How a Prison Gang Took Over Baltimore By Getting 4 Guards Pregnant

December 2022, just before dawn, federal agents stack up outside a Baltimore row house and breach the door. Inside, they’re not looking for a kingpin in the traditional sense. They’re not looking for a cartel boss or a street corner dealer. They’re looking for a rapper. His name is Davon Harrison.

 On streaming platforms, he goes by YGG Tay. His tracks pull millions of plays. His face is on flyers for shows up and down the East Coast. To the kids in his neighborhood, he’s proof that you can make it out. But, the federal indictment in the agent’s hands tells a different story. It says Davonte Harrison wasn’t just rapping about the life.

 He was running one. Not pulling triggers. Not standing on corners. Something quieter. And in many ways more dangerous. Harrison had money. Harrison had reach. And Harrison had a working relationship with one of the most violent prison gangs in American history, the Black Gorilla Family.  The way it worked was simple.

Harrison would point. The Black Gorilla Family would move. And the man they moved was David Warren. By the age of 24, Warren had been charged with attempted murder 10 separate times. 10. Every single charge had either been dropped or ended in acquittal. Baltimore’s own police commissioner once called him a trigger puller who didn’t belong on the streets.

And yet, there he was. Together, Harrison and Warren  are tied to six killings, 11 non-fatal shootings, a web of contracts and consignments and bodies that  stretches back nearly a decade.  The 26-year-old’s real name is Davonte Harrison. He was convicted of conspiracy to distribute fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, and crack cocaine, as well as being a felon in possession of a firearm.

 A federal indictment unsealed today charges six men associated with the gang with six murders, 11 shootings, and any number of attempted murders and robberies. And among those charged is Baltimore rapper YGG Tay, whose name is Davante Harrison. Harrison partnered more than a decade ago with a BGF member and began supplying heroin and cocaine to street-level drug shops in Baltimore City.

 And when a customer failed to pay his drug debt, prosecutors say Harrison supplied the BGF member with $10,000 and a gun with the which the BGF member used to shoot the man to death.  How does a major American city end up taken hostage by a prison gang? To answer that, you have to go back almost 3,000 miles and nearly 60 years. San Quentin State Prison, 1966.

  The Black Power movement is exploding across America. Inside one of the toughest cages in the country, three black inmates, George Jackson, George Big Jake Lewis, and W. L. Nolan start putting  something together. They didn’t think of themselves as gangsters. Not yet.  Of course, here in prison, we see the repression, the exploitation, the the victimization of uh lower class.

 Drawing on Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and the writings of Marx and Mao, they framed their new organization as a revolutionary movement of African-American prisoners. The mission, on paper, was ambitious to the point of absurd. Eradicate racism, protect the dignity of inmates, and one day overthrow the United States government itself.

 They called themselves the Black Guerrilla Family. They even wrote a manual, the Black Book, that taught new members how to transform  the criminal mind into a revolutionary mind. For a brief moment in a very specific corner of American history, it almost made sense. But, ideology has a short shelf life behind concrete walls.

 As the years rolled on, the politics quietly  burned off. What remained was the muscle. By 1979, a former BGF lawyer named Fay Stender, one of the people who had helped George Jackson become an international cause celeb, was sitting at home in Berkeley when a recently paroled BGF member named Edward Glenn Brooks walked in and shot her five times.

 He accused her of betraying Jackson. Stender survived, but only barely. Paralyzed from the waist down and in constant pain, she testified against Brooks, then traveled to Hong Kong, and ended her own life. 10 years later, on August 22nd, 1989, a 25-year-old BGF  foot soldier named Tyrone Robinson met Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, on a corner at 1456  9th Street in West Oakland and shot him three times in the head.

 Tensions between the Panthers  and the Gorilla Family have been simmering for almost 20 years. Robinson got 32 years. By the early 1990s, the Black Gorilla Family was already heading east. Maryland, early 1990s. The Gorilla Family started showing up in the state’s prison system, and right away, it’s different.

 The California original had at least tried to keep  a political face on things. The Maryland version dropped the pretense. No manifestos. No revolutionary speeches. Just a street gang operating in plain sight with West Baltimore as its main stronghold. To outsiders, Baltimore is the Inner Harbor, Camden Yards, the highway signs along I-95 to the people who actually live there is something else entirely.

 Block after block of boarded-up row houses, decaying schools, and a job market that walked away decades ago. By the time BGF arrived, the city was already bleeding. That was the opening, a crumbling local prison system, federal oversight that barely existed, corrupt guards, and a generation of young men who could see exactly two paths in front of them, and only one of them paid.

 Inside the gang, members called it Jamaa, family. But, the wildest thing the Black Gorilla Family ever did in Baltimore didn’t happen on the streets. It happened behind bars. The Baltimore City Detention Center sits in plain view of downtown. A brutalist hulk of concrete  that has held some of the worst offenders in the state for over a century.

 In 2009, a 25-year-old named Tavon White walked through his intake doors on an attempted murder  charge. He went by Bulldog. He had no formal authority, no rank, no resume. Within months, he was running the place. White understood something most inmates never figure out, that the real weak point in any prison isn’t the walls.

 It’s the people, and specifically, it’s the people who walk in every morning wearing a uniform. The Black Gorilla Family had a playbook for this, refined over years. Look for the guards who carried themselves  a certain way. The ones with low self-esteem, the ones with financial trouble, the ones lonely enough to be flattered by attention from a man behind glass.

 Build the relationship, make her feel chosen. Then, slowly ask for favors. The male guards were easier. You just paid them. A single inmate could put  three to five thousand dollars a week into the right officer’s pocket. The payment system was almost elegant. Inmates would have associates on the outside load money onto green.

money pack prepaid debit cards then text the 14 digit codes inside the walls from a cell. You could move thousands of dollars in seconds. White used the proceeds to buy himself a Mercedes-Benz, a BMW. On a slow month, he said, he still cleared over $15,000. He was incarcerated the entire time. The contraband itself came in any way the human body could carry it.

 Underwear, hair, places no one wanted to search and no one bothered to. One federal witness estimated that of the roughly 650 correctional officers at the jail, somewhere between 60 and 75% were involved  either in the smuggling, the relationships, or both. 95% of the inmates with work detail privileges  were BGF members acting as the gang’s internal couriers.

 Without them, the entire economy collapses. But the part that made national news wasn’t the cars or the cash or the cell  phones, it was the children. Tavon White had sexual relationships with at least four correctional officers. Jennifer Owens, 31. Katera Stevenson, 24. Chania Brooks, Tiffany Lender, 27. He fathered five children  with them. One of them with Owens twice.

Owens had Tavon tattooed on her neck. Stevenson had it inked on her wrist. Federal prosecutors would later write that those relationships weren’t reckless flings. They were the glue that held the operation together. Another BGF member, Jamar Anderson,    was involved with five separate guards on his own.

 On an intercepted phone call, White summed up the whole situation  in five words. This is my jail.  This is my jail. I make every final call in here.  The gang even had a name for the economy they had built, Jamenomics. They had a minister of finance to collect dues. They had a tipster network that warned them before every shakedown.

 In April 2013, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment naming 25  defendants, including 13 correctional officers. That November they added 14 more, bringing the total guard count to 27. By the time the dust settled, 44 people had been charged, 40 convicted, 24 of them officers. White himself flipped, testifying for five days against his own people.

 He took 12 years, running concurrent with everything else. The political damage spread fast. Governor Martin O’Malley, who had built his national profile on prison reform and was openly eyeing the 2016 presidential race, watched his credibility collapse on  live television.  The absurd situation described in the indictment took root  at least partly because of a bill of rights for correctional officers backed  by Governor O’Malley.

 The camera state, but out on the streets the bodies kept piling up. The same week federal prosecutors announced the second wave of guard indictments.    In November 2013, doors started coming down in East Baltimore. Cops and federal agents hit the Greenmount Corridor in coordinated raids targeting 48 alleged BGF members and associates.

Investigators tied that single  crew to at least 13 killings and 12 non-fatal shootings going back to 2005. One of those killings haunted the neighborhood more than the rest. Carlos Williams was a 50-year-old Comcast technician, husband, community activist, recovering addict who had spent years trying to pull other men out of the hole he climbed out of.

 On a Sunday morning before sunrise, he was walking to his work van on Boone Street when three men approached him. Police found him later, slumped behind the wheel with multiple gunshot wounds. Williams hadn’t crossed anyone. He hadn’t owed anyone. His mistake,    in the eyes of the Black Gorilla Family, was that he had been trying to open a drug rehabilitation  center in their territory.

 A recovery clinic threatens a corner the way a Walmart threatens a mom-and-pop store. So, they took him out.  Killed on the job early Sunday morning, leaving city police to search for his killer. 11 is reporter Carrie Cavanaugh is at city police headquarters with that story.  At this point though, it’s unclear whether his killers were waiting for him to leave for work or if he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 At this point, we suspect that the incident happened due to an attempted robbery, but we just don’t know without witnesses or suspects to tell us what we have.  take the shirt off his back, his wife, Lisa Williams, told reporters, and give it if that’s what it took to help somebody.

 Then she said something colder. She prayed his killers would never sleep again. The pattern repeated itself for years.  I feel angry that someone senselessly took my husband’s life this morning.  He would take the shirt off his back and give it if he if that’s what it took to help him.  Police have no suspects in Williams’ murder, but his wife has some words for whomever is responsible.

 Even though I’m angry, I pray that they do not rest, that they don’t get no sleep, that the God just every  June  2015, federal authorities indicted 14 more BGF members tied to two killings, two attempted  ones, and three fatal overdoses caused by the gang’s product. Their shops operated like franchises Pratt and Paca, Catherine, and Baltimore Lemon Street.

 Irvin Vincent was linked to three customer deaths in 2013 and 2014 from heroin, oxymorphine, and fentanyl. Timothy Michael Gray ordered hits on his own people, including a target known only as Gutter. By mid-2015, 118 BGF  members and associates had been charged in federal court since 2009. And somehow, the gang was still expanding.

Baltimore had a program designed to stop exactly  this kind of bloodshed. It was called Safe Streets. The idea, borrowed from a model that had worked in Chicago, was simple and almost beautiful in  its logic. Higher former gang members as violence interrupters, send them into the neighborhoods where they had credibility, and let them diffuse conflicts before someone reached for a gun.

 People who once caused a problem now solving it. On paper, it made sense. The Black Gorilla Family read the same program and saw something else entirely. They saw a way to dress  up the strategy was patient. Get your highest-ranking members on the payroll of a city-funded anti-violence nonprofit, and suddenly the same men running drug shops are showing up in newspaper photos shaking hands with the mayor.

 Todd Duncan worked as a youth counselor at a nonprofit called Community Organized to Improve Life, COIL, while quietly serving as a street-level BGF leader. Shawn Thomas, known as Bucky, collected gang dues and ran corners in East Baltimore from the same chair he sat in while drawing a Safe Streets  check. The most important name on the list though was Ricky Evans. They called him Dorsey.

   He held a senior position at Safe Streets and one of the senior positions in BGF. And at a certain point, those two jobs  had stopped being separate. In 2015, federal agents raided the Safe Streets East office on the 2300 block  of East Monument Street. What they found inside didn’t look like a community center.

 It looked like a clubhouse, a meeting spot for BGF  leadership with firearms and product stashed on site. Witnesses identified most of the staff at that location as gang members. Evans was finally picked up in November 2016, intercepted in Virginia on a drug run. The charges against him were staggering.

He had been running a murder-for-hire operation out of an office paid for by Baltimore taxpayers. He had ordered the kidnapping  and extortion of 33-year-old Marlow Walton, who turned up dead  in January 2010. He had authorized the elimination of one of his own, Darryl Austin, suspected of cooperating with law enforcement, and then quietly, Evans flipped.

 For the next 7 years, the man who had helped turn a violence prevention program into a gang headquarters    was working as a confidential federal informant. He didn’t get sentenced until October 2025. One prosecutor compared what Evans did to flipping a top-shelf  colonel in the mafia. Every empire has its triggerman.

 Evans groomed the most dangerous one Baltimore had ever produced. The most dangerous one was a kid named Daryl Martin Anderson. In the summer of 2013, Anderson was 25 years old. Long dreads, tattoos across his forehead, the word thoroughbred inked in heavy script across his chest. He didn’t try to blend in. He didn’t think he had to.

 The killings had actually started a year earlier. In July 2012, Anderson  walked up to Derek Gamble outside TB’s bar in Parkville and shot the 31-year-old dead in his own  car. But the case that put his face on every news broadcast in Baltimore came on June 27, 2013 on a porch in the 3300 block of Elmora Avenue.

 A woman named Tiara Fallon had been feuding with another woman to make a bishop for months. That night Fallon showed up at Bishop’s house    where eight people were sitting on the front porch. She pointed at the house, turned to Anderson, and said four words that would follow her for the rest of her life. Do what y’all do.

 Going to be the first. Charging documents quote Fallon is saying, “She left and a few minutes later returned police say with Daryl Anderson and another man.” She pointed to the house and directed the man next to her to do what you all do according to document.  Anderson opened fire. Jenny Sherod, 20, died right there on the steps.

 Sierra Williams, 24, was hit in the head and barely survived. Michelle Hitchens, 51, took what doctors initially called a non-life-threatening wound to the arm. A blood clot killed her weeks later. Three days after that, Anderson kicked in a door on Moore’s Run Court and put three more  people on the ground.

Baltimore police did something they had never done before. They publicly named him public enemy number  one.  Once identified as public enemy number one, the conviction of Daryl Martin Anderson is now heralded as an example of how Baltimore’s new State’s Attorney is serious about teaming up with police to put violent repeat offenders away for good.

While police have rarely used the public enemy designation, they’re well aware that it’s been effective when they do. And while there’s no objective criteria for it, they say Anderson was a perfect example of the type of criminal worthy of pulling out all the stops.  His photo went up everywhere, and Anderson, instead of running, kept walking his own neighborhood shirtless, gun visible, that chest tattoo on full display. He wanted you to see him.

 US Marshals finally tracked him to Birmingham, Alabama in July 2013. When they surrounded the apartment complex, a woman walked out and claimed he wasn’t there. Seconds  later, Anderson stepped out with his hands up. Inside, they recovered a .40 caliber Glock and two  bulletproof vests. At trial, prosecutors described him as polite, articulate, a perfect gentleman.

It was an act. He got life plus 35 years for Gamble, then life plus 240 more for the porch. On March 24th, 2015, standing in chains at his final sentencing, Anderson thanked the judge, turned to States’ Attorney Marilyn Mosby, smiled, and gave her the middle finger. He was 27  years old, and he was only one of them.

 The next one was David Warren. The young man Ricky Evans had been quietly raising inside the Black Gorilla Family the way other men raise sons. By 24, Warren had walked away from 10 attempted murder charges. Police Commissioner Kevin Davis publicly called him a trigger puller who had no business breathing free air.

 In 2018, Davonte Harrison hired him on something close to a salary, then went on Instagram and bragged that he had just signed the top shooter in the city. He wasn’t exaggerating.  Years earlier, Warren had already hit a BGF member who burglarized Harrison’s home. The confirmation  text said simply, “Job.”  You know who I’m talking about, but I ain’t going to do you like that.

 And and for the add-on there, you hear me?  On April 4th, 2018, Warren went looking for a man named Reytaw Benjamin on Gorman Avenue. Benjamin wasn’t there. His mother was His sister was Warren forced 43-year-old  Shanette Neal and 21-year-old Justice Allen to call Benjamin and beg him to come home. He didn’t pick up.

 Warren executed them  both. A 16-year-old relative watched it happen. Years later in court, she would say, “I was 12  at the time, looking over my shoulder every day.” Four months later, Warren and a co-conspirator named Wayne  Prince fired on a Northeast Baltimore home. Brian McKemmie, 27, was a contractor installing aluminum trim around a sliding glass door.

 He never came inside. His co-worker was shot in the head and somehow survived. “A little bit of justice,” Brian’s father, Scott, would say later, “was served today.”  Warren was later arrested after investigators say he was found to be in possession of the gun that killed McKemmie, but no one has been charged with his murder until now.

 This federal indictment details it was Harrison who ordered the hit, Warren and another defendant, Wayne Prince, who attempted to carry out the murder, and  Prince and an unindicted co-conspirator who instead murdered McKemmie.  Justice, when it finally came, came in pieces. Davonte Harrison was already serving 15 years on drug and firearm charges from November 2021 when he pleaded guilty in July 2024 to the racketeering conspiracy.

 The federal judge  handed him 25 more, running concurrent. The rapper who once bragged about signing the top shooter in Baltimore will spend most of his 30s and  40s behind a different kind of mic. David Warren took his plea the same month. In September 2024, Judge James  K.

 Bredar sentenced him to 45 years and called the entire crew depraved and dangerous. Wayne Prince got 28. Brian McKimmy’s father stood in court and refused to call it justice. “He’ll get out and still be a young man,” Scott McKimmy said. “My son will still be very much dead.”  It was a shock. Like a slap in the face.

 You know, he got 28 years. He’ll get out, he’ll still be a young man. 28 years, my son will still be very dead.  Barack Olz was the last to fall in the Yasmil Wilson case, a 20-year-old mother pushing her 1-year-old daughter in a stroller on North Rose Street near McKeldin Park on July 3rd, 2019. Eliminated for selling on BGF turf without permission, her mother, Sandra Waddle, told the court she never imagined writing a victim impact statement in her life.

 Olz got 21 years in September  2025. Judge Bredar said he had personally taken part in three cold-blooded attempts on human life. Ricky Evans, the man at the center of all of it, finally got sentenced in October 2025 after 7 years quietly working as a federal informant. The prosecutor compared it to flipping a  top-shelf colonel in the mafia.

 Since 2009, more than 118 BGF members and associates have been charged in federal court out of Baltimore alone. Say their names. Carlos Williams, Kenny Sherrod, Michelle Hitchens, Tron Daniel, Justice Allen, Brian McKimmy, Yasmil Wilson. Not statistics, people, husbands, mothers, daughters, sons, futures that ended on porches and sidewalks and back patios for reasons that made sense only inside the walls of a broken system.

 The Black Gorilla Family was founded to liberate black people from American prisons. It ended up filling them. Somewhere in Baltimore tonight, another kid is choosing between the same two  paths Davonte Harrison once chose between. Whether history repeats itself is a question the sentencing didn’t answer.