Young was handcuffed and thrown into the pan of a police pickup truck, then shot dead at the junction where the Vista Del Mar access road meets the Northern Highway and mile eight. So yeah, you know, we talked about the execution, the extrajudicial executions, and there's

There's one right there. And that was in 2012. And of course, a bunch of other retaliation killings kick off. Shiny Tillett, the brother takes over, but he's gunned down in 2016. But remember that Tillett family. In 2020, the government has another state of emergency. 137 gang members are remanded. They're held for a month, then released when they pledge to stop the violence and turn in a bunch of gangs. It happens after seven people are killed in five days, including a five-year-old. And it's just, you know...

I could go through it, but it's just like back and forth, back and forth like this. Couple of periods of stability, followed by two weeks or a month of murders. And you got to wonder, I mean, how many people are actually left to keep these gangs running? But apparently there's always new soldiers, you know? Fast forward to this past May, there was actually a decrease in the murders during, um,

during the pandemic there. They had like a really strict curfew control. So 2020 wasn't a really violent year there, comparatively speaking. But this past May 2021, Tillett Jr., Shiny's son, is gunned down while on his bicycle. He's largely suspected to be the doing of the Taylor Alley gang. That was Arthur Young's gang. And this sets off another round of murders. And now things are just popping off again. In August 2021,

A state of emergency is declared again as the cycle of retaliations continue. And in September, this past September, only a couple months ago, the violence is once again just getting egregious. The prime minister is furious. He's making aggressive statements, issuing states of emergency, giving police more powers. And he says it's really only 500 gay members that are terrorizing the city. I guess 500 in a city of like 60,000. That's quite a lot. Massive.

Yeah. Yeah. Things get really bad when a 15-year-old is executed allegedly for wearing the wrong color. So much so that representatives from 13 gangs hold a press conference saying things went too far, announcing their intentions to keep a ceasefire. And meanwhile, the public, if you look at any article on these local news sites, they're just out for blood. I mean, they're fed up with it and they're fed up with the government's lack of success in combating the gangs.

So yeah, there were 134 killings in 2019. 2020 saw a drop off with COVID. It was down to 102, but things are heating up again. And that leaves us with Shine taking the stage. See, Shine, as mentioned way earlier, was born in Belize. And from what I can tell, his parents were never married and his mom took him when he was just a kid to East Flatbush, like so many other Belizans. But get this, Shine's dad,

Dean Barrow, he's an up-and-coming politician at the time when the family, when Shine and his mom can't come to the U.S. He ends up being prime minister for three terms from 2008 to 2020. Yeah, like Shine's dad was prime minister. His uncle actually started the party that Shine is now in. He has high up other politicians in the family. I think his aunt is a member of parliament. Like Shine is from a political dynasty.

But again, that couldn't save him in East Flatbush where he grows up in the streets. So he has the thing with Puffy, club shooting, prison, Orthodox Judaism, back to Belize. And he gets elected as part of the center-right United Democratic Party to the House of Representatives in 2020. So after all of that, he basically just becomes a Tory. Yeah.

I don't know how to describe the party there. But yeah, man, he's got to continue the family dynasty. Can you just study Orthodox Judaism? I don't know anything about that. You can just straight up study Talmud and then become Jewish? How does it work? The way he talked about it was that he... I think he had a grandmother or great-grandmother or something that was Ethiopian. He assumed that they were part of the Ethiopian Jews. Oh, yeah.

And he said he was interested in his whole life. He really started studying a lot, you know, in prison, you don't have much to do. And then he went to Israel where he underwent a formal conversion and converting, converting isn't easy. You know, it's not like a, like it takes, it's a serious effort and he put the work in and he was like very, very well regarded. Like he was really studying and spending his time there. So he converted. And then I think he's, you know, he still maintains it to a degree, but yeah, no, it wasn't, it wasn't an easy road.

Shortly after he's elected, there's some political maneuvering involving another guy, and he essentially becomes the main opposition leader, the shadow prime minister, which I guess is a thing that exists in parliaments. That sounds really cool, and I probably should know what it is, but I'm going to be honest with you. I just don't feel like learning. We got him. We got him.

Sean, what's a shadow prime minister? Just the leader of the opposition? Yeah, pretty much. That's it. There's nothing more to it than that, actually. Do you get to do cool, like, in the shadows type work, or is it just a cool title without any sort of cool job? In Britain, it just means that you get to stand up in parliament once a week and slag off the prime minister. Oh, that's kind of cool. I respect that. Yeah, it's pretty fun.

And there's a lot of people now who think Shine is well on his way to being the next prime minister. And as it turns out, the district he represents, Mesopotamia, is home to some of the most powerful gangs in Belize City, like the ones we've talked about, the George Street Bloods, the Taylor Alley Gang. And the crime and violence and safety concerns is one of, if not the key concern of citizens in Belize right now. Like it's in the papers every day. And Shine is pushing his story of redemption forward.

of leaving the gang life as a way of reaching out to the young men in the gangs. Slate, of all places, they had some great stories on it. Quote, Barrow, citing his own legal issues in the past, told the nation and those of his constituents involved in criminal activity, it's not too late. It's not too late to put down the gun. It is not too late to take advantage of the opportunities. He's been speaking openly about it in Parliament. You know, he's done lots of interviews, goodwill tours, raising awareness. He's even been in the States doing it. I know he's done interviews with Puff and Fat Joe and all that.

He's campaigning for scholarships, trade skills development, things like that to help the disaffected youth and give them some bit of hope to not join gangs. Quote, I own my mistake, and I use that today, Madam Speaker, as a tool of inspiration to those young men that being a bad man is not your life's aspiration. You can aspire to come to this honorable house of representatives and pass legislation that will be for the benefit of the public.

Now I'm just imagining like Keir Starmer, our shadow guy, being like a former rap star that used to hang out with Puffy. But yeah, I mean, he sounds pretty cool. I like this guy. Sounds like he's had an interesting life. I mean, yeah, probably the most interesting life I've ever heard in my entire life. Amazing.

He's also, though, I mean, he's stuck to the party center right roots. He's definitely pushed for enforcement and for just not letting people get away with crimes there. Janowitz has reported that he has been active in nonprofit work in the district, but there's also concerns about, obviously, nepotism, political dynasties, and all the sorts of corruption that exists in the country and how that could be affected. Now, remember Matthew Scar Allen? He's the guy who kind of kicked off that shooting in the club in New York where China ended up going to prison.

Well, he's executed at point blank range outside a nightclub in Brooklyn in 2011. Rumors swirled that Puffy or Shine was behind it, but I found this crazy story of a guy who was shot in front of his building about a month before that shooting. This building is actually, it's like three blocks away from my apartment.

That shooter mistakenly thought this guy was Scar. Turns out Scar was dating the guy who got shot, his landlord's daughter, and it was a case of mistaken identity. Scar's killed a month later. All these rumors swirl. When the case is solved, it ends up being a disgruntled ex who had hired a hitman because Scar had abused her. That sounds like you need to take a walk around your block, mate.

Yeah, man. It's a pretty, I don't know, man. It's pretty, it would have been a better story, I think, for the podcast if the murder had never been solved. But, you know, this is what it is. We got to come at you guys with reality. But remember, again, always for more of this stuff, patreon.com slash the underworld podcast. If you can give us reviews, but only if you're going to give us good reviews. If you're going to give us bad reviews, don't review it. Download, subscribe, share it, and all that sort of stuff.

All right, we just want to thank, too, our big-tier Patreon guys who make this all possible. Patrick Rowland, Tanner McCleave, Juan Ponce, Pete Thomas, Mike Ulrich, William Wintercross, Trey Nance, Matthew Cutler, Chris Cusimano, Ross Clark, Jeremy Rich, Doug Prindival. I mean, without you guys, we wouldn't even be able to maintain. So thank you guys so much for doing this.

hit us up, whatever you want. You know, we're, uh, we're always here to chat and thanks again so much for, for tuning in. We really, really appreciate it. Thanks guys. And all the support that we've been getting, especially with those Spotify, you know, year end rap licks that, that was rap list. That was, that was pretty cool. So thanks. Thank you all.