A Year After R2 Bust, Newhallville’s Quieter

One year after cops broke up the violent Newhallville gang known as R2, Lt. Thaddeus Reddish pulled up at the corner of Butler and Huntington streets, where homeowner Mark Barros reported that he no longer hears afternoon gunshots.

Reddish is working to keep it that way.

It used to be you’d hear ​“fix, six, seven, eight, nine rounds” of gunfire going off, even in the middle of the afternoon, said Barros (pictured), who lost his nephew in a fatal city shooting in 2009.

Newhallville was quiet on the Tuesday afternoon Barros spoke. Neighbors raked leaves and strolled the sidewalks.

While shootings haven’t disappeared, life has quieted down somewhat in the year since cops a year ago this week rounded up nearly 50 members of a violent gang that had terrorized the neighborhood with a policy of ​“Beef With Everybody.” The former leaders of that group, called R2, are currently working their way through the court system on a variety of drug and conspiracy charges.

The R2 investigation netted 47 indictments, with 30 people convicted and 17 cases still pending.

It was the first dismantling of a large-scale drug gang in town since the mid-‘90s, when a string of similar joint local-federal investigations sent leaders of the Jungle Boys and Kensington Street International, among others, to prison.

City police conducted the R2 investigation in coordination with federal, state, and suburban police agencies. Two U.S. attorneys were assigned to the investigation, helping the team put together a case that would fall under federal racketeering provisions and thus lead to longer prison sentences. The Justice Department gave it a name: Operation Crip Keeper. The involvement of the feds meant the investigators could use wiretaps and make use of extra manpower in amassing evidence over months of surveillance and undercover buys.

So far in 2011, a year after those busts, Newhallville has had 24 non-fatal shootings. It had 37 in 2009, 32 in 2010. Newhallville had five murders last year; so far this year, two.

“A year out, violence is down in Newhalllville,” said Lt. Jeff Hoffman, the current head of the Tactical Narcotics Unit. ​“It affirms what we believed: Narcotics investigations have a long-term impact” on violence.

“It seems as though it has quieted down over in Newhallville on Read Street,” said Newhallville Alderwoman Alfreda Edwards. ​“You don’t hear gunshots as often.”

Meanwhile, the police department’s incoming new chief, Dean Esserman, has promised to make dismantling violent drug-dealing gangs a top priority. Along with scattered ad hoc young criminal bands across town, New Haven is believed to have four major, structured violent gangs in operation: the Grape Street Crips, the Bloods (two subsets), the Latin Kings, and the Hell’s Angels.

While R2 isn’t on that list, it still exists, Reddish said.

Moments before Barros approached his cruiser Tuesday afternoon, Reddish called a young teenage boy over. He indulged a reporter in a couple of questions while chewing on the strings of his sweatshirt. When the subject turned to R2, the teen backed away from the car. He said he had nothing more to say.

R2 is still around, Reddish said. It’s just under the radar.

“Them R Boys”

“They used to control all of this,” Reddish said as he rolled down Read Street on Tueday afternoon. ​“This used to be a very big stronghold.”

In the neighborhood, Read Street is known as ​“the R,” Reddish explained. He was behind the wheel of his cruiser, criss-crossing the streets on a tour of R2’s past territory. Soft rock played quietly from 94.3 FM on the car’s radio.

“R2” refers to the western portion of Read Street, from Newhall Street to Goodyear Street, Reddish explained. ​“R1” refers to the remaining eastern block. At its height, R2 controlled turf from Ivy Street north into Hamden, between Newhall and Shelton, Reddish said.

“You’d see them all out here. It’d be a bunch of kids hanging out,” Reddish said. ​“Other drug groups didn’t come in here.”

How did they control the neighborhood? ​“Through violence,” Reddish said. R2 had a motto of ​“B.W.E.” — Beef With Everyone. Members wore black and were proudly unaffiliated with any other group, which meant the bullets flew freely.

Reddish said he first encountered R2 several years ago when he made lieutenant and became a daytime shift commander in Newhallville. He would ride around and ​“see all these kids” 15 to 20 years old, hanging out. ​“I’m like, what the hell is going on?”

He started to look at neighborhood graffiti. ​“I would see ​‘R2’ written on all these things.”

He also observed something else. ​“I noticed people were afraid,” he said. When he would talk to neighbors after an violent incident — someone getting beat up, say — he would hear, ​“It’s them R boys” or ​“It was them guys from the R.”

Reddish started moving kids off of corners, breaking up groups of kids whenever he saw them congregating. He started paying attention to faces, learning names and addresses.

In June 2009, Reddish was made district manager. ​“Now I’m really fixated,” he said. He said he started thinking of R2 as ​“urban terrorists.” Neighbors were afraid. ​“There was gunfire every night,” Reddis said. ​“Because they were beefing with everybody.”

R2 would beef over anything, Reddish said. It might start in high school, or on Facebook, or even with someone looking at someone the wrong way in the Milford mall.

He and his officers started cracking down harder, making gun and drug arrests. ​“We were on top of them so much,” Reddish said, ​“they started going into Hamden.”

Reddish started working with Hamden cops. ​“It just grew and grew and grew.” Investigative services got involved. Then the feds came in, with the ability to do wire taps. Then came the sweep in November 2010 — and dozens of arrests.

“The Good Ones & The Bad Ones”

The arrests took out the top level of R2 leaders, Reddish said. ​“It got quieter.”

Now the neighborhood sees ​“sporadic gunfire,” but ​“we’re not getting it every night.”

Reddish said the neighborhood has avoided seeing another gang move in to take over because neighbors and cops have worked together to prevent it.

For Reddish, it’s personal. The lieutenant, who’s 46, spent his childhood in Newhallville. He lives today in the house he grew up in. ​“Now this is my family here,” he said, parked outside a corner store at Huntington and Shepard. ​“I see this all as part of me.”

“I know a lot of the people,” Reddish said. ​“The good ones and the bad ones.”

Lately, Reddish said, he’s been dealing with kids heading up to Prospect Hill or East Rock to steal GPS units out of cars or pilfer bikes. He keeps his eye out for kids on bikes that look like they don’t fit right, or are obviously stolen. He talks to teens, and runs a mentorship program.

He has learned some of the lingo.

East Rock is ​“the other side.” Prospect Hill: ​“Chinatown.”

“I say, ​‘Why do you go up there?’” Reddish said. ​“They say, ​‘They give us money.’” The teens intimidate people on the street into handing over cash, Reddish said.

“They say, ​‘There’s bikes over there,’” Reddish said. When he points out that the bikes in East Rock already belong to people, the teens reply, ​“They don’t want them.”

They say that because the bikes often aren’t locked up, or aren’t locked up well, Reddish said.

Why do the neighborhood kids tell him all this stuff?

Let’s ask one, Reddish replied.

He drove a block and found a teenage boy he recognized, wearing a black and red sweatshirt. He called him over to the car.

“How come you guys talk to me?” Reddish asked.

“I don’t know,” the boy said. ​“Just to show we not bad.”

Asked if he knew anything about R2, the boy suddenly had somewhere else he had to be.

Barros, who was out in his yard with his two dogs, came over to the car. He reminisced about a time when a Tuesday afternoon would be punctuated by the sound of gunshots. Look closely at a lot of the neighboring houses and you’ll find bullet holes, he said.

Barros also recalled a fateful day that changed R2 history. It was a July 2008. ​“I was painting my house,” Barros said. As he was up on a ladder, he heard a kid on a dirt bike whizzing around nearby streets. ​“I heard him — eeeh, eeeh — all day.”

The guy whizzed by his house, turned a corner, and then Barros heard a terrible crash. He turned to a neighbor. ​“I said, ​‘John that kid’s dead.’”

Sure enough, the 15-year-old had collided with a van in a fatal accident. His friends pulled the van driver out and beat him viciously.

The boy was a leader in R2, Reddish said. He was a capable commander; had he lived, the gang might have grown even bigger before the takedown.

“It’s The Street”

Reddish continued his tour through the neighborhood, waving and stopping to talk with people he recognized, and some he didn’t, even though they knew him.

A group of half a dozen teenagers was gathered on a stoop. One girl, a 16-year-old named Taniah Horton, was braiding Tony Santana’s hair. Another boy, who said his name is Dave Johnson, responded to a question about R2.

“I don’t mess with them,” he said. ​“I don’t talk to them.”

So R2 still exists?

Johnson wouldn’t say.

“It’s not a gang, it’s the street,” said Santana. R2 simply refers to a section of Read Street, to ​“whoever lives around there since they were little.”

“You can’t assume it’s a gang,” said Santana.

Inside the Quick Check Stop (pictured above) at the corner of Shelton and Read, a clerk was selling loosies and bags of chips. The store is located in what used to be the epicenter of R2 activity.

“I have nothing to say about those people,” the clerk said with a smile when asked about R2. ​“I have no trouble with nobody.”

He said he’s seen no change in the neighborhood in the year since the feds announced victory over R2. ​“New Haven is the same.”

No one wants to say anything negative about R2, Reddish said. ​“The presence is there; it’s just not seen.”

“They’re not doing what they did,” he said. ​“They’re not shooting up everyone’s houses. Things are a whole lot better.”