# The Rise and Fall of the Cash Money Brothers: Brooklyn's Most Ruthless Empire

## A Legacy Built on Blood and Powder

The story of the Cash Money Brothers reads like a screenplay plucked from the gritty streets of Brooklyn—a tale of ambition, violence, and the inexorable machinery of organized crime that would ultimately grind its operators to dust. Yet this was no fictional narrative. For nearly a decade, the CMB operated as one of the most formidable drug trafficking organizations to emerge from the crack epidemic that ravaged New York City's neighborhoods in the late twentieth century. At the center of this empire stood two brothers whose names would become synonymous with the very worst excesses of street-level capitalism: Damion World Hardy and his older sibling, Myron Wise Hardy.

Both brothers had emerged from respectable circumstances. They attended Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School, a prestigious Roman Catholic preparatory academy located in the heart of Brooklyn. The institution was known for cultivating young minds toward legitimate success, yet for the Hardy brothers, education served merely as a launching pad for something far darker. By 1991, they had channeled their considerable ambition and organizational acumen into founding what would become one of the borough's most feared criminal enterprises.

The name itself—the Cash Money Brothers—was a deliberate homage to the fictional gang featured in Mario Van Peebles' 1991 cult classic film *New Jack City*. The film had captured the imagination of a generation of young men in urban America, romanticizing drug kingpins and their lavish lifestyles while depicting the street game as a viable alternative to legitimate employment. For Damion and Myron Hardy, *New Jack City* wasn't merely entertainment; it was a blueprint.

## A Corporate Structure of Violence

What distinguished the Cash Money Brothers from the countless other crews operating across Brooklyn's neighborhoods was their level of organization and sophistication. This was not a simple collection of corner hustlers or neighborhood toughs. The CMB functioned with the precision of a legitimate corporate entity, complete with a hierarchical structure, defined territories, and ruthless operational protocols that would have impressed even legitimate business executives.

Damion World Hardy assumed the role of de facto leader, a position he held with an iron will and a demonstrated willingness to employ extreme violence to maintain discipline and control. The organization's reach extended far beyond a single neighborhood; CMB operatives worked in coordinated fashion across multiple boroughs, establishing supply chains, managing distribution networks, and enforcing the kind of loyalty that only fear can guarantee.

The group's crown jewel was their dominance over Lafayette Gardens, the sprawling public housing complex nestled in the heart of Bed-Stuy. Lafayette Gardens was no ordinary housing project. The complex housed over 2,600 residents distributed across seven high-rise residential towers, each rising at least thirteen stories into the Brooklyn sky. To control Lafayette Gardens was to control access to a captive market of thousands—young people susceptible to addiction, residents with cash in their pockets, and numerous structural blind spots that made law enforcement operations difficult to execute.

Damion and Myron Hardy didn't inherit control of Lafayette Gardens through any traditional means. They simply took it, using a combination of overwhelming firepower, calculated brutality, and an absolute refusal to acknowledge the authority of the established hustlers who had previously dominated the territory. The older generation of dealers—men who had built their reputations and networks through years of incremental accumulation—found themselves outmaneuvered and terrorized by the younger, more aggressive Hardy organization. Within months, Lafayette Gardens had transformed from a contested marketplace into a CMB fortress, a stronghold from which the brothers could orchestrate their expanding criminal operations with minimal interference from external threats.

## The Price of Ambition: Damion's First Fall

Damion Hardy's reign, however, was not without interruption. In 1993, the consequences of his lifestyle caught up with him in a manner that would prove difficult to escape. Authorities moved against him on serious charges: weapons possession and witness tampering. The witness tampering charge carried particular weight—Hardy stood accused of not merely attempting to silence a witness through intimidation, but of actively attempting to arrange the murder of someone whose testimony threatened one of his organization's members. More alarmingly, there were credible accusations that Hardy had personally fired upon narcotics officers conducting enforcement operations against his organization.

The judicial system proved unforgiving. Hardy received a sentence of two to four years, and he was shipped upstate to serve his time in the custody of the New York Department of Corrections. For most men, such a removal from the street would have been catastrophic to their criminal operations. But Damion Hardy's reputation had been constructed with sufficient care that even his incarceration could not dismantle it.

What occurred during those years incarcerated remains, in many respects, a testament to the psychological hold that successful street leaders maintain over their organizations. Despite being physically removed from the action, with no direct ability to supervise operations or enforce discipline, the Cash Money Brothers continued to function with impressive coordination. The organization's institutional structures proved strong enough to operate without the constant presence of its figurehead. Meanwhile, on the street, everyone understood a simple truth: Damion Hardy would eventually return.

In April 1996, Hardy walked free from incarceration. He had served his time with the understanding that the streets outside had not forgotten him, that his operation remained intact, and that his name still carried the weight of genuine menace. The moment of his release proved to be precisely what both Hardy and his rivals had anticipated: a return to power for a man whose appetite for dominance had, if anything, been sharpened by his time away from the street.

## Disrespect and Its Consequences

By 1998, Damion Hardy had reestablished himself firmly within the criminal hierarchy of Brooklyn. Yet pride, reputation, and the appearance of absolute dominance were matters he took with utmost seriousness. A single act of perceived disrespect could, in his calculus, undermine the carefully constructed image of invulnerability that kept his organization functioning. Such an incident occurred one evening at a roller skating rink in Brooklyn.

Michael Colon, a bouncer employed at the venue, made the fateful decision to remove Damion Hardy from the establishment. The specifics of what prompted this action remain unclear from available records—perhaps Hardy was intoxicated and disruptive, perhaps he was engaged in an altercation with another patron, or perhaps the bouncer simply failed to recognize the significance of the man he was escorting to the exit. Regardless of the underlying cause, the effect was decisive and immediate.

For Damion Hardy, being removed from a public establishment by a mere bouncer was far more than a routine inconvenience. It was a public slight, a demonstration to anyone present that he was not entirely beyond the ordinary rules that governed other men. In the peculiar economics of street reputation, such incidents could not be permitted to stand. Hardy made a single phone call, and one of his CMB soldiers—a man whose eagerness to prove his loyalty remained unquestionable—carried out what was essentially a contract killing.

Michael Colon would not survive the consequences of his professional judgment. His death would become another entry in the rapidly expanding list of corpses that followed in the wake of CMB's expansion and consolidation of power.

## Fraternal Blood and Retaliatory Fire

The transformation of Lafayette Gardens into an active war zone began in earnest on June 12, 1999—a date that would forever alter the trajectory of the Hardy brothers' empire and set in motion a cascade of violence that law enforcement would struggle to contain.

On that date, Myron Hardy—Damion's older brother and a crucial figure in the organization's operational structure—was gunned down within the Lafayette Gardens complex itself. The circumstances of his murder were brutal and unambiguous: this was not a random shooting or a crime of passion, but rather a calculated assassination carried out by a representative of a rival organization seeking to disrupt CMB's dominance.

The shooter was Rumeil Davis, known on the streets as Nino. Nino, operating under the direction of his uncle, Ivory Pena Davis, represented the interests of a rival crew attempting to muscularize its position within the drug trade and challenge CMB's territorial supremacy. Myron's death was a declaration of war—a direct assault on the heart of the Hardy organization, intended to destabilize their operations and demonstrate that they were not, in fact, invulnerable.

At the moment of Myron's murder, Damion Hardy remained incarcerated, serving out the tail end of his sentence for the earlier weapons and tampering charges. But incarceration did not insulate him from the devastating news. Word of his brother's assassination reached him quickly, and his response was immediate and unambiguous: retribution was not merely desired—it was mandatory.

From behind prison walls, Damion Hardy sent out the message that would set the street afire. The Cash Money Brothers would respond in kind. Blood would flow. The only variable remaining was how much.

## Swift and Merciless Retaliation

Three days after Myron Hardy's execution, the CMB responded with precision that demonstrated their organization's continued operational capability despite their leader's incarceration. On June 15, 1999, Dwayne Thor Myers—one of the organization's most reliable and ruthless enforcers—located Jared McKinns, known on the streets as Kojak. Kojak held the status of a soldier within the rival Davis crew and, more significantly, he was believed to have been the individual who had provided Nino Davis with the firearm used to execute Myron Hardy.

The location chosen for McKinns' assassination was pregnant with meaning: the vestibule of 456 Lafayette Street, the very same building within which Myron Hardy had been gunned down merely seventy-two hours earlier. As McKinns entered the building, Myers emerged from the shadows and delivered the execution with the professionalism of someone who had performed such tasks before. The message was unmistakable and impossible to ignore: the Cash Money Brothers would respond to aggression with overwhelming force, and they would do so in locations so central to their territory that even their murdered members' killers would find no sanctuary.

## The Chase and the Cage

Nino Davis, fully cognizant that he had painted an enormous target across his own back through his actions against Myron Hardy, made the decision to flee New York entirely. He slipped out of the city and made his way south, eventually establishing himself in North Carolina where he attempted to disappear into obscurity and obscurity promised, perhaps, safety.

But the machinery of American law enforcement, once properly engaged, operates with a persistence that geography cannot forestall. In 2001, nearly two years after Myron Hardy's murder, federal agents succeeded in locating Nino Davis in North Carolina. He was arrested and, following the requisite legal procedures, was extradited back to New York to face prosecution for his capital crime.

The justice system, despite its many failings, proved adequate to this particular task. Nino Davis was convicted of the murder of Myron Hardy, and the sentencing was severe: twenty-eight years of imprisonment, a sentence effectively designed to incapacitate him during what remained of his productive years.

## The Boxer and His Fallen Friend

On June 10, 2000, as Brooklyn continued to reverberate from the Hardy-Davis conflict, another execution underscored the increasingly lethal environment that CMB's reign had created. Darryl Bowen, known on the street as Hamo-Boum (a contraction of "homicide"), found himself targeted by the CMB for the crime of disrespect.

Hamo had the audacity to approach Edward "Taz" Cook, a member in good standing of the Cash Money Brothers, and pressure him to begin moving cocaine for Hamo's own organization. In the calculus of street economics, this represented not merely competition but a direct insult to CMB's authority and organizational structure. Such affronts could not be tolerated without an immediate and emphatic response.

In the predawn hours of June 10, at the intersection of Quincy Street and Marcy Avenue, Hamo's time ran out. Eric Moore, known to the street as E-Bay, positioned himself behind his intended target and fired a single shot into the back of Bowen's skull with cold precision. The execution was witnessed by multiple individuals, but the getaway driver—a woman named Zara Puff Sarkissian—spirited Moore away from the scene before authorities could respond.

The circumstances of Hamo's presence at that particular location suggested that he had been deliberately lured there, drawn to the spot by a woman he trusted. What should have been a routine meeting became instead a killing ground orchestrated with the efficiency of a professional operation.

Bowen was rushed to King's County Hospital, where he clung to life for ten hours before succumbing to his injuries. His death might have been noted simply as another casualty of Brooklyn's drug war, except for one remarkable detail: Darryl Bowen's funeral expenses and burial costs were paid by none other than Mike Tyson, the former heavyweight boxing champion of the world.

Tyson and Bowen shared a friendship that predated the heights of the former champion's career. The loss of his longtime friend affected Tyson profoundly, and his decision to personally finance Bowen's final arrangements spoke to a bond that transcended the criminality that increasingly consumed Bowen's life.

## Conclusion: The Inevitable Fall

The Cash Money Brothers' reign, built on cocaine and cemented with blood, would not survive the escalating violence its leaders had unleashed. What began as an efficiently organized criminal enterprise gradually transformed into something more primal and destructive—a full-scale war that no amount of organizational sophistication could contain. Damion Hardy's careful calculations could not anticipate or prevent the inevitable response from law enforcement, nor could the violence that accumulated, body by body, remain indefinitely hidden from federal scrutiny.

The Hardy brothers' story is ultimately one of tremendous talent systematically misdirected toward destruction. Had Damion and Myron Hardy channeled their organizational abilities, their strategic thinking, and their capacity for leadership toward legitimate enterprise, they might have built something that endured. Instead, they built an empire on powder and blood—and such empires, by their very nature, are destined to collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions.