Eleven members of the notorious Godbodies, a murderous gang of drug dealers that operated a major crack-cocaine business from a Brooklyn tenement, were busted in a joint task-force probe, law-enforcement sources said.
The Brooklyn branch of the Godbodies, whose criminal tentacles are said to reach throughout Brooklyn and Queens, had a base in a 20-unit apartment house at 1223 Bushwick Ave., in Bushwick.
The ring pulled in between $3,000 and $5,000 a day in drug sales, according to the FBI, DEA and 83rd Precinct detectives.
One of the accused ringleaders, David Jones, 33, was arrested in Charleston, W.Va., where he had been running a second drug ring, according to the indictment.
Jones has an extensive rap sheet, which includes arrests for shooting at two cops, one in the 75th Precinct in 1988 and one in the 78th Precinct in 1991.
The suspects were charged with running a criminal enterprise for conspiracy to distribute narcotics and weapons possession, according to the indictment, unsealed Friday in Brooklyn federal court.
“Since 1998, the defendants and others organized, managed and worked for a profitable interstate crack cocaine distribution ring that purchased narcotics in Manhattan and brought the drugs to Brooklyn,” court papers said.
The crew also hired female couriers to transport crack to Charleston, where workers sold the drugs in various apartments and alleyways and the proceeds were sometimes wired back to New York, according to U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf.
Four other gang members were being sought. One of the suspects who remains at large, Elson Warren, 27, had been arrested for attempted murder in the 75th Precinct.
The Godbodies, who have ties with the violent Bloods gang, seized the building in 1998 from a rival drug dealer, whom they shot and wounded.
The Godbodies, a splinter group of the Five Percenters, black militants who broke from the Nation of Islam in the 1960s, “terrorized the neighborhood,” said one law-enforcement source.
The gang drove around in flashy cars and sported expensive jewelry, the source said.
The Five Percenters drew their name from the belief that their members were God’s chosen 5 percent.
Some of those arrested were formerly associated with the A-team, a violent gang that terrorized residents at the Cypress Hills projects in East New York during the late ’80s and early ’90s.