Life, no parole for murderous gang boss
If there were bosses of the infamous Short North Posse, Robert Brandon “Killer B” Ledbetter was one of them.
When he wanted someone dead, the deed was done.
According to testimony during his June trial in U.S. District Court, Ledbetter and two other gang members killed Alan Johnson on April 6, 2006. Ledbetter believed Johnson, 23, had killed his brother, Elisha.
Ledbetter stayed in a van when others robbed and killed rival drug dealer Marschell Brumfield Jr. on April 22, 2007. He said he was elsewhere on Nov. 3, 2007, when gang members killed Rodriccos Williams at Williams’ Pickerington home.
And Ledbetter was in prison on drug charges Oct. 22, 2011, when he ordered the hit on his girlfriend, Crystal Fyffe, for snitching, prosecutors said.
Ledbetter said he was innocent, but a jury convicted him on four counts of murder, racketeering and a gun charge, among others. On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced
the 37-year-old gangster to a mandatory term of life in prison with no possibility of parole.
U.S. District Judge Algenon L. Marbley said there was no doubt of Ledbetter’s role.
“I think the evidence is clear that Mr. Ledbetter was the leader, or a leader, in this enterprise,” he said.
Prosecutors said Ledbetter was in charge of the Homicide Squad, one of the Short North Posse’s two killing teams. They said he recruited gang members to pull the trigger, which elevated their status in the organization.
Several of those subordinates later turned on Ledbetter to get a better deal from the government for their own crimes, but none said they actually saw him kill the four victims.
A witness testified that he couldn’t positively say whether Ledbetter had shot Johnson. Another witness said Ledbetter was in a van while others went in a
North Side apartment to rob and kill Brumfield, 24.
The evening of Williams’ murder, Ledbetter called the man’s wife, an ex-girlfriend for whom Ledbetter still carried a torch.
“Why was it so quiet? Where was everybody at?” she said he asked her. She told him Williams had taken the kids to a movie.
Hours later, Williams, 36, was killed in the doorway of his own home when he returned. Ledbetter later called Williams’ wife again. She said that when she told him her husband was dead, “He said, ‘For real?’”
Ledbetter, who told her he was in Weinland Park at the time, asked if she could describe the attackers. She said she could not.
A gang member later testified that Ledbetter was outside Williams’ house at the time.
In regard to his own girlfriend, Ledbetter’s text messages to Crystal Fyffe made it clear he suspected her of cooperating with authorities, which she eventually admitted doing.
“You know what happens to people with loose lips,” he wrote on Sept. 15, 2010.
“Kill me then ... Have it done, I don’t even care,” Fyffe answered. “You can finish what you started tomorrow ... not until tomorrow. I don’t want my daughter to see.”
In a rambling letter three months before her death he wrote, “I wouldn’t have thought in a million years that you would ever throw me to the wolves.”
Fyffe, 30, was shot outside her mother’s Hilltop home while returning with a pizza for her daughter.
Eileen Fyffe addressed Judge Marbley on Wednesday, telling him, “It should be me watching my daughter raising her teenage daughter. She’s underground now. Why can’t they be underground?”
The U.S. attorney general at the time took the death penalty off the table.
Marcysia Daniels, who turned 17 on Tuesday, said she had considered Ledbetter a father figure until she once saw the bruises her mother suffered after an argument with him.
“From that point on, I knew he wasn’t the loving father I thought he was,” she said.
Ledbetter professed his innocence to Marbley and said those testifying against him were murderers and drug users.
“I guess you can do what you want if you cooperate with the government,” he said. “It just baffles me how the system works.”
Ledbetter was the last of six defendants who took their chances at trial and were convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Of the 20 original gang members indicted in 2014-15, one died awaiting trial and 13 pleaded guilty.
Those who took plea deals and worked with prosecutors received shorter sentences.
On Monday, Lance A. Green, 36, who pleaded guilty to two slayings, will be the last Short North Posse member to be sentenced.