Young Boys, Inc.

Young Boys, Inc, or YBI, was a street gang that sprang up on the west side of Detroit in the latter part of the 1970`s.  This street gang operated differently to all the other gangs, by using a structured plan that was very much like a corporation, in which tasks were assigned to youngsters, and this was the job they did, unless the leaders promoted them or decided to eliminate them.  The leaders were Ray Peoples & Butch Jones, and their "team" comprised of neighbourhood boys who were recruited from ten years of age and older.  They were used not only as dealers, but runners and the older ones, as muscle.  They even adopted the supermarket approach by using various names for all the different drugs they supplied.  They took this supermarket approach even further by offering freebie samples and two for one deals.

    Jones & Peoples treated their boys extremely well, by paying them a good wage every week, and the best salesmen were handsomely rewarded.  The best boys went a step higher in their organisation.  One aspect they never shied away from was murder.  Enemies, informants, rip off merchants, and anybody deemed as dangerous or bothersome, were killed without compunction.  This business model was adopted by other gangs but it was the YBI who had the stranglehold on the Detroit heroin market.  One of the main enforcers for the YBI was Kurt Napier, aged 19.  His violence and intimidation was so much that he was labelled the city`s Public Enemy No.1  But the cops had not been idle and were planning a city wide swoop on the gang and arresting as many as they could.  Napier decided to go out in a blaze of glory.  He got hold of other enforcers and they tore around the city, extracting unpaid debts and giving severe beatings.  He was chased by cops in a stolen car and captured.  He went down for a life sentence.

    Ray Peoples and Butch Jones were jailed in 1982, but after being released, Peoples tried to re-establish himself in the Detroit Underworld, but even after a short time away, the scene changes and other villains have stepped up to the plate.  They were not happy about Peoples, so they simply had him killed.  Butch Jones was in jail for a 12 year stretch but was named in an indictment in 1987 by a Grand Jury, naming 26 individuals, including Jones` wife and a cop!  Jones was said to be running the organisation from jail in Texas, and was responsible for the murder of five people.  This seemed to signal the end of the YBI.