LÜST, LIES & GANG TIES: Birmingham Dístríct Attorney's Secret Relationship With Corruptîon, Crîme and the Críps!

{TheChronicle.cc} –The crowds standing before the portable stage in the dank Birmingham ballroom Tuesday that November in 2018 were as noisy as they were jubilant.

       "Thank you, thank you!" Grinned Danny Carr, after struggling to climb onto the stage. "Tonight you have elected one of your own!" The big man roared proudly, his portly round boyish face glistening sweat, donning one of his now signature blue suits, tie already loosened around his short neck, his last name Carr embroidered on his still crisp French cuffs.

A career Jefferson County prosecutor and criminal justice reformer with little to yet show, Carr was nonsurprisingly the victorious Democratic nominee for Jefferson County District Attorney that year in the general election, beating scholarly and juristically brilliant Republícan Mike Anderton.

 Just a year earlier, the then-45-year-old former ambulance chaser emerged from relative anonymity as a Jefferson County Deputy DA to being sworn in as District Attorney pro tem, only a week after allegedly helping secretly derail newly elected DA Charles Todd Henderson who, days later, would go on to be indicted on a perjury charge and thus immediately suspended under Alabama law.

In the audience that fateful night, quietly watching and rooting his "homeboy" on was 46-year-old Tyrone Johnson, an original Brickyard Projects native and Rolling 60s Crîp, who went by several aliases —Ty Jones, Ty Dolla, John Tyson, Tyrone Jackson —but was universally known in the westside streets as "Trouble."

A year or so following the election of Birmingham's first black head prosecutor, Trouble Johnson would be implicated in multiple armed robberies and a brutal car jacking on Birmingham's Southside, only to ultimately have all serious charges thrown out in preliminary do to what the District Attorney's office now wholly controlled by his "cuz" claimed was a lack of evidence. All of which may well have been true but still highly suspicious.

                            ____________________

                                 Crippin' ain't easy

"Evrybody don't need to know Danny 6-0 Cuzzin [Crîp lingo for 'family']. It's a need-to-know type situation."   

                     -Jim Flood, Bessemer Crîps founder

In interviews, Danny Carr loves to say that he was lured by the law since age fifteen, while more chatty and unencumbered old school peers casually confess (when there are no cameras or white folks around) what most street chieftains already seem to know, that the true unspoken path Carr has tread has long been influenced by actual familial Crîp gangstás almost all in the Carr/Hope/Hunter household.

Raised in the heart of the hood by a single mother, Regina Carr-Hope, a probation officer who eventually quit to pursue a career in education soon after being implicated in a tampering case involving her villainous brother Otis Taylor.

A documented [c]riminal and [k]iller that the FBI once dubbed "one of the most notorious [d]rugloads in America, Otis Taylor, or OT, was an original Los Angeles Neighborhood 60s Crîp who, the story goes, fled LA for good in the early 1980s after ripping off a stash house belonging to infamous California coke king Freeway Rick Ross and migrating with sister Regina and brother Eric on Birmingham's westside, where OT along with other male members of the family would go on to establish one of the most certified and vicious Crîp sets in all the city.

"OT, Eric, lil fat Danny and his lil brother Dannard—they whole family team blue," says old head Tuxedo Junction jooger "Buck" Williams, during one of our phone conversations. "Ensley always been Crîps and GDs, and we had that 8ball thang goin' on back then, see. OT ran sh** becuz he was the man wit' the bag. His nephew Rickey Hunter—who Danny and Dannard'nem's cousin—he more or less ran top West End with the creation of the Nasty Boy Crîps, see. And when I say 'ran,' I mean RAN IT! Dan nem had a step daddy, named Old Man James, who was a cussing drunk and a fool but he was also the po po [police]. A captain or something. That's why the uniforms ain't never bother them negas. Whole dam family royal blue."

According to Williams as well as a number of other old-timers not presently in fear of prosecution or looking for favors, teenage Danny Carr was your average run-of-the-mill and fairly unremarkable high school ball player who hardly practiced on Saturdays (for sneak-geeking), pitched pennies in the church basement on Sundays (to flee the preaching), and on weekdays perpetrated Crîp at nearby Jackson Olin High (to get by freely).

       "Man, Danny Carr is as funny and fake as the fruit bowl on my grandma dining room table, bruh," another longtime Ensley native and businessman who admitted he didn't care for him. "He was Crîp before he got that office the same way Cardi B blood until she got bank. Only Danny Carr a former fat boy on Ozempic and can't rap, ya dig? Soon as they come up, they ain't hood nomo," he added dryly.

Right here is where I had to disagree, even if silently to myself, because, according to everyone I talked to from the life, while uncle OT would eventually be sent to federal prison, for racketeering, narc trafficking, and conspiracy to commit mûrdér, and cousin Rickey was shipped off to reformatory school in the early 1990s, the Carrs might have conformed and changed their behavior but definitely not their beliefs.

                               ____________________

                                         Consigliere

Danny Carr went on to attend Alabama State on a basketball scholarship, majoring in criminal justice at the behest of his now imprisoned uncle, and pledging a fraternity to whitewash his affiliation. He attended Miles Law School for both local convenience and legible connections, briefly working four nights a week at Birmingham's probation office under his mother (who placed him in the tutelage of her probation office colleague and likely work lover Emanuel Washington) before she quit to ultimately become a principal of troubled Wenonah High School, where known Crîppin' delinquents affectionately referred to her as Mama Blue and Queen C, according to my own nephew.

It will not come as a revelation to the discernable amongst us that our brand-conscience, shades-wearing district attorney is a corruptible nepo baby who intentionally talks and acts like a preacher's kid, using heavily-laced Christian vernacular when campaigning and gaming his people for votes and money. The fact that politicians are quite often in it for themselves is not surprising. We like criticize Donald Trump because he's so boarish and blatant in his alleged illegality, but the deception being displayed by DA Carr is more of a dagger to our local body politics. Hypocrisy and conning with a coat of confidence and respectability is not new, even in rustic Birmingham.

       What is new in our dear city, however, is that our prosecutorial Pied Piper is now African-American, unlike in past. To see this yella moon-face doughboy nega playing the old southern white [r]acists' game is truly sickening.

                              ____________________

                          Once a Crîp, always a Crîp

Working on this story the last few weeks, using circuit court filings, city [c]rime stats and convictions, coupled with the Alabama inmate data base and general news sheets, my colleague Nate Simms and I compiled a list. Not a total listing but a damn good sampling, and the results are numbingly painful. What we discovered is, aside from the stun that the racial makeup of the Jefferson County Jail inmate population has jumped a whopping twenty-two percent—from 65% African-American male intake to upwards of an 87% African-American male one—all strictly during the ongoing reign of our distinguished DA Carr (and if we're being the same honest, the tenure of Mayor Randall Woodfin, as well), 14 out of 20 felons that we looked at convicted of 1st degree felony offenses or major [v]iolent [c]rimes are avowed gáng members; six of them proud Birmingham Crîps for whom, upon sentencing, the DA's office recommended only at, close to, or less than half the punishment time that sentencing guidelines suggested.

DA Carr's reasoning for the lenient terms: "I don't think just heartlessly throwing folks in jail is the answer." 

Awww. What a guy. How noble, bless his heart.

Now, let's look at four others in that same sampling, all of them with similar cases, nearly an identical match in character and upbringing as the Crîps except of course for gang affiliation, and here we see that to a person these young men were almost systemically given alphabets and numbers that amounts to durational life sentences.

And the DA's response: "[c]riminals need to know that no unjust deed will go unpunished, and these were some very serious [c]rimes."

And of course, I don't have to tell you that not a single decent person in local news took the time to go back and review case files for these grotesque sentencing anomalies, because who cares, right? Nor does any real reporter ever call Carr on his fake holy-just-righteous lawman crap, because that could piss off the still relatively new black local power structure and limit the B'ham outlets' access, which hurts local media's otherwise easy output when local politicians get an attitude and decide to stop talking and essentially telling them what to print, which in turn stifles conversation, general clicks and ad revenue, and the news biz is already tough as it is, yada yada.

Or maybe unwavering journalism is no longer the job criteria since attempting to shine a bright disinfectant light on actual corruption can arguably kill one quicker than cancer nowadays.

Albeit probably best you're DA Carr's cuz, or from Ensley.

       Or both.

       Lord, help this place.