Fat Cat had spoken: Myrtle Horsham had to go.
In December 1987, Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols thought his girlfriend Horsham, 20, was stealing cash he had stashed in her Queens apartment.
Back in the 80s, few New York City drug lords — if any — had more sway than Nichols. At 29, he ruled the southeastern Queens drug trade with an iron fist. He ordered up murders like Chinese takeout.
When Nichols wanted Horsham killed, he tapped a top lieutenant, Brian “Glaze” Gibbs.
“She claimed she had been robbed, but it didn’t make sense,” Gibbs recalled in one of a series of lengthy Daily News interviews. “He called a hit on her and pulled me aside and told me to do it.”
Gibbs told two men from his crew to kill Horsham five days before Christmas.
As Gibbs sat in a car, he watched Horsham leave her mother’s house in Queens with her 3-year-old son and get into another woman’s car.
As soon as she got into the car, the two assassins jumped in next to the toddler in the back seat. They forced Horsham’s 26-year-old companion at gunpoint to drive to an abandoned warehouse district.
Gibbs, then 24, watched as his henchmen fatally shot Horsham in the head on a dead-end street in Jamaica in the early morning darkness. They shot her friend too, but she survived.
The killers brought the toddler to Gibbs’ car. In the midst of a rainstorm, Gibbs drove to Horsham’s mother’s home in Springfield Gardens, he recalled. He dumped the toddler, dressed in a coat with a hood, on the front lawn.
Gibbs left the little boy standing there and drove to a nearby payphone. He called the victim’s mother and anonymously told her to come get the tot.
Gibbs, who now expresses remorse for his reign of violence, said Horsham begged for her life.
“Myrtle tried to offer them $100,000 not to kill her but that wasn’t going to happen,” he said.
Once Fat Cat issued the order to kill, there was no turning back, no negotiating.
“There wasn’t much to think about,” he added. “You didn’t have a heart.”
“THE REAL DEAL”
Gibbs rose out of the Cypress Hills Houses to peddle crack and heroin across Brooklyn to crowds of addicts lined up outside his heavily fortified drug spots.
By his mid-20s, he had ordered or participated in five murders and two attempted murders as a big-time player in the violent world of the crack cocaine gangs that gripped the city during the 1980’s.
Gibbs ran with Nichols and Howard “Pappy” Mason in Southeastern Queens, and also with the notorious A-Team which operated out of the Cypress Hills Houses. It was Mason who ordered the 1988 murder of Byrne, a 22-year-old rookie cop.
Gibbs was the first suspect in that case but was never charged. He wouldn’t be free for long.
The crack dealer was busted on federal drug charges and flipped, helping the feds dismantle the Nichols/Mason organization. He spent nearly a decade in prison for his crimes and went into the witness protection program in 1997. He was in the program for 18 months, given housing, a new name, a new identity and six months of living expenses.
Now almost two decades after his first murder, Gibbs, 53, lives in the South under an assumed name and has embarked on a self-described campaign of redemption.
“I was a sick soul,” he says. “You out there and you get caught up in that life, you gotta go all the way. In order for you to be it, you have to go all the way.”
He told The News about his own crimes in a a dark world of heartless men who kill rivals over their lust for money.
“He’s the real deal,” said Joseph Ponzi, the former chief investigator for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office who helped turn Gibbs into a cooperator. “He was absolutely plugged in to that culture, and he was as notorious as they come at the height of the crack epidemic. They were crack pioneers.”
“MY LIFE WAS DOOMED”
Brian Gibbs believes everything went wrong from birth.
His mother Dorothy, then 23, had gone into labor in their apartment on Herkimer St. in Brooklyn on Dec. 1, 1963. Cops got there before the ambulance, and bundled Dorothy into their cruiser for a ride to the hospital.
But Gibbs couldn’t wait.
“I was born in the back of a police car and I should have known my life was doomed,” he said.
The family moved to the Cypress Hills Houses in East New York, where Gibbs made his first forays into the underworld. But he didn’t have the tortured childhood one might expect.
Dorothy Gibbs worked for New York Telephone and provided a stable home.
“His childhood was not difficult at all,” said his younger sister, who requested her name not be used for safety reasons. “We were raised as kids to be respectful. Our mother taught us right from wrong. He got caught up with the wrong people.”
“My mother was my big sister and my best friend,” Gibbs says. “Anything that we wanted, she got it for us. I wasn’t angry at society.”
But as a teenager, Gibbs grew jealous of other kids with flashy clothes and nice sneakers, and wanted to have those things, too.
He and two or three friends began climbing across balconies and breaking into apartments in places like the nearby Linden Plaza Apartments on Lincoln Ave. and stealing cash and anything they could resell.
“I started doing crimes to make fast money to be able to keep up with my peers,” he said. “If you want something, you do what it takes to get it.”
Gibbs fell in with a buddy, Walter “King Tut” Johnson, who in 1982 infamously robbed 300 Jehovah’s Witnesses in his mother’s church.
Johnson was once suspected, but never charged in the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. And Queens rapper 50 Cent mentions Johnson in his song “Many Men (Wish Death).”
Gibbs, then 16, robbed someone while holding a starter pistol near Pratt Institute in 1979, and cops caught him. About a week later, cops arrested him against for another robbery on a train. He got probation.
Johnson, Gibbs and several accomplices also robbed 12 people at gunpoint on a bus that was headed from Queens to Brooklyn.
In 1981, cops busted Gibbs a fourth time for robbery. And so, on Jan. 13, 1982, at the age of just 19, he found himself imprisoned at the Fishkill State Correctional Facility. He was convicted and went to prison on Jan. 13, 1982 at the age of 19. By that time, he had four felony convictions for robberies. It was only the beginning.
A SENSELESS WAY OF LIFE
The city-run Cypress Hills Houses sprawls across 29 acres with 15 seven-story buildings, 1,444 apartments and 3,397 residents.
In the era that Gibbs made his bones, the crack-driven wave of violence terrified tenants into submission.
Dwayne Faison, 60, the Cypress Hills Tenant Association president, said the development was so dangerous in the late 1980’s, he and his wife would take the mattresses from their beds and have the family sleep on the floor for fear they would be killed by stray bullets coming through the windows at night.
“There was a time when (people living in) several buildings here weren’t even able to come outside and sit on a bench because of the crime that was taking place,” he said. “Those were the days when you didn’t want to get up and go to work — you had to look over your shoulder.”
The NYPD recorded 1,896 murders in New York City in 1988, compared with 335 in 2016. The murder frenzy driven by the crack epidemic would peak in 1990 with 2,245 killings — or six a day. No one believed the cycle would ever end.
In East New York’s 75th Precinct alone, police investigated 105 murders in 1988, up from 82 in 1987, and 55 in 1986. The number of murders in the precinct peaked at 126 in 1993. In 2016, there were just 23 murders in the 75th Precinct that includes the Cypress Hills Houses.
“Nowadays, people don’t understand or can’t grasp it,” Ponzi said. “Detectives were under incredible pressure to solve murders.”
The numbers underscore the relentless wave of violence that the city confronted in the crack years, and its subsequent transformation driven by police work, the economy, incarceration, death and communities fed up with the bloodshed.
“When people ask me about this transformation, I tell them they also wiped themselves out,” Ponzi said. “In addition to the policing element, an entire generation wiped themselves out, whether through overdoses, murders, or prison.”
Retired Detective Michael Race, then with East New York’s 75th Precinct, recalls the day when then-mayoral candidate David Dinkins was at an event at the Cypress Hills Houses, and a gun battle erupted on the other side of the complex.
“Innocent people were being shot senselessly, caught in the middle of crossfires,” Race said. “It was a senseless way of life. Money meant more than life, and it didn’t matter who got in the way. As a detective, you couldn’t keep up with the volume.”
Race, who grew up in East New York, said the neighborhood was thriving when he was a kid. All that changed and a lot of it was due to drugs and crime.
Race noted that crack drove other economies as well.
“It was the biggest money mover you can imagine,” he said. “You had 19-year-olds driving brand new Mercedes. The sneakers business, clothing, the jewelry business skyrocketed.”
And that wasn’t all.
“Funeral homes made a lot of money,” he said.
“MOOCHIE”
Gibbs faced three years in Fishkill, a medium-security prison, originally built in 1896 as a hospital for the criminally insane.
There, he said he was obligated to join up with other black prisoners for protection in an environment where racially-charged battles between gangs erupted regularly.
On one day, a Hispanic prisoner tried to shank him in a hallway. Gibbs caught up to the man in the mess hall the next day and stabbed him in the chest. The man survived. Gibbs found himself in “the box” — or solitary confinement — for 150 days.
The Parole Board released him in 1984, and he returned to crime because he couldn’t get a job, Gibbs says.
He saw the money being made in cocaine and heroin and began making inroads. He also jumped back into armed robbery.
“At first, I was against drugs because I used to see guys laying on the stoop strung out,” he said. “It took me to go away to prison to start dealing.”
Gibbs knew a Cypress Hills guy nicknamed “Moochie,” who ran a hangout called the “Nut Hut” and had a cocaine supplier. “He’d give me an ounce of cocaine, and you bag it up and start selling it,” he said. “We used beepers. You just let people know you have it and people start paging you.”
Gibbs once contemplated killing a drug spot worker for stealing $5,000 and went to Moochie for advice.
“He said, ‘Why kill him? You got stole for $5,000,'” Gibbs recalled. “He started using the product. In all honesty, it’s your fault. Sometimes you gotta take certain things as a loss.”
MAKING THE “A-TEAM”
For decades, the Cypress Hills Houses have been divided by gang territory. At the time, a group which dubbed the “A-Team” controlled the Sutter Ave. side.
“They were the people who you didn’t want to f— with, you wanted to stay away from those guys and those people,” Faison said. “They had this place locked down.”
Faison describes Gibbs as respectful and quiet.
“He was running with murderers, known gangsters, known drug dealers who were the worst of the worst but this guy was respectful,” he said. “These guys could have ran a corporation.”
Most of the A-Team were Five Percenters, members of a religious movement that believes the black man himself is God and the white man is the devil.
“If you didn’t live on their side of the project, you weren’t allowed to go there,” Gibbs said. “They were known for drugs, robbery and murder.”
In the summer of 1985, Gibbs approached Akbar, the leader of the fearsome crew.
“He told me you’ve got a lot of balls,” Gibbs said. “He goes ‘When you first came home we was going to kill you’ because I robbed an old-timer of his jewelry.”
The A-Team controlled a drug location on Fountain Ave. between Sutter and Belmont Aves. that they shared with a Dominican gang, he said. Akbar gave Gibbs the responsibility to watch over the spot from 11 p.m. to 7:30 a.m.
He would sometimes carry two guns on the assignment.
“I was more comfortable with a revolver because it wouldn’t jam,” he said. “One guy was selling fake drugs. I shot him in the butt and he never came around again.”
Gibbs and Johnson came up with the idea to take over the drug spot from the Dominicans. He and the A-Team members cornered four of them in an apartment and were about to kill them when cops suddenly swarmed the block. They escaped by jumping from roof to roof.
THE SOUTHERN PIPELINE
Gibbs, already selling drugs, hit on a new money-making venture — flooding the already murderous streets with weapons bought in states with soft gun laws.
“I would go down south to the Carolinas and Virginia and pay people to go into pawn shops and buy guns for me,” he said.
Gibbs’ straw buyers would purchase a .44 or a Tech-9 sub-machine gun for about $250 and send them north. He marked up the price to $1,250 and still found easy takers.
Gibbs estimates he put hundreds of guns on the street this way.
“I sold so many guns I had family members that the ATF came to putting pressure on them,” he said.
Gibbs continued to work the drug spot, but starting branching out. He opened another drug den at Ralph Ave. and Pacific St. in Bedford-Stuyvesant. He also started drug spots on Marion St. and Thomas S. Boyland St. in Bed-Stuy, the Farragut Houses in Vinegar Hill, the Marlboro Houses in Gravesend, and later spots in South Jamaica, Queens.
“It was an empty building,” he said. “You paid people to set it up with electricity and a stove. The customers slid their money under the door and got their drugs.”
THE DARK SIDE
In February 1986, three people waded into Gibbs’ Ralph Ave. drug spot and robbed it of hundred of vials of heroin. A few days later, it happened again.
Gibbs immediately suspected an inside job.
“Something didn’t fit right,” he said. “So I took each worker out and put them in the car. I’m going to ask you the question again. I put a snub-nose .44 in their mouths. I’m going to take it out and you better tell me the truth.”
Gibbs got a name — Crazy Clyde, and immediately knew him as a fellow player in the Cypress Hill drug scene.
“I was enraged,” he said. “Out of a million and one drug spots in New York City, why would he pick mine?”
In a meeting with Clyde, his girlfriend Sybil Mims and a third man named Bronco, he offered $5,000 to them to find the robbers as a pretext. Clyde and Bronco left, leaving Mims with Gibbs and a friend named Amare in the car.
Gibbs was armed with his .44 and itching for revenge. They drove to a corner store on Pitkin Ave., where he bought Perrier and Juicy Fruit gum, and then parked near a welfare office.
Gibbs pulled Mims out of the car and demanded to know why Clyde robbed the drug spot. She denied everything. Gibbs then shot her in the stomach. She fell, curled in then fetal position.
“I didn’t mean to shoot her the first time, but then I was so enraged that I bent down and put the gun to her head and fired, and blood and brain matter splashed my face,” he said. “That’s when I really went over to the dark side. I used my tongue to lick the blood from my face, and my hoodie sleeve to wipe off the rest.”
Gibbs dumped the gun in a pond and switched cars, and then went to see a girlfriend to make up an alibi. Cops responded to the crime scene, and Gibbs claims they found small containers of heroin hidden in her coat.
Hours later, Amare paged him. When Gibbs called back, the number went to Brooklyn Central Booking.
He knew things were bad. In the meantime, Clyde caught up to him and tried to kill him, but Gibbs got away.
“Get this: They were shooting at me with guns I had sold them,” he said.
On March 2, detectives caught him at MacDougal St. and Ralph Ave.
“They cuffed me, and a detective said, ‘Either we got the wrong person or you’re in a lot of trouble.'”
He wasn’t immediately charged with the Mims murder. Instead, cops suspected him in the late 1985 killing of a man named Jonathan Penn-Maxwell. But he wasn’t identified in the lineup and he walked.
“I felt like John Gotti,” he said. “The head homicide guy says ‘I know you shot Sybil. Right now, she’s brain dead. If she goes out of the picture, we’re coming to get your black a–.'”
About two months later, Mims’ brother claimed that Gibbs had admitted the murder and threatened him. Gibbs then learned that Amare had flipped.
He met up with Tut and they both wept at the prospect of a long prison stint.
“I had to turn myself in, and told my family,” he said. “I try to have as much sex as possible with my girlfriends because I knew it was going to be a long time.”
THE MIMS TRIAL
Gibbs was represented by Murray Cutler, a former police captain turned lawyer whose son Bruce famously represented Gotti. The case collapsed after the main witness Amare refused to testify, and Mims’ brother’s testimony was seen as too contradictory.
Gibbs claims that he paid Amare $25,000 not to testify. Ponzi confirmed that Amare refused to testify, but could not confirm that he was paid off.
Gibbs was acquitted in June 1987. Only Amare went to prison.
“I stole years from his life,” Gibbs said.
Years later he says he apologized.
MOVING UP
Having beaten the Mims case, Gibbs now felt invincible. He took over an apartment on Sutter Ave. in the Cypress Hills Houses, where he says he plotted with his 10-man crew and stashed cash and guns in a large armoire with a hidden compartment.
Underworld types who visited him would have to strip to their underwear for the meetings, and a neighbor recalls shoes lined up at the door.
He claims to have been making $40,000 a day at the height of his drug-dealing career. Race, the former detective, said that sounded like an exaggeration. He had various stashes for the cash — wrapped in plastic and buried in the backyard or driven down south to a friend for safekeeping.
An old friend who requested anonymity, said Gibbs was rarely flamboyant. He and his crew would move through the projects with a sense of purpose, she said, never loitering outside.
“When you see them coming, you mind your business,” she said. “You don’t stare. He was scary, but not with me.”
Gibbs’ sister said he was kind of scary.
“I was afraid of him at one point,” he said. “You could see something in his eyes. What I know now, I didn’t have a clue then. I didn’t want to know.”
Soon after his acquittal, “Fat Cat” Nichols came calling.
“I became like a free agent or a star and everybody wanted me on their team,” he said.
Gibbs chose Nichols, who operated out of South Jamaica and had a Chinese heroin connection they called ‘John’ because they couldn’t pronounce his name.
Gibbs became an enforcer, who also delivered cash and drugs wherever it needed to go — in addition to running his own drug operation.
“I did whatever he wanted done,” he said. “I partnered with a guy named Bug-Out who made $800,000 a month for Nichols at South Jamaica drug spots.”
MAURICE BELLAMY
Gibbs also arranged the murder of Maurice Bellamy in December 1987. Bellamy’s son Perry had cooperated with authorities investigating the murder of Parole Officer Brian Rooney in 1985 and was being protected.
Nichols wanted Rooney dead because he said he violated his parole and put him back in prison.
Gibbs said when Nichols got indicted for the murder in 1987, the drug lord plotted to kill Bellamy’s mother. He changed his mind, making the father the target. He planned to tranquilize the cops and whack Perry at the funeral.
Bellamy was working in a laundromat, and Gibbs sent a hitman there.
“It had to look like a robbery,” Gibbs said. “He was supposed to ask for change and then execute him.”
But the gunman just walked in and shot him in the head.
CLIFTON RICE
On February 26, 1988, four men in Mason’s crew plotted and carried out the murder of Officer Edward Byrne, as he sat outside a the home of a witness. David McClary walked up to the cop’s patrol car and shot him five times in the head. Mason had ordered them to kill a cop to send a message.
“Mason ordered it,” said Lawrence Byrne, the NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters, the slain cop’s brother. “He had been sent back to prison. He told them, ‘If they take one of us, we take one of them. We need to send a message.'”
Gibbs was immediately a suspect, but was never ultimately tied to the crime. That’s because he was at the Cypress Hills Houses killing a rival named Clifton Rice.
“He was part of a team who robbed a guy who was part of my crew,” he said, referring to Rice. “I had just got there from Queens and I saw movement coming toward me. He slapped five and he walked off. I turned and started shooting him. He died in front of 1240 Sutter Ave.”
Lawrence Byrne said the members of the Nichols/Mason organization had all murdered more than once.
“In that part of Queens, these guys ruled,” Byrne said. “He was part of this crew that killed on a moment’s notice. They had no appreciation for human life. They had no moral grounding.”
Gibbs says he didn’t know anything about Byrne’s murder until he woke up to repeated pages from his Queens partner that cops were everywhere.
Gibbs and the rest of Nichols’ crew met at the home of Fat Cat’s sister. Gibbs wanted to kill everyone responsible, but he says he didn’t know it was Nichols’ guys. He only learned after the meeting when someone pulled him aside and told him.
“I was kind of devastated,” he said. “Whatever you’re into, that’s the cardinal sin. You don’t kill cops.”
Gibbs was eventually charged with Rice’s murder, and Byrne’s murder brought the full wrath of law enforcement down on Nichols’ crew and drug gangs in general. McClary and the other men made the mistake of boasting about the murder to multiple people.
“A kilo of cocaine went from $15,000 to $40,000,” he said. “People were desperate. Everything got so hot. Anytime you got in a car you looked for car bombs.”
The authorities eventually dismissed the charges in the Rice murder for lack of evidence. Meanwhile, the feds opened a major drug trafficking investigation.
TWO MORE HITS
In April 1988, Gibbs ordered two more murders. Keith Reedy was killed by his hitmen on April 17 after Gibbs ordered him dead because he had killed one of his crew.
“He was in a Chinese restaurant and had a child in his hand,” Gibbs said. “He didn’t want to put it down. He gave his girlfriend the child and they shot him.”
Gibbs went to South Carolina and while there, he ordered his hitmen to track down rival gangster Arthel Benson, 24, on April 30.
“Someone shouted his name. As he turned around they shot him in the head,” Gibbs said.
When Gibbs returned to the city, he sat with Nichols and told him he felt guilty about the murders.
“I sat down and cried about that one,” he said. “I was going to say who was going to live or die? Yet and still, I’m 600 miles away and I still can call the shot?”
That May, a rival gang firebombed Nichols’ mother’s house, thinking Gibbs was living there. Gangs began hitting each other and shootouts spread across the city, Gibbs said.
The end of his criminal career loomed.
QUICK TO VOLUNTEER
Gibbs claims that when he was arrested by federal agents in South Carolina on Aug. 11, 1988, he had $10 million stashed in various places and owned two apartments in Kew Gardens.
Authorities hit addresses linked to the Nichols/Mason organization in New York, Alabama and Virginia. Gibbs considered getting plastic surgery and running but in the end, was caught at a McDonald’s.
After he was arrested on drug conspiracy charges, detectives bombarded the federal prosecutors with claims that Gibbs was responsible for dozens of murders, Ponzi said.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Leslie Caldwell then brought in Ponzi to get the record straight, he said.
“They had attributed a murder a day to him, but that was way out of proportion,” he said. “I told them to take a deep breath.”
Gibbs agreed to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for a lesser sentence.
“He was quick to volunteer,” Ponzi said. “We never caught him in a single lie. He somehow never got on the witness stand, so he hasn’t been outed like many others.”
Gibbs, who has an extraordinary ability to recall names, addresses and details, was key to the case, and subsequently became a source whom Ponzi relied to learn about the operations of gangsters across north Brooklyn, he said.
“He was responsible for helping cause the demise of the Fat Cat organization,” he said. “He was one of the first upper echelon cooperators against them. He’s a really bad guy, but those guys killed a parole officer and a police officer.”
The federal prosecutors initially weren’t going to charge him with the homicides, but the Queens and Brooklyn district attorneys objected so forcefully that he was also obliged to plead guilty to the five murders and two attempted murders, Ponzi said.
His cooperation was valuable enough that prosecutors spoke on his behalf at the sentencing, he said.
Gibbs was sent to the federal prison in Otisville, N.Y., and then to FCI Sandstone, a low-security facility with tennis courts along the Kettle River in central Minnesota. He made gloves at the prison.
And then his mother Dorothy died at the age of 52 on Feb. 9, 1992. Staring out at white-out snow conditions, he had a breakdown and stopped eating and drinking. He was barred from attending the funeral.
“It took the death of my mother to do some true soul searching,” he said. “I can’t blame nobody for what I did. It took my mother’s death to understand the pain I put my victims’ families through.”
He got out of prison in July 1997 and was placed in the witness protection program, moved out west and started working in a warehouse.
“They could have put me on Pluto. It didn’t matter. I was free. I was going to make the best of that shot,” he said. “I told the probation officer I was never going back to jail.”
Eighteen months later, he found out that his probation officer had given him 90 days before he would reoffend and go back to prison. The U.S. Marshals gave him 45.
In witness protection, he felt like Ray Liotta’s character in “Goodfellas.”
“You lose everything. I had to start all over again,” he said. “They told me to say I was from South Africa. People believed it.”
Gibbs has worked as a salesman at Nordstrom, a supervisor at UPS, and a security guard.
“HE’S NOT THE SAME PERSON”
Gibbs now works as a salesman in the south under an assumed name. He makes just under $100,000 a year.
He has two children, and, beating the huge odds against him, has never re-offended. He’s hoping to redeem himself with the families of his victims and talk to kids to warn them away from ‘The Life.’
He also self-published a book, called “Beyond Lucky,” which is available for sale online.
“I certainly don’t forgive him for what he did, but I give him credit for taking advantage of the chance he got,” Ponzi said. “He hasn’t been in trouble. I know a 1,000 guys who reoffended. He really made a concerted effort, at times working two jobs.”
Gibbs has changed, his sister said.
“The thing is I’ve seen people who pushed him and he’s not the same person,” she said. “He’s now the person who would apologize and say please forgive me. He tries to keep the peace.”
