Court Docs: FBI Investigated Wu-Tang Link to Two Staten Island Murders
The FBI examined an informant’s claim that two Wu-Tang Members—RZA and Raekwon—ordered the murder of two Staten Island drug dealers in 1999, according to newly released court documents obtained by the Staten Island Advance.
The documents are related to a 2014 trial against Staten Island brothers Anthony and Harvey Christian, who were convicted last October of running a drug empire in the borough for 20 years; during the same trial, Anthony Christian was also convicted of arranging the murder 17-year-old Jerome “Boo Boo” Estella in June 1999.
Chrisitan’s attorney, Michael Gold, now claims that an FBI file includes allegations from an informant that founding Wu-Tang members Robert “RZA” Diggs and Corey “Raekwon” Woods ordered the murder of Estella and another S.I. resident, Corey “Shank Bank” Brooker, who died a few weeks after Estella and whose murder remains unsolved. The informant, according to the FBI file, claims Estella robbed RZA’s brother and that Brooker robbed Raekwon’s cousin; RZA, the informant reportedly said, paid $30,000 for the hit on Brooker.
Gold is now requesting access to the full FBI file.
“These reports seem to suggest someone else was liable for those murders. I’m not suggesting that Wu-Tang committed these crimes. The FBI did,” Gold told the Advance. “What I’m trying to ascertain is their stated belief in an official file that Wu-Tang ordered this homicide.”
Assistant US Attorney Allon Lifshitz said his office provided all relevant information from the file to Gold before the Christian brothers trial began, and he included several relevant passages from the file in a court filing last month.
Those excerpts — culled from interviews with an informant named Brian Humphreys, the man who shot Estella — suggest that the doomed dealer had robbed RZA’s relative.
“A couple of weeks before the Boo Boo shooting, Uncles (informant Paul Ford) told Humphreys about a Blood named Boo Boo who just came home from jail. He stated that Boo Boo had robbed RZA’s little brother and had also gotten into something with the Christian brothers,” the excerpt reads.
“Uncles was talking about Boo Boo and said that he had just come home and robbed RZA’s brother and that they would likely come after him for that. Humphreys believes Uncles was referring to members of Wu-Tang.”
Another excerpt includes information about a conversation between Ford, Humphreys, and Christian.
“Ford stated that he had previously heard that Shank Bank was killed by Phife (ph). Ford believes that Phife collected money from RZA for executing the hit,” the document says. It’s not clear who Phife is, according to the Advance.
No charges were filed agains RZA or Raekwon, and prosecutors claim the allegations that Estella and Brooker only strengthen their cases against the Christians, because high-profile robberies would have increased police presence and hurt the drug trade.
