At the stroke of midnight and into the predawn this past May 20, the little unincorporated Galveston County town of Bacliff was roiling with squadrons of cops of every description, from small-town police to the Department of Public Safety's Narcotics Service to the FBI and DEA.

This was the culmination of this ad hoc task force's two-year investigation of Bacliff's 4th Street Players — a street gang claiming affiliation with the Bloods, the predominantly black, Los Angeles-based gang founded in 1972 — and a few of the ten alleged members hauled away that night on charges of dealing cocaine, crack cocaine and methamphetamine sported the gang's tattoos: "Kliff Side," "4SP," "4th Street Playa," "4th Street Blood," "Playa 4 Life," "MOB (Member of Bloods)" and "Paw Prints."

The address of the gang's headquarters and birthplace was furnished by the FBI — 4410 4th St. in Bacliff — and if you drive there today, you'll see three pairs of red sneakers dangling like strange fruit over a power line overhanging the street.

On their MySpace pages, the members and associates still more clearly showed their Blood colors — several claiming affiliation had customized the backgrounds of their pages with flame-red bandannas, while others had music playing by New Orleans rapper Lil' Wayne, who recently claimed affiliation with the Bloods. (Others featured gangsta rap tracks performed by some of the set's more musically inclined members.)

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These kids call each other "my nigga," sport long baggy shorts and several have customized red bandanna-patterned Houston Astros hats. Other pics show them smoking weed and packing AK-47's and pump shotguns. One who was not arrested had this message of support for his recently incarcerated homies on his site: ""FREE RED, SEAN G, SHO, NUT, JASON, RICKY G, LIL G 50/50 4SP 1 LUV 500UUPP LIL JOE."

Others sent shout-outs to their 'hood — flashing tats repping "The Wicked Sticks," which along with "The Kliffside" is another of Bacliff's many nicknames.

When you travel there, you can see that the Wicked nickname fits — Grand Avenue, the town's main thoroughfare, is lined with little more than a nonstop succession of beer joints, liquor stores and gambling halls, while the town's back streets offer up vistas of ramshackle abodes and general deprivation not often seen outside of Appalachia. (It's Gulf Coast-style poverty, though; often as not, these houses have the hulks of rusted-out boats in their tiny yards instead of trucks.)

Poverty is nothing new, nor is it earth-shattering news when street gangs peddle drugs (and get busted for same). What is unusual about the 4th Street Players Blood set — from reputed leader Jason James Ruppert, a.k.a. "Lil' J," on down — is the fact that every single one of them, like 70 percent of Bacliff's roughly 7,000 inhabitants, is white.
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"Bacliff right now is the problem child [in the area]," says "Gator" Miller, the editor of regional entertainment sheet Night Moves and the publisher of the Seabreeze, a monthly newspaper that is one of the best reads among small-town papers in America. "It's pretty close to Kemah. There's criminal activity there. The sheriff doesn't have enough resources to go after it, and these guys go up to Kemah and jack tourists, and there's a lot of violent crime over in Bacliff. The deputies tell me they spend 90 percent of their time in Bacliff."

And while there are plenty of nice houses and good people in Bacliff, especially along the waterfront, the overall impression of the town is that much of it is a white ghetto almost as hardcore as the roughest parts of Houston's South Park or Fifth Ward.

Stats bear this out — there are nearly as many unemployed as owners of college degrees, the median house price is $80,000 and 22 percent of the populace is below the poverty level, as against 15 percent for the state of Texas, with 8.9 percent of Bacliffians making half or less of the poverty level. Lou's, the town's one true grocery store, is well stocked with booze, cigarettes and canned food, but offers little else other than wilted vegetables and whole aisles of all-but-bare shelves.

For some kids from the area, it is all too easy to be lured in by the prospect of quick, easy money, just like the fantasies the dope boy rappers sell. Bacliff is awash in vice. With fewer than 7,000 inhabitants, Bacliff has to be one of the smallest towns in Texas with its very own strip club. There are "game rooms" all over town, many open around-the-clock and offering enticing targets for stickup kids. (A man was killed in one such robbery this past Fourth of July.)

For such a small town, Bacliff has an astounding number of bars. In fact, its ratio of taverns-to-citizens rivals those of many hard-drinking British seaside resorts. "This is the only town I know that has churches next to bars that are next to gambling halls, and then repeat that all over town," says local resident Jack ­Nelson.

Bacliff was never supposed to have been a year-round place of inhabitation. It was first built in 1910 as a vacation resort called Clifton-By-The-Sea, but several hurricanes, the rebirth of Galveston after the 1900 storm and the rise of rapid transportation rendered its charms less potent. Why go to Clifton-By-The-Sea (which is actually on the bay) when you can head down to the open water in Galveston, Florida or even the Caribbean?

But if it made a less-than-ideal vacation spot, it was a decent enough place to live, for a time. Galveston Bay wasn't so polluted back then, nor was the shoreline as eroded as it is today. The shrimping industry was booming. "There was still a beach in Bacliff, and cliffs," remembers Miller. "There were still flying fish in the bay."

In a pre-Christmas Eve press conference, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo urged county residents to stay home for the holidays and limit any Christmas or New Year’s Eve celebrations to within their immediate households given the troubling upticks in local coronavirus metrics over the last few months.

“Right now, in the holiday season, as the virus rages on around the nation and our state, we face the greatest challenge yet,” Hidalgo said. “In our hospitals, the numbers in the ICU have not stopped creeping up. All across Texas, communities are entering danger territory. The current situation where our medical center — the largest in the world — is routinely crossing its base capacity, means that procedures are postponed, that healthcare workers are at risk of burnout, that we can’t sustain a surge in infections beyond where we are right now, and that we’re living at the very, very edge.”

“The way to show your loved ones that you love them this holiday season is to stay home, to put your plans on hold this year,” she continued.

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To drive the point home, Hidalgo was joined by Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, U.S. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, Dr. David Persse of the Houston Health Department and Harris County Public Health’s interim director Dr. Sherri Onyiego, all of whom echoed Hidalgo’s request that county residents stay vigilant through the holiday season and limit their contact with others accordingly.

The Houston Health Department reported an additional 634 cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday and two new deaths within the city of Houston. As of 4 p.m., Harris County had recorded a total of 224,245 coronavirus cases and 2,605 deaths from the disease.

Hidalgo and Turner said that they’ve both discussed the possibility of issuing a local curfew order if the coronavirus begins to spread even more rapidly and we get closer to a point of no return, but the two local officials said they agree that this type of sweeping restriction isn’t necessary — yet.

“The curfew is a very blunt tool that we have — pretty much the last tool that we have — and so we want to make sure to deploy that in a very worst case scenario… Right now, we’re at a point where if people do their part, we can still turn things around,” Hidalgo said. “It’s not a foregone conclusion that we’re headed into a completely unsustainable place, but we’re very close.”

“The way I look at things,” Hidalgo explained, “the numbers continue to creep up, the ICU population numbers continue to accelerate, [but] that acceleration is not increasing. So we have a little bit of runway, but we’ll see what happens.”

Turner also had harsh words for the Houstonian who attacked an employee at Grand Prize Bar earlier this week after being asked to wear a face mask as required. The disgruntled maskless patron attacked the employee in the head with a glass, sending the bloodied bar worker to Ben Taub hospital where he needed ten stitches.

“We are aggressively looking for this individual. We want to find this individual, we want to find him and arrest him and bring charges against him,” Turner said. “Quite frankly, I view it as almost like attempted murder, myself. But this type of foolishness is not going to be accepted.”

Wednesday’s press conference came on the heels of new forecasts from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s PolicyLab which projected that Houston could soon become a nationwide COVID-19 hotspot if an expected surge in coronavirus spread comes after the holiday season.

It also followed Monday’s news that the state has ordered nine southeast Texas counties — Galveston, Jefferson, Chambers, Brazoria, Jasper, Hardin, Liberty, Orange and Newton — to halt ratchet-back their reopenings due to dangerous COVID-19 hospitalization stats.

By Monday in that region, the number of hospital patients with the coronavirus had been over 15 percent for seven straight days. As required by Gov. Greg Abbott’s statewide reopening guidelines, areas of Texas that sustain those high levels of hospitalizations for a week straight have to roll back business occupancy levels to 50 percent, shut down any bars that haven't been reclassified as restaurants through a TABC loophole and halt elective surgeries.

“By the time you get there, you’re really in a tough position, and so to see our neighbors reach that is concerning,” Hidalgo said, before warning that if Harris County residents let their guards down, our area could easily hit that scary milestone.

“It is a very real possibility that we could end up facing the fate we’ve avoided thus far. But look, we have avoided it because of our ability to do our part, to take that personal responsibility, to be realistic about how this virus spreads, and that’s why we’re not mincing words today,” she said.

“Please,” Hidalgo continued, “no gathering for the holidays, no gathering for New Year, and continue to remember: the moment you are with somebody you don’t live with and you’re taking off your mask, you are at risk of spreading the virus.”

Twenty years ago, there would have been little debate. Maybe a few people would have complained, but the Texas Department of Transportation would have simply paved them over, if you'll excuse the metaphor. Expanding freeways is the business of TxDOT in Houston and, for as long as anyone can remember, business was good.

Old Texas, meet new Houston.

Just as droves of people turned out to comment on the bizarre and archaic plans from the Army Corps of Engineers to deepen and widen Buffalo Bayou, those affected by the plans to expand Interstate 45, and advocates of alternative forms of transportation and urban planning, aren't willing to be roadkill.

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When the plans for the expansion of Interstate 45 from downtown north to the Beltway and beyond began to emerge a couple years ago, the initial focus was on the radical changes proposed to much of the area around downtown. After all, little work on the freeways around the city's urban hub had been done in decades and the plans were audacious with massive aesthetic changes to the cityscape including wiping out Pierce Elevated and green spaces on top of underground freeways.

It was as shocking as it was ambitious.

We even did a cover story on the planned changes to the east end and businesses were not thrilled.

But, as the dust settled on those plans, a new outcry came from the city's east and near north sides. For decades, both areas had mostly been neglected and, not surprisingly, predominantly populated by people of color. Their complaints generally fell on deaf ears for all the same reasons those sorts of things have always occurred.

This time around, however, there is a new alignment of interests that not only long time residents and business owners, but new investors in the area and a coalition of Houstonians tired of a city that favors widening freeways over alternatives. After all, METRORail's Red Line runs right through the heart of the near north side all the way to Airline.

It is precisely why TxDOT extended the comment deadline at the urging of Mayor Sylvester Turner and other area political leaders. The plan, which would destroy a number of homes and businesses, is still under consideration, but the final design phase is nearly complete. Of particular concern is the number of affordable housing units the city will lose in the construction. Given the limited number of affordable options for Houston residents, it's difficult to imagine losing any.

None of that is good for Houston, but one thing we imagine TxDOT was not ready for was the groundswell of support for taking a different approach to life on the road in the Bayou City.

Most Houstonians know that pouring more concrete will never solve the problem of traffic and growth in Houston even if it is fast and cheap. It's why the Army Corps was so quick to suggest widening Buffalo Bayou. The price was right. But, this is not our parents Houston. Those who live here now value quality of life over the ease of freeways.

The clamor for more rail — fought tooth and nail by anti-rail forces and business interests — the desire for more park space and bike trails, the urging of better and wider sidewalks for pedestrians, and even the call for closing of some streets to vehicles entirely are all part of the city's changing nature on a topic we most like to complain about: traffic.

It has come time for civic leaders, city, state and federal, to realize that the changing demographic of Houston must be considered when it comes to large scale projects that will impact the way we get around for decades to come. This is not the blue collar, refinery town it was when many of these freeways were created. This is particularly true inside the Loop where so much of the construction is heavily scrutinized.

It's also critically important that we address the needs of the less fortunate in Houston. We have a affordable housing crisis only worsened by a recession created by the pandemic. The last thing we need to be doing is demolishing those resources for a bigger freeway.

And we haven't even bothered to broach the subject of flooding, which more concrete will certainly exacerbate.

There are no easy solutions to the problems Houston faces and traffic is most certainly at the top of the list. It is why we must look at every possible option and not just stick with the same old plans we have relied on for decades. They may have worked years ago, but they cannot be the only option for a city poised to become the third largest in the country.

This is a young, vibrant city that wants better for itself and its future. Out with the old and in with the new.

On Monday, Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner urged residents to cancel any planned gatherings ahead of the Christmas holiday later this week given the still raging pandemic, and called out Congress for neglecting to authorize any more emergency funding for city governments in the latest coronavirus relief package.

The Houston Health Department reported an additional 777 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday and three additional deaths within the city, bringing Houston’s cumulative total case count to 111,211 and the city’s death toll to 1,530 since the start of the pandemic over nine months ago.

Turner also announced that the local COVID-19 test positivity rate is still rising — the city’s 14-day-average rate increased to 11.2 percent, up from the 10.5 percent reported last week, he said.

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Given that increase and the steadily growing number of COVID-19 patients in local hospitals over the past several weeks, Turner echoed his statements ahead of Thanksgiving and asked Houstonians to keep their Christmas gatherings local and confined to people who they already share a roof with.

“I’m asking people to cancel your holiday gatherings if you plan to gather, especially outside of your immediate household,” Turner said. “I’m asking that you delay those activities. To avoid a surge on top of a surge, postpone traveling until sometime next year.”

“I know a lot of people are flying from here to there. I just don’t think that is a wise thing to do right now,” he continued.

Turner said that HHD and the Houston Fire Department will each receive 3,000 doses of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine — the second coronavirus vaccine to be approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — within the next week or so.

HHD Director Dr. Stephen Williams stressed that we’re still in the very, very early stages of vaccine delivery, and explained that the state still hasn’t even determined what groups of Texans will be prioritized to get the scarce vaccine next once frontline healthcare workers and nursing home residents are taken care of.

Turner urged all Houstonians to take any available vaccine for COVID-19 “when you have the opportunity,” and said he plans to take the vaccine himself “once my number is called.”

Regarding news from the last few days about a new mutation of the coronavirus running throughout the United Kingdom that’s caused England to enact sweeping new lockdowns reminiscent of the early days of the pandemic, Dr. David Persse of HHD said that the good news is this latest variation of the disease doesn’t appear to be any more deadly than the old variant, although it does spread much more rapidly.

“The new version of it is not more lethal, it does not make people any sicker at this point, and also importantly… it appears that the vaccine will still work against this new mutation,” Persse explained.

In terms of preventing this new British variant of COVID-19 from getting to Houston, Persse said that’s above the local health department’s pay grade, unfortunately. “At this point, there’s not a lot that we can do differently… It would be up to the CDC to put in whatever provisions at the federal level to restrict movement of people from the U.K. to the United States, but if they’re going to do that, that’s not our call,” he said.

Turner got the most animated when asked about the latest federal coronavirus relief package passed by Congress over the weekend, which contained funding for checks of at least $600 to most Americans and extended unemployment benefits, but no additional money for cash-strapped local governments.

“I cannot tell you how disappointed I am with Congress that they did not include local government in the stimulus package,” Turner said. “They say that they’re gonna come back later on. It may or may not be included, and for us, our budgets are due [and] have to balance by the end of June, so it may not even be in time for the City of Houston.”

Turner said that the city is currently facing a budget shortfall after losing out on an estimated $150 million in sales tax dollars thanks to the pandemic, and said that there’s a real chance that city-provided services like trash pickup, fire department service and policing might be affected if the feds don’t come through with some assistance for local governments sooner rather than later.

“I’m glad that they did something,” Turner said, “but I am very, very disappointed that local governments did not receive any assistance in this package.”

Well, that didn't take long. The first game of the NBA season lost to COVID-19 just happened to be the first Rockets game of the season against the Oklahoma City Thunder at Toyota Center. The reason? The Rockets do not have enough players available.

James Harden was deemed unavailable due to a violation of the league's COVID protocols for starters. The disgruntled NBA guard was apparently out recently at a club with friends (he even took to Instagram to say it wasn't a strip club and later removed the post) and it was captured on video. Given this is the second violation he has had — the first delaying his return to training camp — there is no way to know how long this will keep him out. The NBA is not messing around with its protocols, so don't be surprised if Harden is suspended.

As for the other players, three players returned positive or inconclusive tests and four others are being forced to quarantine for contact tracing — they were near someone who tested positive.

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It marks yet another chapter of the ongoing saga of the Houston Rockets as they fall ass backwards into the new season. The first game postponement is particularly disappointing given it was the first chance for fans to get a look at new and exciting players like John Wall and Christian Wood.

Since the Rockets are not on the slate of NBA Christmas games, we will all have to wait until Saturday when the Rockets visit Portland to face the Trailblazers, assuming they can cobble together enough players for that game.

Stay tuned.