Once a blue-collar factory neighborhood, Kensington was especially devastated when deindustrialization swept through the area in the 1950s. As the white population fled for the suburbs, Hispanic and African-American people moved in, and with few investments from the city, the drug market filled the economic vacuum. Houses transformed into drug dens, factories into spaces to shoot up, rail yards into homeless encampments. Most residents, many of them immigrant families who had come to Kensington for a better life, did not have the means to move.
In the early 2000s, Dominican gangs started bringing in Colombian heroin that was not only purer but much cheaper than heroin imported from Asia, which historically predominated. Kensington’s decentralized market kept competition high and prices low. Most corners were run by small, unaffiliated groups of dealers, making the area difficult to police; if a dealer was arrested, there was always someone there to replace him. The Philadelphia prison system has become the largest provider of drug treatment in the city. The police have realized that they can’t arrest the problem away, and they spend many of their calls reviving drug addicts with narcan, an overdose-reversal spray. The D.E.A. focused on the high-level drug traffickers, not the guys working the streets, but the arrests did little to curb the growing demand.

The conflicts about the corners became however overwhelming which inevitably led to a crisis within the criminal network surrounding the neighborhood. Many gangs acknowledged the presented possibilities for revenue in the drug market, especially heroin. This unleashed an eventful chain of upheavals, whereby many received a one way ticket to the afterworld.

The Vukovic Massacre
That was the name given for the events in 2003, following a complete destruction of a Serbian-American gang operating from West Kensington and Harrowgate; Radojko “Radko” Vukovic was presumed as the head of the organization. Feud over control of the drug market in East Kensington was allegedly the reasoning behind the massacre. Patrick Maguire, an infamous criminal figure from Irish descent, was the one who ordered the hit on Vukovic through the Pagans Motorcycle Club. A total amount of $150,000 was delivered to the local chapter to perform the murder for hire.

The following night Vukovic went missing. Later that night CCTV footage was released of four masked individuals piling a male body matching Radojko Vukovic’s parameters into the trunk of a Ford pick-up truck. As a subsequent factor to Vukovic’s disappearance, four bodies were found in the Delaware River and six more on a landfill site, riddled with numerous bullets in the torsos and the heads. PPD failed to file in any arrests due to the lack of evidence.

The Legend of the Leprechauns
The Maguire Mob was quite proficient at murdering their competitors in order to overtake rackets or protect rackets, thus multiplying their revenues enormously. Succeeding on the wipe of the Balkan opposition, the organization secured the neighborhood’s drug market and later even monopolized it.

The organization slowly pushed away the heroin from the Kensington’s streets by paying off the local street gangs and inducting the independent dealers under their protection racket to be able to introduce the methamphetamine to the street. Purportedly the product was cooked in the outskirts of Philadelphia in a high-end for the time laboratory run by the Maguire and his men.

The Philadelphia Police Department managed to seize approximately 75 liters of Phenylacetone, commonly abbreviated as P2P, from a truck during a traffic stop in 2009 once but failed to trace the source and issue indictments.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!Patrick Maguire’s incarceration
Patrick Maguire, the brain behind the operations and one of Philadelphia’s most feared, received 25 years to life sentence in December 2012.

The indictment was part of a two year investigation by the FBI into corruption schemes with high ranked individuals within the port union and bribery of government officials. Maguire was widely seen as one of the talismans behind the import-export rackets of the Irish-American Mob in Philadelphia. He pleaded guilty of all charges after the trail was tarnished with wiretaps and reports of corrupted jury members, as well the presence of two key witnesses for the prosecution – Andrew Graham, a high ranked member within the union, and Holy George, an official representative for the Philadelphia Jury Selection Commission. Their respective identities were kept secret prior the official trial as both of them were introduced to the federal witness protection program. Graham and George took the offer from the federal officials after both were found guilty of aiding and abetting Maguire on numerous occasions.

The incarceration caused a huge discomfort within the criminal organization and eventually led to a shakeout.

Doherty’s reign
Following Maguire’s imprisonment, a gangland figure and his most trusted lieutenant was inauguration as the head of operations – Stanley Doherty. He became intimate with the Mob around 2007 as he practically led the distribution rackets through a wide network of independent dealers under the protection of the Mob and the connections he had with various street gangs across the city.

Doherty however struggled to protect the territories and the rackets Patrick Maguire managed to monopolize throughout the years. The Camoranesi Crime Family, a longtime partnering organization of Italian-American descent to Maguire’s Mob, took the possibility to multiply their revenue by taking over various rackets following the transition in leadership within the Mob. This was not done without blood spilling however.

January, 2013, Stanley Doherty and his wife were found dead outside of their home in Downtown Philadelphia. The woman was decapitated and Doherty’s body was riddled with numerous bullets which later by the autopsy were recognized as 39mm munition fired by an AK-47.

The Byrne-Nolan conflict
The murder of Doherty and the consequential appraisal of the Camoranesi Crime Family sprayed chaos within the Mob. The business became slow; the loss of revenue was enormous. The upheaval was tenured by Jonathan Keane.

Stephen Byrne and Aiden Nolan were appointed as captains of the respective crews within the organization by Keane himself. In the ambition to put his crew above and impress the new head of the Mob, associates of Byrne murdered three business owners which had due payments to Nolan’s crew as part of a loanshark operation.

Nolan went directly to Keane to express his dissent. Allegedly the two were very close, it was rumored that Aiden Nolan received the captain position simply because of his personal friendship with Jonathan Keane. The outcome was Byrne being summoned by Keane the next day for a sit-down between him and Nolan. The second demanded reimburse of the potential income that was lost but a consensus was not found.

Stephen Byrne and two of his enforcers were found dead in an alley, all housing a single 9mm bullet in their heads. Nolan ordered a hit on his colleague, enraged by the situation. Normally this would have been the last actions of Nolan’s but Keane let Nolan walk away, supposedly because of their strong friendship. However one crucial condition had to be met. It was retirement. Aiden Nolan could not work more for the Mob after the betrayal.