[2] In February 2007, McGriff was convicted in federal court of racketeering, two murder-for-hire homicides, narcotics trafficking, and engaging in illegal financial transactions with drug money.
[5] The Supreme Team was a street gang organized in the early 1980s in the vicinity of the Baisley Park Houses in Jamaica, Queens, New York, by a group of teenagers who were members of the Five-Percent Nation.
Under the leadership of Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff, with Miller, his nephew, as second-in-command, the gang concentrated its criminal efforts on the widespread distribution of crack cocaine.
At its 1987 peak, the Supreme Team's receipts exceeded $200,000 a day, and the gang regularly committed acts of violence and murder to maintain its stranglehold on the area's drug trade.
The Supreme Team's narcotics operations used dozens of employees, including layers of drug sellers to insulate the gang leaders from the street-level activity.
The sophistication of the gang's operation enabled it to survive the periodic targeting of various members for prosecution by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and the Queens County District Attorney's Office (collectively, the "State").
In late 1987, however, while Miller was incarcerated on state charges, a task force of NYPD and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents executed search warrants on a number of Supreme Team storage locations, drug outlets, and residences.
When Miller was released from prison in the spring of 1989, he began to rebuild the Supreme Team and regained control of two of its most lucrative retail locations known as "spots."
The substantive narcotics distribution charges against the present defendants focused on the period from December 1989 to March 1990, during which the State was monitoring the gang's activity with wiretaps.
Tucker, Coleman, and David Robinson would deliver to the apartment the moneys received at the retail spots they supervised; Miller and the Team's primary drug courier Trent Morris would negotiate cocaine deals by telephone with William Graham, a supplier who had Colombian connections; and Morris and Raymond Robinson would then drive to Graham's apartment with money to purchase kilogram-quantities of cocaine.
In 1987, Ina McGriff also gave Piniella copies of Parole Division documents indicating that Supreme Team member James Page was cooperating with authorities.
According to the trial testimony, four of these Colombian drug traffickers were robbed of their cocaine and brutally murdered in July 1989 by Miller, Arroyo, Hale, Hunt, and Jimenez.