Old School YBI Member Back On The Streets In Detroit After Half-Dozen Years As Property Of The State

Former Young Boys, Incorporated (YBI) drug gang lieutenant, Herbert (Fat Herbie) Daniels, got out of Michigan state prison in recent weeks on a narcotics case. The 59-year old Fat Herbie did six years behind bars for heroin found at a traffic stop in Detroit in December 2008.

Ruling the Motor City drug trade in the late 1970s and first half of the 1980s, YBI is the Great Lakes region’s most iconic urban crime syndicate ever, revolutionizing the heroin industry in the Midwest rustbelt. Daniels went down in the first of three YBI busts and did three years in prison, getting out in 1985. His father, Herbert (Heavy Herbie) Daniels, was a highly-respected numbers boss on Detroit’s Westside.

YBI, known for rocking Adidas sportswear and shoes, fur-collared jackets and John Dillinger-style derby hats, was founded around 1978 by Milton (Butch) Jones, Mark (Block) Marshall, Raymond (Baby Ray) Peoples and Dewayne (Wonderful Wayne) Davis. Eventually, the bullish, but business-minded Jones maneuvered his way to the top of the gang’s leadership structure, allegedly ordering the murders of both Davis and Peoples in 1982 and 1985, respectively. Marshall left town before the series of busts that spelled the end of the YBI regime began to drop. Fat Herbie Daniels, sometimes referred to as “Lovebug,” was a key lieutenant under Jones’ wing of the organization.

The self-proclaimed “Henry Ford of Heroin,” Jones did seven years in prison for heading YBI, came out in the 1990s and promptly staged a takeover of an already-established drug gang known as the Dawg Pound. By the end of the decade, he’d be convicted of murder, narcotics trafficking and racketeering and sent back to prison for the rest of his life.

Before he was killed in the fall of 1982, Wonderful Wayne Davis had branched off on his own and started what he was dubbing the H20 Crew, reportedly importing foot soldiers from Boston and Seattle, – cities the flashy and entrepreneurial “W.W.” had gone and planted flags in -, and refusing to cut Jones and the rest of the YBI hierarchy in on the action. In the year prior to his slaying in the summer of 1985, Baby Ray Peoples engineered a botched robbery of Jones’ suburban Troy, Michigan home while both were away in prison.