Read Online The Reluctant Warrior (Warriors Series Book 2) by Ty Patterson - Free Book Online

Bloods and the Latin Kings diminished. Everything was good. And then, five years back, a new gang turned up.
    ‘The thing with gangs is that most of them are based on some ethnic affiliation or some shared story. Bloods in New York had their origins on Rikers Island. Latin Kings have mostly Hispanic members.
    ‘This new gang has no ethnic affiliation. They have black members, white, Hispanic, East European, Asian… The shared story they have in common is military service. Many of their members have served in the US armed forces, South American forces, or NATO forces. Many are mercenaries who have seen action in Africa or Europe or the Middle East… obviously these guys are not your Pentagon four-star material. They are the dregs, the scum, court-martialed bastards. Several of them are deserters, some discharged from their forces under a cloud.’
    ‘You’re talking about 5Clubs, aren’t you?’
    Isakson nodded grimly and leaned against the window overlooking the street below, thick glass separating sound and silence.
    ‘Their service experience gives them an advantage over every other New York gang. Organization and discipline. These guys just cut through the other gangs like a warm knife through butter and took over a sizeable part of the city in just five years. Oh, and they’re ruthless too. One Latin Kings’ chapter had its entire management wiped out one evening… their heads were adorning the gate of one of their offices.
    ‘Small businesses are acquired overnight. If a garage owner defies them, his wife and daughter are raped in front of him. And then shot. The hapless owner is left alive. As you can imagine, they’re in every conceivable illegal trade. Drugs, girls, gambling, protection, human trafficking… you name it, this gang owns a significant piece of it.
    ‘And that’s not all. Their genius lies in their invisibility. When you mention gang, Joe New Yorker immediately thinks of the Mafia or Latin Kings or Bloods… this gang has managed to stay out of the mainstream consciousness, yet they are the single, most organized, successful gang in the city today. They have managed to stay invisible by doing their dirty business most professionally. Even the ruthlessness hasn’t captured the public because they relied on us – the FBI, the NYPD – to hush up the gory details. And the fuckers were right about that. Why would we want to make public that organized crime, on a downward trend for so many years, has shot up again?’
    Broker allowed impatience to show. ‘All this is most interesting, but what does it have to do with me? Or with you, for that matter?’
    Isakson nodded. ‘This gang came to our attention because of the scale of their operations and the speed of their growth. The FBI went after this gang, and we used all our intel to bust them, but the funny thing was that most of the time we went to no-shows… a deal was supposed to go down; we put everything in place – people, wheels, tech – the deal never happened. The few busts we made were small; the guys we got were strictly small-time street dealers, nothing to connect them to the gang.’
    He paused to allow that to sink in. ‘We wondered – shit does happen, but not as regularly as that – but we were nowhere close to pressing the panic button.
    ‘This went on for about eighteen months, and then we decided to change tactics. The NYPD and the FBI have a Joint Organized Crime Task Force, JOCTF, that goes after gangs, and 5Clubs was already on their plate, but we created a smaller cell, calling it 5JTF, within that task force to go after just them, headed by me. We figured the 5JTF, with an exclusive focus, backed up by resources of the JOCTF – more resources, more feet on the ground, different perspectives – would lead to better results.
    ‘We started building a more complete picture of the gang, with all that additional muscle. What we found was this gang ran like a commercial entity, each chapter head had the freedom to