Operation Falling Star Redux: Detroit Drug Gang Enforcer ‘L-Boogie’ Paris Stayed Busy In Three Years On Run From Law

Notorious Detroit hit man and cowboy-style drug gang lieutenant Lamont (L-Boogie) Paris didn’t let his fugitive status affect his ability to ply his trade, according to federal court filings, as the hired gun and “main muscle” for former Motown marijuana king Quasand (Q-Dawg) Lewis remained active in the war that engulfed the Lewis organization in the early-to-mid 2000s while wanted by the law for getting into a shootout with a Lewis rival across the street from the then-Detroit Police Department headquarters in 2003 – the former DPD HQ can be seen in the photo above. Paris was finally tracked down by authorities in late 2006, suspected in playing a role in two murders and two attempted murders during his time on the run.

Annette Sanchez, a stripper and drug courier in Lewis’ organization, finally ended up in handcuffs in November 2016, having spent the past 11 years as a fugitive avoiding arrest for her alleged role in the historic Operation Falling Star case. Giovanni (Big G) Ruanova, Sanchez’s boyfriend and Lewis’ lieutenant tasked with coordinating narcotics shipments from Mexico to Michigan is still at-large. Operation Falling Star dropped in July 2005 and bagged two dozen players in the Lewis drug operation. The 46-year old Lewis is two years away from release from prison, serving his time behind bars in a low-security federal correctional facility in Florida.

Paris, 40, won’t be heading home anytime soon. He’s a decade in to a 50-to-70-year state prison sentence for three counts of attempted murder stemming from the shooting outside the police station as a result of the repeat felon law and won’t be eligible for parole until 2061.

In the late 1990s and first part of the New Millennium, Paris led the enforcement wing of Quasand Lewis’ drug operation called the “Connecticut Boys,” nicknamed for their ties out east in Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut and their support of the University of Connecticut basketball team. Per federal records, Paris and his Connecticut Boys got their share of work when the Lewis organization went to war with Thomas (Shotgun Tommie) Hodges, another local drug lord hell bent on controlling the area’s entire marijuana industry, even though a bulk of the assignments came while Paris was a wanted man.

Hostilities between Lewis and Hodges broke out into the open in the fall of 2002, as Lewis dodged assassination departing a nightclub and both sides bunkered down for battle. The Operation Falling Star indictment painted Paris as Lewis’ sergeant-at-arms in the war which had a reported 11 casualties in less than three years.

L-Boogie Paris etched his name in infamy in the storied Motor City underworld by staging a daring attempt on Shotgun Tommie Hodges’ life in the parking lot of Tiffany’s, a downtown Detroit nightclub facing the Detroit Police Department’s central command center on the night of April 12, 2003. Paris and Connecticut Boys henchmen Rhashi (Heartless) Harris unloaded AK-47 assault rifles into Hodges’ Mercedes Benz idling outside of Tiffany’s with Hodges behind the wheel and his girlfriend in the passenger seat.

Miraculously, neither was struck and Hodges raced off. Letting his girlfriend out of the vehicle up the block, Hodges returned to the parking lot and got into a shootout with Paris and Harris in full view of shocked nightclub patrons ducking for cover and nightclub valets calling 911. Witnesses reported up to 20 shots being exchanged back and forth between the combatants. An innocent bystander would be wounded in the eye and both parties fled after hearing sirens.

Escaping in a blue-colored Chevy van, Paris and Harris ditched their weapons and bullet-proof vests and took responding police on a high-speed chase through the crowded surrounding neighborhood bordering Greektown, Detroit’s primary entertainment district, before being arrested. Paris skipped bail immediately. Harris was convicted the following year.

Lamont “L-Boogie” Paris

Going on the run didn’t stop Paris from leading the Lewis organization’s continued offensive in the war versus Shotgun Tommie Hodges and his crew. Four months after the attack on Hodges at Tiffany’s, Hodges’ half-brother was slain in a drive-by shooting on the city’s westside. Over the next two years, L-Boogie Paris is believed to have helped carry out the murders of Armond Hickman and Hashim Williams and the attempted murders of Robin (Slick) Wilson and Marcus Smith, according to police records. Wilson was a high-ranking lieutenant in the Lewis organization.

Armond Hickman was killed on June 22, 2004, ambushed by a hit team consisting of three masked men and slain in a barrage of gunfire in the hallway of the Independent Greens apartment building in Farmington Hills, Michigan he lived in as he left for his job as a security guard at a local plastics factory that morning. Hickman’s younger brother Antoine had just split town less than 24 hours earlier after testifying at a grand jury probing the Hodges-Lewis beef and their respective drug-slinging crews a week before.

Authorities speculated Hickman was either killed in retaliation for his brother’s testimony or as a case of mistaken identity considering despite the two-year age difference, Armond and Antoine Hickman were practically identical. The three assassins sped from the scene in a stolen Mercury Sable sedan, abandoning it in a motel parking lot several miles away.

On March 9, 2005, Slick Wilson, the right-hand man of Lewis’ No. 2 in charge Edward (Lemon) Walker, was shot by two masked gunmen as he got into his Dodge Magnum parked in his driveway. Wilson placed the blame for planning the attack on Lewis’ driver and Lewis’ wife Saeeda (Sissy) Walker’s bodyguard Lavert (Vicious Vito) Dafney, according to Wilson on audio surveillance, the lone member of the Lewis crew to have visited his new home.

Smith, thought to be a relative and Shotgun Tommie Hodges loyalist, was shot twice in an attack as he left his job at the post office on April 23, 2005. Sissy Walker was Lemon Walker’s sister and indicted and convicted in Operation Falling Star too. She was intercepted on a federal wiretap of her cell phone receiving Smith’s license plate number to his car, work hours and physical description from a co-worker of his at the post office and caught in another pair of conversations discussing details of the hit with Lewis and Jamil (Ice Cream Cone) Carter, another Lewis lieutenant and enforcer convicted in the case.

In May 2005, Hashim Williams showed up dead. Williams allegedly robbed a Lewis crew stash house. Informants told the DEA that Sissy Walker was offering a $50,000 bounty on the head of the culprit. The bug on her phone also revealed conversations between her and her brother about the Slick Wilson shooting.

L-Boogie Paris stayed on the run for well over another year before his luck finally ran out in late 2006. He was taken into custody without incident on December 8, 2006 in a private residence in Belleville, Michigan, a middle class suburb approximately 25 miles west of the Motor City. His apprehension came as a result of a tip acquired from someone who saw Paris featured in a segment that aired on the television show America’s Most Wanted the previous month.

Hodges, nailed in a separate indictment in 2005, got out of prison in the spring of 2015. “Cone” Carter, Sissy Walker and Vicious Vito Dafney all came home that fall.