NEW YORK – Two gang members on Monday were each sentenced to six life sentences after being convicted last month on charges of murder-in-aid-of-racketeering and related felony offenses, officials
Damion Hardy, also known as “World,” and Aaron Granton, also known as “E-Bay,” were members of the Cash Money Brothers, a Brooklyn-based criminal street gang that was heavily involved in cocaine distribution, officials said.
Both are 40 years old and live in Brooklyn, authorities said.
“Gang members and would-be gang members are on notice that we will never cease in our efforts to bring murderous criminals to justice and to make communities like Lafayette Gardens safe for its law abiding residents,” stated Acting United States Attorney Kelly T. Currie.
“The Cash Money Brothers, counted a rotating roster of roughly 50 members, said an official with the F.B.I. The official said the arrests yesterday devastated the midlevel management of the gang, and had also caught several so-called associates – freelancers, essentially, who would sell the gang’s drugs for profit,” according to a New York Times Story.
According to the evidence, these are the facts and circumstances surrounding this case:
- From 1991 until August 2004, Hardy was the leader of a criminal enterprise known as the “Cash Money Brothers.” based in the Lafayette Gardens houses in Brooklyn.
- Granton was a member of Money Brothers and one of its top enforcers.
- From the time the crack-cocaine epidemic began in the late 1980s, Lafayette Gardens was a central and lucrative hub for the distribution of cocaine base.
- At that time, the young men who would later form Money Brothers acted as street dealers under the direction of the senior drug dealers who controlled Lafayette Gardens.
- In approximately 1991, after the gang was formed under the leadership of the defendant Hardy and his brother, Myron Hardy, also known as “Wise,” the Money Brothers ousted the senior dealers and seized control of the Lafayette Gardens crack trade.
- Money Brothers maintained control of Lafayette Gardens through violence that included near-daily gun battles with rival organizations and numerous murders.
- For example, in 1998, Hardy ordered a junior gang member to shoot and kill Michael Colon because Hardy believed Colon disrespected and humiliated him at a roller skating rink.
- In 1999, while Hardy was incarcerated, his brother Myron was shot and killed in Lafayette Gardens. Hardy.
- Other Money Brothers members believed that a rival drug dealer named Ivery “Peanut” Davis and other members of Davis’s drug organization were responsible for the murder.
- While Hardy lay wounded in the hospital, Damion Hardy, from his prison cell, ordered Money Brothers members to murder Darryl Baum, James Hamilton, Tyrone Baum, and Ivery Davis—each was murdered by Granton.
- Davis’s killing also resulted in the death of an innocent bystander, Johan Camitz.
- Granton earned a reputation as an effective and ruthless killer.
- As a result, he was recruited in 2001 by a separate gang, the “Supreme Team,” to kill Troy Singleton—who was then shot multiple times in the back and head as he left a nightclub in Queens, New York.
