As progressives push to “decarcerate” Vermont, opioid deaths increase. Residents may have noticed steady reports of out-of-state fentanyl and heroin dealers being apprehended in Vermont, often associated with well-organized and extremely violent inner city gangs who also traffic in guns, sex workers (including children), and anything else that makes a profit. Progressives eclipse the real crisis of a steady influx of society’s most dangerous and malicious capitalists — drug gangs and related cartels.
Federal authorities say Dajuan Williams, 28, of Detroit, was the leader of a drug trafficking organization that reached Vermont. They say Williams, along with Mohamed Luhizo, 23; Jaylinn Lenoir, 22; Stephen Alexander, 31; Rendell Perkins, 21; Jessica Elwell, 30; Juwon Robinson, 26; and another defendant who remains a fugitive, are charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and many of them also face money laundering charges. … This all happened between September 2019 and November 2020 in Vermont, North Dakota, and elsewhere.
Dajuan has previously made Vermont headlines, after stabbing a man in St. Albans then fleeing to Maine. He was also apprehended in New Hampshire in 2018 with heroin, stolen credit cards, and $32,000 in cash, and sentenced to two-to-four years in jail. His return to the community (in his recent arrest as kingpin) has been less than “restorative.” Others in his group also have a Vermont history: Juwan Robinson was arrested in Burlington in 2020, and Dajuan was arrested back in 2012 in Winooski with 2 ounces of crack cocaine and a 2-year-old in the car. It’s a good thing the feds arrested him, or Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George likely would have already released him with a scolding and a free coupon to stay in a Vermont hotel.
It is evident that the allure of easy profits coupled with mild penalties has attracted Dajuan to return to Vermont again and again. (It doesn’t hurt that Burlington has made a huge push to defund its police; crime rates immediately escalated). These same attractive policies draw other gang activity, thriving during COVID. Vermont’s progressives worry more about racial profiling than victims of fentanyl — perhaps if the Mafia was distributing drugs they would howl at any pullovers of Italians. But then, Italians not dealing drugs would be allowed on their way. … And they are “fat old white men.”
Burlington is becoming a less pleasant place to reside or visit:
The crime rate in Burlington is considerably higher than the national average across all communities in America from the largest to the smallest. … Relative to Vermont, Burlington has a crime rate that is higher than 96% of the state’s cities and towns of all sizes. … Importantly, when you compare Burlington to other communities of similar population, then Burlington crime rate (violent and property crimes combined) is quite a bit higher than average.
The issue of drug dealing is not racist — white motorcycle gangs also deal heroin, as do clans of white Vermont criminals (as a recent bust in St Johnsbury reveals). Yet Vermont’s Black Lives Matter ideological stupor has blindly reduced drug interdiction to a race issue. In defunding the police, many leftists demanded even more police budget cuts than granted, condemning police viciously. As reported in Seven Days, one histrionic Burlingtonian chirped to the city council: “This takes courage. It takes leadership. We can lead Vermont. We can lead this country. Get fired f–ing up right now.”
Burlington is leading the country into an ignorant stupor. Crime rates will continue to escalate. Graffiti has exploded in the last year, costing businesses huge sums for cleanup while undermining downtown shopping. Homelessness continues to increase in Burlington. White Vermonters are faulted as racists, even if those homeless got off the bus from Detroit last week.
Dajuan Williams didn’t just get off the bus in Vermont — he is very familiar with the lucrative business that thrives in Vermont’s black market, even as Gov. Phil Scott and his progressive entourage destroy established businesses with unconstitutional, capricious business restrictions. If only hotel owners could do business as freely as gang members.
That’s the problem with false ideological narratives such as “Vermont is systemically racist” or “Vermont police are all racist” — they don’t match up with reality. The reality of drug trafficking, deaths from overdose, and related violence will continue to intrude on these idiotic mantras of the left. The slanderous attack on Vermont and its culture will be exposed as crime rates escalate and reality restores reason to Burlington and its oblivious mayor.
The more progressives seek to pretend the gangs are not there, the more incongruous their positions appear in the real world. But the gangs will keep coming — the flow will increase. Rutland was alerted to gang activity in the 1990s, and has been fighting a gang presence ever since. (There was a drug-related killing there this month. State officials let the killer go home, but the feds have stepped in and saved us, yet again.)
In 2008 it was noted that:
Suburbs in the Northeast offer gangs potential advantages: less intense competition from urban rivals and fewer local police “gang units” focused solely on frustrating their efforts. The gangs still benefit from relatively easy interstate highway access to major drug routes and population centers.
In 2010 the Vermont Times Argus took note of this reality:
They’re not flying their colors or fighting for turf, but urban gangs with familiar names like the Bloods, Crips and Latin Kings are active in Vermont and have been for years. They’re drawn to Vermont by the lure of easy profits in the drug trade, according to police, and many gang members end up staying as inmates in Vermont jails. … One of the most recent gang arrests in Rutland involved a 21-year-old man from Brooklyn, N.Y., named Genghis A. Khan who was charged with selling and possessing crack cocaine in the city.
By 2014 this activity by gangs, escalating with the opioid scourge, was obvious. A Burlington Free Pressarticle noted:
As illicit drugs have trickled into Vermont in past decades, so have gangs. There is no comparison to the nation’s larger cities, those in law enforcement say, but communities across the state regularly experience activity related to organized crime. … Federal laws have made a difference in the past two decades, local police chiefs say, but more needs be done, including the creation of state gang laws.
In 2015, Vermont witnessed the “Brooklyn bust,” in which two Brooklyn, NY defendants were:
allegedly at the center of a case that extends from 2012 to March of this year. Prosecutors describe the two as being the “leaders of a significant drug trafficking organization” that operated in Vermont, Maine and New York. … The case provides a window into two troubling trends in the drug crisis in the Northeast: The rise in popularity of fentanyl and the extent to which criminal gangs from New York run operations in Vermont using a local network of drug users and other accomplices, often women. … In addition to the drug dealing, Cargo and Delima are charged with trafficking women for prostitution — including a minor — and money laundering.
That year, Vermont officials stated that gang activity was at “an all-time high” and increasing.
Then Vermont saw a Bronx gang bust in Burlington in 2016:
It was the biggest gang bust in the history of the Bronx. And it’s hitting home for the Burlington police. … Chief Brandon del Pozo released a statement on Friday that said, in part: “To think that gangs from the Bronx victimize opiate and crack addicts directly to our south and east, but not here in Vermont, is naive,” wrote del Pozo. “The same roads and highways that brought them there also bring them here, every day, and the same profit margins exist. This gang operation typifies what we see here in Burlington.” … Eighty-four members of different New York City gangs were indicted for trafficking heroin and crack cocaine as far north as Manchester, New Hampshire.
More clear evidence of gang-related trafficking continues to arise (especially trading drugs for guns, which progressives then leverage as justification to enact yet more gun restrictions against native Vermonters). In 2018, Vermont police detained “Weezy” and “Sunshine,” two nice-sounding Latin Kings gangmembers who do not-so-nice things:
In a statement, U.S. Attorney for Vermont Christina Nolan said, “Darwin Medina was one of two leaders of a conspiracy to pour dangerous drugs into Franklin County. Their actions invited destruction in two communities. The citizens of Vermont suffered the consequences of the drugs they brought in, while the defendants took money and guns back to Boston to further gang activities there.”
Just to round out the calendar, in 2019 there was an interdiction of 10,000 bags of fentanyl-laced heroin, from Holyoke, Mass, assisted by the FBI’s Western Massachusetts Gang Task Force. And in February, the feds arrested a self-declared Massachusetts gang member in Brattleboro.
Vermont has resisted creating a gang task force, perhaps in fear of histrionic howls of derision from deluded far-left whackos who prefer to expose the citizenry to the worst criminal element on our continent in the name of “social equity.” This silly lark of “social justice that creates victims and injustice” is tiresome enough without exposing young Vermonters (of any color) to risk of death: opioid overdoses have risen sharply during COVID.
It is time to allow factual reality into this “race” conversation. VTDigger and others indignantly proclaim that Vermont police use force more often with black defendants — are these reporters aware of the honor culture of gangs, and that resisting police, or assaulting them, gains respect, prestige, and honor in the gangs and on the street? Is it possiblethat an increased gang presence in Burlington has contributed to those statistics, or to the spike in graffiti (gangs are known for “tagging” through graffiti? These are merely logical questions regarding causation.
If gang activity were the actual causeof increased physical conflict with police, arrests of BIPOC fentanyl dealers, drug deaths, or graffiti, how would an ideologically-compromised media with a pre-written social justice script even fathomthat reality, until it bit them in the face? It will bite us all. Vermont is suffering from a race crisis — the ideologically perverted progressive push to slander Vermont police as racist, Vermont farmers as having used sharecropping laws to oust black Vermont farmers, and alleged genocide against “Native Peoples.”
The “native people” of Vermont are living here now, being scolded by colonizing thugs who pave the way for urban gangs and cheap drugs, to rape pillage and plunder the clueless and naive. And if Dajuan and his BIPOC Detroit associates are incarcerated in Vermont, their race will then be used to allege Vermont’s police and justice system are racist — as proved by the increase in black inmates.
I grew up in violent, impoverished inner city areas — something Vermont does not historically have, but is furiously constructing in Burlington, Rutland, Bennington and Newport. I guess something has to fill the corrupt hole left by the EB-5 program: mentally ill progressives and the gangland thugs they pander to are rushing to fill the void.
Of course, gang members are flooding Vermont with fentanyl and heroin while our police are condemned as racists. It will get worse until truth and justice are restored through the rule of constitutional law.