Chambers Brothers (gang)

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Detroit, Michigan was home to the Chambers' Brothers crack organization.

The Chambers Brothers were a street gang heavily involved in the distribution of crack cocaine in the city of Detroit, Michigan during the 1980's. The brothers became notorious nationally when the Detroit Police Department confiscated video tapes of the brothers counting their laundry baskets full of money, and flaunting their excessive wealth. The tapes were happened upon accidentally in a crack house raid in 1988 and leaked to local media which broadcast them on local television. The story garnered more national attention when the then-Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, mentioned the Chambers brothers, originally from an Arkansas family of fourteen children, while nominating Michael Dukakis at the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. Clinton cited the poverty of the region in his own state, and the flourishing crack trade in the poorer sections of urban America, as reasons for doubting the merit of Nancy Reagan’s ‘Just Say No’ anti-drug campaign.

Originally from an economically depressed and racially segregated county in Arkansas, Lee County, the brothers came to Detroit individually to find legitimate work in the early in 1980s. This pattern of migration from the rural South to the industrial North, especially by African-Americans, had helped to build Detroit in the post World War II decades of Fordism. High employment and wages attracted southern blacks to the manufacturing center of Detroit, but by the end of the 1970s, one third of the city’s residents were living below the poverty line, and the manufacturers who had built the city, had left for the suburban communities untouched by the legacy of the 12th Street Riot and related economic stress furthered by the Coleman Young administration’s policies. Moreover, a large portion of the residents were becoming introduced to a cheaper form of cocaine, called crack, which was sold in five and ten dollar denominations. Thus cocaine, once considered a drug of the wealthier classes, was made accessible to persons of every social-economic background.

One of the Chambers brothers had purchased a ‘party store ’- the name used to describe a ‘convenience’, ‘corner’, or ‘liquor’ store in Detroit- near Kercheval and St Clair streets on the east side. Besides cigarettes, cold beer and potato chips, the store sold small bags of home grown marijuana. When one of the Chambers brother was told how to turn powdered cocaine into crack, thus multiplying its street sale value, the party store switched from pot palace to a crack house. Within a few short months the Chambers brothers had so many crack customers they began to occupy homes across the city to use as crack sales centers as well as places of prostitution. As reported in the BET documentary, entire apartment blocks were taken over to eliminate the long lines of customers outside traditional single-family homes. Additionally, the organization was so feared in the community, it was not unusual for the drug dealers to actually enter occupied dwellings for days at a time to sell crack, forcing single mothers and their children, totally unrelated to the drug dealers or the drug traffic, to comply with the dealers demands, or flee until the drug trafficking had moved elsewhere.

The spread of crack use in Detroit happened so rapidly the police, FBI and federal Department of Justice were ineffective in combating the relatively organized and sophisticated methods employed by the Chambers Brothers organization. Reportedly, this was furthered by the pay off of many Detroit Police Officers, as Larry Chambers claimed in a letter from prison. The group was extremely violent, yet retained a large number of employees by recruiting rural youth in Marianna, Arkansas. These rural recruits had little knowledge about Detroit before becoming employed in the trade and were so dependent on the drug dealers for life’s necessities that they could not easily flee the circumstances they found themselves in. But it was the notoriety of the confiscated video tapes aired repeatedly on Detroit television that really brought an end to the organization.

The complexity of the Chambers organization was so poorly understood by law enforcement and the justice system in the years of their explosive growth several Chambers brothers, including the kingpins, had been arrested in crack house raids and charged with simple possession like an average user. This is possibly why the Chambers did not flee when it became apparent they would face charges. The BET documentary quotes DEA officials claiming that several bothers did not know the difference between state and federal charges and the extent to how much time they would do behind bars. The gang leaders were arrested when heavy Reagan administration mandatory sentencing was first being imposed. Ultimately, nine members of the organization were convicted and imprisoned, but the legacy of the Chambers Brothers was felt in other cities since so many of the underlings in the group escaped attention and left Detroit to replicate the criminal methods elsewhere.

[edit] Cultural legacy

In the novel Warpath by Jeffry Scott Hansen the street gang The Six-Mile Syndicate is based loosely on the Chambers Brothers Gang. In the 1991 Film New Jack City, the character Nino Brown is largely based on the real life Detroit gang The Chambers Brothers. Nino had also made a name for the group as "Cash Money Brothers". Also, The Chambers Brothers were known for having their own building to move their drugs, in New Jack City it was known as "The Carter".