These gang-bangers love social media — and so do the cops who busted them.
East Harlem has been cleared of 63 dangerous gangsters who openly incriminated themselves in slang-filled, misspelled postings on Twitter, FaceBook and YouTube, Manhattan law-enforcement officials said yesterday in announcing the take-down of three rival gangs.
Some of the thugs even posted photos of themselves holding guns, officials said.
“God forgives I don’t … somebody gotta die,” one alleged member of the gang Air It Out posted on Facebook, according to the massive conspiracy indictments.
“I’m 2 Glocks strapped, rolling down 112th Madison, 116 this is the New Iraq,” boasted another AIO member.
“I’ll give u $300 if u clap a Trill or Whoadey before October,” another gangster promised, using the slang “clap” for shooting members of the rival gangs.
The alleged members of Air It Out, the True Money Gang (or Trillas), and Whoadey — 18 of whom remain at large — have collectively notched three murders and some 30 shootings, officials said.
The evidence against them — amassed by the Manhattan DA’s Violent Criminal Enterprise Unit, the NYPD’s Gang Division, and cops from the 23rd and 25th precincts — included dangerous surveillance and gun seizures conducted over three years.
But in gathering much of the evidence, investigators simply peeked into the punks’ online postings, along the way decoding a small dictionary worth of garbled slang.
A “2&5 tran” is a .25-caliber gun, according to a two-page glossary compiled by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
“Air it,” “dump on,” “pop a bottle” and “play the flute” all mean fire a gun, the list says.
A gun itself can be a “biscuit,” a “bitch,” a “blamer,” a “clickety,” a “drum set,” a “flocka,” a “girlfriend,” a “grip,” an “instrument,” a “ratchet,” a “little piece of metal,” a “shorty,” a “speaker,” a “toy,” a “utensil,” and, more oddly, a “flamingo” or a “sandwich.”
Cops are “boys,” money is “bread,” a pal is a “cro,” and bullets are “food,” “gas,” “sea shellz” or “electricity.”
Murder? That’s to “rock to sleep early,” the glossary says.
“There is a lot of social-networking and investigation using the Internet that all of us use now in law enforcement,” Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. said, adding, “The Internet is our 21st-century crime scene.”
But in some instances, the alleged thugs may have hung themselves by an old-fashioned land line.
“I went over there, you know, and played the flute twice,” one perp announced on a recorded pay phone call from a city jail.