After a 15-month investigation, the NYPD and Queens District Attorney arrested 45 people connected to two notorious gangs that made over $15,000 a week slinging drugs on the streets of southeast Queens.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Queens District Attorney Richard Brown laid out a slew of charges on May 17. Twenty-six members of two gangs and 19 customers were slapped with weapons charges and drug charges for dealing coke, heroin and marijuana. Most of the gangs’ crimes were focused around Jamaica.
The lengthy investigation began in February 2011. Over the following months, the Queens Gang Squad and Narcotics Investigations Bureau started looking into two separate gangs in Southeast Queens.
They used electronic surveillance, physical surveillance and search warrants to develop information on the two crews.
They found that the first group, the Corley Crew—allegedly led by James Corley—supplied customers in the South Jamaica Houses, the Baisley Houses, Rochdale Village and other areas in the Jamaica section of Queens, Brown said.
The second group, the South Side Bloods, supplied customers in Baisley Gardens and other parts of the Jamaica section of Queens.
On May 10, police moved in to take down the two groups in a swarm of arrests and seizures.
Among those arrested was James “Wall” Corley, an original member of the Queens Supreme Team, a violent narcotics gang that flourished during the height of New York City’s crack epidemic in the 1980s.
“Although Corley allegedly took extreme care to insulate himself from detection by law enforcement by frequently changing telephone numbers and having he and his associates communicate through coded language, his efforts proved unsuccessful,” Brown said. “These arrests—and the seizure of drugs, guns and other contraband resulting from this investigation—should serve as a warning to both drug dealers and violent criminals alike that the law enforcement community—in spite of the City’s economic difficulties—will continue to aggressively track down those individuals who traffic in drugs and seek to put them in prison.”
In addition to the arrests, officers searched 14 locations and seized approximately one and one-half kilograms of cocaine, over 50 small bags of heroin, a quantity of marijuana, approximately $70,000 in alleged narcotic proceeds, numerous cell phones, four handguns and a 9mm Intratec submachine gun.
In addition to Corley, various top members of his alleged narcotics organization were also arrested.
Among them were Nathan Braithwaite and Troy Walker. When police searched their Jamaica, Queens, residences, 27 forged $20 bills, 28 forged $5 bills, a quantity of cocaine and various narcotics paraphernalia were recovered.
Two days earlier, a search warrant was executed at the Rosedale residence of Nicole Turner, who allegedly maintained a narcotics stash-house for the suppliers of this organization. Among the items recovered there were approximately 231 grams of cocaine, six kilo presses, three digital scales and narcotics packaging materials.
“Despite the fact that police and prosecutors successfully dismantled the gangs and sent their leaders away to prison for long periods of time,” Brown said, “it is alleged that the defendant Corley returned to his roots to sell crack and cocaine in and around the same housing project his crew held hostage years ago. What he failed to realize, however, was that the city had changed for the better and would not be dragged back to the bad old days.”
