Murder City USA: St Louis's Record Breaking Murder Rate
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Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast. It is 2021. I am one of your hosts, Danny Gold, and I'm here with Sean Williams. And things have already gotten off to like a disaster kind of, you know, Sean's in New Zealand.

Our audio producer might have COVID. So, yeah, the quality in this might not be great. Bear with us. You might hear people in my neighborhood yelling at each other. It's the way things go down, you know, where we're keeping it gritty over here. Yeah, I mean, you're going to hear maybe some parrots going crazy on my end. It's pretty amazing here. It's like bright sunshine. I'm on an island somewhere outside Auckland. It's quite idyllic, but there's like some pretty loud birds. So that's all you're going to get on my end.

Kids in New Zealand listen to parrots. I'm here. You might hear some degenerates yelling at each other outside my window, but anyway.

Thank you guys for joining us. This is the podcast where we talk about organized crime and various criminal phenomenons and things of that nature. This is our first episode for 2021. We're going to keep it moving, but this episode, it's going to be a little different than I think what we've done in the past, mostly because it's something that I'm interested in and I've reported on a lot, and it's kind of being completely ignored in U.S. national media to the point where it's kind of a disgrace. Yeah.

And you know, this is a free podcast, so bear with me. If you pay for the Patreon, you can yell at me all you want. But I think it's going to be interesting. Yeah, like, this is something that you've done a lot of work on. You've done documentaries and done tons and tons of stuff on. And I didn't know anything about this as a foreigner, so this is completely fascinating to me. We don't hear anything about this outside America, so like, yeah. I mean, I'm probably going to be the foreign voice in this podcast, asking a lot of stupid questions about America, but

Like this is really, I mean, some of the numbers I think we're going to go into, which is crazy. So yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah.

Yeah, it's wild. So this is the story of Murder City, USA, otherwise known as St. Louis, and how it got that way. And we're going to talk about gangs, heroin, fentanyl, guns, housing discrimination, job loss, segregation, all that. But I need you to understand how bad it is in St. Louis, a city I actually really love. And there are a lot of great things to it. It has a lot of good, has a lot of great areas and a lot of good people. But it's a city that's really suffering right now.

You see, St. Louis has had the highest murder rate in the U.S. for any real city for the last seven years in a row. Way higher than Chicago, higher than Baltimore, higher than Detroit, higher than any city you've ever heard of when it comes to having a violence problem. And it's not even close. This year, I mean, the city was bleeding. It had 262 murders for a population of 300,000.

That means the murder rate there is about 87, which is insane. I mean, even the highest crime European cities are around like four, five, six. For comparison's sake, Chicago is usually in the 20s. El Salvador's worst year was 101, but usually it's in the 60s. And I mean, El Salvador is generally called like the homicide capital of

of the world. St. Louis is one of the deadliest peacetime cities in the world. It's up there with cartel war cities in Mexico and Brazil. I mean, New York is in the single digits, right, for murder rates. St. Louis' murder rate is like 15 times for New York City. The numbers are staggering. It has doubled the murders of London, which is a city of 9 million people. Yeah, I mean, that's like, I mean, London is always called like a dangerous city by our media, but this is like

I mean, it's not even another world. It's another fucking planet. It's crazy. Like every time you see, you know, a crime story about London or people talking about the London murder rate, you know, or any of those crime shows, Gangs of London, Top Boy, like St. Louis is far, far more dangerous.

300,000 people, North St. Louis, which we're really going to focus on, had 142 murders this year for a population of like 90,000. So that set, I mean, that gives it North St. Louis had more murders than London did total. I think London was around 120 or something like that. So it's, yeah, it's really disheartening and

I, you know, I'm not one of those people who rants about the mainstream media, who I think actually do a decent job most of the time, you know, at least way better than like the alternative alternate media industry.

youtubers and whatnot but the lack of attention paid to st louis is just super it's disgraceful the local media there does a great job the st louis post dispatch uh kdsk riverfront press but the national media i mean it's just the right time to ask you about sub stack we're gonna get into that if someone did a sub stack about st louis actually i think it would be like one of the like actually beneficial as opposed to you know yelling about whatever the hell people yell about on there yeah yeah yeah but

St. Louis, you know, I've made these documentaries down there. I've spent a fair amount of time in the city. And what initially interested me in it wasn't just this murder rate. It's also this perfect coming together of all these problems in America right now. You've got a crazy opioid problem.

really lacks gun laws, lots of gang violence, just terrible housing policy. This legacy of racism and discrimination, especially when it comes to neighborhoods going back generations, the decline of jobs and industry and Rust Belt manufacturing, bad policing and population loss all coming together in one. It's just this recipe for disaster. And I think one of the things we like doing with the show is

It's really getting into the background of why these things happen. Like, yeah, this is an organized crime show. We have fun with, with some of these stories and we like telling wild details of mafiosos and gangs and drug dealers, but we don't just want to do that. You know, like these things don't just exist in a vacuum and we want to talk about why they're happening without getting too political or academic or preaching to you. I mean, not preaching to you is kind of, I think the most important, important part. Yeah, for sure. But,

You know, I just wanted to say all that before we get started since this episode is going to be all over the place. But patreon.com slash the Underworld Podcast where if you donate, you get to criticize me. You can tell me I talk too fast. You can tell me you don't like my accent. And I have no choice but to listen if that's the case. We should like make a tier where you can just berate me or you if you put in a certain amount of money a month. And we'll put up with it. Yeah, you put the right money and I'll get in the stocks and you can chuck dog shit at me. I don't care. So one thing...

One thing I think a lot of media fails at when they cover stories like St. Louis, whether Chicago, Baltimore or else that I think I made sure to do in the work that I was doing in the city was to talk to the young men actually at the center of the violence. Right. Because it is primarily young men that are both doing the shooting and getting killed.

And too often media will just talk to victims' families or people doing social justice type work or law enforcement. And I think that's valuable. But I personally want to know, like, why? Why are these guys? Why are they pulling the trigger? Why are they getting shot? And it is mostly young men. It's young black men in St. Louis, to be specific, mostly on the north side. And if you're a Patreon member, you heard me interview my dude, Izo.

who comes from the Clinton Peabody's. It's one of the roughest areas in St. Louis. You know, he killed someone. It was a justifiable homicide. He's also a convicted fentanyl dealer. And he sort of brings a level of insight that I think you guys would want to hear if you're interested in this. But I'll try to sort of summarize what he told me. And if you watch the doc I've done, I spent a lot of time with him.

This guy named Lyndon, who was what's known as an Aldine gangster crip. He used to deal heroin. He got addicted to heroin after being shot a bunch of times. Another guy we spoke to is this famous St. Louis local rapper, Yo Banga, who used to be the leader of the Jeff Vanderloo Bloods. The JVL is like one of the probably most dangerous neighborhoods in America. And it was said at its height, that gang was the most dangerous gang in the city. So these are the perspectives that

You know, I think we need to find valuable. I actually checked in with some of them just this week to ask why they think this year alone the murder rate has gone so high. Lyndon was saying, like, it's not gangs. It's more like sets in neighborhoods, just small cliques competing for drugs. And people just wrapped up in the drug gang. Izzo was talking about young kids killing just for the name, for clout. Kind of the shit talking you see going on on social media, Instagram, Twitter.

YouTube, all that, which is something I've actually heard a lot from young kids in the streets, both in St. Louis and New York and all that. I don't think people actually realize that stuff like Instagram and YouTube are literally leading to shootouts. Like, I guess part of the problem with the media as well is because so many of these journalists, they come from privileged backgrounds and it's considered some like classical job. At least it is in the UK anyway. And like people go to university and get the right degree. And then they know someone who gets the right job and like,

Then you become... Then you're, like, in a city where you don't really know the community and you don't really know the neighborhood and you're reporting on people that you've got no clue about their background or their life, anything like that. And then, like... And then the people that these journalists recognize are the cops and they're the counselors and the people in power and they don't really...

They do ride-alongs and stuff, and they don't really speak to the people on the streets, right? Well, I mean, yes and no, right? Like, that is a problem, I think, with a lot of big national media. But local newspapers, like when I worked for local newspapers in New York, like the people on the streets, I mean, some of them had rap sheets, you know? Some of them were like straight-up blue-collar guys who really got it. It's also, you know, a matter of...

the national media, not paying attention to, to the Midwest, not getting the room to really discuss these problems, having to make people into really two dimensional characters. Cause you don't have the room for it. I don't think we can blame reporters for it for the most part, you know? Uh,

uh i do think there should be more focus on on getting in with with young kids that are that are at the center of these things but there have been some great stories that have happened i mean new york magazine uh new york times magazine if you go and look at some of the work they've done in brownsville or whatever else you do see good work like that it's just few and far between uh i actually i mean i blame commissioning editors like i blame for everything else yeah that's a fair call maybe i'm just talking about the uk i mean it's it's pretty dreadful in the uk but yeah

I don't see some of this stuff, but we've got reading lists, right, that people can read on the Patreon. So if you want to follow up on this stuff and you want to donate, then there's loads of stuff to read. There'll be some good stuff up there. Another guy who I talked about there is this rapper, Jizzlebucks. He actually told me back in 2018 when he goes on Facebook, it's just all people holding guns. And this is a quote he said, I could go on Facebook right now and see somebody holding guns. Every picture, every time you scroll, you're going to see people holding guns and they want to use them.

They're not finna keep faking with them. They're hearing this music. They got them now. All you got to do is load your gun, cock back and shoot it. So they're going to use them. They want to put them to use. I mean, he, you know, repeated himself a bit there, but you kind of get, you kind of get what he's saying. He has a crazy story, man. He, he's a rapper, which like being a rapper in St. Louis is the most dangerous job in America. Something crazy, like 15 rappers in the area have been killed the last five years, probably dozens more locked up. I think the guardian actually did an article on it. They've done some good St. Louis coverage.

And Jizzle, he caught the craziest murder charge I think I've ever heard. He was a heroin dealer. He was dealing heroin. Some customers, they call them geeks in St. Louis. I don't know whether it came from The Walking Dead or what it is, but that's what they call junkies, customers, all that. They texted him to make a buy, but they get lost, and they end up in some other neighborhood, and they get killed by some other just random dudes.

And keep in mind, he had nothing to do with the shooting, right? He was going to sell them stuff, but he had nothing to do with the shooting. Totally separate people killed the customers. He ends up getting held for three years on that murder charge from, I think he was 19 until he was 21.

nothing happens. It ends up being dropped and then he just gets let out. But that's three years on a murder charge for a murder he had nothing to do with. They knew he had nothing to do with it besides, you know, wanting to sell these people heroin. It's a pretty wild story. I keep telling him, like, he should file a lawsuit. I think he had previously been arrested at 16 for ramming a cop car. You know, I'm not trying to tell you my dude is an angel right here. But, uh...

Yeah. It's, it's a wild thing to get caught. Yeah. On a murder charge like that for something like that. And like in the, in the prime of your life as well. Right. That's going to just completely switch your life around. Yeah. So true story too. After we made the doc, I had, I got a meetings with the guys who run duck down records, which is a famous like New York hardcore rap label. Uh, cause I grew up in one of the guys there and I say all that to say this, if you're a potential source, if you talk to the underworld podcast, we will do whatever we can to get you a rap deal. Yeah.

Like, we're going to try to make it happen if you talk to us, you know? So, you know, reach out. Paying it forward, yeah. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself here, but I want to go into the history of St. Louis because it's kind of the story of America's failures. Even though we love America here, Sean might not. He's a British communist, but I do. But you really, you can't talk about St. Louis without looking at how the country has failed that city.

And it's struggling with all these issues that are endemic now to a lot of American cities, especially in the Midwest, Cleveland, Milwaukee, places like that, Omaha, Kansas City, even include Baltimore in there. But it's heroin epidemic, loss of industry, gang violence, policing issues, super lax gun laws, crippling poverty and racial segregation.

And the roots of St. Louis' decay, it connects some of these legacies, some of the worst legacies in America to right now. In the first half of the 20th century, when St. Louis was thriving as this hub of manufacturing, river, train transportation, there were these harsh segregation laws that deliberately put black residents into low-income ghettos.

So when the essential industries began to fall apart, these manufacturing jobs headed overseas in the latter half of the 20th century, all these inequalities were made much worse. You had white flight to the suburbs and failed housing policies that effectively abandoned these black communities to drugs and to crime. This is like redlining, right? I think I've heard of this before. This reminds me, last year I was going, I was road tripping through the South on a story and I was going through

Like I was kind of like a bit, I don't know, ignorant of the kind of poverty that I had seen in America before. But then I went to these towns in like the middle of nowhere, Alabama and Mississippi. And they're like the level of poverty is like nothing I've ever seen in like a so-called developed country. I mean, people living in like shacks and shanties in towns that like have no connection to like any other major cities. And people just like I guess they're just like redlined into these communities where there's just nothing going on at all. Right.

Well, the rural areas are different, right? Those are, I wouldn't call that redlining. I mean, they're atrocious. I think the UN even did some touring in Alabama and some neighborhoods. But redlining refers more to, I believe, and our documentary was called The Red Line, refers more to cities segregating communities by ethnicity, usually making sure Black people end up in neighborhoods that are, you know, in terrible areas, under-resourced, uh,

heavily polluted. A lot of them were attached to heavy industry that was polluting the air, the water, and all that. And redlining was the process of doing that first through legal means, then through whatever means that you could. Now, proportionally, St. Louis has lost more of its population over the past couple decades than Detroit. All those stories you hear of abandoned buildings and hollowed out blocks, you know, all the sort of disaster porn you've seen in Detroit, destruction porn, whatever you want to call it, St. Louis is worse.

In the 1950s, the population was 850,000. Now it's hovering around 300,000. The murders in the city are mostly in a handful of neighborhoods like the one where Lyndon sold heroin, mostly North St. Louis. And one thing with St. Louis is you always hear about the Del Mar Divide, which is a big east-west avenue that divides the north from the rest of the city. That division is crazy. North St. Louis is like 90% black and the south is 70% white.

And the North has been historically segregated and neglected. It's not hard to really draw a line from decades of systemically bad policies to the current violence that's happening, right? Egregious examples of redlining, failing education system, thousands of vacant houses, racialized policing, and a lack of employment opportunities. There's an urban studies professor that I interviewed, Carol Campyiki, and she called it death by zip code.

There's an 18-year life expectancy gap between certain neighborhoods in St. Louis. Jesus, this is crazy. But let's backtrack, right? We're going to go through some of that history. 1904, St. Louis is booming. It's a big city.

It's the gateway to the Midwest, the fourth biggest city in the U S at that point. Now it's not even top 50, but it actually has 250,000 less people than it did in 1904. It's crazy, right? How that changes. Anyway, the city city was doing great back then. It's a major transportation spot for trains and steamboats. And there's a ton of manufacturing jobs, lots of factory jobs. What did they make back then? Like what St. Louis famous for? They actually had a lot of car manufacturing plants, uh,

beer, chemicals, things of that nature. But there was a lot of jobs there. And even though it was a slave state, Missouri itself had the great migration there, which is where Black Americans who were suffering under Jim Crow laws left the South for cities in the West and in the North for better conditions and jobs. If you haven't read Warmth of Other Suns, you really should. It will explain America to you. And that's what happens in St. Louis. And they kind of get corralled into North St. Louis

Not that St. Louis itself was super welcoming. I mean, there was actually a vicious race ride in 1917 in East St. Louis, which is just over the river from St. Louis in a separate city, actually in Illinois. But you get the idea. I mean, this was, I think, one of the worst massacres, if not the worst massacre in America.

Anyway, in 1916, the people of St. Louis voted on a law that would prevent anyone from buying a home in a neighborhood that's more than 75% occupied by another race. Basically, if you're black, you can't buy in a white neighborhood. It's the first law in the country to impose racial segregation on housing. It actually got struck down, but then you had these racial covenants where basically white families were asked to sign a document saying they wouldn't sell to black families.

That doesn't get outlawed until 1948. But by then, the dividing lines are pretty set. And then it just becomes zoning laws, mortgage companies, real estate companies who keep that segregation going. And why that's important is that the neighborhoods are set, divided like that. You can ignore the poor, fucked up black neighborhoods when it comes to dishing out resources. You also have concentrated poverty, which we've already covered a lot. That doesn't lead to many good things. And that process, I mean, that's what we talk about when we talk about redlining.

And the north of St. Louis is really messed up. I mean, I think when I was there, there was 11,000 vacant properties, though some have been torn down now, but just streets and streets of abandoned homes. One interesting thing a housing advocate guy taught me when I was down there, and he was talking about how the banks won't give mortgages out on the north side, was that over half of the intergenerational wealth transfer in the U.S. goes with the home.

So people in these communities, they can't buy homes. You can't buy homes. You can't transfer wealth. You can't build wealth. So essentially, you have a lot of folks that are locked out of the most popular and common way to build financial health and stability for your family over generations.

And that's this cycle of poverty that keeps going. And I also want to mention that it wasn't just white flight, too. You actually had a lot of middle class blacks from North St. Louis that left the city for the suburbs over the last few decades. Yeah, I mean, this is like that Martin Luther King speech about the whites getting their covered wagons and their patches of land like the Sooners in Oklahoma and stuff like that. And like when slavery ends and all these inequalities are kind of like legally...

torn up i guess like them people moaning about welfare queens and stuff like that but this is like going back decades and decades i mean centuries to like this inequality there's never really been evened up right it's still yeah yeah puts people at a massive disadvantage in the economy now so you guys are still with me right like we're doing a little bit of policy we're going to get to all the fun stuff at the guns and the heroin the bloods and the crips and all that soon

So Molly Metzger, who's another housing expert over there, she told me that in the 70s, the Rand Corporation actually came to St. Louis. And what they suggested to the city leadership was just that the north is just too messed up. Like there's nothing you can do. You're losing so much of the population. It's too far gone. Cut it off. Don't invest there. Don't invest in infrastructure. Just let it go.

And the city didn't officially endorse this plan. I want to be clear about that. But what she kind of says is that they might have well just have done that because they do kind of give up on the north side. Now, I don't want to pretend like there's no one in the north side doing anything right now. There's some amazing NGOs and agencies and there's people out there trying to make a difference, but they face a really uphill battle. And once you don't get that help, it's just this domino effect.

Schools are dependent on property taxes for the surrounding area. So if the houses aren't worth buying anything, the schools aren't getting anything. 67% of residents south of Del Mar over the age of 25 have a bachelor's degree. North, the number is just 5%. And the home value for north of Del Mar is typically one-fourth of that of south of Del Mar. And you drive up and down the street, and it's wild how it changes. You have legit suburban mansions like four or five blocks south, and you have trap houses two blocks north. Okay, my hands up. Like, what's a trap house?

It's just somewhere where people sell drugs. Sean, I'm surprised at you, man. Sometimes I'm going to let you down, man. So there were also some massive screw-ups there. Misguided urban renewal projects when trying to do good, but they just didn't. Pruitt-Igoe is the most famous one. That's famous across the country. It was this big block of housing project towers that the city built in the 1950s. And the whole thing was so poorly managed that within a few years,

It was just this hellhole concentration of poverty, crime, and drugs. And they actually ended up blowing it up in the 70s. So it barely lasted. I don't even think it lasted 15 years. It was supposed to be a good thing, right? You were supposed to rescue people from shoddy tenement buildings, provide a lot of concentrated housing for a growing population, but it was just built poorly and not maintained and just disastrous. And then you get the job situation in St. Louis, which we talked about. Let's just say it's not so full of opportunities.

Obviously, the last 30, 40, 50 years, manufacturing in the U.S. has gone overseas, and that was a big part of the St. Louis economy. One example, St. Louis used to have plants for Ford, Chrysler, and General Motors. All of them were finally shut down in the 2000s. But there were other thriving industries in St. Louis, like advertising, banking, and all that, but there's more to it than that. In 1980, St. Louis had 23 Fortune 500 companies. There were 12 in 2009 and 2017. In the late 70s and early 80s,

Politicians quietly overturned many of these anti-monopoly laws that had been in place for decades to protect smaller companies. And it wasn't just Reagan. It was Jimmy Carter, too.

So what happened was all these giant companies started buying up the smaller ones, regional ones that were based in cities like St. Louis and moving their corporate headquarters to cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco, or overseas, you know, this pattern of corporate takeovers. And I mean, when you lose a major company, it affects everything from like a local accounting firm that does some of their work to lunch spots that everyone goes to. And that's another part of what messed over the city and actually a lot of other Midwestern cities too. So

So we're getting the building blocks, right? Like the poverty, the job loss, the segregation, the lack of opportunity. What always comes with that? What leads to murders, guns and drugs and guns? I mean, like, I know, I know this is going to earn me some flack with, with some of our fan base, but I have to point it out. Yeah.

I like guns. If I didn't live in New York City, I would own guns. I really like shooting. You know, I've taken girlfriend shooting to firing ranges. We actually used to go skeet shooting up in upstate New York. It's fun. It rules. I've got friends with lots of guns, most of them legally. I have friends that hunt and I want to learn how to hunt, but we do a disservice if we don't mention the guns because it's so easy to get a gun in St. Louis. I mean, that's that's one of the major differences, right? In cities like London or New York and St. Louis.

You think there's worse poverty in St. Louis than in East New York or South Bronx or Brownsville or than in London? Worse crime, bigger drug markets, more gangs? No. The difference is the guns. Why does St. Louis have a murder rate 20 or 30 times higher than New York and London?

You know how hard it is to get a gun in London or New York? Why do you think when cops bust guns in New York, it always looks like it was the gun used to kill Abraham Lincoln? In St. Louis, people, they're firing ARs at each other from different cars. They've got extendos. They've got Mickey Mouse drums. All that stuff. And everyone has a gun. I'm not saying you can't get a gun in New York. I mean...

If you want, you definitely can, but it's way, way harder. I mean, in New York, you have block guns, right? Sets will pass around a few guns between like 20 people. In St. Louis, the idea of doing that is absurd. Like on my block, right? Hang out, know a bunch of the dudes from the neighborhood.

When I do the Gangs of Trinidad story, I'll share a few more stories. But let's just say there's like some knucklehead blockbeef in my neighborhood that kind of goes back like 30 years and flares up every once in a while. Now, some of the people know the kind of work that I was doing, at least that I go to conflict zones and stuff, and they'd see me carrying a bulletproof vest into my apartment. So once I'm

One dude, he pulls me aside and he's being real kind of mysterious and quiet. So I'm not really sure what to expect. And he starts rambling on about seeing me with the vest and knowing where I go. And I think he thought I was in the military, something like that. And he's just like, you know, I was wondering if you could kind of help me out, get me some ammo.

Which is, you know, I'm not saying you can't get a gun in New York, but if someone's asking me on the street for ammo, like it's, it's a hard thing. You won't, that doesn't happen in, in, in St. Louis. I think like, like I know if I'm going to kick off on guns, I'm going to get like 1776 bullshit. So I'm not going to go there, but like in Europe, in a major European city, like if you see a gun, it doesn't,

It doesn't, like, give you any sign of security, right? I think the whole idea of a gun is, like, flipped around the other way in Europe. And, like, I know that's probably, like, in the minority of places in the world, actually. But, like, even if people see cops with guns in the UK, they'll get a bit, like, unsettled and weirded out. Whereas, like, I think it's just the other way around. I don't know if that's history or anything like that, but...

It's kind of interesting how those two things kind of rub up the other way. I mean, it's not like we, you know, people in New York see someone with a gun and don't get freaked out. You know, I'm sure there's places in the States and more rural areas where it's normal, but not in the cities. Anyway, that dude ended up getting busted on a gun charge. I think it was like a year or two later. He did three years. But anyway, people like to bring up Chicago as having strict gun control, for example, that doesn't work. But Chicago literally borders Indiana where guns are just as easy to get as St. Louis and Chicago.

I don't know. One of the dudes in St. Louis, I was talking to him about this, and he's just like, this is a conservative state. They're not going to change the gun laws. They'll always be here. No offense to y'all, but white motherfuckers love their guns. So you think you're going to take these guns from Missouri?

And someone else chimed in. This guy actually, they call him Little Half, and he's a little person rapper. Look him up on Instagram. He's great. He's like, they got gun shows here every month. It's so easy to get a gun. All you got to do is sign the papers and give them your money. You used to have to wait five days. I mean, all the young people in St. Louis have guns.

It's the first study I've been where parents have told me they felt relieved when their child had a gun because at least then they knew they had some protection. Jesus Christ. That's insane. Yeah. And then this is another quote from talking to these guys. Back in 09, people weren't riding around with no drums. Back then you had an extender or a drum, you were God. Now everybody got one of them. Everybody got one. If you guys don't know what drums are, they're sort of like, you know, those circular clips you used to see on,

on like old time, but you know, let's just say you can fire a lot of bullets with them. Missouri has notoriously loose gun laws. And in 2016, they made it legal for state residents without a record to carry concealed weapons without a permit or trading.

And 2007, there was a repeal of a Missouri law which required hang on by rights to undergo a background check before getting a gun permit. I always thought that like it can conceal carry is concealed carry and open carry. Right. The two major kind of gun laws in sort of the Midwest and the South. Right. And some some states let you just carry a gun openly and others let you hide it in a bag or whatever. Right. Is that it?

kind of gist of these things? There's various different laws in various different states. I mean, you can get a concealed permit in New York if you work in like a high cash business, like a lot of jewelers have them and things like that. But, you know, it's actually people get busted going from state to state because they don't study what the gun laws are there. So when I have friends that come to New York from rural areas, I'm like, dude, just, you know, check your luggage, make sure.

Because it won't end well for you. Yeah. Even the New York Times said in 2015, quote, by all accounts, the proliferation of guns among young men here is beyond control, turning petty insults, neighborhood rivalries, and drug disputes into lethal melees of attack and reprisal that can occur in waves. Lyndon, you know, the guy I've spoken to a bit, I asked him how easy it was to get a gun, and he was...

just said real easy. You just got to know the right people and they could point you in the right direction. And from the typical revolvers to automatics with the extended clips, as they call them 30 rounds, you've got the automatics with the 50 rounds. They call them the Mickey mouse drums. You've got the drum on it. You've got assault rifles. You've got like the AK 47s, the text, the max, pretty much everything that's in the movies. It's out here in the streets. And that was in response to a question about if you have a record, can you get a gun?

I spent a lot of time with Lyndon's dad, Reverend McCoy. He's a street activist who basically patrols North St. Louis, the streets there, trying to stop conflict and help addicts. And it must have been 25 degrees the night we went out, and you're still hearing gunshots every so often. And he said in the summer, it's like every five minutes when you're walking around St. Louis, you just hear gunshots, whether it's someone firing in the air or whatever it is.

And then you have the drug market, which is huge in St. Louis. Missouri was really hard hit by the opioid epidemic. You know, you have a lot of rust about areas, you have rural areas, the kind of places that OxyContin just ran through. And everyone from the surrounding areas comes to St. Louis to re-up. And you've got big trafficking networks nearby. St. Louis is a connector on the highway system. So lots of heroin moves through it, especially coming from Chicago to go through to the Midwest.

Kansas City as well. You also have tons of poverty, depression, like I said, no resources, no opportunity. So you have this heavily addicted population in North St. Louis, and you have people coming in from hours away all over. Ezo actually told me that most of the people he was serving were actually white people, and that fentanyl had basically taken over, and just everybody asked for fentanyl now.

He said crack and coke in the 90s, switched over to heroin, but the last three or four years, it's just been fentanyl, fentanyl, fentanyl. I mean, yeah, you can, I guess you can just follow the money with a lot of these drug industries, right? And there's all these kind of Sackler types that are peddling opioids and whatnot. I wanted to ask you a question, actually, because like,

in the UK, we would hear like Chicago, Chicago, all the time Chicago for like gang crime and stuff like that. But we never hear about St. Louis. Like, why do you think that is? Like, why do we know more about Chicago? It's like more prominent. So there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that Chicago has the highest total amount of murders, right? So it's near the top of the list now for I feel like every year for the past five, ten years. It used to be, I mean, in the 90s, you had New York. But

But Chicago has the highest total amount of murder, so that's going to be up there. But it's like anything else. There's no originality in journalism. So this Chicago story just gets hit over and over and over. I mean, you add Obama was from there. Chicago is also a really populous city. You know, it's probably the biggest, most well-known city in the Midwest. So it got a lot of attention. I'm just saying...

Maybe do a few articles on St. Louis, right? It's not so hard. Like it's a really rough city going through a lot and it's just completely ignored by national media. And I get that Chicago, you know, Obama was from there, like I said, highest number, but the, the way that St. Louis was ignored also the Midwest in general, you know, fly over states just get glossed over. Um,

But yeah, St. Louis, I mean, dope is just everywhere and everyone can get it. There's no real structure anymore to the drug game. So you just have a lot of people fighting over the customer base. Izzo said it's easy now. And that's why it's so fucked up now because it's so accessible now and everyone can do that shit. You wake up one day, like I'm finished our trapping. Like back then you had to know somebody to jump in the dope game. Now you can just wake up like I'm going to get me a pack.

And this is the point I asked him, I was in a room of people and I was like, there's that much dope out in St. Louis. Whole room just started laughing. Jesus. That's crazy. Yeah. It's just like one of the few opportunities in North St. Louis right now. And a lot of people find that hard to turn down.

So obviously, a big drug market leads to people getting shot. I mean, it's territory, sure, but it's also phones, which is a crazy thing in St. Louis. In St. Louis, like a bunch of other cities, cell phones are how everything moves when it comes to person-to-person dealing. So every geek, what they call a customer, has the cell number of a dealer they text. And it doesn't matter who is on the other side of that cell as long as they have dope.

So if you really start moving to a lot of customers, there's going to be a whole lot of people hitting up your phone. I mean, I heard stories of a single phone doing three, four, five grand in sales a day. So naturally, people are going to come for those phones. People get killed over them. In other cities, you know, they might have strips or blocks, but there, they call it geek seeking. You literally go out, you hand out testers, you hand out the phone number to that phone, and that's how you get your customers.

And people get people... I mean, when those phones start doing $4,000 or $5,000 a day, you can get... There's stories too. I mean, they have stories of people killing friends over cell phones. Yeah, I mean, that's crazy money. That's like so much money as well in a place that's like so depressed. Yeah. And then, obviously, you have the gangs there. So before...

He was on Twitter posting like wild Illuminati conspiracy theories about Bill Gates or whatever. Ice Cube actually used to rap. And yeah, one of those songs was, was called summer vacation. If you look it up, he rapped about coming from LA to St. Louis to set up shop and to sell dope there.

But the song is about how he didn't realize how crazy it was there. And by the end of the song, like a bunch of his crew is dead and he's just like really screwed over. This was the 80s. And it's a real thing. I was told this by older people in St. Louis. It's a real thing gang members in L.A. used to do. But you already had you had Bloods and Crips already set up shop in St. Louis. And then you also had the Chicago gangs coming down. So vice lords, gangster disciples, all that.

And when I was there, we kind of went between a few groups. You had the Aldine gangster Crips, you had the Cochran Crips, you had the JVL Bloods and the Clinton Peabody Bloodsets. And it's real out there. You know, the North especially has sets like everywhere and they all beef with each other, sometimes over stupid territory stuff that's been going on for decades, sometimes over heroin sales. You see, it's no longer really big. I know I'm saying Bloods and Crips, but it's no longer big gangs, right, that are organized and

that have hierarchy, that control big territories, that have rules. It's much smaller sets of drug dealers, and that leads to more and more violence because there's less regulation, right? We talk a lot about kingpin theory. Once those kingpins get knocked off, you have a bunch of smaller people fighting for territory, fighting for control, and that gets ugly. Christine Byers, who's a local reporter in St. Louis, she has this quote from a cop recently, and he says, these days, everybody is killing everybody, and everybody has a gun. There's no structure.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've done this in a bunch of other episodes, right? Like it's kind of like suits. I mean, it keeps the body count down if there's a hierarchy and there's people at the top. I mean, I'm reading about New Zealand gangs at the moment and like it takes time to bring down big gang gang leaders and it takes like police effort. And while that's going on, I guess it doesn't make much sense to like be dropping bodies all the time. Like business is good. So when you've got this chaos, like.

Right. I mean, the guys who are bigger like that tend to have a more focused outlook, like they're focused on business. You know, that's something you hear a lot from OGs. They're going to tell you back in, I mean, half the time they could be full of shit too. You know, these guys weren't exactly shy to pull the trigger, but their whole thing is like, we kill people over money. We kill people with a purpose. Now the young kids are running around. You hear that? I mean, I'm researching the Israeli mafias right now. You hear the same thing there. So maybe it's one of those things everyone says every generation, but...

Yeah, it's no longer big gangs that are organized out of hierarchy. There's no structure. And Yo Bang, who I talked about earlier, he's just like everybody who wants to be a killer now. Back in his day, he said it actually was Bloods and Crips, and you knew what someone got killed for. Somebody got caught out of bounds. Now it's totally different. The guy that kills you, he might have just been hugging your mom.

He kind of talks about how they used to protect their hood, but now there's no hood to protect because everybody's, he calls it being in traffic. You know, when you're on the move, when you're selling off the cell phone, when you're selling everywhere. And he talks about, he had a song about shooting it out over Natural Bridge Ave, where the guard actually did a study that showed that, I think it was in 2016, that a four mile stretch of Natural Bridge Ave was the most violent place in America. And he's just like, if you turn anywhere off Natural Bridge Ave onto any other street, you're going to have a set there.

And they're going to have someone else who's looking to, he says, Swiss cheese you if you're the wrong person or the wrong set. Izzo actually, he attributes the current situation to a set back, I think it was mid-late 2000s, called the Downtown Taliban, which, I mean, you've got to give that name

Some props, right? That is a good name. And he just kind of says they're the reason the city is the way it is right now. It was just a group of guys from different areas that had a ton of guns, and they all just came together, got a ton of money, ton of guns, and that kind of killed the whole thing.

My hood, your hood. It's just, it's cliques now, not gangs. Linden, who I mentioned earlier, he was running with us at the Aldine Crips. When he first started talking, he was talking about how they have a long-running war with the JBL Bloods, and that's actually who he believes shot him a couple years ago when he almost died. And one thing he talked about a lot is why he joined the gang. He got into it, he says, because his friends did. Basically, when he was like 9 or 10 or 11, and...

He also stressed that he kind of did this, and this is something that you don't hear mentioned in any academic study or whatever. He got into it to get girls, and he likened it to 50s movies, just like wearing a letterman jacket to show the side that you're on.

He said, you know, you're 12 years old. You're listening to little Wayne. You're seeing all these gang members get the girls. And people don't talk enough about how young people also join gangs. Like obviously poverty, family, lack of opportunity, but also because it's cool. Like everybody wants to analyze societal factors, but a lot of these kids are like they're 12 years old and they're just like, this is who's tough in my neighborhood. This is cool. I'm going to join up.

And he has this quote, I just look at it like a lot of young, dumb minds trying to prove a point, get a name out on the streets, take credit for stuff and probably money in a little way, but just like jealousy and just the fact that one of my friends beat one of your friends up in the 10th grade turns into now you want to kill us and just add to the fact that we're Crips and they're Bloods too. And it just really doesn't make sense. It's just all little petty stuff, especially if it's like, don't nobody value life at all.

Just to reiterate here, he's saying Bloods and Crips, but he's not talking about the big national games, right? He's talking about these little one or two block sets. So like what makes these guys Crips and Bloods then? Are they affiliated with the guys on the coasts or like what's going on there?

It's weird because some of them are, or at least they were back in the day, and then some of them aren't. It's more just like a signifier, I would say. And you've seen that in blood sets in New York and all that. There's some claim they're co-signed by the LA OGs and all this sort of stuff. It's just a weird thing, man. It's almost like a brand where someone's starting a franchise, but without permission from the national brand.

Yeah. You know, they have blood sets that beef with each other. There's Crip sets that beef with each other. There's a lot of blood sets beefing with each other in New York, you know? So it's not like one bloods, one Crips that, that I think a lot of maybe people in Europe or whatever assume, um,

Yeah, we had that with the Black Axe as well, where loads of guys were kind of like going off and starting their own crews without like talking to the guys back in Nigeria. And they're kind of just all chaotic now. I guess it sounds pretty similar. You know, I'm talking about Lyndon a lot because he really gave us insight. And it's interesting the way he talks about how hopeless the situation was.

Another quote from him, when I was in it, I was one of those ones thinking the same young, dumb way. I didn't really take into consideration nobody else's feelings. I didn't take into consideration nobody else's life. I didn't value life myself. But I felt like I was protecting my people and my family because it felt like every time I did something, it was always retaliation or something to prevent something happening. Like we didn't go start things. We finished it. And I brought up to him, I was like, if you retaliate and they retaliate back, like it just keeps going.

And he said, it's an ongoing battle. See song back and forth, back and forth. We kill one of y'all. They kill one of us. We kill one of them. They kill one of us. And I guess we're going to just go until somebody got some sense or we was all out of people to kill.

That's the route that it goes. And it's, I mean, that's, I don't think that's the most original statement, but like that's the, I think he really captures that mindset really well. And then you got to ask yourself, how do you, how do you stop this? What's been going on for, for decades, like you said, and his story, I mean, he went, he went from selling dope to using it himself. Then he was out on the street and he got addicted because he needed pain pills to help recover from gunshot wounds. I mean, it's like, it's like there's so much purposelessness, right? I mean, people don't really have another purpose.

purpose in life other than this and there's nothing to kind of keep them going other than this kind of world so it just becomes their entire life that's the whole thing when you don't have any resources opportunity like I'm not saying bad choices weren't made right but

You know, if like, you know, personal responsibility is everything. But at the same time, if there's zero opportunity, if, you know, you're born in a nice neighborhood, you got a hundred choices, maybe 10 of them are bad. It's a lot easier to make a good choice. If you're born in a neighborhood like Lynn was, you got maybe 10 choices and nine of them are bad. You know what I'm saying? I think like, you know, a single crime, a single guy doing, doing a crime is kind of like a personal responsibility thing you could argue. But like, we're talking about gangs and organized crimes and mafia and stuff like that. And that's like,

I guess that's why we want to go into the past and the kind of stuff that underlies all this shit, because that's the reason why these big sweeping movements happen. Yeah. And another thing actually that I thought was interesting is I used to ask everyone, like, what's the difference between St. Louis and Chicago and Baltimore and other cities with high murder rates? Like, what's one thing that everyone says is different? And they were just like, everyone here knows each other. Like, it's a small city.

It's kind of true. When I was with Lyndon, one of his friends had just been killed. He was a Cochran crypt they called Little Rat, which I feel like is not a good name if you're a gang member. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah.

Cochran was another neighborhood we had just been in. It's where the guys had given us the rundown about Ice Cube and told us that story. And they were tidying what Lyndon said, and it turns out that Little Rat was Izo's girl's cousin, and Izo lived in a blood neighborhood and knew all those. So it's all like, it really is like a small city where everyone really does know each other, which is the wildest thing. And that's the other thing that doesn't get attention, I think,

from talking to Linda and all that, there really is just so much trauma in these communities. And we talked about that with everyone. Everyone has lost friends. Lots of people have been shot and survived or saw someone shot in front of them. It's not normal, you know, and it does something to your brain witnessing all that violence.

There's just a whole lot of untreated PTSD out there in these neighborhoods and not a lot of resources to treat it. And that just, again, that perpetuates the cycle. You just get more and more violence. And I'll never forget this moment. We're talking to these guys in a crew called AMR, which stands for ammunition, money, and respect. And I'm interviewing them in a hotel room and they're just like, they're stone as all hell. They're rolling up giant blunts, eating like sour patch kids at skills. And I'm trying to interview them. So they're talking into the mic and their mouths are, it was, it was a messy situation, right?

I'm getting like one or two word answers. Interview is just completely unusable. And then we asked him about their earliest memories of violence and the whole disposition just changed. The guy's like probably, you know, my little brother's dad, he got shot and killed right in front of me, in front of us. And we were probably nine or 10 years old. And I asked him if he remembered it. And he kind of has this dark laugh and he's like, yeah, like that, that shit was real. And he was quiet and not giggling for the first time.

And just like that, that shit wasn't right for real. He's just mumbling that to himself. And you kind of saw like when you're nine years old and someone gets killed in front of you like that, it's going to do something to you. And if you're seeing all your, I mean, I talked to him and I'm in Izo's neighborhood, like he'll just list off,

You know, you'll need your toes and your fingers to count all the friends he's lost to violence. And there's so many stories out there like that in North St. Louis. And there's so little attention being paid to helping these people get the treatment they need to get over that, you know? Yeah. I mean, if you're talking about seeing role models or getting like a blueprint for how you're going to live your life, if you see how pointless life can be, if everyone's just getting shot in the street all the time, Linh,

I don't know. Like the PTSD of that alone would just... Izzo's got this story about a friend of his who, like one of his best buddies, he dropped him off. It was 4th of July. He dropped him off and 10 minutes later, the guy got gunned down and he was just like...

He didn't have problems with anyone. Like he was a good dude. And once that, once that happened, like I had been trying to be better. I've been trying to keep myself on the straight and narrow. But once that happened, I was like, I'm out for myself. Like, it doesn't matter if you're good or if you're not good. Cause it could happen to anyone in St. Louis. And you know, that does something to your mind, especially when you're 17, 18, 19, 20.

But another thing to mention, too, in St. Louis that I left off is the policing issues. And obviously, St. Louis is just outside where Mike Brown was killed. It's right outside Ferguson. Ferguson's right outside St. Louis, I should say. And those issues carry over into the city as well. The department has a bad history of racism and kind of the usual police issues affecting American cities right now.

St. Louis also has one of the highest rates of police officers killing people and shootings in general. And there's also been some insane racism scandals and some just absurdly wild shit. Like one St. Louis cop a couple of years ago killed another during a game of Russian roulette. I mean, yeah, that's mad. Yeah. And you know, I do, there is a degree to which I sympathize with St. Louis police officers compared to other cities, uh,

Because like I said, it's not an unreasonable assumption that everyone you're interacting with has a gun. Again, I'm not excusing shooting people, but I'm saying, you know, in St. Louis, if you're walking out on the street, like, and you're chasing somebody at night, you're breaking up a scene. I feel like that's going to factor into some of the decisions that you make and into your adrenaline and how you conduct yourself. Like, we're not excusing police violence here. We're just talking reality. Like, I don't envy that job at all.

There's also something called the Ferguson effect, which was coined by a St. Louis criminologist, but it's kind of not what you think.

So yeah, at first the Ferguson effect meant that police officers were backing off of being proactive, just not responding as fast or not really getting involved in stuff because they weren't willing to do their jobs at the height of the Ferguson protests and the new scrutiny that came with being a police officer. And that's kind of been disproven though. Officers I've talked to have actually told me there's elements of truth to that. But the other Ferguson effect is that of once the trust is destroyed between the community and the police,

It gets a lot harder to solve crimes. Police are called less. The community that may have called the police in the past now doesn't or tries to take matters into their own hands or just won't talk to them. So that same criminologist says that that actually is true. And St. Louis does have a very low clearance rate for homicides. They're also understaffed and overwhelmed and just competing with a stop snitching culture that makes it really hard for them to do their jobs.

So, yeah, that is, I mean, that is, that's kind of what we have as the building blocks for murder city USA. I think it applies to a lot of cities in the U.S. with high murder rates right now. You know, it's not L.A. or Miami or New York anymore, right? Cincinnati and Cleveland and Milwaukee, Kansas City, Detroit, Chicago, of course. But it's those factors that I think are thrown there. And I have this theory about how, you know, you had these communities that were, like I said,

Great migration happens. You have a lot of communities that are sort of corral, especially black communities that are corralled into really messed up neighborhoods, but things are a little tolerable because there are jobs there. Right. And then those jobs, solidly middle-class jobs or working class jobs, factory jobs that provide for people, those jobs start to disappear because

And that makes things a lot harder when there's no resources, right? When people can't put food on the table, then you have the drug war in the 70s and the 80s and incarceration rates going up. And you just have a generation of young men, fathers thrown in jail, thrown in prison, no jobs. And then you're kind of seeing this wave now of this violence. First, it was in the 90s with crack and now it's going on with this. And also, obviously, you have the pandemic. But St. Louis has been...

extremely murderous for the past seven years. I don't know, man. I'm rambling about this, but... It's crazy to see as a, like, looking in from a foreign perspective, because, like, we've seen Ferguson, and we've seen, like, some of the stuff that the politicians say about these, like, death rates in cities across the Midwest, but, like, to hear it from people who are, like, there, reported there, or, like, being wrapped up in it is, like, really... I mean, it's kind of sad how unique it is, right? I mean, we should be learning about this all the time, but...

Like just, just to see how these cities have got stripped of their identities and their purpose over the years. It's like, you know, it's, it's kind of obvious that things are going to degenerate, but like to this, to the level they have is,

It's pretty, it's pretty wild to see. Yeah. I mean, there's ways of building it back and there are, there are some neighborhoods in St. Louis that are doing great, but it's just, you know, these neighborhoods get deprived of resources and kind of forgotten and no one cares about them. Like what do you think is going to happen? Like I said, you know, I'm all about personal responsibility, but if you, if you put these building blocks in place for this, you can't be surprised after, after what happens. But I mean, I don't, I don't give up hope on St. Louis, man. Like there's a lot of people out there in the streets, especially in the North that are doing amazing work, uh,

the linden's dad the reverend he's out there talking all these addicts trying to help everything he can linden himself is clean now he's got jobs he's doing great um you know it's uh it's it's crazy and then there's another guy we spoke we spent some time with demetrius johnson it's a former nfl player from the clinton p bodies he does this consulting and construction stuff where he takes young men with records he gets them jobs in the construction industry and

Even though they have records, there's this guy, TJ Weiss, who runs a huge construction company. He gets them in there, gets them in these union jobs. Guys with records, there aren't a lot of jobs there, period. Guys with records trying to get a job in, especially with a felony, it's impossible. But he's doing this thing where he's getting these guys jobs and they're earning an earnest living. They get to put the streets behind. It's a small city. I'm looking at, come on, Jack, you got billions. Jack is from St. Louis. Put some money into North St. Louis. Make it happen out there.

It's like, it's like we saw in your El Salvador stuff as well, right? Where the churches are actually, I mean, despite what, like, despite what people think about churches and religion and stuff, like so many of these pastors and these religious figures are like right out there on the front lines of these conflicts trying to save lives. And I mean, that's gotta be worth a lot. Um,

But yeah, I mean, at least there are good things happening because there's a lot of bad stuff going on in this podcast. But yeah, I mean, like people, people react to the situations they're in. Right. I mean, you know, people aren't good or bad in their nature. They just like they react into their environment. So if you give them a better place to live in, then things will get better. But I hope that happens.

Yeah, yeah, it's rough out there, man. I really hope the next year. I mean, they had an increase of, I think, I think last year it was like 200, around 200 murders, and this year it was 260.

There are 50 killings in July, I believe, which is, I mean, it's a small city, 50 killings in one month in a city of 300,000. I mean, there's countries out there in Europe that don't have that many kids. I've been thinking here, you know, about Stockholm or Malmo or, or all these stories about the London murder rate. Like, I mean, it's, it's incomparable. So what's going on in, in, in St. Louis. Uh, but yeah, that is our episode. Sorry. It was a little different. Uh,

If you put money to the Patreon, you can complain. I'm a little brain dead from New Year's and all that, so we rambled on a bit, but hopefully you learned something.

And, yeah, stay with us because I think we'll get back to the normal gangs and organized crime stuff, I think, next week. But I just – I really wanted to talk about this, so thanks for bearing with us. Yeah. I love hearing about this stuff. You've seen this stuff. That's what I'm here for. Yeah, if you want, I'll put the documentary up on the Twitter page.

and uh instagram and all that uh do we do anything usually i haven't done this in a while like i haven't recorded in like a month man i'm right did we say anything when we say goodbye but we should we should get people on the patreon right it's patreon.com or slash younger world podcast give us money so we can keep doing these and dedicate more of our time to it yeah all right happy new year uh cheers to 2021 see you later 2020