The Devil Wears Dashikis (Pt. 3): Gussy Unmasked

[Content Warning: this article, the last part of a three-part exposé on the destructive cult known as Black Hammer Organization, describes alleged cases of kidnapping, domestic violence, extreme labor exploitation, sexual manipulation and harassment, verbal and physical abuse, and a number of other disturbing anecdotes about life in the Atlanta Hammer House. Please include this warning when re-sharing the link or any parts of this article. Pts. 1 and 2 are available here and here]

Pictured: Orisha Oya, deity of the thunder and lightning, that are now crashing down on all Black Hammer's attempts to get back right, after scarring too many African lives

"You Don't Play With Revolution" (CLR James)

Comrades Pat and Jack were basically the last straw for BHO's integrity, for its spirit of internal criticism and respect for African people. Once Pat was being pushed out of Gazi's office, Comrade Savvy tells us, it became obvious to her (and everyone else we talked to) that something was seriously wrong with Black Hammer. When the couple went to YouTube and denounced BHO as a cult, that's when Gussy's mask started slipping for real.

Pat is a vivacious school teacher and graphic designer from Brooklyn, with an infectious laugh and easygoing manner. Jack is a professionally trained music teacher from Harlem, and a Lukumi initiate, under the Orisha Oya--deity of the wind and storms, of birth and death, all of which carry together in their voice.

The relationship is strong, indomitable really. It was their love for each other, and their reverence for the egungun (ancestors), that finally pulled them away from the Black Hammer Organization, which wanted to trample on both sacred bonds.

Pat joined first; then Jack joined the movement, once their year-long rites of religious initiation were complete. "I was in [Gazi's] office for a long time," Pat explains. "Then [Gazi] wanted me to be their social media director, which I did for three months."

In that position, Pat would quickly learn that Gazi's lauded YouTube career was based almost entirely on white supremacist subscribers, who checked in from time to time to see if there was anything as cringeworthy as Gazi's "Reparations" video--still their biggest hit, dating from 2016. After reviewing months of receipts, Pat was forced to conclude that Gazi's lifestyle was mainly supported by the organization's treasury, since their YouTube ad revenue never rose above $15 a month.

That treasury was fed by round-the-clock free labor by Pat and Jack, and dozens more serious militants like them, in a cultic pattern known as the spiral of escalating commitment.

Comrade Jack describes the couple's increasing investment in an unrealistic, mind-numbing workload, one that's designed to break Black militants down to work mules.

"The workload was crazy. We were working twenty-hour days, even checking in to BHO at our colonial jobs."

Pat describes having to change their lens prescription, because of the damage done to their eyes from staring so long at computer screens during online cadre meetings, which could last from six to eight hours on a weekly basis.

"The reason it was easy for people who are smart to get involved [to this degree] is because we think about the revolution, and how much it requires of your time and energy, and how much [of that] will have to be directed against your [colonial] enemy," Jack clarifies. "Some uncomfortable and heavy work might be necessary to take on the enemy."

Though they worked harder than many to make BHO run, their real dedication was to national liberation, to the African Nation that they held sacred--not to a personality, not to an organization.

"We are dedicated to the revolution. We weren't "Gazi-ites." We are children of the revolution and understand the need for it. We work colonial jobs [as educators] and understand how that [work] affects the future, so we do what we can to implant the message into the children."

The couple explains that the impossible workload took a toll on their relationship, that it affected Jack's artistic endeavors, and how they struggled through all that to realize the organization's potential for building "dual contending power" to the colonial system. But it was an uphill battle, strategized by a petty-bou "Commander" with no realistic sense of the labor process for working-class Africans.

"A lot of the workload came from incompetence, and leadership not giving the rank- and- file the ability to learn and grow about the things they were actually [supposed to be] doing," Pat tells us, with a note of sadness for what could have been.

"A lot of this [also] came from Gazi's sporadic nature. All of a sudden everybody has to [drop what they're doing and] beef with Conscious Lee [the TikTok star]. It got to the point where I was in cadre circles saying that this has to stop, you're stretching people too far. [The office of] social media was doing literally ten posts a day, and people were on the verge of trying to commit suicide."

As social media director, Pat was responsible for producing every single live show for Black Hammer Organization, which broadcasts on nearly a daily basis.

But Gazi wasn't driving people to these lengths from pure malice or greed. "Gazi was doing that so people wouldn't have time to ask questions about other things [in the organization]," Pat explains.

This is another well-known pattern of destructive cults: plunging people into so much work that they don't have time to question the breakneck pace and abusive conduct of their leadership. Dr. Janja Lalich, renowned sociologist and survivor of the Democratic Workers Party (a US-based Maoist cult from the 70's), lists overwork of membership as a "mind-altering practice," one among fifteen of the prime characteristics of a cult.

Another key cult characteristic is that "[q]uestioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged or even punished," and according to Pat and Jack, this feature was fully on display in BHO.

"It was considered 'gossip' if you complained [about workload or leadership], and you would be held to criticism; you would be treated as though you were trying to start a coup if you raised concerns."

Pictured: Esu, Yoruba deity of the crossroads, gatekeeper of the spiritual realm and messenger to the Orishas. According to West African tradition, they can open the gate for any force, good or bad, and are revered for tricks they play on the dishonest. In other words, Esu is not to be messed with by non-initiates, not at all.

Disturbing as those details may be, there is another, more ominous side to Black Hammer, as Pat and Jack describe it. Not content with a dictatorship over the material lives and labor of their membership, "CIC" Gazi now has spiritual pretensions, and wants to own the literal souls of BHO members.

The couple describe accounts of a special room in the Atlanta "Hammer House," confirmed by several of their contacts, where members are forced to sign over their literal souls at gunpoint. According to one visitor, "entering that room was like entering another realm, another source."

This claim seems shocking at first. Most people think of Black Hammer as strictly a political cult; and communists are used to militant atheism in our abusive microsects, not to dark magic.

Yet as we explained in Pt. 1 of our expose, Black Hammer truly aims to be a one-stop fraud shop. Augustus--Gussy for short--is nothing else if not a performer; so they have recently decided to play spiritual guru, too. In that role they stomp on Africa's religious traditions as foolishly and disdainfully as on its history and politics.

That is the real meaning behind this unsettling cult video by Black Hammer, released in 2020. In the video, Gazi bounces around the stage like a whole theater kid on Tina, wearing full Joker makeup, taunting white anarchists, and laughing over the death of Anne Frank; while silent, anonymous goons stand guard in the back, like shock troops in a DC cartoon.

When viewers mocked Gussy's reveal as Earth's lamest super-villain, members of Black Hammer shot back angrily that this was, in fact, an "Esu invocation," that Gazi was really channeling the Yoruba trickster-deity. By a stroke of gaslight magic, Gazi's critics were now failing to show adequate respect to African traditions.

Only, less naive viewers had noticed that there were none of the traditional effects of an Ifa ceremony on that stage--no ritual garments, no drum, no altar or offerings, no officiating Babalawo.

As it turns out, Gazi had consulted with Pat and Jack prior to doing the video, and then directly ignored their instructions for doing the event as an authentic Ifa ritual.

"Gazi did that invocation against literally every recommendation from the Babalawo [we had consulted]," Jack explains. "We were on the phone with Gazi for two hours, and then the next day they did this live, four days ahead of schedule."

This cavalier approach to Ifa practices was deeply concerning to the couple, who take their ancestral faith very seriously, and had hoped to bring what they called a spiritual quadrant (or Squad) into Black Hammer Organization. Seeing the power in the idea, and probably sensing the threat in Jack's spiritual leadership, Gazi began incorporating more religious themes into their revolutionary role-playing, but in a way that trivialized and cut corners with African traditional cosmology.

"You can't use a deity that people actually worship as a caricature," Jack insists. "Esu is the elemental force of the universe." Here was Gazi the consummate fool, playing games with the OG trickster; not knowing they might get played right back, in ways they can't recover from.

Still, candlelight vigils divorced from any ritual, pseudo-"traditional" name changes based on Google searches, and other forms of ersatz African religion started creeping into the org's practices.

It's probably not a coincidence that, as Gazi began stealing and diluting spiritual practices from Jack, and as Pat was transitioned to a role in the Political Education and Command Committee (PECC), key org leadership began actively trying to drive a wedge between the couple, and that these actions took a specifically antiblack form.

The contradiction reached a head when two key non-Black chiefs in the Secretary General's office grew nervous at Pat and Jack's influence, since they saw the couple as a threat to their positions, and therefore to their income. Select leadership of BHO, including Secretary General Anco and his partner, were receiving a discreet monthly allowance from the Treasury, that the rest of the org did not know about. They were also singularly bad at their jobs, and highly abusive to comrades. They owed their positions mainly to their sycophantic relationship to Gazi.

"We were effective in the org and that's why we were a problem," Jack explains. Pat claims that they were a voice of reason in the org, always trying to ensure that too-ambitious plans of action were checked by a realistic sense of what could be done with the org's time and resources. The couple felt that non-Black "Gazi-ites" resented their influence, and also resented their lane-guarding for Black people.

"We were constantly having to tell [non-black leadership] to stay out of Black folk's business. At the point I had joined, all the founding members [who were Black] had left. The org had transitioned into a policy of "colonized unity," which is fine, but at the same time antiblackness is at the core of the colonial struggle. Then eventually [antiblackness] started disappearing from the conversation."

During one especially tense meeting, which had carried on until 2 AM, Pat was being harshly criticized by Anco and Sante, neither of whom are Black, for assigning the "wrong" Political Education (PE) material for the org, Harriet Washington's Medical Apartheid. At that point, Jack could see that Pat was being railroaded by jealous leadership, and loudly intervened to defend their partner.

"If I gotta cuss you out it's not for no reason. You are coming for mine in a way that is violent. Out of respect for you imma tell you the truth, instead of doing what I would with enemies."

Symbolically, SG Anco tried to force a Black woman comrade who was transcribing the meeting to stop reacting to Pat and Jack's unjust treatment, to stay quiet about the entire exchange and not to say "anything to anybody" about what happened there. After that night, Black Hammer officially stopped keeping minutes at its meetings.

This conflict was the breaking point. "Black" Hammer was now giving more Beige than Black. Soon after, they left the org they had done so much to bring others into. Jack had created the signature, gospel-inspired jingle that started each Black Hammer broadcast; had introduced much-needed African spirituality and ethics to the org. Pat had brought a high level of political education to the Hammers, and cutting-edge graphic design to their social media content.

Then Pat and Jack released a widely-shared video explaining the many reasons they felt that Black Hammer is a cult. To some comrades, it was the death-knell of the organization. All the problems that Pat and Jack had identified--financial mismanagement and lack of transparency; a burgeoning personality cult propped up by abusive bureaucrats; a highly exploitative and unrealistic workload; a vacuum of any kind of ethical or spiritual principles in Gazi's inner circle, and also their unabashed antiblackness--all that would only get worse once these comrades left.

In our final and most harrowing testimony, from Comrade Savvy, we will see how these deformed traits of a revolutionary org all converged in a special way, to make the life of a young, working-class Black woman into a perfect hell.

Gussy Unmasked: Savvy's Testimony

Pictured: the members of Augustus Romain, Jr.'s bougie social class, trying out a different costumed hustle on the Continent, with the same result for the Black masses--but a bigger payday for them, at least, than for backward hustlin ass Augustus

Savvy was 23 when she first discovered Black Hammer. She was newly unemployed, fired up, and looking to get involved in the Black freedom struggle in a more serious way. Throwing herself into the George Floyd protests in her city, she soon began to feel that her understanding of politics was inadequate. Like young Black militants in each generation, she was looking for answers, and not finding them in the power structure.

Then she discovered Black Hammer through their social media content.

“I saw the way they politicized the paparazzi-style stuff that our people are drawn to. They were making politics digestible [for everyday people].”

She attended an org meeting, where she met powerful comrades with inviting personalities and sharp political analyses. She saw the excellent outreach work that was being done by local chapters, like handing out protective personal equipment (PPE), and assembling water filtration devices to fight the contaminated water crisis in majority-Black cities. Savvy had found her political home, a base from which to build “dual contending power” against the colonial system.

She did not know who Gazi was when she first joined. She was a Hammer because she wanted to liberate her people, not because of her love of celebrity or desire for clout. But through hard work and personal sacrifice, she would very quickly rise through the ranks of Black Hammer, eventually becoming Gazi’s social media coordinator. It was during her transition into that office that Savvy’s opinion of Gazi started to take definite shape.

“All of [my experience with BHO] was good except for Gazi. We were doing legitimate work across the world. Gazi used that [collective] power to flex on others, basically to say “I can do whatever the fuck I want to do.””

Savvy began to notice that Gazi would pull comrades away from important work, just so that they could swarm Gazi’s enemies in various Twitter and Facebook beefs.

“Gazi was always good at trying to drag somebody. In the organization [they] had [their] own Twitter squad. “Urgent message” would pop up in the chat, and everybody had to go like and boost Gazi’s stuff.”

She also saw that Gazi was an expert manipulator, who would coach subordinates in what to do and say in advance, then pretend that the results of meetings were unrehearsed; that comrades were in spontaneous unity with the Commander.

These manipulations affected Black Hammer’s entire structure, even at the highest level. Although Black Hammer claimed to be a democratic centralist organization, whose leading body was the International Central Committee (ICC), Savvy claims that “the key people that they had in Colorado were like the biggest wigs, the real ICC of the organization.”

The first time that Savvy was “trapped” by Gazi, in fact, was when she arrived in Colorado to help build Hammer City. “Once I got there,” she says, “they said I’m not leaving.”

This would become a pattern for her, for other comrades, too. Gazi wanted the power to relocate cadres as the organization (i.e., Gazi) saw fit, sometimes not even alerting them of the decision until they arrived at their new home for what was only supposed to be a visit.

Savvy would move a total of four times during her year-plus involvement with Black Hammer. In all but one case, she was expected to cover the travel expenses herself. (The one exception was the 26-hour drive from Colorado to Atlanta, following the failure of Hammer City. Though she suggests that being stuck in a car with Gazi on a cross-country trip has its own high costs.)

In his well-known paper "Cult Formation" (1991), psychiatrist and cult expert Robert Jay Lifton defines milieu control as the concerted effort by a high-control organization to reduce the individual autonomy of its members, to isolate them from outside sources of information and dissenting opinions from the organization's leadership--basically to make the cult member fully dependent on the cult, for their maximum financial, sexual, and other forms of exploitation.

This was exactly what Savvy was witnessing take place in Black Hammer at this point in its development. In Colorado, Savvy did not yet have to live in the run-down “Hammer House,” a basement apartment and makeshift headquarters that Gazi then shared with three other cadre, though she was expected to report there daily for work, at 8 AM sharp.

Already, she was being exposed to the high-control atmosphere that would later swallow the whole organization. Already, Gazi had come up with a shrewd explanation for why people should give up their independence, and fall under their "command."

"We were told to abandon the Colony [which could mean your job, your school, your apartment, your family, your mate], because the Colony was dying anyway, and Black Hammer was building the new world after that," she explains. "But it's really Gazi just making you dependent on Gazi."

The Hammer Houses, as they were growing throughout the country, were not being funded by Black Hammer's national organization, but directly by local org membership. And so were all of the local outreach efforts, even though these efforts were then used in propaganda, to plug Black Hammer Org's CashApp and Venmo accounts.

"So we had to fundraise [for everything we did], sometimes we had to use our own food stamps to buy outreach supplies. You did it because you felt like you were doing it for the masses. At the end of the day you just lining Gazi's pockets."

Initially, Gazi did not have access to Black Hammer's accounts, which were held in trust by the Office of Economic Development. However, as the org grew and Gazi's power expanded within it, they would use their stooges in the Ministry of Defense to change all that, forcing the ICC to hand over the accounts at gunpoint.

The picture that Savvy paints here is of a fairly sophisticated racketeering operation, held up by a highly authoritarian cult structure, whose supreme leader identified their own interests with those of the organization. Black Hammer took extraordinary measures to make young people fully dependent on the org. Ostensibly to achieve a post-colonial utopia, but really to draw in more dollars for the avaricious leader.

And the biggest financial draw--the one that energized the most membership, and unaffiliated Black and Third World people fed up with Corona, and cops, and landlords--was Hammer City, the land for which was (falsely advertised as being) purchased in Colorado, in early May, 2021.

So to raise even more money before the land purchase was finalized, Black Hammer began posting videos and uploading photos of camping expeditions on the "rich soil" of their patch of land in the Colorado Rockies.

Wild, Wild Campsite

Pictured: Ma Anand Sheela--murderous and morally bankrupt second-in-command of the hyper-capitalist Rajneesh cult, and Gazi's weird muse for Hammer City

According to Savvy, the reality of Hammer City Colorado was less like Black utopia than an episode of Black Survivor.

“I went to the last trip to the land, before we lost the land. I was staying with the North Carolina chapter at that time. I got off the plane at 11 PM; by 3 AM I had to be back up, so that we could make the six-hour drive up the mountain.”

As they got closer to the site, the riders were blindfolded, purportedly for security reasons, but more probably so the surrounding area could not be memorized, in case an escape was made by foot.

Once they arrived, Savvy discovered that Gazi's “dictatorship over the colonized” was only a poison-induced fever dream.

“We almost died on the land!,” Savvy claims, without a hint of exaggeration.

“I thought they packed up everything. We were supposed to have all kinds of supplies for living out there. We got out there, we didn’t have enough firewood, we didn’t have water; we had to go to a hotel room to get some water. We didn’t have enough food, so we had to go down to the bottom of the mountain to get food on the third day. We didn't shower for five days.”

Savvy had regretted that the Hammer City land purchase was for territory in the Rockies, because the original plan had been for a plot of fertile land in the more inviting climate of Florida or in Georgia. Instead she found herself ten thousand feet in the air, "in the most extreme climate I’ve ever been in in my life. It was scorching hot in the day and deathly cold at night.”

According to Savvy, she suffered frostbite from exposure to the night air, due to lack of firewood and adequate camping equipment. But her worst affliction was due to the unresearched suggestion, approved by Gazi, that the Hammers substitute mugwort for firewood.

Savvy was told that mugwort had spiritual properties, that burning it would induce powerful dreams, according to unspecified Indigenous medical knowledge. Instead, the Hammers became frighteningly sick from handling and inhaling fumes from the poisonous plant, which contains thujone, a chemical compound that is toxic in high doses.

Several comrades passed out from the mugwort smoke, including Savvy. One of her hands also developed an allergic reaction, swelling up to four times its size. The whole ordeal left her hand with a bleeding, oozing rash for weeks after the trip's end. Even after their return, though, Gazi still expected Savvy to perform routine manual labor for the org, her hands still in that condition.

(Since Gazi's sadism knows no bounds, once she left the organization, they would post a picture of Savvy's swollen and bleeding hand on Twitter--with none of the above context--in order to make fun of her looks.)

But the most symbolic moment of Hammer City's failure was its inability to defend its people from the threat of armed whites.

One day, while they were cooking a meager breakfast and discussing Mao, an older white man with a sawed-off rifle pulled up on the armed encampment.

"The white dude starts yelling about [our] cars being in the middle of the road. Then he pulls out a gun. Our defense [team] was soft as cotton, they let him pull out a gun and tell them to put theirs down, and they did. We had to have a huge self-crit after that situation."

The security of the entire Hammer City project, in fact, had been compromised by Gazi themselves, who insisted on letting the whole world know through internet flexing that Black Hammer was in San Miguel County--including white supremacists in the nearby town.

In one of their patented strokes of unreality, Gazi decided that the best solution to this problem would be to bring in white members of the Black Hammer Reparations Corps, to infiltrate the nearby town, and politically neutralize them as a threat to Hammer City.

That strategy, of course, is familiar from the "neo-sannyasin" cult's infiltration of the town of Antelope, Oregon in 1982, in order to overwhelm the votes of its small local population and expand the power of neighboring Rajneeshpuram.

This plan was detailed at length in the celebrated "Wild, Wild Country" docuseries on Netflix, which Black Hammer members were bizarrely instructed to watch as political education for the Hammer City project. Gazi had obviously intended to stay in San Miguel County, to wage their own Sheela-style campaign of defiance against county residents.

But unlike Black Hammer, the Rajneeshees had millions of dollars, several thousand followers worldwide, and years of experience running an "intentional community" overseas in Pune, India, going into the Rajneeshpuram experiment. Importantly, too, they had a keen grasp on the niceties of the law.

Though Savvy confirms that the down-payment on the "Hammer City" land was made, it was not secured, and the owners decided to pull out at the last minute. At that point, "Hammer City" had become a highly publicized and illegal squat. This is when the cops got involved, and were supposed to be coming to the camp site to remove the Hammers by force.

But in a last display of eccentricity or cowardice, Gazi decided to retreat into the woods, where a makeshift shelter was constructed for them and a few close companions to hide out, while Savvy and the rest of the Hammers stood by in the sleeting rain, waiting for well-armed sheriff's deputies to arrive.

(Ultimately, the San Miguel County Sheriff's Department chose to expel the Hammers less dramatically, with a polite yet firm phone call, recorded by an officer and shared to social media.)

This episode gives two compelling reasons why it's good that Hammer City never materialized. It shows, first of all, that Gazi has no grasp of the concept of reckless endangerment. At any point in this story, one of the Hammers under their supervision could have died from mugwort poisoning, from hypothermia, from starvation, or from police or vigilante gun violence. We can only guess how many brushes with death, or actual deaths, might have taken place, had the land purchase gone through.

It also shows that Gazi's long-term plans as a leader are based on totally unachievable power fantasies, gleaned from TV shows and movies, and the examples of infamous dictators and cult leaders; fantasies that Gazi tries to realize at their followers' expense. If they were at all capable of pulling off their schemes, it would only embolden them to hatch even more grandiose plans, meaning more sorrow for their exploited and harassed membership.

To be clear, a tendency to confuse fantasy with reality is not a bad or dangerous thing, in itself: our purpose is not to stigmatize mental health challenges. But when that is joined to self-conscious and cynical tactics of social manipulation, and a profound lack of empathy for the suffering caused to others in pursuing these fantasies, we have a formula for disaster on a grand scale.

As Savvy's nightmare experience living in the Atlanta Hammer House would soon reveal.

Gussy Romaine: "Stunt Queen" of the Flies

Once Hammer City collapsed, Gazi decided to relocate the Colorado Hammers to Atlanta. There was vague talk of re-distributing the Hammer City funds to each of the local chapters, but nothing was concretely done to make that happen.

Instead, Gazi and select leadership became more and more lavish in their private spending with the people's donations; and life in the rebranded Atlanta chapter grew darker, more crushingly abusive, and less connected from any political objective or sense of outside reality.

As Gazi's Chief of Staff during the Atlanta period, being responsible for laying out most the details of their daily life, and keeping many of their closest secrets, Savvy's face was pressed right against it all, the evil truth of Gussy unmasked--which made her too valuable an asset for Gazi to ever let go, at any cost.

In Atlanta, the strict household regime that was already evident in Colorado intensified, and Gazi began using techniques of thought reform that can only be described as hostage-holding and physical torture.

"If you wasn't up at 8 AM somebody from Defense was there to get you up [by force]. We had to be in bed, with the doors locked, by 11 PM."

Atlanta Hammers were not allowed any privacy or time away from their daily responsibilities, which ranged from monotonous and unpaid, paper-pushing work for Black Hammer, to building Gazi's social media brand, to rigorous domestic labor, which was also applied as a punishment. They lived on a starvation diet, that at one point included a weekly meat ration. They stayed several members to a room--all except for Gazi, who had a queen-sized room entirely to themselves. Armed members of Defense stood guard to ensure that nobody left the house. If people fell short of Gazi's exacting and ever-shifting demands, they met with humiliating and physically exhausting forms of punishment.

"Once I made the mistake of going to the grocery store without telling Gazi. Gazi flipped out and made me run ten laps around the house and do fifty push-ups, and stand outside for hours. When [Defense member, name redacted] fucks up, Gazi makes them sleep outside."

During "breaks" from this endless work, supported on a starvation diet, the Hammer House residents were subjected to regular, Manson-esque trips in the "space ship," a room where Gazi would loudly berate, love-bomb, and trauma-bond with them for hours, sometimes after group consumption of psychedelic mushrooms.

During a rare recording of one of these sessions, Gazi can be seen manically bouncing through the room, with hands outstretched like a cross; while they rave, with tears streaming down their face, about their messianic status as the "gravedigger of colonialism"; and then pressuring the bewildered Hammers, all seated on the ground, to profess their collective love for Gazi in the form of a cheer.

"We couldn't move out of our spot without asking for permission. If we tried to leave, a Defense member would put their hand at the door, and wait for Gazi to say it's okay to let us through."

Perhaps the only time Hammers were allowed to leave this den of horrors was when they went on "outreach" in the metro Atlanta community, which was hardly a break for the membership.

"Outreach is miserable as fuck. When we first got to Atlanta we had to go out seven days straight, every morning at 7 AM. We had to be up at the club until 2-3 AM too. Gazi was forcing us to drink out there. Forcing us to get drugs from people out there. DURING COVID."

Gazi claimed that this was the organization going directly to the masses, that Black Hammer was meeting the people where they were at. But Savvy thinks that was just a cover for Gazi's real intention.

"They just wanted to go to the club scene to stunt on their old friends," she says, implying that Gazi's team of young, carefully trained servants would prove that little Gussy had really become the "Atlanta stunt queen" they always pretended to be.

And in fact, despite all their talk of the "colonized proletariat" and committing "class suicide," Gazi had all the airs of a Hollywood big-shot, treating their staff like the worst finger-snapping celebrity boss.

As Chief of Staff, Savvy had to serve as Gazi's personal assistant, drug mule, domestic servant, unpaid therapist, and emotional punching bag. In the morning she was expected to lay out their unlabeled drug pills, bring them water, prepare their coffee and breakfast, create agendas for them, and reach out to comrades they wanted to meet with for that day.

"I had to carry around their "caffeine" and shroom pills [for regular dosing] on my person at all times," Savvy explains.

When asked why she often uses scare quotes to describe the caffeine pills, Savvy clarifies that these pills came from an unlabeled container, so that she doesn't know what they really are. She also explains that Defense is fed a regular diet of these pills, that keep them in a constant state of sleep-deprived, excitable activity.

(At the risk of being overly speculative, it sounds to this writer like these "caffeine" pills might actually be unprescribed stimulants, maybe amphetamines, which can lead to enhanced aggressiveness, mania, and dangerous risk-taking when used off label. These are especially dangerous in combination with psychedelic drugs, like psilocybin (shrooms), which Gazi apparently consumes in risky quantities, per Savvy's account.)

Gazi was not only decadent in their drug abuse. In fact, they lived entirely off the Black Hammer Treasury, and spent freely and lavishly from the Hammer City fund, along with the Secretary General (SG).

"Gazi had a red debit card with all the money on it, and so did SG, and the money was all funneled up to them. Gazi used the money for whatever they wanted, like going to the thrift store, or buying stuff on the internet."

As a gift to themselves for their "service to the people," Savvy says, Gazi purchased a $2,000 puppy, named Gugu, that they never showed to the general Hammer membership--who would naturally have questions about how Gazi could afford such a thing in their condition of "class suicide."

To consolidate this regime of luxury for themselves, and spartan obedience for others, Gazi used a number of unhealthy social engineering tactics. They specifically targeted people who were in vulnerable positions, to make them dependent on the organization: houseless folks, victims of domestic violence, folks with mental health challenges, folks whose gender/queer identity caused rifts with their families. They cynically shared details of their own troubled past, in order to trauma-bond with their victims, to more effectively lull them into a state of slavery, after winning their trust.

And quite naturally for the proud "Hollywood pimp," they pushed members to enter into or terminate romantic relationships with one another.

"Gazi pairs people up that [they want] to date [each other]. [They] specifically tried to pair me up with [name redacted]. I wasn't feeling it at all. Gazi was very mad about that. Gazi has broken people up, planted stuff in their ears about their relationships. Any sexual relationships outside the org are not recognized by the org."

When asked what she meant by this last point, Savvy clarified that if a Hammer was in a monogamous relationship with someone outside the org, Gazi did not respect that, and would still push for them to get romantically involved with another Hammer.

The sexual boundary-pushing at the Hammer House was constant. It ranged from casual sexual harassment to outright violation of consent. Always, members were encouraged to use their sexuality to bring attention, members, and money to the org.

During one live stream, Gazi suddenly announced that if the stream got a hundred likes, they would make a Defense member take their shirt off. The organization had regular "Instagram thirst trap" days, where the nude or semi-nude bodies of their members were put on display, to boost engagement with Black Hammer's IG page. They called them "Man Crush Mondays," "Woman Crush Wednesdays," "Them Crush Thursdays."

"Gazi said you gotta flirt with the people, you gotta dress sexy, you gotta get that contact by any means necessary. The colonized masses "love what they love" and we gotta meet them where they at," was the justification for all this nonsense.

As if that did not present a troubling enough picture of Gazi's sense of sexual propriety, Savvy explained to us that Gazi apparently has very strange beliefs about their own real age.

"One day, Gazi broke down at the club crying, talking about how they "trans-age," that they believe they are a 16-17 year old girl," she claims.

Without disclosing any further details that we know of, but can't responsibly print on this site, Red Voice trusts our readers to draw their own conclusions about the dangers of such a belief for a thirty-five year old, self-proclaimed "Hollywood pimp," with a very poor idea of consent and of appropriate sexual boundaries.

And that, according to Savvy, is the sick domestic regime of Augustus, "stunt queen from Atlanta," stripped of all the nonsense political slogans, and glossy filters for the Gram. An abusive and closely guarded slave camp for its starved and fearful hostages, some of them still under the drinking age. "Defended" by a pliant pretorian guard of cis males, who threaten members with bodily harm and even death, just to keep from being brutalized themselves. Ruled by one of the more ignorant, soulless, and self-hating worms to ever crawl out the Negro bourgeoisie, and try to front like some revolutionary, sent here to save us, not enslave us.

Savvy's Escape(s)

It's midsummer now. For his birthday, Gazi's partner wanted to visit their hometown, affluent Stone Mountain. Like nearly everything else in Gazi's life, Savvy was made responsible for planning this event. When she got home, she was made responsible for picking up birthday dinner, too.

Apparently, Gazi's plate had tilted in the bag, and some of the sauce from their dish had spilled out. Gazi called Savvy an "incompetent b*tch" and told her she had to self-criticize (write a report stating her error and how she will do better). They then confiscated some weed and a bit of moonshine that Savvy had to herself, announcing "you can't have that anymore."

The next morning, at 7:30, Savvy woke up to Gazi screaming at her about their Facebook, and commanding her to go stand outside, before she had even had a chance to use the bathroom. While outside, she noticed that she was being removed from various Black Hammer chats. She received a text from SG Anco, telling her that she was going to be moved by the organization yet again (one of Gazi's favorite forms of threat).

"At that point I just snapped. I went inside and started packing my stuff to get away from there."

That's when Gazi came downstairs, and told her to stop yelling in the house. When she showed defiance, Gazi had the male Defense members swarm her.

Fearful of being attacked by three grown men, she pulled a knife out and told them "I'll hurt all you b*tches."

At this point, the three Defense goons grabbed her, and one of them dragged her outside, while she screamed for help.

"That's when I started turning up outside, messing up all the patio furniture."

Inside, Gazi was doing something more destructive--pouring bleach on all Savvy's clothes, and her suitcase, too. Then they threw her belongings out on the street.

Thankfully, Savvy was able to get in contact with a cousin who lived in Georgia, one of the few relatives with whom she has contact. As she made her way to her cousin's house, Gazi began doing what many domestic abusers do: calling her non-stop, pretending to be apologetic. They claimed that if Savvy stayed with the organization, she could live at the North Carolina house instead. Savvy reluctantly agreed, but she did so with a plan.

"I thought, Let me get the info I need to get these people out [of the cult]." But it would not be that easy.

In late July, the New York chapter of Black Hammer Organization publicly denounced Gazi Kodzo as a serial abuser and grifter. (This was apparently in response to Gazi's attempted defamation of one of the East Coast membership as an "alleged" pedophile, though Red Voice has not had the chance to interview with the interested parties for clearer details.) In their denunciation, among a litany of other horrendous accusations, the New York chapter cited Savvy's physical assault and the destruction of her clothes.

Gazi saw the writing on the wall and panicked, and decided to do what they always do when their comrades leave them: put together a public show of support for Gazi.

In this case, they had the North Carolina chapter drive for hours to the Atlanta Hammer House, so that they could YouTube livestream a group response to the accusations being made against Gazi. That is when, Savvy alleges, the visiting Hammers were intimidated with guns, and Savvy was compelled to present a false testimony about the experience around her assault.

The NC Hammers had brought [name redacted] with them. The chief, who reportedly was brought into their Hammer House as the result of an outreach in a park, had been houseless, and suffered from epileptic seizures, during which time they would inflict harm on themselves. The Hammers took him in, looked after him, learned how to properly attend to him during one of his episodes.

During the livestream, the loud activity of Gazi and the other Hammers triggered one of these episodes. Gazi began essentially "faith-healing" [name redacted], and can be heard whispering affirmations to him, apparently to calm him down so that the show could continue, when what he needed was medical intervention.

Not only was this a window into the true cult nature of the ATL Hammer House for the Carolina chiefs: the entire world could see that something was terribly wrong here, that life in Black Hammer was looking a lot more like a bunker of the abused, gaslighted, and coerced.

But there was still another reason for this gathering, according to Savvy. Gazi wanted her back at the Hammer House. They reportedly got on their knees and begged Savvy to return and act as Chief of Staff again. Here was the emotional manipulation that was the carrot to the sticks held by Gazi's private security force.

So, when the other Hammers returned to NC, Savvy and [name redacted] had to stay, in a house where she felt the next conflict could lead to her death. But she was already preparing for her second escape.

"The day I knew I was gonna leave, I had already talked to the people in the NC chapter. I spent that whole day packing up my stuff. I was tryna get [name redacted] out, but I knew he would compromise the escape." (Gazi had apparently begun the process of intensively love-bombing this person, who would later make strong accusations of abuse against Savvy and the other NC Hammers.)

Gazi was apparently suspicious, and had Defense take away Savvy's phone. But she didn't care, she needed to be out, that night.

"I finessed my way outside for a smoke break in the rain and just disappeared. Defense was right at the door, and defense stay with guns. I had to run barefoot in the rain, in the middle of the night."

Eventually Savvy made her way back to the NC House. She left her phone, which Gazi quickly destroyed, but she brought her life and her sanity with her. Now she mainly hammers nails into the coffin of the dying Black Hammer Organization.

These days, BHO is a shivering shell of its old self. Savvy estimates that there may be two dozen active members in the whole country, a considerable drop from its peak membership of several hundred. The old sources of external revenue have mostly dried up, since everybody in the US left know's what's up with that fool Gazi now. Most of the remaining membership is concentrated in the Atlanta Hammer House, where Gazi and their hostages are reportedly on the verge of eviction.

In their latest streams, Augustus Romain looks haggard, confused, angry, and frightened. And they should be. If these accusations are all true, they have left a trail of abuse at least as long as any of the destructive cults that have recently garnered national attention, such as NXIVM or "Love Has Won," and they have done so before the really big payday.

Each week, it seems, another hostage in the Hammer House manages to escape. Our writers recently spoke with one escapee who claims that they were basically a domestic servant for Gazi Kodzo, and that Kodzo would punish them for unsatisfactory work by denying them hospital visits, leading to the degeneration of their lifelong physical illness. Another hostage is the child of a former US State Department official; still another is the child of a prominent Democratic attorney in the state of Kentucky.

By consciously choosing to become a cult leader, Gazi had stepped into an exceedingly dangerous game, one they were never smart or disciplined enough for, and now Esu is catching up with them.

Still, a lifelong fool will remain a fool until they have no life left. Gazi is trying everything they can to rebrand, since all their bridges are burned as a "communist revolutionary." Recently, they tried to exploit the tropical storm Ida crisis in New Orleans, by bringing care packages to (mainly unaffected) residents.

That gimmick didn't work to get the attention of Charlamagne, Saweetie, and other celebrities that they tagged on their social media photo-ops. So now they're posing as "Barbz" (Nicki Minaj fans) instead of Black Hammer revolutionaries, and leading small anti-vaxx protests outside the CDC, after the style of the Westboro Baptist Church, in the miserable hope of riding the rapper's clout to all-important fame.

Gazi has also been sharing Tweets from Candace Owens, Black darling of the far right, and threatening to sic the Proud Boys and ICE on their former chiefs. In all likelihood, if Black Hammer somehow survives, their dwindling sect will make a sharp turn toward anti-communism and bare-faced reaction--like the LaRouche cult, after their own wrecker activity had isolated them from the entire Trotskyist left, and forced them to turn to fascist groups for financial aid.

You can run left, or you can run right, reactionary scum. There's not a corner of this earth where the ancestors won't see you, and turn whatever you try into dust. "Ma'at" is an ancient word that means "justice," Augustus. Yours is coming.