A Brooklyn Crips member executed his gang’s leader to avenge the death of his best friend, and to put a quick end to a budding civil war brewing in the group, prosecutors said at the admitted gangbanger’s federal murder trial Wednesday.
Jason Soto, 37, fired a bullet into the head of Cypress Gangsta Crips leader Shakim Rivera on Feb. 22, 2015, convinced that Rivera had ordered the slaying of another member of the gang, Demetrius Graham, three days earlier, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andres Palacio told jurors in Brooklyn Federal Court.
Soto, Rivera and Graham — who went by the nicknames “Twin,” “Stacks” and “Duke” — were a tight-knit team as they headed up the Cypress Gangsta Crips, making good money as they dealt drugs in and around the Cypress Hills Houses, prosecutors allege.
But Graham started selling drugs for a different group, and Rivera started to resent him for not bringing some of the proceeds back to the gang, Palacio said.
So Rivera took action. He ordered two of his loyalists to break into Graham’s home on Bradford St. in East New York and shoot the 23-year-old gang leader to death as he slept on his girlfriend’s bed Feb. 19, 2015, according to the feds.
“Stacks went rogue, because he made that decision on his own,” Palacio said. “For members of the gang who were Team Duke, there was very little doubt that Stacks ordered the murder.”
Soto was squarely in Team Duke, Palacio said.
He saw Graham as a little brother, and in a phone call with his twin sibling, Jonathan, who was locked up on Rikers Island, and two others, he vowed revenge, prosecutors said.
“I got Duke! I got Duke!” he exclaimed on that call, expressing how badly he wanted to avenge his friend, Palacio said.
Soto said he was ready to “touch” the killer, grousing, “Trying to insult my intelligence like he don’t know what he, like he care. Ain’t shed a tear, ain’t shed a mad nothing…. I got this s—, I got it. I ain’t leaving until something happens,” according to a transcript of the call filed by prosecutors in June.
All the while, his twin, Jonathan Soto, was trying to calm him down, warning him, “Yo, chill. You can’t, you can’t really talk like that.”
On Feb. 22, Soto got his vengeance, luring Rivera to a spot outside a home on Bayview Place in Canarsie, where he and an associate shot Rivera and drove off, Palacio said.
“That night, Team Duke took control of the gang,” Palacio said.
Vladimir Hernandez, the owner of the Canarsie home, testified Wednesday about hearing the shot outside his place, then seeing a car that was blocking his driveway peel off. Moments later, he saw Rivera bleeding to death, the puffs of his breath weakening in the cold winter air.
“He stopped breathing after a couple of minutes,” Hernandez said. An ambulance crew arrived, and “they tried to revive him, but he was dead.”
Soto’s defense lawyer, Lisa Scolari, admitted he was a member of the gang, but said he denied committing the murder.
“There are a number of things that we cannot deny. Jason Soto is a Crip,” she told the jury in her opening statement. “Jason Soto has been a bad guy. He has done some bad things… There’s no doubt they were a plague on that neighborhood. But that information is background.”
She said no forensic evidence tied Soto to the crime, that prosecutors didn’t have his fingerprints, DNA or the murder weapon, and had no witnesses or video of Soto committing the murder.
“Anger, pain, outrage, they’re powerful feelings,” Scolari said. “But feelings are not evidence of murder. Feelings change.”
Prosecutors have long known Soto was their prime suspect in Rivera’s murder, calling him a “cold-blooded assassin who has vowed to kill again” as they tried to get him sent away for 40 years on federal gun charges in 2018. After an evidentiary hearing in January 2018, Brooklyn Federal Judge Leo Glasser found that prosecutors presented “clear and convincing” proof that Soto committed the killing, though sentenced him to just five years.
Soto completed that sentence in December 2023, and was locked up in Pennsylvania for several months after that for violating his parole. He was indicted for Rivera’s murder in December 2024.
While locked up between 2016 and 2018, he wrote an “autobiographical manuscript” that referenced Rivera. “This comrade of ours was no longer a friend of ours, and that envy made him a monster,” he wrote, according to court filings.
He allegedly wrote of Graham, “I failed him as a brother, but would never fail him again.”