The rise and fall of the Young Bag Chasers

The gunmen sat in the parking lot of a North Philadelphia McDonald’s, their eyes fixed on the door. They were waiting for Zyir Stafford to finish his shift.

Stafford walked out into the cool, damp air just after 8:15 p.m. on Dec. 7, 2023. He would not make it two blocks before he was shot more than a dozen times. He died at a nearby hospital shortly after, his work uniform riddled with bullets and soaked in blood.

Members of the Young Bag Chasers, a West Philadelphia gang, quickly claimed responsibility for the killing online and began mocking Stafford in rap songs and social media posts.

Abdul Vicks, a rapper considered the leader of YBC, slapped the McDonald’s name and logo on his song titles, album covers, and the packages of weed he sold. He filmed a music video in which he pretended to pull a body from the trunk of a car, then lit a fire next to it, and poured McDonald’s fries into the flames.

The mere smell of food from McDonald’s now makes Stafford’s family sick.

To understand a trend that law enforcement officials say is driving more and more young people to commit shootings, The Inquirer spent months interviewing members of YBC — including two men in prison for murder — along with their families, police, prosecutors, and others who know them. Those conversations, along with hundreds of pages of court documents, police records, social media posts, and music videos, revealed how YBC ascended in the city’s music scene, making tens of thousands of dollars in profits, even as the crew killed people — and bragged about it.

The Young Bag Chasers, named after the teens’ initial pursuit of money, didn’t start out as even a shadow of the vicious clique it would become. It all began around 2017 when best friends from West Philly started making music for fun, writing songs in their basements and bedrooms that they hoped could one day bring them a career, riches, and a life outside their struggling neighborhood.

But then a string of shootings and the rise of social media and drill rap, a subgenre of hip-hop that celebrates violence, scrambled their intentions — and altered the trajectory of their young lives.

“We were young, we didn’t know what we getting into,” said Kavon “Von” Lee, 24. “And a lot of people ain’t had no guidance.”

In the years since YBC was formed, nearly a dozen of its members have been killed, including Vicks, who had become the face of the group in recent years. Many others, like Lee, are serving decades behind bars for murder or related crimes.

Eventually, he and other YBC members said, the teens, fueled by the pursuit of fame and money, came to believe the formula to success was to dis the dead. Shocking lyrics about violence, they learned, drew hundreds of thousands — sometimes millions — of listeners to their songs.

Soon, some YBC members were pulling in more than $10,000 a month from YouTube and Spotify alone, they said. They made even more by selling weed, charging extra for packs named after their victims.

YBC became a business. Violence was the brand, and murder fueled its profits.

But in the beginning, it was just a group of neighborhood kids who formed an unbreakable allegiance through shared struggles. Exposed to hard realities and difficult home lives, some said they started selling drugs at 9 or 10 years old, just to survive. Everything escalated from there, they said — theft, fights in school, carrying a gun, dropping out.

It was a simple path, really, one young man said. First, they’re introduced to the scales. Then, the mask and the gun.

And then, in the digital age of drill rap and social media, they pick up a microphone.

The boys became friends by proximity. Most attended Belmont Charter School, and grew up on nearby blocks in the Bottom, a part of West Philadelphia cutting across Mantua, Belmont, and West Powelton that for decades has been among the poorest sections of the city. The typical household there earns less than $34,000 per year, according to the latest data from the U.S. Census.

They spent their summers and afternoons riding bikes through overgrown alleys and shooting hoops at 39th Street Playground. They wrestled and played football for the Parkside Saints and, at night, piled onto the floors of one another’s homes for sleepovers.

They proudly called themselves Bottom Boys. And they loved one another like brothers.

Many had fathers who were dead, incarcerated, or absent. Some had parents who used drugs, and relatives that sold them. Most lived below the poverty line, shared clothes and meals, and saw each other’s mothers and grandmothers as their own. After one boy’s parents died, Lee said, he and his friends had to sign him up for school. They were 12.

“We rely on each other like family,” Lee said. “It’s the only way to get by.”

Their neighborhood had been shaped by decades of structural racism. It was redlined in the 1930s and deemed “hazardous” to investors, ushering in an era of economic and racial segregation. In the decades to follow, Black families were crushed by the crack epidemic and subsequent mass incarceration.

Decrepit and abandoned homes lined many blocks where the boys played. Trash littered the sidewalks. Their schools were overcrowded and underfunded.

At Belmont Charter, the boys cherished their music class, where they learned how to carry a beat and write songs about everything from recycling and not bullying to their experiences as Black children. They would take home what they had learned and create beats on their miniature keyboards.

Tahjae Brooks in particular had a gift for telling stories through his songs that made his friends see a better future for themselves.

Tall and thin with light green eyes, Brooks made music for fun beginning when he was about 12. At 16, in 2017, he started releasing tracks under the name “Jae100” and quickly generated a local buzz.

“He was the ticket,” Lee said of his cousin — the ticket to money, fame, a new life away from West Philadelphia.

Once other friends started releasing music, the teens decided they needed a name for themselves, something that emphasized what they were really after: Money.

They landed on the Young Bag Chasers, or Youngins Bout Chicken. (Chicken is slang for money.)

YBC for short.

By this point, most of the boys were known to police in the neighborhood for stirring up trouble. They had started smoking weed, stealing bikes, and getting kicked out of school before age 12.

They wanted to impress girls by having the latest shoes, clothes, and video games. But their parents didn’t have money to spare, and they quickly learned — often by example and recruited by older teens — that the easiest way to get cash was to sell drugs.

While a few started selling crack by age 9, most, like Lee, stuck to marijuana. Lee was about 14 when he started selling, he said. Weed was being decriminalized, and became the perfect way to make a little money — you didn’t have to stand on the corner, he said, and if you got caught as a juvenile, you’d probably get a slap on the wrist.

Munson could go to any neighborhood — Cobbs Creek, Parkside, North Philly — and know somebody.

The second oldest of four boys, Munson had an innocence about him — a lighthearted laugh and an easygoing manner that invited conversation. He had a learning disability, his mother said, but also an uncannily accurate memory.

His family called him their little lawyer. His friends called him “Baby YBC.”

By 2019, YBC’s music was well-established locally. Lee and Munson were like the group managers, pooling their money from weed sales and side jobs at the Philadelphia Zoo and Fresh Grocer for time in the studio, and to order T-shirts and sweatsuits decorated with the three big letters.

YBC’s songs, especially Brooks’, were getting thousands of streams.

But what started as petty fights between neighborhood kids began to escalate. A fight over a girl led YBC teens to badly beat up a young man from a few streets over, and the boy on the other side wanted revenge.

Teens from other West Philly blocks who were also pursuing rap took it as an opportunity to start dissing Munson online and in songs. Lines were drawn and rivalries formed.

Philly rapper Meek Mill had taken notice of the talents of YBC and other groups pursuing music — and he also noted their feuds. He later said on social media that there were “some hot young bulls from my city but they all beefing!”

At one point in late 2019, Lee said, he convened all sides to try to squash the growing conflict. The guys shook hands and agreed to do a song together in a show of good faith. Mill would later share a photo of the moment on Instagram, lauding them for coming together.

“That’s a boss move y’all made!” Mill wrote.

But the song was never recorded, and the truce lasted only a few months.

Because it wasn’t just about music anymore, it was life and death. From then on, YBC’s music was more angry, more violent. The guys tattooed “Josh World” on their faces, hands, and forearms and started dissing anyone who disrespected them.

And then they started shooting.

Lee doesn’t know exactly why he killed 19-year-old Nyfeic Hawkins the evening of March 2, 2020.

He attended West Philly High with Hawkins, also known as “Bud” from 62nd and Callowhill Streets, and had no issues with him. But he was friends with Kaseem Easley, whom he met while in juvenile placement, so Easley’s enemies became his own.

It started as a fistfight between Easley and Hawkins on the basketball court at 39th and Olive Streets. Lee, then 20, intervened and shot Hawkins nearly a dozen times.

Lee and Easley were quickly arrested and later convicted and sentenced to long prison terms.

“I had too much kind heart for my friends, so I would do whatever for them,” Lee said. “I think about it almost every day. I regret it.”

Lee was the first person in YBC to be charged with murder. In the months and years to follow, he watched from inside his cell as his cousin and friends became infatuated with the growing wave of drill music.

Drill, which started in Chicago in the early 2010s, is known for its dark, confrontational lyrics that often explicitly describe shootings, mock victims, and taunt enemies.

The teens had seen original drill rappers Chief Keef’s and Lil Durk’s rise to fame — how kids with no ties to Chicago walked around singing their songs and yelling out insults to their enemies. And they saw how it paid off — Keef was signed to a $6 million record deal at just 16.

By this point, the group had started collaborating with young rappers from Northwest and North Philly, like Semaj Nolan, a.k.a. Reek12Hunnit, a teen from 12th and Susquehanna. Nolan was affiliated with a younger crop of teens who called themselves the “Young Face Arrangers,” or YFA, and who had earned a reputation in the city for committing shootings.

Nolan, in an interview from prison, where he is serving 35 to life for killing two teens, said he knew Brooks — then considered YBC’s most talented rapper — through a family friend, and they started doing songs together in 2020 when he was about 16.

It was a way for the artists to benefit from each other’s followings — but it also meant they had more manpower and protection, and inherited each other’s beefs.

“After that, we was just together,” Nolan said. YFA would come to be seen as the “little brothers” of YBC, and the groups became synonymous with each other.

The emergence of drill and the linking of crews unfolded as the coronavirus pandemic shuttered schools and businesses, and the rate of shootings across the city reached new heights.

Many young people were scamming the state’s expanded unemployment system, Nolan said, signing up for benefits for themselves, friends, and even the neighborhood drug users. For the first time, he said, teens were getting hundreds of dollars a week. Some saw thousand-dollar checks through payment protection programs.

Costs went up accordingly, he said. An eighth of weed jumped from $40 to nearly $100. An $800 gun was now worth twice that.

“It was young people who didn’t really have nothing going for themselves,” said Nolan, now 20. “Then they got some money, and everything went off the roof — drugs, guns, cars. People would just take some of everything.”

Between the new collaborations, pandemic unemployment benefits, and weed sales, YBC was growing, and now had a steady income stream.

After Lee was locked up, Vicks, a.k.a. YBC Dul, stepped up as a manager.

Vicks, skinny and small in stature, was born in North Philly, but moved down the Bottom at 9 years old. He was in and out of placement for various juvenile crimes through his teen years, and was kicked out of school for fighting. His father used drugs, and because of his behavioral issues, there were many nights Vicks slept on friends’ couches instead of returning home.

His friends — YBC — were his family.

Musically, Vicks was not as smooth as Brooks, but he could see how popular drill was becoming, and he saw the potential for YBC to become a business. In December 2020, he created Young Bag Chasers LLC.

Vicks released his first song in 2021, around the same time that YBC’s feuds with different cliques across West Philly were heating up. He leaned heavily into dissing, and as his friends, like Nolan, committed shootings, he had more victims to mock in songs.

Even people who were killed by mistake, or were not involved with YBC feuds, became fair game.

That was not unique to YBC — but it was a key part of the formula for success.

The rappers saw how hundreds of thousands of views poured in with each dis — and how the money followed. Nolan said YBC would make up to $10,000 a month from YouTube ad revenue and Spotify streams, and Vicks would disburse it to members depending on how seriously they took the music.

“The drill era was what people wanted to hear at the time,” Nolan said. “We seen how the views was going up, we just stuck to it. We was in the studio every other day.”

Vicks’ songs were so relentlessly cruel that his fans nicknamed him “Mr. Disrespectful.” He even rapped about slapping a 16-year-old victim’s mother, and mixed snippets of speeches by District Attorney Larry Krasner into the songs.

And he did all of this at the expense of his friends’ court cases. Even though the death of Hawkins, the young man Lee killed, had nothing to do with a YBC feud, it was a “body” Vicks couldn’t let go to waste.

Lee said he would call Vicks from jail and tell him to stop rapping about his case and insulting the victim.

“I used to always tell him, ‘stop rapping about that, it’s not cool to rap about,’ but they wouldn’t listen. And they’re out there and I’m in here,” Lee said in an interview from the state prison in Frackville.

At Lee’s sentencing, Hawkins’ mother told the judge how Lee’s friends bragged about killing her son. Hawkins was the second child she had lost to a shooting, she said, and after YBC members threatened her third surviving child, she sent him to live with family outside the city.

They were “telling me if I let him stay around here, I’m gonna have a third son dead, basically,” she said.

Lee said he wishes he could have persuaded his friends to stop harassing the family. He can’t help but wonder if their actions contributed to the 20-to-40-year sentence he was handed.

“They want the clout and fame,” he said. “And they f— me over in the long run.”

YBC’s enemy list grew with every dis and shooting, and eventually the group was physically surrounded by people who wanted them dead — from 38th Street, 39th Street, 56th Street, Parkside. People they didn’t even know had it out for them.

The summer of 2022 in particular brought a world of hurt to the group. Three key members were killed within two months, and fissures began to form over the politics of grief, money, and music collabs.

Lee recalled talking to his cousin, Brooks, from jail and trying to persuade him to return to his old style of rap, something more melodic and less violent.

“‘You don’t want to be here,’” he said he told his cousin. “But he’d always say, it’s fine, he’s cool.”

But on the night of Dec. 6, 2022, an opposing group learned Brooks was shooting a music video at a friend’s house on the 4300 block of Parrish Street. As Brooks waited outside for an Uber, he was shot and killed.

That was a crushing moment for the group — YBC’s founder, its “ticket,” was dead.

But Vicks saw it as his duty to stay the course.

“Everyone depend on me, I can’t let it die,” Vicks said in an interview on YouTube last year.

He began spending weeks in California, and moving large amounts of weed between the states. Vicks built YBC into a weed enterprise, and people were willing to pay more just so they could say they smoked YBC weed. One YBC member, Zaire Crawford, said he was making $1,500 a day selling pot.

Vicks was able to evade law enforcement for the most part. He was arrested as an adult only once, in October 2022, after two men from a rival group shot up a South Philly Airbnb where Vicks and others were gathered, said Assistant District Attorney William Fritze, who oversees the unit tasked with investigating gangs.

Officers caught Vicks running out of the back of the house, carrying a blue suitcase filled with two pounds of marijuana, Fritze said. Vicks was arrested on drug charges, but a judge later tossed the case after witnesses repeatedly failed to show up in court, Fritze said.

Vicks was free to return to his music, his friends, and his growing weed business.

Fellow YBC members say Vicks wasn’t antagonizing his enemies any more than they were antagonizing him. He, too, was traumatized by how many people he had lost. Tattooed beneath his left bicep were the letters “PTSD.”

He struggled with addiction, too, he said in interviews with YouTubers. After getting injured in a car accident, he said, he became hooked on Percocet. He also started drinking “lean,” a combination of codeine, cough syrup, and soda.

“I don’t even eat,” he said. “I get high, pop percs, drink lean.”

He was trapped in a self-destructive cycle, trying to show that he could hurt others more than they hurt him.

When one of Vicks’ best friends — a man with the initials B.K. — was killed, a rival crew mocked him by filming a video at a Burger King.

Vicks later pulled the same stunt after the killing of Stafford, who worked at McDonald’s to support his two daughters — except he took it further, slapping the fast-food logo on his album covers and handing out weed in boxes designed to look like Happy Meals.

Stafford’s mother declined to be interviewed for this story, citing the trauma of her son’s death. In a brief message over Instagram, she said she wished the police would devote as much time and energy to bringing her son’s killers to justice as they have spent on other “higher profile” cases.

Prosecutors with the Gun Violence Task Force, the unit that investigates gang violence, said they could not say how many shootings in the city are connected to YBC and its feuds. Last year, officials estimated that, in just 11 months leading up to April 2024, more than 30 people were shot in gunfire connected to the group.

But many of those shootings are unsolved, and because gangs sometimes want to take credit for shootings they didn’t commit, it’s difficult to accurately quantify the bloodshed, Assistant District Attorney Robert Goggin said.

“It gets so interconnected and convoluted that it can be difficult to kind of see the forest through the trees,” he said. “If you think about it, it makes sense. They want the credit, because then their music videos start to get more views.”

Marianne Aguilar, another assistant district attorney who works alongside Goggin, noted how Vicks at one point openly admitted that murder fueled his success.

“We gotta have more blood,” Vicks told one YouTuber. “I gotta make more music, bro. We need more blood.”

Aguilar said it was shocking to hear him say that outright.

“To him, it really was like ‘the deaths lead to raps, which leads to money for me,’” she said.

“Bodies pay the bills,” Goggin added.

The violence of YBC and the surrounding crews has consumed the Bottom for years. Even as shootings are on the decline across the city, the streets of the neighborhood seem empty, and residents fearful.

Vicks acknowledged that in August, when he walked a YouTuber through the area, pointing out the abandoned homes he and his friends used to hang out in, the parks where his crew shot people.

“We tortured the whole hood,” he said. “Nobody come outside no more.”

He told his interviewer it was dangerous to be seen with him, but acted untouchable.

“Anywhere I go, nobody play with me,” he said. “I never got robbed, I never got touched, shot at in the city.”

He paused briefly, then added: “Yet.”

Twenty-four hours after that interview was released online, Vicks was dead.

On Aug. 23, Vicks was in Olney, meeting with his friend and manager. They had plans to drive to New York that evening and loaded up their trunk with a few bags of weed, then got on the road.

A few minutes into the drive, as Vicks approached a red light, a white Hyundai pulled up next to him and several gunmen, armed with a rifle and handguns, pumped the car full of bullets. Vicks was struck in the right hand and the chest and died at the hospital shortly after.

Police have since charged four people, ages 14 to 18, with the rapper’s death — young men who are affiliated with a little-known crew in Olney.

Surveillance video recovered by police showed how one of the teens squealed upon learning his friends had shot Vicks.

“I could throw a party!” he said.

Because he knew that in killing Vicks, his crew would rack up what the rapper had shown them was so valuable: clout.

YBC’s dwindling members continue to profit from Vicks’ content. His Instagram and YouTube accounts remain active and continue to release music that was recorded before his death.

In the last 30 days, nearly 3 million people have viewed his YouTube videos, according to the social media tracker SocialBlade, and his Instagram has nearly 75,000 followers.

Vicks’ relatives declined to be interviewed for this article. His mother, Candace Sanders, said briefly in court in December that her son was a talented rapper who just wanted to succeed musically so he could help his friends and family build a better life.

“He was not a gang leader,” she said.

For many, Vicks’ death underscored that what many young men saw as a pathway to success through drill — and the blueprint of bragging about shootings — led them to only two places: a jail cell or a coffin.

Lee said he has tried to convince his friends of that.

“Learn from me,” he said he tells them. “When you’re in here alone, all you got is your family, no friends. … Most of us don’t even got kids. You gonna die before you got kids?”

But even as Lee tries to foster a new mindset and envision his life after prison, he will forever be linked to YBC. On his left arm, just below his shoulder, the three letters are tattooed in black ink. And just beneath that is the mantra that has defined his life:

“NLMB” — Never Leave My Brothers.