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The world that produced Montana “Tana” Barronette and his crew was just over the horizon from where I grew up in Baltimore. I was in the county, the white sanctuary just north of the old city line. Sandtown was Black Baltimore, just ten miles southwest as the crow flies, but in my apartheid haven, a place that might as well have been on the moon.
After the US Attorney’s Office in Maryland successfully prosecuted Tana’s gang, and then offered me access to its records and personnel, I set out to discover who Tana was and how he and his friends became the city’s most notorious killers. In 2019, Tana was sentenced to life in prison for federal racketeering and drug conspiracy charges, including murder and witness intimidation.
I wrote to him and the others in prison, and with their help was introduced to family members and friends who offered invaluable insight into Sandtown. I think their stories — or ones just like it — are unfolding today in every city in America.
THE DAY BEFORE TANA THREATENED Pony Head (Jan Gray), a young barber had been shot dead a few blocks away. Alfonzo Williams wasn’t the first murder victim who would eventually be linked to the gang “Trained to Go”, or TTG, but his was the first for which Tana was named as the killer. It is particularly shocking because it arose from something so seemingly trivial.
It happened on a balmy Saturday afternoon. More people than usual were out on the stoops and sidewalks along the sloping row-house block of West Lafayette Avenue. Allise Bridges and her half sister Leandra Williams were taking in the air outside their home, a three-story brick row house painted rust red with a marble stoop. They were new to Sandtown, as were their mother and their brother Alfonzo, known to his friends as “Twin,” who was, at twenty-three, three years older than Allise and a year younger than Leandra. He was a big, burly, jovial, round-faced fellow who liked to dance and sing — “He thought he could sing,” says Allise. Alfonzo had moved out of state for a while but had returned when a former girlfriend gave birth to his son. He wanted to help raise the boy. That afternoon he had come home from a haircutting shift and, as was his custom, rounded up all the kids on the block and marched them up to the Everything Cheap convenience store on the corner to buy candy. He had lingered there with his friend Gotti, Daniel Purdie, to purchase some Percocet pills from a wiry teenage dealer on the corner, and then walked back down to the house to stretch out on the steps. He lit a cigarette and popped open a beer. Music was playing nearby. There was a buzz in the air about a big pay-per-view TV event that night, a welterweight fight between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao. A neighbor one door down was hosting a fight party, and folks were anteing up to help pay the fee. So the mood was festive. The sisters were still getting acquainted with their new neighbors and had dressed to attract attention, Allise in a shirt that showed cleavage and Leandra in a clingy dress.
They caught the eye of the teenage drug peddler, who came loping down the sidewalk, small, lean, athletic, with big sleepy eyes and jutting lips, smiling, showing off gold fronts. Perhaps “leering” would be the right word, because the sisters said he greeted them by saying, “You so fine, I’ll take you and you.”
Like they were supposed to be honored. That’s how they would remember it. In another account, the dealer opened with a wise-crack about Leandra’s thighs, which were exposed beneath the short hem of her dress, saying, “You need to cover them up.” Whatever he said, the sisters were insulted. They chirped back at him sharply, Leandra telling him not to sell his pills in front of their house. The sisters remembered what followed like this:
“What do you mean?” the young man said. “I do what I want.” Sharp words were exchanged. Then Alfonzo spoke up.
“Yo, you don’t talk to my sisters like that,” he said. Williams stood up and towered over the teen. “That’s not the way you talk to them. They not ’hood rats.”
The young man backed off immediately. “My bad. We playin’.”
He asked if Leandra was Alfonzo’s girl. “She’s my sister, bro,” he said.
That’s all there was to it. A neighbor stepped up to say that he also didn’t appreciate drugs being sold in front of his house. Alfonzo, characteristically, tried to make peace. He talked with the dealer, who said he had grown up just a few blocks away. They shook hands. Alfonzo invited him to come back that night to watch the fight, and said, “We’ll save some drinks for you.”
They never saw the fight. Just before it was supposed to start — it was now dark outside — Alfonzo went out to the steps to wait with Gotti and Leandra for a pizza delivery, and the slender dude reappeared, emerging from a nearby alley. The hood of his sweatshirt was up, and he was carrying a gun.
Allise, who was inside, had never heard gunshots before. They had moved to Sandtown only recently; they had lived with their mother in the county and in East Baltimore. She thought she was hearing fire- works. A man across the street had been setting off some earlier. Pop after pop after pop. Then she heard Leandra scream, and she thought, That’s just her acting stupid. When Allise got to the front door, her brother was slumped on the steps, bleeding. The shooter had fled.
Nine bullets had hit Alfonzo, in the chest, arms, and neck. The neck shot is probably what killed him. Alcohol in his system interfered with the trauma team’s efforts to stop the bleeding. He died on the hospital table. The shooting was witnessed by many, but when the police came, nobody would talk except the horrified sisters. They told the police who they thought the shooter was and didn’t understand why no one else would, not even Gotti, who had been sitting on the steps next to their brother.
They soon learned why. Tana was infamous.
AFTER ALONZO WILLIAMS’S GRIEVING SISTERS had named Tana to the police, he was picked up for questioning. He arrived at the homicide headquarters downtown, calm, pleasant, polite, smiling, wearing a black vest over a sleeveless T-shirt. In the interview room, questioned by Detective Josh Fuller, he appeared shocked that anyone might accuse him of murder. Sure, he’d been selling “a little Percocet” that day, and there had been “a little altercation” with the victim earlier in the evening, but that was it. He’d been nowhere near West Lafayette Avenue that night. He’d been with a girlfriend in a room at the Sheraton Hotel downtown. He said he hadn’t checked in under his own name, and he couldn’t remember the name on the ID he’d used. His girlfriend backed up his story, but neither hotel records nor surveillance cameras confirmed it.
The truth is, the whole neighborhood knew who had shot Alfonzo Williams, but apart from his sisters—newcomers who did not know Tana and could not pick him from a photo lineup—no one would name him. Fuller had a list of witnesses who wouldn’t talk.
They were terrified.
Gotti was Fuller’s best bet. He had been sitting on the stoop with Alfonzo when the shooter walked up. Gotti knew exactly who Tana was. He had spent his whole life in the neighborhood. Tall and thin, he was ten years older and referred to Tana as “the boy.” Sitting opposite Fuller and Detective Gordon Carew in the interview room, three weeks after the murder, he fell apart.
He immediately choked up when the questioning started. He stammered that he had seen nothing. He had walked away before the shooting happened. The detectives knew this wasn’t true.
“I can see that talking about this makes you upset,” said Fuller. “People said you were right there when the shooting happened.”
Gotti’s head fell to the desk, and he wrapped it in both of his big hands. He was shaking.
“We know you know the guy who did it, who [Alfonzo] was having the argument with. You need to tell the truth about what happened.”
“If you don’t,” said Carew, “you put yourself in the middle, become part of protecting [the shooter].”
There was a long silence. Gotti’s head stayed in his hands.
“I’m not trying to get myself or my family involved in this,” he said. “I know for sure that he will come for me next.”
Another long silence. An internal struggle was taking place. Eventually, just five words emerged.
“His street name is Tana.”
“What’s his real name?”
“Don’t know his name for sure.”
“You know his name,” said Fuller.
Long pause.
“I wish I did so I could give it to you.”
“What we have to determine is if you were part of it or not,” said Carew, turning the screw.
“Twin was my friend!”
He described the murderer as “dark-skinned.”
“How many times did he shoot him?”
“Seemed like the whole clip to me. The boy kept shooting and shooting, and I was, like, damn! And I was stuck, sitting right there next to him.”
He said they had all seen Tana coming down the street with a gun.
“How long has he been coming around?”
“Damn near all his life.”
Gotti said his friend was shot because the boy felt “disrespected.”
“Twin got killed for standing up for his sister.”
The detectives arranged for Gotti to review a sequence of photos with Detective Dawnyell Taylor.
“Am I going to have to take the stand?” he asked when she came in. She told him he’d have to take that up with the other detectives. Gotti balked at signing the papers to begin the photo array.
“This says I’m a witness,” he complained.
“We use some witnesses, others no,” said Taylor. Then she tried to ease his mind, telling him, in effect, that reviewing the photos did not commit him to testify openly. She said, “Look, I know it’s hard to do the right thing. What you do down the line, when it comes to trial, your conscience has to be your guide.”
Gotti then, sighing with heavy reluctance, opened each file folder she gave him, one by one, and stared at the pictures, saying nothing. When he’d finished, Taylor asked, “Did you recognize any of them?”
“Five,” said Gotti, referring to the fifth photo, the one labeled Montana Barronette.
Taylor pulled open file number five again and placed it before him.
“What connection did that individual have to the shooting?”
“That nigga shot Twin,” said Gotti. Then he bowed again, taking his head in his hands. “God damn!” He spent a long time with his head down on the table. Then he pleaded, “If I go any farther, I might be the next one!” Then, to himself, “What the fuck am I doing?”
Another long silence, head on the table, hands draped over it.
“God put me here,” he said, finally.
“You gotta do whatever God wants you to do,” said Taylor.
Taylor got him to write out “He shot Twin” on the form under the photo of Tana.
“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said, mostly to himself.
“We need your signature at the bottom.”
“I’ve got to sign my name?” Gotti hammered the pen down on the table several times, furious with himself. Then he signed. As Taylor left, he protested, “I can’t testify. I can’t. I need to know if they are going to need me to testify! I can’t go on. My own life! My family’s life!”
He was left sitting alone in the room.
Excerpted fromLife Sentence© 2023 Mark Bowden. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, Inc. All rights reserved.
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