The Underworld Podcast - Crack, Chaos, and Cartels: Rayful Edmond’s Empire

Episode Date: July 29, 2025

In the 1980's, Rayful Edmond rose to infamy as Washington D.C.’s most notorious crack kingpin, building a multimillion-dollar empire by the age of 19. At the height of his reign, D.C. became the murder capital of America, with crack cocaine fueling a deadly wave of violence and addiction. Edmond's lavish lifestyle and ruthless control of the streets made him a legend, and a target. He was arrested and imprisoned for life before the age of 25, but his story didn’t end behind bars. In prison, Edmond secretly partnered with the sons of Colombian drug queenpin Griselda Blanco, helping move even more cocaine into the U.S. through direct Medellín Cartel connections. His continued trafficking from prison shocked authorities and cemented his place as one of America's most infamous drug lords. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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And you at least get some of your dignity money back. Someone on Deepop wants what you've got. Start selling now. Deepop where taste recognizes taste. Just after dawn on a Sunday, November, 1988, Interstate 44 near Springfield, Missouri. Jack McMullen, a Missouri state trooper, notices a van going a bit above the speed limit. Usually not the sort of thing that gets a highway copse motor running, but this is the late 80s. The cocaine industry, fueled by the recent emergence of crack, is blowing up.

And this area, this stretch of highway, is a prime transport route for couriers moving weight between West Coast importers and East Coast drug dealers. McMullen knows the signs. He's not new to this. Driver with a California license, van registered in East St. Louis, that warrants a search. And the search turns up, under a mattress, 1,100 pounds of Coke, all in bricks stamped with a scorpion, the logo of Columbia's powerful and notorious Cali cartel. The drugs are going to lead back to Los Angeles and a couple of heavyweights. One, a Colombian expat known for his connection to the cartel, and another, a high-level Crip gang member and a notorious Coke broker.

But we'll get to them in a bit. This is the second largest seizure of cocaine ever in the U.S. at that point. And what's interesting is not just where it's coming from, but where it's going. It's destination. And that destination is Washington, D.C. The dealers in D.C., even the biggest ones, are not usually getting that pure Colombian stuff direct to them. Usually it's coming stepped on from Miami or New York in much smaller shipments. This is different, though, and it doesn't bode well for D.C.

In 1988, the city is fast becoming America's murder capital, not just its official capital. It's the height of a crack epidemic that's also a murder epidemic, as gangs wage war for control of crucial blocks and an unprepared and overwhelmed police force can do little to stop it. That cocaine, too, is headed specifically for one man, a man who police estimate controls 30% of D.C.'s cocaine and crack trade, but who himself would later tell an incident. interviewer that he had controlled 60% of it, of the entire city, a man who many in DC see as the guy who brought crack to their city, or at least ushered in the crack era, who became so notorious that even 30 years later, his name still rings down in the streets. When he goes down, which isn't much later than this van bust, the entire country will be fascinated by the trial of the drug lord dubbed the $300 million man by 60 minutes, who had 150 dealers working for him and who's crew was suspected of at least 30 murders. Throughout the course of his dealing career, he'll do business with both the Cali cartel and the Medellian cartel, including the sons of the infamous Griselda Blanco,

cocaine queenpin of Miami. Law enforcement, scared that something violent might happen during his trial, elect to keep him and his crew detained at the Quantical Military Prison 40 miles away in Virginia instead of D.C. jails and fly them to and from the court every day in helicopter. That man is Rayful Edmund III. And the crazy thing is, he's only 23 years old at the time of that busted Missouri, and only 24 when he's brought to trial the following year in a case that became perhaps the most symbolic of the crack era.

Edmund is nothing if not a business savant. An assistant U.S. attorney once said of him, quote, he could remember deals, transactions, you know, to the penny. Just think of what he could have done legitimately. And the craziest thing about Raeful Edmund, he's going to become an even bigger dealer after he's locked up in a maximum security prison. And then, one of the FBI's most notorious snitches. This is the Underworld podcast. Welcome back to the Underworld podcast, a show that dives into the murky world of international organized crime,

brought to you by two journalists who have reported on this stuff all over the globe. myself Danny Gold and my colleague, Sean Williams, who is in New Zealand. Every week, we trade off hosting duties and bring you a story about, you know, Russian mafias, cartels, drug lords, fun things like that. And as always, bonus episodes and interviews are up at patreon.com slash an underworld podcast. You can sign up on Spotify or iTunes for the low, low price of $5 a month. Email us tips at the underworld podcast at gmail.com. Shout out to Alex Epperly, who actually emailed about this episode and the good guys at

Theorist Podcast Studio. videos, theorist podcast studios, or letting us use their facilities today. Underwallpod.com for merch, you know, the usual, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, the blah, blah, blah. I'm going to keep seeding this, but if anyone wants us to do something together live in New York, I'm going to be there in November. I'm just going to keep pushing this until Daddy finally relents, because it's going to be my 40th birthday, man.

So you kind of owe me, I think. You've got to do it. So just spam us if you want to live a live live show. Saddest 40th birthday I've ever heard. I just wonder if anyone's interested in this, by the way, I realized this morning, this is how a story gets made in my world, by the way. This is like, I'm in the middle of a story, and this is like, this is what that looks like. It's like a million different index cards with a load of shit on them.

And that is why I currently feel like a psychopath every day. But anyway, yeah, I was the show. Oh, yeah, hold on. I got, um, dude, I was, uh, I have a friend and associate of the show, I think, who I've mentioned. before who got himself to some trouble. You know, had the fed, someone I've warned constantly to stop posting,

got himself into a situation, kept posting, and then I sent him a photo because I found the old t-shirt that we sell for merch right here, you know? It's such a cool t-shirt, man. It's a great t-shirt, go buy those. But I sent him a picture and was like,

dude, how many times do I have to tell you? And then he ordered one. So hopefully he's going to slow down with the posting. Yeah, just don't post, guys. It's not, if you're living that kind of life, it's not worth it. But yeah, let's get into it, man. September 5th, 1989, George H.W. Bush famously the same year he took office, I think in his first emergency address directly to the country from the Oval Office,

gave a press conference on crack. Quote, this is the first time since taking the oath of office that I felt an issue was so important, so threatening that it warranted talking directly with you, the American people. This is crack cocaine. He held up like a little piece of crack. Seased a few days ago by drug enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House. As the camera kind of zooms in to show the crack. It's as innocent looking as candy, but it's turning our cities into battle zones.

And I think not as cool as the interview Hunter Biden just gave where he talks about how to make crack. I don't know if anyone saw that, but that's good advice. But I think a lot of attention was paid to how bad and bloody the crack era and sort of crack wars were. in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami, even though Miami, I guess, was more cocaine wars. But Washington, D.C., around like 1988, was, I think, one of the most, if not the most violent cities in America. And it got so bad that you had congressmen, senators, even the president giving statements about how dire the situation was, like blocks from the White House.

And especially with it as the nation's capital, it kind of was this symbol of how bad drug violence had gotten. It was just like a gnarly city at the time. I mean, famously, it's mayor smoke crack, Marion Barry, and he got caught by FBI surveillance, smoking crack in a hotel room after an ex-girlfriend set him up. And he famously uttered the line, bitch set me up right when he got caught,

which, you know, fair, like she did, she set him up. Still, though, I think the Toronto mayor, right? Rob Ford. He was, like, smoking crack in the peas with, like, Somalian gang members, I think bloods. Like, that was, I mean, that was, that was, and there's videos up it. And he saw, he zooted out, man.

Yeah. Yeah, that was a good. RAP, Rob Ford. I think he died like 10 years ago, but we should actually do a, we should actually do a show on him. That was crazy, man, when that came out. Also, probably maybe the largest man with a crack addiction in human history. They loved it, man. He was up there.

Like, he, he was familiar. You know, like, it wasn't his first time when they had that video. And he was just, like, riffing, like one of your friends, man. It was a. Maybe we need to get Hunter Biden on the show. Why not? I mean, he gives a good interview, you know? He really does.

But, yeah, D.C., this is the height of any crack area depiction you've ever had in your head. It's being torn apart by the drug violence, the corruption, and a complete breakdown of public trust. By 1988, the city's homicide rate reaches 369 murders, and it keeps climbing, which doesn't sound like a lot, but it's a city of only 600,000 people. In 1990, it has the highest per capita murder rate in America. and in 1991, Washington hits its bloody peak with 479 homicides. It's a war zone. Police are going to later admit that they basically lost complete control of certain neighborhoods,

like a lot of neighborhoods. Says a Washington Post Crime Reporter from Los Angeles, who moved to D.C. and later wrote a book about being a crack addict while covering the crack epidemic in D.C., quote, the drug dealers here on S Street did not seem to care at all about anybody watching them. Whereas in Los Angeles, the drug markets where I made my market, where I made my purchases were controlled by Central American gangsters, and they at least bothered to look over their shoulders to see if there were any LAPD,

black and whites nearby. Yes, good gonzo. I mean, journalists addicted to drugs while reporting on drugs is a fine tradition, not just from me. It's like, I don't know, I had a friend who was, well, an acquaintance, let's say, who was addicted to smack while reporting on the city of London back in the day. And there's a bunch of other guys in the UK, like Will Self, Bernie Hoskins, John Crace. I don't know, maybe they're saying to it.

I've got these index cards to turn into something legible. Maybe I need to get doing something different. I think a lot depends on how you classify the word addict. Yeah. In that regard, just saying. It's a one-off. You can do one-offs with heroin, right?

It's easy. Sure. You know, if current members of the Washington Post were crack addicts, it would explain a whole lot. Well done. Dale, give me the, but um, after that. That's some good lounge lizard humor right there.

Seriously, though, I mean, I've talked about, like, you know, the reporting that I've done on the ground in, like, in Kensington, North Philadelphia, in places like North St. Louis. But I think it's really hard to grasp for people, myself too, even though I was alive at the time, but those under 30, like, how devastating the crack error really was in these neighborhoods, not just like the addicts, but the violence that came with it. Here's a D.C. police officer, again, speaking to the Washington Post, quote, We had cases where guys would shoot somebody, ambulance would come pick them up.

They'd follow the ambulance. And if the guy was still alive, they run up to the ambulance and they start shooting the guy on the stretcher. Jesus Christ, that's like, well, Haiti levels of violence is nuts. Yeah, I mean, there was a sense of lawlessness. And a lot of people attribute all of this in D.C. Or at least point to one man as the guy who brought on the onslaught of that crack epidemic in their city. And that's Rayful Edmund. who was actually locked up pretty much for good by the time he, like before he even turned 25,

just to show you how, how quick his reign was. But Rayful Edmund III is born in D.C. on November 26, 1964. That means two other sets of parents called their kid, Rayful. I kind of like the name, you know? Rayful. Rayful. Yeah, I don't know. He grows up in Northeast D.C. in a pretty middle-class home, like his mom,

Bootsie, she works for the government in the Department of Health and Human Services. his dad is a government employee as well. She had told Diane Sawyer she was making 40K a year, which I mean, you know, in the mid-70s in D.C., it's not bad, right? But both his parents also allegedly deal drugs on the side, which we'll get into in a minute. He's got six siblings and he grows up in a house with lots of relatives, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, like a multi-generational home crowded.

He's the baby brother of the family, and he's spoiled by his parents. He grows up going to church, playing basketball to local courts, you know, normal things like that. His mom, though, she flips diet pills on the side, which I assume are like prescription amphetamies, right? Yeah. And his dad allegedly had ties to some heroin dealers

and might have sold some blow. From a young age, he watches his parents bag up the stuff. He watches them make money, and he's soon carrying cash for his mom and collecting money for his dad at age nine. You know, start your kids young at what you want them to do, like apprenticing, like a guilt. Like that's really, that's the move.

That's how they learn. He also grows up in a neighborhood where drug dealers are ever present and they're getting money. In the 70s, it's a lot of heroin. In the 80s, the early 80s especially, you're seeing a lot of cocaine. And there's a lot of money to be made. And the people that are making them money, they're not shy about flashing it. Still, he's a popular kid in school.

He's talented. He does well, gets good grades. Teachers like him. They say he was sharp and motivated and good at math, which is a little foreshadding right there. He's also like a seriously good ball player. He wins most popular and best dressed in high school. just like a young Sean Williams did at whatever Hogwarts-ass school that he went to.

Nice. Do you want to know which year my school was founded? I don't know. 1276. Who knows? Whoa, you got the last bit right. It was 1576. I mean a couple hundred years off, but I figured it was something like that. And it was founded by a guy named Death, but he changed his name to Dath, which is, I don't know. I don't know what to make of that, but yeah, it's so right. All right. That's good. You wearing your glasses from your bad era, too. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Yeah. And I, you know, I think we're going to have a lot of new listeners this episode, but I wear sunglasses indoors. I know guys, but there's bright lights. I got to read off a screen. It looks funny. I know people get really mad about it, but there's more important things to focus your energy on. Yeah. Don't look at this spot that I got, which is making me not shave as well, but just focus on something else in the background on there. So anyway, despite the early skill set development, he ends up going to college for a bit. I think one semester at the University of D.C. gets a job. as a cook before he becomes the chef and does actually get left up north.

But anyway, the money is not coming in. He's seeing all this fast money getting made around him, and he decides he actually needs to get into game seriously. We're talking like early to mid-80s, I think here, maybe like 82, 83. Hannah McKinney, who wrote a chapter about Edmund in an academic book or a white paper, I couldn't tell which, says Edmund's dad provided his first kilo to start selling. Another source I saw says a local kingpin named Cornelie Jones takes Edmunds, takes Edmund under his wing and starts teaching him the ins and outs.

And Edmund is a prodigy of sorts. He gets his own strip in the neighborhood, starts expanding. He gets kids to service lookouts. He starts employing some family members and all that, and he's making money. By the start of the mid-80s, 84-85, he's one of the biggest dealers in the city at only 19 years old. He's setting up shifts for his workers. They're doing like three a days, eight hours per week. He's got a photographic memory for numbers, for business, insanely detailed, a great leader,

smart and there's this amateur documentary about him. One street dude tells the camera that he was a superstar already just coming out of the 12th grade. It's actually refreshing to that in this day and I used to hear about a guy who's mandating a sort of like eight hour workday. It's good. I like it. He provided benefits too, which we'll get to. You know, the real deal guys treat stuff like a corporation and they make they make money. I mean, they also murder a lot of people, but still. Oh, don't they all, Danny? Yeah, yeah. But in around 1985, 1986,

everything changes. Because that's when Rayful admin, the third, discovers crack. And that's going to change the game. It's impossible to verify this. And we've talked about it before,

like the origins of crack. And who brought it where, right? There's a story of the Dominicans and Washington Heights, Neat, inventing it. There's also a story

about crack first being cooked in the Bahamas and the sort of vicious Jamaican possees who emerged in the late 70s and 80s, bringing it to the U.S. and spreading it all across the country.

Which the second part is definitely true, and we'll talk about that more in a bit. But all that is to say that there is a lot of lore. And the lore for Rafael Edmund is that he's the person who brought crack to D.C. and popularized it. We do know at the very least, he's going to go on to develop the largest crack dealing organization in Washington, D.C. in the 80s, maybe ever. He monopolizes the drug trade in a way that no one else had ever seen.

He starts raking in the dough. But the big change, the thing that's really going to change, the game for him. Happens one night in 1987 in Las Vegas. April 6th, 1987, to be precise. That's the night of the marvelous Marvin Hagler for a Sugar Ray Robinson fight at Caesar's Palace, predicted it to be the fight of the year. It was an amazing fight that, oh my God, I love Marvin Hagler. He's just like kept coming forward, kept coming forward. It's like Margarito. Speaking of a box, I'm actually reading the fight by Norman Mailer, which I don't know, just wanted the reef of research.

which is pretty incredible stuff, although he just, like, kind of walks around Kinshasa, wondering if he hates all black people, which is not a vibe that would probably get you published these days. I just listen to a chapter where... We get to a top podcast, though. Yeah, he would have been. He would have been a number one influencer.

I just listened to a chapter where he just basically talks about pooing his pants because he doesn't like toilets. That's a whole chapter. I mean, the 60s, man. It's just amazing. 70s? I don't know. It's just a better time.

So anyway, that's the night that he meets, that's the night that Rayful Alamins meets Melvin. And Melvin is a Crip in Los Angeles. He's high ranking and he's also got connections. The kind of connections that go right to the Cali cartel in Columbia. I mean, we've done an episode on Cali, but for those who don't know, hey, go back and this another episode, it's really good. But they were Pablo Escobar's main competition, more powerful at times, bigger, and they

controlled a significant amount of all the cocaine in the world. So Butler, his connection is through another young drug. Lord in Los Angeles, a guy by the name of Bo Bennett. Bennett had stumbled on the good fortune of being friendly with a Colombian who moved to L.A. and represented the Cali cartel's interest there. Or if not, he was well-connected enough to the higher-ups. There's lots of names here, but follow me. It'll be over quick.

Bennett befriends this Colombian, a guy by the name of Mario Villabona, whose contact in Cali goes by Oscar. So you have Melvin Butler connected to Bennett, who works with a Colombian in Los Angeles named Villabona, who takes orders from Cali, Cartel, Higher Up, called Oscar. Here's Time magazine in 1990, breaking it down, and this is fascinating, honestly. Benet's good fortune began when Oscar instructed Villabona to develop a market for crack in ghetto areas. It was a bold but necessary business decision. By the mid-1980s, the price of powder cocaine had fallen, in part because sales to affluent

whites had peaked. Crack, the tiny smokable rock, could be immensely profitable if it could be moved in huge quantities. Blacks were attempting new market. Villabona somehow selected Bennett to become the Cali Group's first connection with black street gangs in the U.S. with Villabona, he swiftly built an empire that by 1988 was moving one ton of cocaine a week and pulling in gross income of up to $4 million a month. And this team in L.A., it puts crack on the map in South Central and Los Angeles, according to that time article and law enforcement, which is just kind of wild. Like, I never knew that

before. Yeah, I'm guessing like four mil a month, almost 40 years ago, what, five, six times that now, at least. It's probably more, right? Yeah, yeah, I think that's just starting. I mean, they were raking in hundreds of millions dollars a year for the short time period that at last. And this is also, this is right around the time the Florida smuggling routes are getting pounded by the feds. So Mexico to Southern California is becoming a much, much bigger market. L.A. was becoming what the feds called the New Miami, and they estimated that 5,000 Colombians working for Cali and Medellini. had moved there, which to my ear sounds got to be exaggerated, right?

But they were definitely present in numbers, and they were looking to connect with high-ranking members of the Bloods and Crips to set up distribution. So back to this fateful night in Las Vegas. Edmund used to fly out to Vegas all the time. You know, big-time boxing matches, always drew an audience of like mafiosos and big-time drug dealers, gambling, all that. And he meets Melvin Butler either at the fight or later that night at a nightclub in the Hilton Hotel. My assumption is they each kind of like, you know, recognize who the other is or what they do,

and they agree to meet up the next day to play some ball at a local YMCA. And it's there that they talk shop and strike up a deal. Ray's asking him for a couple small stripments, maybe five keys, to see what's going on. They have no contact for two months. Remember, even though Butler is like a big-time crypt, he's just a broker, right? He doesn't have the direct connections. Rayful calls him back to check up on whether he could pull it off. He says he's not quite ready, but he tells him to come out to a party

in Cali. Whatever happens there, it must have worked out with Bennett, because by January 1988, there are big trips happening with 200 kilos shipments moving to DC. Interestingly, Edmund never even meets Villabona, the Colombian Connect in LA. Everything is through Butler, though I think he does come out to LA and party with Bennett, I believe. Yeah, that's pretty much how we started this podcast, wasn't it? You just asked me to play some ball, and then we kind of took it from there. So, like, just to kind of rewind it a bit, The Bloods and the Crips are dishing the stuff. They're like the guys dishing the stuff out on the streets.

And then the Cali Cartel are getting it out of Columbia. And it's the cartel who are sort of like placing their guys in the States to get it from the jungle to the streets, right? Or are there any other kind of middlemen playing that game? I assume there's other middlemen. I mean, if it's going through LA, it's going through Mexico already. But I assume there are other middlemen whose job it is just to get it over the border. but yeah yeah i mean i didn't realize it was such a i knew they they worked with some of these gangs i didn't realize it was such a concentrated effort and it could be be you know um time magazine

being hyperbolic i don't put that past them but uh it is kind of fascinating how how you know they were able to connect to the street gangs right there and all of course you know there's all every drug dealer a rapper names itself after or shouts out whether it's bmf or or um you know uh rick raw the real freeway rick raw you know they all had these connections some But this just seems like the beginning, like a start of it, you know. It's interesting. And the thing to understand about D.C., right, it was at this weird part of the distribution chain, right? It was never a destination for top quality stuff.

I mean, the local dealers did not have the straight from Columbia connection. They would go to New York or Miami and just kind of scavenged together a couple of kilos at a time. So, Rayful setting up this stuff that's directly connected, it's unheard of, right? When they're finally busted, you know, the bricks that were heading to, uh, to Rayful from LA, they're going to test at like 93% purity. At Edmund's stuff that he sells on the street, where it's usually 20 to 30% pure after being cut and chopped up, it's going to come back higher than 50%, which is unheard of and might explain why he dominates the market.

Edmund at one point is buying a quarter of all the Coke Villabona is bringing in. He's paying 17,500 key. The Labona would get it from Cali for 9 to 10 a key, and he would sell it at only a 5% market, you know, markup to Bennett, who then says, For as low as 13 to some people, which is wild. And I mean, very nice of Villabona, to be honest with you. Yeah. You know?

With the price that he was paying, Edmund, after cutting it, he's making 70K cash on it. And that is a lot of money. He's getting massive shipments every two or three weeks. And he's sending back couriers with millions constantly to L.A. Edmund also, he didn't work on consignment, right? He just paid these guys in advance always. He trusted Bennett. He trusted Butler.

They'd go to L.A., he'd party with Benin & Butler. They'd go on big shopping sprees on a more day or drive, and those guys would come to D.C. and party with Edmund there, and everyone would just go to Georgetown and spend $60,000 on all the boutiques there. The shipments, which I mentioned are as large as 200 keys. They're driven across the country in rented vans or trucks, and they're usually moving vans or trucks, right? So as not to arouse suspicion, they have license plates that are out of state, and they actually change vehicles in every state. Sometimes there's smaller shipments of up to 20 keys that people just kind of flew with, like in luggage. Remember, there's no metal detectors then, I think, right?

No metal detectors back then. So it was very easy to move stuff if you were smart about it over airplanes. Here's the Washington Post describing Edmonds operation, quote, operating near the strip from a house on M Street owned by his grandmother, Edmund 24 is alleged to have presided over a local processing and marketing system that involved a virtual army of workers in his retail operation. He also allegedly dealt with dozens of other. smaller dealers and his wholesale cocaine business.

From the time the drugs were delivered to Edmund from suppliers on the West Coast, they were moved to at least four separate locations before being turned over to the street sellers, who could make up to $7,000 a week, hawking the plastic bags at an expanding number of open-air city drug markets, according to court affidavits. The cocaine had to be cut, packaged, stored, and then distributed by lieutenants, responsible for collecting the cash and supervising the street sellers. So I don't know much about crack, although fun fact, it was technically the first class A drug I ever took in my life. That is a fun fact.

Kind of story, yeah. I think I was 15 or 16. It was really weird evening. Anyway, are there big problems with ODs on crack? Or is it like the opioid situation now, or is it more the associated crime like you mentioned up the show? I mean, people OD and they're hardstop and things like that. but it wasn't like fentany, you know, in terms of like, like, the massive amounts of ODs. I think a big part of it too was like the people themselves.

The dealer's fighting over territory for sure. And then also the people themselves getting very desperate and like frank and stuff like that. Whereas, you know, fentanyl is a downer, people not out as opposed to, you know. Yeah, I think like, Sean, if you were going to fight a crackhead or someone on fentanyl, I think you'd rather choose the person on fentanyl. Okay, good. Yeah, that's a good way I put it in it. Yeah, yeah.

That's why you wait around the incident, right? We just try to beat everyone up. Just the name is for my new YouTube channel where I just go stream just the worst things that you made. Anyway. Many followers. Yeah. We'd probably be 10 times better than this and that was actually what we did.

Rayful Edmund is making money handover fix, right? He's treating his employees right to. He's sending them on all expenses paid trips to the Super Bowl, boxing matches, legal coverage, benefits, And if you thought he was a presence in the neighborhood before, a star, now it's even crazier. And yes, Sean, they do call him a Robin Hood. Quote, yet back in Edmund's home neighborhoods, many residents saw the drug boss as a Robin Hood-esque figure. He passed out free turkeys on holidays, sponsored youth sport teams, and randomly tossed cash to crowds.

Burnishing his image as both self-indulgent but also invested in his community, quote, writes a blog called The Ghost of DC. Wow, what a line. I mean, a couple of turkeys in a little league sponsor is pretty small potatoes to get the Robin Hood status. There's other people building entire cities that we've covered on this, but I don't know, man. I mean, he would go, you know, in the hood and a limousine passing a hundred dollar bills out to the neighborhood kids whenever he saw them and stuff like that. But, you know, he had the limo, the benzes, the porches, the jaguars, the custom silk suits, the diamonds, the Rolex, all that sort of stuff. And cruising around in like the back of a limo is pretty, you know, pretty sick, kind of like that old Chappelleau. sketch. I'll take your word for a bit. But a later segment about him on 60 Minutes begins,

quote, walk down any street in northeast Washington and people will tell you here, he was the reigning king. He was a man to be admired and imitated. On the other side of that, here's a quote from an old timer reminiscing about him in a 2019 article from the Washington Post, quote, he'd come on the street and throw little bags of drugs in the air and everyone, all the crackheads would scramble and pick them up. When I walked outside, I walked in the middle of the road, because all the sidewalks were so crowded with drug dealers and crackheads. And here's the Washingtonian describing some stuff depicted in a book by Tony Lewis, who worked alongside Rayful Edmund but kind of did his own thing, but he was a top dealer too.

Tony Lewis Jr.'s father was the top associate of Edmund. He writes, in his excellent autobiography slug that he once saw Edmund win $10,000 at craps and throw it in the air so people in the neighborhood could pick up whatever they could. In D.C. Lewis writes, kids knew more about Rayful than they did about Martin Luther King Jr. He'd make sure neighbors had turkeys on Thanksgiving. He bought meals for the homeless, cars for his top staff, and clothes for his friends. He sponsored a basketball team in the police athletic league called Clean Sweep,

the name of the police operation designed to get drug dealers off the streets. He owns dozens of cars, six properties, a bicycle shop, a clothing store. I mean, who explains this stuff to these kids, right? Like who, even setting up an LLC and doing the taxes for this podcast is super annoying. Yeah, but was he tax-compliant? That's what I want to know. they didn't get him on tax fraud, so maybe he was. He was.

There's also an infamous story of Rafeu'll having a run-in with legendary college basketball coach John Thompson, who was ever, you know, Rafeel was always at the courtside at the Georgetown Hoyas games, which must have been like the Patrick Ewan era, I think. It was definitely way before Iverson. What happens is Thompson's coaching the Summer Olympics in Seoul, and then he gets back, and law enforcement officials inform him that some of his players are being seen around town with Edmund. Thompson puts word out on the street that he wants to talk with Edmond Thompson had also lectured his players to avoid drug dealers or places where they hung out

like a particular club where there had been a shooting and his son who was on the team tells him you might as well tell them not to go to church or the boys club because the drug dealers are everywhere that's how insane the crack error was oh okay wait so the main player

hanging out with him is Alonzo morning so post you win Thompson has his meeting what's that even I know him I think yeah I mean he's great Hornets dude sick team. Thompson had this meeting with Edmund,

and the story goes that he told him to stop hanging out with his players, that there would be consequences if he didn't. Edmund backs off and later says that Thompson was a cool guy. And Thompson wrote about it in his memoir, I think it only came out like five years ago, says that he was respectful and just asked him to make sure his players weren't caught up in anything illegal. That's a pretty boss move.

Also, I feel like half of these scenes have ripped straight from the wire. I mean, the wire ripped them straight from this, right? I can just see that. In Baltimore, yeah, similar by. But yeah, this is all shortly after the land bias incident, which, you know, he was a top draft pick in the NBA in 1986 and he OD'd on cocaine. I think he was free-bracing two days after being drafted by the Celtics and died, which is a wild story and sort of, you know, was a giant national scandal, especially during this heightened sort of drug war, drug epidemic situation. But like the sort of nightmare that you heard of someone doing something once and, like, ODing was that. but I think he had congenital heart problem that he had a general heart problem that he

should have looked that up. So the Thompson one too, I mean, that's a national news story as well after a nightline piece airs on the meeting. And Thompson admits to meeting with Rayful and gets some flag for it. And he says in response, quote, I don't understand this expression of amazement. We cannot close ourselves off from the whole of society. Anybody who experienced the land bias situation knows we cannot isolate ourselves, seal ourselves off from people. We better start confronting these problems. We better understand we're incorporated

with these problems. This isn't them or they. The people involved with the drugs and being killed are our children. It's not like somebody crawled out from some hole who is so different from us. Nice. Good work. It is a great speech and it kind of gives you a good feel for how crazy the crack King Penera really was. For DC, for Edmund, I mean, he is the man in DC, which is not supposed to stand for Dodge City. But it does because even though Rafeel is controlling 30% of the trade in the city by some accounts. 60% according to him later, like I said, there's others who want that territory.

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that really goes into the crack wars that theorizes why it was so violent that it wasn't just the money. It talks about how, unlike heroin, there were no organized crime, there was no organized crime merely in crack. It was easy for anyone to get involved, no top-down structure, quote,

with no overall hierarchy or command structure in post-order, turf wars broke out over the most lucrative spots. Dealers regularly ripped off customers and stole from one another, leading to frequent shootouts, and executions. Crack started a new breed of urban guerrilla,

members of a fierce, proliferating army that left the police badly outnumbered and outgunned. The article, like the main, are you drinking wine right now, dude? No, I'm drinking Diet Coke. I was going to say it's not fucking stout at 8 a.m. Yeah.

The article, like that New York Times Magazine article is actually about how the Jamaican possees moved it out of New York and the Miami into all over the U.S., which I guess is the other competing side of the Bloods Crip stories from L.A. and I'll let them take it from here. Soon, however, the drug began to move out

from these gateway cities and into the heartland. It would travel via a fearsome new set of traffickers, illegal immigrants from Jamaica, who would quickly and radically transform the way crack was distributed around the country. Now, we've gone into detail about this in our Jamaican posse episodes, I think. It was a two-part air, one of our best.

Yeah, great one of years ago, three or four years ago. But it's definitely worth to listen if that's something that you're interested in. The first episode is about the explosion of violence in Jamaica in the 70s, gangs backed by political parties and how some of those gangsters fled to the U.S., New York, Miami,

and got heavily involved in the cocaine and then crack trade. And in D.C., you know, crack was going for three to four times the prices as New York. So those posseys wise up and they start branching out from Miami and New York, setting up shop wherever, including D.C., and either clashing with the local heavyweights or just completely taking things over or clashing with each other.

Yeah, this does kind of set, I mean, it sounds similar to the stuff you said about Kensington and now. Is that also fall over by a small cruise, the kind of fentanyl crisis, or is there a big top-down kind of Godfather situation? I think there's a top-down situation with the cartels. I don't remember exactly what, you know, we toured it with a cop who works advice there. It's in the episode where we talk about Kensington, but I don't remember exactly. I mean, obviously people are going to fight and drug dealers are not the most responsible. People selling fentanyl.

But I think for the most part, it's top-down and they're more interested in making money at this point. And also, like, it's harder to get away, I think, with that. But, I mean, there are lots of shootouts in Philly. Did you see that one? If like, so, yeah, I mean, the honest answer is I don't know for sure, but I think it's definitely more top down and definitely less violent than the crack era. Definitely less violent than when the Jamaicans set up shop. Throughout its run in the mid to late 80s,

Edmund's crew is going to be suspected of being involved in at least 30 murders. I saw one source mentioned they'd be for the Jamaicans, and the Washington Post was talking about it in 1987, how the Jamaican policies were trying to take over in these. So it would make sense that Edmund and his crew went to war with them. And here's that post quote. A quarter gram of crack that sells for $10 in New York brings $25 here. Police say the possees control the crack market here and are trying to take over the district's active cocaine market.

No one knows what share of the market Jamaicans control. But it is the struggle for the cocaine market that has led to numerous shootings and an increasing number of homicides, police say. And here's an article from a few years later breaking down one of the wars the Raifle-Edwin crew fought. Trinidad's a neighbor to here. It's not the country. During the summer and fall of 1988, the guns got more use as rivals tried to invade Edmund's territory and other dealers balked that paying for cocaine supplies. Early June 13th, two of Edmonds' trust lieutenants, Leslie Wheeler and Anthony Thomas,

were killed in separate incidents on Orleans and Morden Places Northeast. Three days later, Ricky Raleigh, another of Edmonds' lieutenants, was gunned down as he sat in a car in the 600 block of I Street Northeast. Within a week, Brandon Terrell, leader, of the rival Trinidad Drug Gang was slain outside the Chapter 2 nightclub, allegedly on Edmund's order, sparking a gang war that has not subsided,

even with the arrest of Edmund and more than two dozen of his associates. At Edmund has bigger problems than just street wars. The feds are on him like clockwork. That van bus from the cold open happens in the fall of 88, and it's a big piece of the unraveling, though they've already been on him for something close to a year before that. And while he isn't connected right away to the van, it doesn't take long.

cops soon discovered that the driver is a suspected courier for Bennett, the LA heavyweight, and also is suspected of delivering to Edmund. The van is a car phone and they go through it and see, you know, phone calls to Bennett and Villabona, the Colombian. There's no encryption in those days like that. I don't think there is, right? Probably not. They get a wiretap up and they use that wiretop to make a multi-million dollar bust in Detroit of one of Villabona's lieutenants.

And a few days later, literally weeks, I think, since that car bust, Villabona is arrested in Malibu. Bennett's busted soon after. This is in November of 1988. Edmund's main supply chain is being completely dismantled. This is a pretty random question. Because it's not a state, right, D.C.

So what's the situation? Does law enforcement work differently there with like the feds and local cops and stuff? I think there was talk during this period of, obviously there's no state police. I think there was talk during this period of the feds taking over DC policing because they have a city police force. Right.

Things had gotten so bad that like on the hill, politicians were bringing up a sort of federal takeover of DC. Okay. Yeah, I can imagine that. It's pretty weird that DC, I don't know. I don't get how it kind of works, but yeah, it's pretty random. So yeah, at this time, the other guy in that trium bit that was not busted, Butler, he's the

crypt, he can keep the supply going a little bit, but not enough, and he gets busted soon enough. Edmund's wholesale business suffers. Other dealers start going elsewhere. He knows his time is soon going to be up and he starts consolidating, right, selling things off. There's other bus happening, people giving him up. a 48-year-old well-to-do white woman who he had been linked to, maybe even dated,

and who he supplied for her own business, she gets arrested, and she wears a wire on him and his family. And his mother's caught on that wire admitting her son deals drugs. In December, his brother-in-law gets caught in D.C., meaning a courier with 19 kilos. Edmund at this point, like he knows the doors are closing on him. He's selling off his real estate and expensive furniture. There's a big bust in L.A. People start talking as well. he's even informed of a secret indictment about to come down on him. The DEA wants to catch him hands on, but I mean, he's kind of too smart for that.

They're unable to do so in a timely enough fashion. And on April 15, 1989, Rafe Lenneman III, and 30 members of his crew are arrested, including, I think, like, 10 members of his family. Trial is an absolute madhouse. One of the defining ones of the Cracking Pen era. It's a gigantic media sensation, national headlines. Police think the admin crew is so dangerous. there's a chance they're going to try to jail break him,

so they move him and his top associates 40 minutes away to the Quantico Marine Base jail. They're flown to court every day by helicopter. Jurors' identities are kept hidden, the first anonymous jury in Washington, D.C. history, and they're kept behind bulletproof glass. An informant whose name is accidentally released, he's shot in the leg.

Another witness has their home firebombed. Some reports say a 17-year-old witness has killed, but I feel like that would have popped up more if it was true, so I can't verify that. The trial lasts 56 days. notably some friends and employees testify against Edmund, and he makes some pretty incredible arguments that are the kind of arguments you make if you were smoking crack, not selling it.

Here's the Washington Post again, quote. Edmund's main arguments for his innocence were twofold. First, he maintained that since he did not sell the children, he was not doing anything illegal. Those who were old enough, he said, could make their own decisions and buying drugs was their own choice. Second, he declared that he was never caught directly selling drugs so officials could not pin anything on him.

Clever. Which, I mean, caught a libertarian bent, but I don't think it's going to work in the 80s. 100 witnesses take the stand. He gets convicted and receives four life sentences. His mom gets 24 years. His brother gets 21 all the way down the line. So the thing is, you know, Rafeel is seen as the man, a powerful influence, a real deal hustler, Tony Montana type figure.

But much like Tony, his reign is short, right? The LA pipeline only lasts like 18 months. The whole organization was around for maybe four, five, six years. His career in life are over at 24. You know, you want to be Sosa and not Tony. Preach. A wise man once said. But Raffles's career, is it over?

John? Yeah, sure. Sounds over. No, it's not over. Stopped up to conclusions. He's actually about to move more weight than he ever did while on the outside. Oh, good. Okay, we've got a third act because, yeah, my mortgage is piling up.

So can we get some more ads in? Yeah, we need those watchouts. Edmund gets locked up in USP Lewisburg, which is a maximum security prison, where at first, he's held in isolation because of his notoriety with the trial being huge news and everything like that. But when he gets out, he starts hustling in prison. First, small time, right? He's having visitors and other inmates smuggling drugs and balloons in their mouths, probably

in other orvices, coke, heroin, the usual. It's all well and good, right? But there's power moves to be made. And Rayful Edmund is a natural. He's a savant. The thing is, there's other notoriety. drug lord type prisoners in Lewisburg at that time, like big time guys, accomplished, well connected. And two of them are Osvaldo Trujillo Blanco, nicknamed Chicky and his brother

Dixon Trujillo Blanco. Who are they? You might be asking. You might recognize the last name, right? They have the sons and lieutenants of the infamous queen pin in Miami during the city's cocaine cowboys era, Griselle de Blanco, who if you don't know, she's not only the namesake of the best rappers to come out of Buffalo, but she dominated the cocaine trade in South Florida in the 80s. You know, she was one of, like, Escobar's top operators in the U.S., and she was known for not only moving an insane amount of weight, but also being brutally violent. I think she pioneered the motorcycle drive-by with an Uzi and left the trail of dozens, if not hundreds of murders between Miami and Colombia. We actually did an episode on her a year back, I think, right when the Netflix series about her life starring Sophia Vergara came out. Yeah, I remember, I mean, I haven't seen it yet, but I remember thinking back then how could they possibly make a sympathetic character out of her?

because she seemed from the show that you put together a complete bloodthirsty psychopath. Wasn't she like dissolving people's bodies in bars and chopping them up and stuff like this? Yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. Like she was not a nice person, you know? Is it quite warm there? Yeah, it's hot, dude. You can't see I'm sweating? I cannot, no, no.

Okay. But the tale is that you just stuck a bottle on your neck, so now I know. So Griselda from a young age, she has experts in the game teaching her sons about distribution, selling, killing, you know, these guys, these kids are experts and they're connected direct to Columbia. They get introduced, Raifle and Chicky, and they click right away, you know, they start working together. And it's fairly simple in scope, right?

Chicky gets kilos from his family and people in Columbia. And they're going to get that Coke delivered to the people Rayful connects them with in D.C., the street king fans. Rayful is essentially like a power broker himself now. The D.C. dealers would pick up the drugs in Miami in New York, and the Colombians would send their people to D.C. to pick up the money. Rayful is getting 20, 30, 40 kilos shipped to his friends in D.C. And he later estimates he connected Chicky with 20 to 25 dealers there.

Chikki's actually paroled a year later after he had met Rayful, and he returns to his horse farm in Columbia to run things from there. So, Raifle becomes like the conference call king of a prison. He makes a collect call to a friend in D.C. who would then conference in a Colombian number, i.e. his cartel contact in Colombia. The guy's on the phone for hours every day from prison. He's talking in code. he's making like 60 calls in a five-hour period because of course you know you got to go back and

forth a lot when doing these sorts of deals yeah should have been a should have been a reporter or maybe not because he would have had to take about a million percent pay cut yeah a lot a lot less money i think but probably stayed out of jail more so the bureau prisons and the prison authorities they don't seem too bothered by it he's already in prison so you know what do they care he's making only like 5k 10k per deal but he's helping move more kilos than he ever did on the street i mean there's problems, of course. Some of Rayful's guys, they're not making good on their consignments. Chicky's getting pissed.

At one point, he's going to kill two of the DC dealers for failing to pay, but Rayful persuades him just to raise his prices, which makes me think he either must have really liked Rayful or he was like the most persuasive, charming guy of all time. Only a few months later, chicky's gunned down in the club in Colombia. One source said it had to do with the money issue stemming from the DC payments, not being made, but I think the consensus is it had to do with his mom's sort of beefs with pretty much everyone. With Chicky gone, other people in Colombia want to get the money from Ray that

chicky was owed from Ray's people in the street, and they are not feeling as lenient, which might explain why shortly after, Rayful becomes a government informant. Bonjour, compadre. It's the Priceline negotiator. How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget. The Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle,

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at Yamava. Celebrating its 40th anniversary. You win? Details at yamava.com must be 21-20. Please gamble responsibly. Monopoly is a trademark of Hasbro. Hasbro is not a sponsor of this promotion. See, in August of 1992, a CI informs on Rafeel and the Fed start listening in on his calls. Prison authorities might not have cared, and that's going to be a giant scandal when it gets out, but the Fed certainly do. Sometime in 1994, the feds approach Raifle with all this evidence, and he agrees to switch sides and act as an informant. Starting in 1995, he starts reaching out to his dealers again to let them know he's back in business.

Remember, you know, Chicky had died and he was his major connection. So, Rayful lies and says Chicky's brother Dixon, who had also been locked up with them, had taken his place. And immediately, five dealers take the bait, and Rayful goes to work. So what's the leverage here? Because he's already inside on four life counts.

I mean, what are they offering him, or just something to do, something to pass the time while he's behind bars? Well, he wanted to get a big reduction, you know, in his time, which probably maybe, you know, get life without parole, move to like 20 years to parole. But his main focus was getting his mom out of prison.

Right, right, right, okay. Which he was very, very intense on. And I think also he was probably fearful for his life if that stuff about like, you know, chickies guys wanted to go after people for not paying their money off. Over the next few years, he's going to help get 100 drug dealers convicted and solve two killings in the prison, as well as 20 cold case homicides in D.C. He becomes one of the most prolifics and niches of all time. There are some sources online, I think on like DJ Vlad episodes claiming he ratted on 300 people.

He secretly pleads guilty in 1996 to brokering those deals between the D.C. dealers and the Colombian cartels, the original ones, also as part of his deal for informing, like I said, he gets his mom out of prison that actually works. Here's that blog, Ghosts of D.C., quote, throughout the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Edmund aided authorities on unraveling cold case homicides, providing intelligence that led to dozens of drug trafficking arrests and offering insights into operations of Colombian cartels. He also contributed information to Department of Justice investigations that ultimately prompted major reform of the prison telephone system to crack down on inmates' external criminal activities. And once he's done informing, he hits the interview circuit, right? And his story of not only being the crack campaign of D.C., but also the corruption of like, sort of like completely lackadaisical enforcement in America's prisons that allows his second career, it shocks the country. Dan Rather calls him the Al Capone of cocaine. Eric Holder, the U.S. attorney at the time, calls him to debate. Ruth of crack.

These guys would have been like a great brain trust for podcast episode titles, for real. Yeah, the Neil Armstrong of meth, the Eddie Vedder of Vicodin. I don't know why. Why am I keep thinking of Eddie Vedder? Eddie Vedder is on my mind and I have no idea why. I don't even like Pro Jam. I got nothing for you, man. He does a charming interview with Diane Sawyer on 60 Minutes, actually, where he explains

the ins and outs of both sides of his career. Of course, he gets, you know, pretty serious death threats for all the snitching and a bounty on his head before he disappears into prison with sec. His name pops up again around 2019 when he's being considered for a reduced sentence due to all his cooperation. There's a couple of articles about his legacy and all that. One funny one in the Washington Post where they talked about how the streets used to be bloody as hell when Edmund operated there and now they're genderified as hell. And here's the part I like, quote, I've heard there were dead bodies literally on the street, he said as he walked his golden doodle, Obi-Wan Kenobi. Which is, I mean, that's just good.

That's just good stuff right there. But yeah, he actually died just this past December, 24, at a halfway house of Miami of heart disease, which, you know, Sean, it'll get you, man. Yeah. And here's a quote I like that. I just can't remember where I got it from. It was in my note somewhere.

I forgot to jot down where, so apologies on that. But Edmund is to Washington what John Gotti was to New York, an almost mythical figure whose fearless, flashy lifestyle, fascinated even those who condemned him and the way he amassed his whole. fortune. Just claim to quote yourself, man. We're already way more reliable than any other podcast. We can just live a little. That's true. That's true. Patreon.com slash anewel podcast for bonus episodes, guys. Thank you for tuning in. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom

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