The Five Percenters: Good Guy or Bad Guy?
My experience with the Five Percenters -- also known as the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earth, or the Godbodys -- is a little different than most officers. It’s based on dealing with them in the streets of New York City, starting early in my career. In 1983, when I was a rookie police officer in the NYPD, I was assigned to a foot post in the Brookline Housing Projects in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. No one wanted that post because the area was overrun with drug dealers and gang members. The most violent gang there was a gang called the Five Percenters.
On my first day on the post, which turned out to be my last, the Sergeant (who made the mistake of leaving me alone on the post with no supervision and no partner to remind me to keep my nose clean) gave me a marked NYPD van because he didn’t want me walking in the projects. Being one of those rookies that never really paid attention to “staying out of trouble” or minding my own business, I tried to cover as much area as possible in my eight hour tour of duty. I paid SPECIAL attention to areas where the gangs were selling drugs and I came across a 22 year old Five Percenter gang member who was apparently engaged in that activity. He stood on the corner in the cold weather having brief conversations with other street people and always walked away every time a police car drove by. Every time I got close enough to get a good look at what he was doing, he would run into the projects and disappear among the scores -- and I mean scores -- of people hanging out. My reactions were leaning me toward chasing him into the projects but my instinct told me to use my brains and figure out a way to catch him when the odds were more in my favor.
With this in mind, I decided that if I told the Sergeant what I wanted to do he'd take me off the post and put me on a quieter assignment, so I drove to the closest foot post and picked up a young, impressionable rookie police officer with my same sense of adventure. I explained my plan to him. I wanted him to walk toward the drug spot and cause the dealer to run into the projects again but this time I would be coming through the walkway in the van at a high rate of speed.
As my plan unfolded, nighttime and colder weather had started to set in, and the scores of people hanging out seemed to diminish. We were ready to deploy our plan. As the other officer walked toward the drug dealer, he called me on the radio with a code so the Sgt wouldn't know what was going on. I moved into position and started coming from the back of the projects onto the sidewalk and, driving on the narrow walkways I came towards the front of the projects. Within a minute, the officer closed in on the dealer who ran like a bat out of hell into the projects. Fortunately, or unfortunately, for me, depending on how you look at it, the drug dealer was running so fast and looking back to see if the other officer was in pursuit that he ran right into the front of the marked NYPD van I was driving. Like most perps, he bounced off my fender, seemingly unhurt, tried to pick up the drugs he was holding, and attempted to run again. I jumped out of the van just as he was taking off and I mistakenly hit him with the driver's door and knocked him to the ground. He was dazed for a moment so I took advantage of the moment, turned him on his stomach and handcuffed him before he knew what was happening. As he woke up, he started fighting with me. With the help of the other officer who was just arriving to my aid, we dragged the drug dealer into the back of the van and gave him a fast ride toward the 69th Precinct.
On the way to the precinct, I dropped off the other rookie on his post. I then called the Sgt on the radio and informed him I had just made an arrest for drug possession and resisting arrest. I told him I had one prisoner in the van that I was transporting to the precinct before his (the Sgt's) arrival because of a hostile crowd gathering around me. The Sgt acknowledged my radio transmission and agreed to meet me at the Precinct. All the way to the precinct, about a 15 minute ride, the perp was yelling about the rough ride, from the pot-holed Brooklyn streets, and claiming that I intentionally ran him over with the van after my partner chased him toward me
As I arrived to the precinct, I saw, standing in front, the Sergeant and his driver, another rookie police officer who was making a ‘throat cutting’ sign to me behind the Sgt’s back.
“I told you not to get involved out there! What the hell happened?” the Sergeant shouted.
Not planning for the Sgt to arrive at the precinct before me left no time to come up with a good explanation so I left it up to my perp in the back of the van who was shouting to get the Sergeant’s attention.
“He hit me with the van, Sarge!” screamed the gang member strapped into the seatbelt and handcuffed with his hands behind his back.
The Sergeant’s look turned from anger to bewilderment. He walked closer to the van to hear the prisoner’s shouts.
“He hit me with the van, then hit me with the door, and he planted those drugs on me! I am a Five Percenter. I don’t sell drugs. Ask his partner who chased me. He’ll tell you this cop is crazy. He ran me over! He ran me over!”
The Sergeant’s look seemed to add a slight smirk and then he asked me if I recovered any drugs. I said yes and pulled the bags of heroin out of my pocket to show the sergeant. I thought he didn’t believe me. I was worried. I felt he believed my prisoner over me.
As the Sergeant examined the drugs, he noticed that each of the twenty, small, glassine envelopes had the same number stamped on each package in black ink. The symbol was the number seven. The Five Percenter gang and the number seven didn’t make much sense to me. I was a rookie and I didn’t have any experience with such things yet. The Sergeant started to laugh which made me confused. Meanwhile, the prisoner in the van kept yelling I am a Five Percenter, I don’t tell lies and I don’t sell drugs.
The Sergeant walked toward the open side door of the van and got right in the face of the prisoner. He held up one of the glassine envelopes showing the prisoner the stamp on the side of the package then looked into the eyes of the prisoner and in a serious, frightening voice, said “You are definitely a Five Percenter but your ninety five percent full of shit like the rest of your gang!” The Sergeant backed away from the prisoner who now looked like he just lost his best friend. “Book him, Savelli”, the sergeant said to me. “Good collar! This guy, and everyone in his gang, is a bunch of lying scumbag criminals.”
Throughout my career, every contact with the Five Percenters revolved around criminal activity. In 1996, the year I created NYPD’s CAGE (Citywide Anti Gang Enforcement) Unit, my detectives developed information on a sophisticated drug dealing gang operating out of a bar in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. It involved the sale of cocaine, crack, marijuana and guns. An informant heard the gang was involved in murders and assaults bit he didn’t know what they called themselves. We placed the bar under observation for several days while our informants made a few drug purchases. During this investigation, our informants and undercover officers were able to identify the gang. The gang called themselves G.C.D. which signified God Cipher Divine, a term referring to the order of life for none other than the Five Percent Nation. The members were all in their forties and fifties in age and were recent prison releases. After compiling enough information about the gang, we were able to obtain a search warrant for the bar and a safe house located around the corner.
On the day we were going to execute the search warrants, we established surveillance on both locations and awaited the arrival of our gang members. We utilized informants and undercover officers to establish that all our identified gang members were on the premises and that they were engaged in selling drugs. Two hours into the surveillance, I decided to notify the teams to execute the search warrants and arrest the gang. Within minutes, we had made entry into the bar and the safe house. We arrested nineteen members of the gang. We seized drugs, guns, money and a few t-shirts with the Five Percenter’s logo, an eight pointed design with the number 7 in the center.
The moral of the story, I have never met a Five Percenter that was not a criminal and I never met a person who became a Five Percenter who wasn’t a criminal first. Our jails and prisons are filled with them.
