A Brooklyn Crips member who executed the leader of his own gang to avenge his best friend’s death and then wrote about it in an unpublished memoir was found guilty Monday of murder.
Jason “Twin” Soto, 37, a top member of the Cypress Gangsta Crips, faces a mandatory life sentence after a Brooklyn Federal Court jury found him guilty Monday of murder in-aid-of racketeering, causing the 2015 firearm death of gang leader Shakim “Stacks” Rivera, and possession with intent to distribute cocaine.
Soto blamed Rivera for ordering Demetrius “Duke” Graham, 23, for branching out by selling drugs with another group and not giving the gang a cut of the profits, Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Dean, told the jury. Rivera dispatched two underlings to murder Graham as he slept, enraging Soto and causing a schism in the gang.
So on Feb. 22, 2015, Soto lured Rivera to a residential street in Canarsie, and shot him in the back of the head.
The two-week trial stemmed from a decade-long investigation into violence and drug-dealing around the Cypress Hills Houses in East New York, federal prosecutors said.
“Today’s verdict sends a message not only to the residents of the Cypress Hills Houses who were terrorized by Soto and his Crips gang, but to all communities, that law enforcement will hold these criminal enterprises accountable for their violent crimes, especially cold-blooded murder as in this case, no matter how long it takes,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said Monday.
Soto wrote an autobiography from 2016 to 2018 while locked up on a drug and gun case, titling it “Memoirs of Just Another N—-.” Authorities found a copy on his cell phone and showed portions of it to the jury. In the gang-life memoir, Soto waxes about loyalty, “rats” who turn federal informant and revenge.
“As a hawk preys on a snake, so shall I bring doom to this predator. Death to those who feign comraderie [sic] in the name of deceit, may pain encompass every fiber of his being until his dying day,” he writes in one chapter. “Let his name be remembered as the fish whom eats his own eggs, scavanger at his best.”
In another chapter, titled “When Good Dreams Haunt You,” he describes a vivid dream where Graham, who he calls his “little brother Duke,” doesn’t realize he’s dead.
“Duke spoke about this supposed friend of ours being jealous of how good he was doing and didn’t understand why. I started explaining to Duke that this comrade of ours was no longer a friend of ours, and that envy made him a monster I told him that person is only a shell of someone we onced [sic] love but no more,” he wrote.
“I told him between sobbing that the person we loved, though he no longer loved us, had him murdered. Between my profuse crying I told him I was sorry and I failed him as a Brother, but would never fail him again.”
Prior to killing Rivera, Soto vowed revenge during a recorded phone call with his twin sibling, Jonathan — also nicknamed “Twin” — who was locked up on Rikers Island, and two others, prosecutors said, presenting the audio to the jury.
“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,” he said, according to a transcript of the call filed by prosecutors in June.
His brother tried to calm him down, warning him, “Yo, chill. You can’t, you can’t really talk like that,” and “Just stop talking, be easy, man.”