When detectives with the NYPD’s Intelligence Division noticed that members of Brooklyn’s Woo street gang were posting photos of themselves on social media from luxurious locations that looked nothing like their home borough, they were puzzled.
“Palm trees in the background and a swimming pool,” a senior law enforcement official told The Daily Beast. “Movie star homes.”
The detectives soon understood that a number of the pictures had been taken in sumptuous rental homes far from the Canarsie neighborhood where Woo—which is sometimes spelled with an extra “o” and reportedly stands for “We On Our Own”—is based.
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“They were posting on all their Instagram pages where they’re like in these fabulous houses, not in New York City,” the official said. “And you know, these are, these are guys who never go more than three blocks from Canarsie. So you gotta wonder, what are they doing there? And how is it that they are living so large? With what racket, with what money? Like, how is this occurring?”
A number of the shots, which detectives said were taken in California and Florida, showed the gang members brandishing firearms. Investigators were ultimately able to match the background of at least one of the homes with an Airbnb listing.
“You’d see guys waving guns around and you would look at it and say, ‘Where is he?’” the law enforcement official said. “And you’d go through the Airbnb ads and say, ‘Okay, I got the same rental here. There’s the dining room table, here’s the pool in the back that matches everything we see.’”
During the investigation, the team of city cops and federal agents combed through bank records, tracing various withdrawals that were apparently financing the gang members’ newly lavish lifestyles. They soon discovered that the gang had been using false names to file for unemployment benefits administered through a federal COVID relief program, the official said.
That’s when the NYPD teamed up with the Inspector General’s Office of the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL-OIG) and determined that a group of individuals had used more than 800 false identities to file nearly 1,000 unemployment claims, securing at least $4.3 million in illicit benefits. All of the applications were traced to a small handful of IP addresses, the official said.
On Thursday morning, eight Woo members and associates between the ages of 20 and 23 were arrested on federal fraud charges.
The suspects— identified by the Department of Justice as Romean Brown, Tyrek Clarke, Kennith Desir, Stephan Dorminvil, Kai Heyward, Keith James, Oneal Marks, Jahriah Olivierre, Christopher Jean Pierre, Roleeke Smith, and Christopher Topey—carried out the alleged scheme between March 2020 and October 2021, according to prosecutors.
Last May, several of those arrested appeared in a music video for a song called “Trappin,” the DOJ noted in a statement, adding, “The lyrics of the song include, ‘Unemployment got us workin’ a lot,’ a reference to the defendants’ fraudulent scheme.”
The complaint against the eight includes screenshots of publicly accessible Instagram posts in which the Woo members are seen posing with a Mercedes Maybach, a Lamborghini SUV, and a Jaguar. Among other things, the posts show them flaunting enormous stacks of money, carrying shopping bags from Saks Fifth Avenue, and “making the Woo street gang sign (‘W’) with his right hand while sitting on a BMW 7 series vehicle,” the complaint states.
In one photo, one of the suspects is flashing a different hand signal known as “dropping rakes,” which the complaint describes as “a gesture intended to show disrespect to the Gangster Disciples street gang,” an organization at war with Woo.
In another, a suspect wearing Burberry holds up a stack of cash with the location tag: Hollywood, California.
In a third, one of the suspects is “holding a large stack of United States currency with the caption ‘Happy Wooday To My Fucking Blood Brother Anything Go Up For You.’”
“The Unemployment Insurance Program exists to provide needed assistance to qualified individuals who are unemployed due to no fault of their own,” DOL-OIG Special Agent-in-Charge Jonathan Mellone said in a statement after the charges were announced. “Fraud against the Unemployment Insurance Program distracts state workforce agencies, like the New York State Department of Labor, from ensuring benefits go to individuals who are eligible to receive them. The Office of Inspector General will continue to work closely with our many law enforcement partners, to investigate those who exploit the Unemployment Insurance Program.”
The federal response to COVID-19, known as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or, CARES Act, has paid out about $3.5 trillion since early 2020. But the program was beset by fraud, and scammers made off with nearly $100 billion, according to the U.S. Secret Service.
“There’s no doubt that the programs were easily accessible online,” Secret Service Assistant Special Agent in Charge Roy Dotson told CNBC in December. “And so, with that, comes the opportunity for bad actors to get into that mix,” he said. “It was necessary to try to get these funds out to people that were truly hurting, and no fault of anybody.”
Today’s arrests came just hours before the body of alleged Woo member and rising rap star TDott Woo was scheduled to be borne in a white horse-drawn carriage past his Brooklyn home. He was shot to death outside his residence on Feb. 1, the very day he had signed a recording contract with Million Dollar Music that could have enabled him to live large legitimately. The rapper’s funeral is slated for Friday.
In Feb. 2020, Pop Smoke, another Brooklyn-born rapper affiliated with Woo was shot and killed by masked gunmen during a home invasion at a Hollywood Hills mansion owned by Real Housewives of Beverly Hills castmember Teddi Mellencamp and her husband. Pop Smoke’s posthumous hit single, “The Woo,” was released that July. A month before his death, Pop Smoke had been arrested on charges of stealing a $375,000 Rolls-Royce.
Last year, 34 alleged members of the Woo gang and a rival group, the Choo gang, were named in a 122-count indictment on attempted murder, rape, conspiracy, assault, and weapons charges.
