Sex Money Murder A story of crack, blood, and betrayal

all those tv shows and podcasts have it wrong: the truer the crime, the more tedious. That's because the lion's share of American murders fit a predictable template. Whether the setting is the Bronx in the 1980s, South Central Los Angeles in the 1990s, Oakland or any number of midsize cities today, one finds the same broken gold chains, self-published books and shabby mortuaries; the same candle vigils and Russian roulette; the same petty slights, retaliation, snitching taboos and grisly walk-up executions. More is the challenge, then, for the serious chronicler of American violence. Jonathan Green takes a head-on approach in "Sex Money Murder," his detailed account of a federal takedown of a Bronx drug-trafficking crew in the heyday of crack cocaine. Seeking to bridge two familiar forms - the police procedural and the gang-redemption memoir - Green tracks cops and killers by turns as events draw them together. "Pipe" is an 11-year-old gang recruit living in the Soundview Houses of the Bronx in the 1980s. Pete, an older teenager, is his friend and mentor, from a middleclass family but close enough to the crack maelstrom that he easily crosses over. The two youths and their crew - Sex Money Murder or "SMM" - set out to build a profitable drug operation in Soundview, eventually spreading the franchise to other states and aligning with the Bloods. At its height, the crew forms a legal corporation, brazenly named SMMC Inc., to launder proceeds. Meanwhile, a New York police officer named John O'Malley, also a Bronx native, becomes a homicide detective. He sees the work as fruitless in an era when unseen black victims died by the thousands in unsolved murders. O'Malley eventually becomes a United States attorney's investigator, allowing him to deploy the formidable resources of the feds against surging gang violence and the SMM crew. Tension mounts as one suspect after another cuts a deal to cooperate. O'Malley and company are pushing upstream. Early in the book, Liz Glazer, a federal prosecutor who works with O'Malley, coins a derisive term for the cases her colleagues consider more worthwhile: "boy food." She's referring to the testosteronetinged enthusiasm her fellow feds display for Mafia investigations, in contrast to their disdain for street-gang cases. Her point is that their priorities are misplaced. Not only is she right, but the concept of "boy food" applies more broadly. Public interest in violence has long tilted toward outlier cases deemed especially exciting, relatable or outrageous. America's appetite for highbrow whodunits, tabloid true crime, noir reprises, miscarriages of justice may be benign enough as a pastime. But because the same taste also rules journalism, advocacy and policy, it distorts the criminal justice system. "Sex Money Murder" is not boy food, thanks to its faithful depiction of the dismal banality of gang crime. One senses at points that Green wants to reach for novelistic flourishes, but he's restrained by better impulses. The book reconstructs events long past and Green is bound by the available sources, mainly investigative records and interviews with members of the gang. Rather than try to compensate for the material he's missing, he bets on plain language and diligent documentation, and allows his sources' unfiltered remembrances to take center stage. The result is as straightforward an account of the sordid tedium of gang life as exists anywhere. Green's narrative reveals Pete, Pipe and the rest to be casually, habitually murderous, assaulting and threatening people with impunity because no one will testify against them. They see fighting as "a form of politics" and before they are out of their teens their criminal acts are so numerous as to blur together; it's surprising they were able to recall them. Without question, these same young men are also victims of stolen childhoods and shriveled opportunities. But they are no less menacing for that. When the feds finally catch up with them, the SMM boys have grown accustomed to such routine brutality that they seem surprised to learn their habits are illegal. After an especially vicious 1997 killing, one member is taken aback by the ensuing media attention: " He thought that this was just going to be a commonplace projects murder." Green captures a level of detail that marks this work as exceptionally authentic. He conveys the grandiose manner of many older gang members, and their attraction to pseudo-intellectual sophistry (one character considers himself an acolyte of Machiavelli). He faithfully follows the thread of innumerable petty dramas that punctuate gang life, and highlights the strange centrality of envy, something many observers miss. It can be hard to keep track of the throngs of characters and myriad feuds, but Green gets his teeth in and hangs on, teasing out deeper truths of the crew's world - namely, the flatness of social relations and the explosive potential of even silly conflicts. Insiders will recognize real-world touches: the bookish spectacles one defendant dons for court, the feral dogs that roam gang neighborhoods, the civilian police employee who passes tips to her gangmember nephew. For outsiders tempted to believe the solutions to criminal justice challenges are simple or obvious, this book is a corrective. It shows that, wherever impunity and lucrative black markets overlap, violence is useful and easy. Ordinary kids may become remorseless killers who shoot at cops and view second chances as a license to do more harm. That Green fails to penetrate the emotional blankness of his SMM subjects is not his fault. Defensive and often pompous, they veer between self-justification and glum resignation. Green is sympathetic, but does not seek to make them more intriguing than they are. In so doing, he shows the folly of "boy food" and scores an implicit point: Murder may not be interesting. But it surely is important. JILL LEOVY is the author of "Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America" and a senior fellow at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center on Communication Leadership and Policy.

Sex Money Murder is the name of a New York City street gang founded by Peter Pistol Pete Rollack, a career criminal who in November 2000 would be sentenced to multiple life sentences for murder. By all accounts, it was a vicious, violent gang, and investigative journalist Green's book doesn't pull any punches. He traces the origins of SMM (as the gang is also known) and the environment in which it flourished: the drug-infested Bronx of the 1980s and '90s. He also focuses on the municipal and federal law-enforcement representatives who dedicated themselves to building cases against the gang's members no easy task, given the gang's propensity for murdering witnesses. Green's portraits of the good guys and the bad guys are richly layered and compelling: this is no simple cops-and-robbers story. It's a story about an entire way of life and the way people on both sides of the law have been affected by it. A fine piece of crime nonfiction.--Pitt, David Copyright 2018 Booklist

The bloody history of a violent Bronx-based gang in the middle of the crack epidemic.Journalist Green (Murder in the High Himalaya: Loyalty, Tragedy, and Escape from Tibet, 2010) initially focuses on the Bronx during the 1980s and '90s, digging deep to explain how it became infested with gang-related shootings and a massive wave of deadly drug abuse. The author then moves the narrative into the present, explaining why crime has returned to the Bronx in full force after a temporary reduction. Although the saga is populated by a variety of vivid characters, Green emphasizes the importance of winning the trust of two veteran New York City policemen, John O'Malley and Pete Forcelli, and two lifelong Bronx-based criminals with experience inside the gang known as Sex Money Murder. Though the African-American gangsters, Pipe and Suge, felt no reason to trust Green, a white man with a British accent, they reluctantly met with him at the behest of O'Malley and Forcelli, who had helped bring them to justice and then encouraged them to leave their lives of crime. (Pipe mostly succeeded in becoming a law-abiding citizen, while Suge mostly failed.) The author realized the difficulties inherent in verifying much of what he heard from the gang members, and he labored mightily for confirmation by checking court records, police reports, and photographs as well as by interviewing prosecutors and defense lawyers. The bloodiness of the SMM-related crimes, as well as the lack of contrition from Suge, Pipe, and their cohorts, may turn off some readers, but Green's insights into a culture unavailable to most readers are invaluable. As the author writes, "just north of my Manhattan apartment was a world as dangerous as any I had experienced as a journalist reporting in the favelas of Brazil, the garrisons of Kingston, Jamaica, or the killing fields of Colombia."A disturbing yet necessary, significant book by a journalist willing to place himself in danger.