Bloods Gang

Today I’m going to be speaking to you about the street gang known as the Bloods. I will be discussing the origin of the gang, some of the gang’s important members and the impact the gang has on the present day.

It all began in 1971 when the gang that eventually came to establish the Bloods was created. The name of this gang was the Piru Street Boys and they were actually a set of the Crip gang, today’s biggest rivals of the Bloods. When the Piru Street Boys began their operations they were working on Piru Street in Compton, Los Angeles. After almost two years of peace however, a feud began between the Piru Street Boys and the other Crip sets neighboring their territory. The fued later turned violent as fighting evolved between former allies. As the battle continued into the end of 1972 the Piru Street Boys realized they were outnumbered and were eventually going to lose if they didn’t do something quick. They then decided that they were going to terminate peaceful relations with the Crips all together and to do so they turned to other target gangs of the Crips. They called for a meeting on Piru Street and invited these target gangs. Some of the gangs that showed up to the meeting were the Bishops, the Denver Lanes, the Leuder Park Hustlers and the L.A Brims.

At this meeting the gangs discussed how to combat Crip intimidation along with the creation of a new alliance to counter the Crips. They decided to take on the wearing of an opposite color of the Crips, red, and created a united organization that later became known as the Bloods.

The Early leaders of the Bloods were Sylvester Scott and Vincent Owens. They controlled the gang in its early days when the only territory the Bloods covered was in Southern Los Angeles. As the gang grew in the late 70’s to the early 90’s and it spread across the nation, the different sets grew apart and it became nearly impossible for them all to be run by one power. Because of this, each set has its own leaders. Some of the more notorious leaders include Omar “OG Mack” Portee and Shaidon “Don Poppa” Blake.

The first man I mentioned is Omar “OG Mack” Portee. He was the leader of the United Blood Nation, a gang located on the East Coast headquartered in New York City. Omar Portee is also the founder of this set. He founded it in 1993 while incarcerated in Rikers Island Prison in Queens, New York. His reason for creating this set was to protect himself and fellow African Americans that were targets of harsh treatment from the Latin Kings. Once he left jail however, Omar Portee continued recruiting and strengthening his gang. He ran the streets selling drugs and killing anyone who stepped in his way. According to the New York Times however Omar Portee was stopped in April of 2003 and sentenced to 50 years of prison on account of ten charges. He remains in Federal Prison still today.

The next man I’m going to talk about is Shaidon “Don Poppa” Blake. This man was an influential leader of the West Coast bloods. His main job was to travel around the country and make sure that Blood’s members were “playing by the rules”. And if they were not, he made sure that they were punished. However, today he is in federal prison on a count of murder for what Baltimore City Circuit Judge John Prevas said was, “so brutal it probably tops the charts for a generation.” The murder that Shaidon “Don Poppa” Blake committed was of a 19 year old man who was misusing some of the gangs drug money. According to Anthony Fata, the lead city homicide detective on the case, “Blake and two other men punished this man by first bounding him with duct tape, then slashed him with knives, beat him with a sledgehammer and then finally set him ablaze and left him to burn in an alley.