OG Mack: United Blood Nation, Federal Case, and 50-Year Sentence

OG Mack is Omar Portee, a Bronx-born gang leader who co-founded the United Blood Nation on Rikers Island in 1993 and is now serving a 50-year federal sentence imposed in 2003 for racketeering, conspiracy to commit murder, drug trafficking, and related crimes. He was 33 at sentencing, which puts his earliest release around 2053.¹

Who He Is

Portee was born around 1970 and grew up in the Bronx. He committed his first robbery at 17 and a second within a year, and he was cycling in and out of custody before he was old enough to drink.² Inside the New York jail system he went by “OG Mack” and later “The Big Homie,” and it was in jail that he built the organization he is known for.

Founding the United Blood Nation

On July 16, 1993, at the George Motchan Detention Center on Rikers Island, Portee and fellow inmate Leonard McKenzie, known as “Dead Eye,” founded the United Blood Nation.³ At the time Hispanic gangs, particularly the Latin Kings and the Ñeta, dominated the city’s jails and routinely targeted African American inmates. Portee and McKenzie organized a protective coalition under the “Blood” name, borrowed from the Los Angeles gang, though the original West Coast Bloods never sanctioned the East Coast organization and still do not recognize it.⁴

The founders wrote a governing document called “The 31,” a list of 31 rules covering member conduct, discipline, and an absolute ban on cooperating with authorities.³ They also introduced practices that broke with West Coast tradition, including the “Buck 50,” an initiation in which a prospect slashed a non-member’s face deeply enough to require 150 stitches. West Coast Bloods had generally directed violence at rival gangs rather than civilians.⁴

Under the UBN umbrella, existing crews kept their identities while pledging allegiance to the larger organization. These sets included the Nine Trey Gangsters, who served as enforcers; Sex Money Murder, which handled finances; and the One Eight Trey, which Portee personally led and which functioned as “teachers and breeders” for new members.⁴

The Bronx Operation

Portee was released from prison around 1999 and returned to the Bronx, where he set up around 183rd Street and Davidson Avenue. He ran the One Eight Trey set, directing drug sellers, prostitutes, and thieves. Teenagers as young as 16 were initiated through 31-second beatings and handed semiautomatic weapons. Portee called the guns “burners” and personally taught recruits how to use them.²

The violence was routine. When a drug dealer known as “K-Born” clashed with a Bloods member, Portee’s lieutenant Lemrey “Bloody Pimp” Andrews and a 17-year-old went to the dealer’s apartment and fired 30 rounds from an AK-47 and an Intratec 9mm through his door. K-Born survived. In August 2000, associate Dushon “Jah Bee” Foster allegedly shot 16-year-old Frank Esperanza in the face at point-blank range; the bullet lodged in the boy’s teeth and he survived.⁵ Portee enforced discipline inside his own ranks the same way, at one point permanently disfiguring a female member by burning her leg with a heated knife after she tried to leave a fraudulent credit card scheme.²

In public he tried a different story, telling reporters before his arrest that the gang had shifted toward “political activism.” Federal investigators had already been watching him for 17 months.⁶

The Federal Case

On May 8, 2001, a 31-count racketeering indictment was unsealed in the Southern District of New York, naming 15 Bloods members and associates as a criminal enterprise. Portee was arrested in Washington Heights and pleaded not guilty.⁶ The case went to Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald, with Assistant U.S. Attorneys Daniel Gitner, Elizabeth Maringer, and Ronnie Abrams prosecuting.⁷

Portee stood trial alongside Gary “OG G” Jackson, Lemrey Andrews, and Dushon Foster. The trial ran more than two months. In August 2002, the jury convicted Portee on charges including racketeering, conspiracy to commit murder, conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine and marijuana, illegal possession of an AK-47, assault with a dangerous weapon, and fraud counts tied to identity theft and stolen credit cards.¹

The 50-Year Sentence

On April 14, 2003, Judge Buchwald sentenced Portee to 50 years in federal prison. Prosecutors had asked for life.¹ The judge said Portee had “glorified lawlessness” and inducted “impressionable young people into his life of crime,” citing “the absence of much, if anything, on the positive side of the ledger.”⁸ Prosecutor Daniel Gitner called Portee “a crime wave unto himself” who had built “not just a gang, but a culture that puts violence above all else.”²

Portee spoke before being led out. “Your honor, you’re like a doctor looking down on me right now. You can save my life or you can take it,” he told Buchwald, adding that his crimes had been overstated: “It’s like I’m a terrorist.”²

Appeal and Current Status

Portee fought the sentence through two rounds of remand proceedings, asking Judge Buchwald to resentence him under evolving federal sentencing guidelines. She declined both times, writing that although she was “sympathetic to Portee’s health problems” and understood his family’s wishes, “this is an inappropriate case for resentencing.” He appealed to the Second Circuit, arguing procedural errors and that the 50-year term was substantively unreasonable. On May 25, 2010, the Second Circuit affirmed, calling his arguments “without merit.”⁸

He remains in federal custody. The specifics of the health problems referenced in his appeal filings were not made public.⁸

What Happened to the UBN

Portee’s imprisonment did not break the organization. UBN authority was designed to flow from the New York prison system, a tier members called “up top,” and the gang kept running through its council of set leaders and its ranks from godfather down to soldier.³ Federal prosecutors have continued dismantling leadership across jurisdictions in the years since: more than a dozen Nine Trey Gangsters were convicted in Virginia in 2014,⁹ and a 2017 RICO case in the Western District of North Carolina charged 83 UBN members, with 82 sentenced by October 2020 and several receiving life terms.¹⁰ At the time of that case, the Department of Justice estimated UBN membership at up to 15,000 along the East Coast.¹¹

1
The New York Times. Founder of East Coast Bloods Is Given 50 Years
2
New York Post. Blood-Soaked Gang Lord Gets 50 Yrs for Thug Life
3
WSOC-TV. United Blood Nation: History, Terminology, Background
4
Public Intelligence. Bloods Street Gang Intelligence Report
5
New York Post. Bloods Run Cold: Bx Trial Bares Gang Warfare
6
The New York Times. 15 Indicted in Crackdown on Bloods Gang
7
CourtListener. United States v. Portee, 1:01-cr-00450
8
CaseMine. United States v. Portee, No. 09-3323-cr
9
FBI. Nine Trey Gangster Sentenced to More Than Nine Years
10
U.S. Department of Justice. Bloods Gang Members Sentenced to Life in Prison for Racketeering Conspiracy Involving Murder and Other Violent Crimes
11
OCCRP. US: Dozens Arrested in Crackdown on United Blood Nation Gang