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The first of the black drug gangs to operate on a major scale in the city of Detroit, Young Boys Inc., "also known as YBI" was the model upon which latter figures like the Chambers brothers, Best Friends and more recently Clifford Jones used to setup their own successful organizations. Founded on Detroit's Westside in 1978 by Milton "Butch" Jones, Raymond Peoples and Mark Marshall, YBI at the peak of it's strength could call on the services of 300 members or associates to enforce it's leaders will in gang circles. YBI provided as much as 40% of the heroin and cocaine used in Detroit during the late '70s and early '80s. Supplied with their product by businessman/pusher Seal Murray, YBI used school age children to push their product which carried colorful street labels such as Atmoic Dog, Whipcracker, Rolls Royce and Freak of the Week.
The gang rewarded hard working salesmen, women and children with gifts that included expensive jewelery, leather coats, diamonds, concert tickets and bicycles. In testimony presented to the US senate, authorities stated that YBI gained controll of the street level distribution of narcotics in the city of Detroit a few months after the gangs organization on the playground of Birney Elementary in the Montery-Dexter neighborhood of Detroit. The gang's terrorizing hold over the narcotics industry came to a halt with the arrest and conviction of dozens of leaders including Butch Jones, "the enforcer and founder of the notorious A-Team enforcement squad who directed his troops from the business end of a gold plated pistol," Mark Marshall, Raymond Peoples "a man with a reputation for violence," and their supplier and advisor Sylvester "Seal" Murray. By the mid '90s many of the big names "Cary Goins, Charles Obey and Kirk McGurt," associated with YBI were dead or in prison but their legacy was carrying on through the success of drug gangs making a name for themselves on the Eastside of Detroit. Butch made an ill-fated attempt to regain his place atop Detroit's drug world resulting in a possible death sentence. His lates scheme led to the indictment of his wife Portia and several other people including a former Detroit political figure. |
