Indeed, gangs in Boston have become a big business, a multimillion-dollar underclass enterprise. At the moment mega-mergers, buyouts, and friendly takeovers are being negotiated among the gangs. These alliances are being forged to leverage crews' manpower, as well as their drug-and-gun-buying power. State-of-the-art electronic devices are employed to facilitate the distribution and defense of the gangs' weed, coke, smack, or crack. The gangs' profits from those sweet street sales, police sources say, are now being funneled into legitimate businesses.
And law-enforcement sources say they believe the guy who epitomizes the sophisticated gang stance of the '90s, who wants to Milken the system, who has tried to wrap his ruthlessness in sharp suits and his dirty drug money in Roxbury storefronts, and who is positioning himself to become the CEO of Gangs, Incorporated, is that bodacious businessman about town, Mr. Darryl Whiting.
According to a number of sources, a battery of law-enforcement agencies is hot on Whiting's trail. But, though acknowledging that he is a former bad guy, Darryl Whiting insists he is a legitimate businessman and denies any involvement in criminal activity.
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Darryl Whiting & Company moved from New York to Boston in 1987. They didn't come to
root for the Red Sox. Police sources believe they relocated because the blue heat was on in the Baked Apple, and they wanted to extend the lines of their drug action.
Whiting and his crew hit town with all the subtlety of a South Bronx stabber. "When he first got here, he came in with a New York attitude," one copy says of Whiting. "A New York attitude is: 'I'll take what I want and I don't really give a shit.' "
It wasn't long, police sources say, before Whiting and his crumbum cabal were leaving their calling cards all over the Orchard Park (OP) housing project, in Roxbury. Police say Whiting preyed on young single women with children, offering them drugs and/or money -- $150 a day -- to use their apartments as a base for his drug-dealing operation. You could also tell one of Whiting's crack-dealing crash pads, says a cop, because there'd be no food in the fridge but a new set of living-room furniture. If a woman refused the treat, sources say, Whiting responded with a threat. The Reverend Bruce Wall, president of Bruce Wall Ministries and one of the few members of the community-at-large who seem to be aware of Whiting's alleged activities, says sources have told him about OP families who in the past few months have said they felt intimidated after refusing to let Whiting use their places as drug-distribution dens.
Darryl Whiting's first OP pad, sources say, was at 1124 Harrison Avenue. According to a source, he moved in with a woman who was a likely target: she had an alcohol problem, an alias, and a daughter with gonorrhea. When she was evicted, reportedly after the police found guns and drugs in her apartment, says the source, Whiting camped out with a neighbor of hers. "He's a big ladies' man, too," the source says of Whiting. After the second lady was evicted, says the source, Whiting slipped into another flat in the building. He also hopscotched to a place across the street from OP, at 1111 Harrison Avenue. In a series of safe houses, which later extended to domiciles in Fort Hill and Hyde Park, police sources say, Whiting stashed drugs, guns, money, and soldiers. He sheltered his troops in Boston when New York got cop crazy or until they found their own local digs, sources say, then packed them off to New York when the Hub heat got too intense.
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