Old Doggz, old tricks
Gunna Walker was always a slow learner.
Three years ago, then-19-year-old James “Gunna’’ Walker and his fellow Lucerne Street Doggz pimp-rolled into Dorchester District Court for a sitdown with a bunch of cops, probation officers, and preachers.
The Lucerne Street Doggz were shooting anything and everything up around Blue Hill Avenue and Morton Street, where Dorchester and Mattapan kiss. Nearly every one of them was on probation, so it wasn’t as if they could say no to the sitdown.
The message from the cops and the preachers was simple: We know who you are, we know what you do, and you can still keep your dumb rear ends out of jail if you stop what you’re doing. But if you don’t, you’re going down. Gunna and the rest of the Doggz smirked and shook their heads. And then they pimp-rolled back to their patch around Lucerne Street, which became Dodge City in the summer of 2006.
Sure enough, Gunna was under arrest a year later, pinched as he sold crack outside a homeless shelter. In all, the cops lugged 25 Doggz into court, charging them with selling drugs and holding guns.
If Gunna Walker wasn’t very good at taking advice, he wasn’t big on technology, either. Apparently, it was news to him that when you’re in the can and you make a phone call, somebody other than your criminal associates is listening in.
During a conversation recorded at Norfolk County Jail in 2007, Gunna could be heard describing how he planned to kill a hoodlum who was dating his former girlfriend. He expressed relief that a rival had been acquitted of a murder charge, because that would make it easier to kill him.
Gunna got out last year, but not for long, because besides being not good at taking advice or understanding technology, Gunna Walker is just plain lousy at geography. He was standing in his old Doggz stomping grounds, in violation of his probation. So they locked him up again, and while he was locked up, people came forward and told a grand jury that Gunna Walker killed a man.
And so it came to pass that Gunna Walker was back yesterday in the same courthouse where he and the rest of the Doggz blew a chance at redemption.
When he walked into the plexiglass holding area that looks like the penalty box at a Bruins game, Gunna looked around. If he was looking for the TV cameras, they weren’t there. Maybe if Gunna wore a single white glove to his murder arraignment, or voiced an opinion on whether “Thriller’’ or “Off The Wall’’ was the better album, he could have gotten on TV.
If Gunna Walker styles himself an OG, an original gangsta, with GUNNA tattooed on his right hand, the case against him is not the stuff of Hollywood films. According to Suffolk Assistant District Attorney Cory Flashner, Gunna Walker robbed some marijuana dealers in a transaction set up by a kid named Antoine Perkins. The dealers didn’t take kindly to being ripped off, so Perkins faced a Hobson’s choice: Give up Gunna’s identity to the dealers or face their wrath.
He chose the former, which was no choice at all, and soon the dealers were shooting up Gunna’s house. He responded by visiting the cemetery where a dead associate was buried, drinking some courage over the grave, then driving to Perkins’s house in Mattapan, where he shot the 20-year-old quite dead on the front steps.
It’s a lot quieter up around Lucerne Street these days. The Doggz aren’t barking.
Paul Fitzgerald, the police commander, remembers that meeting with the Doggz. The cops and the preachers still meet with gangs. “We give them a chance,’’ he said. “Some of them listen. Some of them don’t.’’
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. 
