Police Superintendent Paul Joyce traces the roots of today's gang violence back to the worst years of the crack epidemic. "Between 1988 and 1997 there were 300 unsolved homicides of young men involved with gangs in Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The children of those 300 young men are our teenagers today. The sons are being told by people in the neighborhood about who may have committed the homicide of their father; they are being put in very difficult positions."
The violent gang culture that the crack trade financed, and solidified, lived on. Less than three years after Whiting's conviction, Boston police were again asking for the DEA's help fighting the project's crack trade, this time taking on local dealers who had sprung up in Whiting's absence.
"Everything [the Trailblazers] learned," says Mann Terror, "we learned from God."
Today, Darryl Whiting is locked up in a federal prison in Florida, about 50 miles outside of Orlando. Barring a successful appeal, Whiting will remain in prison for the rest of his life.
Over the last few years, with nothing but time on his hands, Whiting completed a fictionalized memoir. The story of his rise and fall starts when he is released from prison after a successful appeal. In the book, "I open up a trendy neighborhood barber shop and immediately begin killing my eight co-defendants who testified against me," he told me.
He says he will forever be sorry for introducing the New York Boys to Boston while insisting he was a businessman in the wrong place at the wrong time: "I'm sticking to my innocence."
When I asked Whiting how he maintained hope in the face of a life sentence without parole, he said, "I don't deal in hope."
George P. Hassett's book, Gangsters of Boston, is forthcoming from Strategic Media Press. He can be reached at george.hassett@gmail.com.
