The hardscrabble town of Marianna, Ark. , near the Mississippi River, has no movie theater but plenty of boarded-up storefronts. Summer work for teenagers can mean wrenching labor in the rice and soybean fields. Young black men know that if they want something better, they have to go elsewhere. Enter the four Chambers brothers — Larry, Billy Joe, Willie Lee and Otis — who blew into their old hometown driving gleaming BMWs and Camaros, sporting gold chains and fancy clothes. When they offered ambitious young men $2,000 a month to return with them to Detroit, they had no shortage of takers. Over four years, some 150 young men, most between the ages of 17 and 21, made the trip north. Recalls Michael Vondran Jr., 17: “People were saying, ‘I’m going to Detroit, I’m going to Detroit.’ No one really knew what they were getting into.” What the young recruits found was not what they had been promised. At the height of their empire, the Chambers gang controlled about half of Detroit’s crack trade, running 200 drug houses, supplying some 500 more and raking in $3 million a week. The key to their success was the supply of green kids from Marianna, who were subjected to a regimen far more harrowing than Marine boot camp. The young men who became runners, couriers and dealers were threatened and abused. The trick in the crack trade, police say, is to keep people in line. If the Chamberses’ recruits tried to flee, the brothers knew where to find them. “A Chicago kid might be able to leave, but not a kid from Marianna,” says the town’s police chief, Mark Birchler. Youths caught sampling the cocaine were roughed up. The punishment for stealing could be permanent: one Marianna boy returned with mangled fingers. To exact obedience, the brothers sometimes deliberately shorted the boys on the crack that was parceled out for them to sell. When the receipts came up short, the boys were forced to work off their shortages, which kept them in bondage for months at a time. “They ran everything on fear and intimidation,” says Birchler. Not everyone stayed intimidated. In February tips from disaffected Marianna youths led to criminal indictments in Detroit against the four Chambers brothers, as well as 18 others, including many from Marianna. Today Marianna is a town traumatized by its past. Some of the young men who left as country bumpkins returned as hardened criminals. About half of those indicted are still at large, and people are terrified that the Chamberses will try to get even. There have been several fire bombings, including one directed at a woman who testified against a Chambers brother. Yet one fact about Marianna remains the same. Says Councilman Roy Lewellen: “I can’t think of eight black teenagers who are employed.”
