‘Pistol Pete’ just 14 when he formed crew in Bronx
him. When a drug charge landed him in a North Carolina jail in 1997, he sent a message back to Suge alleging that Twin was a rat who needed to be killed.
Suge did as he was told, but didn’t believe that Twin had flipped. He wondered if Pete had only ordered it to eliminate a possible rival, if anybody was really safe anymore. He wondered what came next.
What loomed was a series of indictments. For years, the FBI had concentrated its racketeering efforts on the Mafia. The institutional and accepted racism was that black gangsters only killed other black gangsters.
The attitude allowed gangs like SMM to build huge criminal enterprises and destroy entire neighborhoods.
A few stubborn police detectives, though — like John O’Malley, who grew up on Soundview Avenue — pushed forward, backed by a pair of dedicated prosecutors.
They started making arrests and squeezing the SMM gangsters to make deals. Their approach worked: Suge took a deal. So did Pipe. So did a lot of other SMM members.
Not Pistol Pete, though. With the help of Suge’s testimony, he was brought up on 28 criminal charges, including racketeering, murder, kidnapping, tampering with a witness “and the use of a machine gun in furtherance of some of those crimes.”
A gangster to the end, the 26-year-old shrugged and pleaded guilty.
On Nov. 8, 2000, the judge passed sentence. Pistol Pete — aka Peter Rollack — was barred from further communication with known gang associates. He would pay the families of his victims $25,400 in restitution. And he was sentenced to life in prison, plus 105 years.
“More time than John Gotti,” his pals bragged.
Suge and Pipe are free again, although maybe not for long. Green notes they’ve been in and out of trouble. Pistol Pete remains in a supermax prison in Colorado.
His gang is in tatters, clinging to power in a few cities, including Newark and upstate Kingston.
In 2001, a federal grant paid to paint over a wall in Soundview, long covered in eulogies to slain thugs. Local schoolkids collaborated on a picture of a colorful jungle scene. While they worked, mysterious men walked slowly past, muttering threats.
The mural was later defaced with pink paint. It was repaired. It was defaced again. It was repaired again. It was defaced again.
There were still some legends, it seemed, that people refused to let die.