Life Sentence by Mark Bowden

Author:Mark Bowden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

8

We Hunting

YGG Tay in a Baltimore recording studio in 2017. © The Baltimore Sun

I lived for the power surge of playing God, having the power of life and death in my hands. Nothing I knew of could compare with riding in a car with three other homeboys with guns, knowing that they were as deadly and courageous as I was.

—Sanyika Shakur, Monster

Three days after nineteen-year-old Markee Brown testified before a federal grand jury, his charred body was found in a North Baltimore cellar. It was April 19, 2016. He had a bullet hole in his throat, the mark of the snitch, and he had been set on fire, which had become something of a TTG signature.

There it was in a new video by the gang’s troubadour, YGG Tay (Davante Harrison), this one called “War.” Over the chanted chorus, “We want war wit’ ’em,” a black Chevy Tahoe pulls up in front of a country house. As Harrison struts and raps, a man is carried out the front door, bound hand and foot with a bloody sack over his head. “Nigga disrespect the gang / Now I want him now,” he sings, as the victim is tied to a chair in a field and then doused with gasoline. Harrison casually lights a cigarette. His glam female companion delicately takes the match in her manicured fingers and drops it into the gasoline. Immolation as a fashion statement.

Brown’s killing made the video seem more than a stylized fantasy. By now, Tana and Rell and the rest were killing routinely, without reflection. It could no longer be rationalized as self-defense. It was simply who they had become—a matter of, as Peanut King had put it, be that, or you ain’t.

It’s not that they thought they would get away with it. They knew by the spring of 2016 that the law was circling them, and for each body dropped, the list of their dangerous local enemies grew. But apparently the risk was exhilarating. They turned up their drill anthems loud, a soundtrack for their adventures. In the words of the rapper Blac Youngsta, one of Tana’s favorites:

I’ll forever be a gunna nigga

I’ll forever be a killer gunna.

I’ll forever carry blammers

I’ll forever, I’ll forever, I’ll forever

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