Nate Boone Craft, the former Detroit hitman known on the street as the Grim Reaper, has died, according to a Facebook post from his family. Craft, who was reportedly in his late 60s according to relatives, spent decades as an enforcer for the notorious Best Friends drug gang before flipping on his own crew and admitting to at least 30 murders.
Craft's death was first reported by Deadline Detroit, whose article by Allan Lengel noted that Craft himself posted about his father's death on Facebook a day earlier, yesterday. Journalist Scott Burnstein, who lived in metro Detroit and communicated with Craft over the years, described him as a menace to society when he was an active gangster and said Craft killed without hesitation. Burnstein also recalled Craft as a gigantic physical presence, a detail that matched the outsized reputation he built as one of the city's most feared contract killers.
From Bodyguard to the Gang's Most Feared Enforcer
The Best Friends gang formed in 1985 under Terrance Brown, initially running as an independent murder-for-hire outfit before becoming the enforcement arm for Detroit drug kingpin Richard “Maserati Rick” Carter, according to a history published by The Ran Report. Craft was initially hired as Carter's bodyguard before rising into the gang's hitman ranks. Carter himself was later assassinated in a hospital bed in 1988, per that same account.
The gang was run by four of the Brown brothers, and violence within the organization ran so deep it eventually consumed its own leadership: three of the four brothers were murdered, per Deadline Detroit's report, with only one brother alive and on parole today. Two of the founding leaders, Ezra “Wizard” Brown and Gregory “Ghost” Brown, were shot to death just seven days apart in December 1986, an internal bloodletting detailed by EverybodyWiki that unleashed a wave of retaliation killings across the city. Gregory Brown, according to that account, was murdered while still wearing the tuxedo from his brother's funeral. Federal investigators estimated the Best Friends gang was responsible for upwards of 80 homicides across Detroit in the late 1980s and early 1990s before agents indicted its leadership in 1993, per a history published on Medium.
Business, Not Personal
Craft was blunt about his role in that carnage. Speaking to WDIV reporter Kevin Dietz in 2018, Craft said he would kill someone if paid to do so, insisting that those he targeted were involved in illegal activities. “It was business,” Craft said, according to Deadline Detroit's report on an interview conducted at his Detroit home that year. During the peak of the city's crack cocaine epidemic, Craft reportedly commanded up to $50,000 per contract killing for the Best Friends gang and other drug kingpins, according to UNILAD.
His volatility reportedly extended even to his own family. UNILAD's report states Craft once pointed a shotgun at his brother Willie over $6,000 in missing drug money that had allegedly been hidden inside a television set, and refrained from pulling the trigger only because their mother stepped in to stop him. Craft survived his own share of violence too, having been shot and stabbed multiple times over the course of his criminal career, per Deadline Detroit.
The Betrayal That Turned Him Informant
Craft's break from the Best Friends gang came after co-founder Terrance Brown killed Craft's younger brother, according to the Medium account of the gang's history. That killing prompted Craft to confess to his 30 homicides in exchange for federal immunity and a reduced sentence, testimony that helped dismantle the organization in federal court. He was ultimately released from prison after cooperating with federal law enforcement, having served about 18 years behind bars, per Deadline Detroit.
The Wershe Connection
Among the most explosive claims tied to Craft's career was his admission that he attempted to kill drug dealer and informant Richard “White Boy Rick” Wershe Jr. In a 2016 broadcast interview, Craft alleged that former Detroit Homicide Inspector and City Council President Gil Hill offered him $125,000 to murder Wershe to keep him from exposing police corruption, according to ClickOnDetroit. Hill, who died earlier in 2016, always denied any wrongdoing.
Craft described a botched ambush of Wershe at a Detroit traffic light, saying his firearm jammed as bullets struck the car; Wershe escaped when his driver accelerated through a red light, per the same ClickOnDetroit report. Craft said he subsequently planned to snipe Wershe from a rooftop outside a Detroit courthouse. By 2018, Craft had reversed course entirely, publicly advocating for Wershe's release from prison. Wershe was ultimately freed from prison in 2020 after more than three decades behind bars.
Craft's statements about being contracted to kill Wershe bolstered long-standing claims from Wershe's supporters that his decades-long sentence was prolonged because he possessed damaging information on Detroit officials, according to The Mob Museum. Craft's claims about figures like Hill continue to intersect with the broader narrative around Wershe, illustrating how street violence, federal informants and municipal corruption allegations were tightly intertwined in Detroit's recent history.
A Syndicate's Last Echoes
Craft's death arrives months after federal prosecutors in Detroit charged another former Best Friends enforcer, Stacey “The Machine” Culbert, in a new federal cocaine trafficking conspiracy. Culbert had cooperated alongside Craft in the 1990s and had previously avoided capital prosecution through that cooperation, as Hoodline reported. With Craft's passing, one of the last living links to Detroit's crack-era murder syndicate is gone, closing out a chapter defined by a body count that federal investigators once numbered in the dozens and a city still grappling with the fallout.
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