As far as NY goes, I too have a pretty first hand understanding of the gang shit. I've seen guys come home without getting seconds, having any paperwork checked, etc. on the street. I've never been locked up for anything substantial, so I've never even been to county, but guys like to hype uptop (the federal prisons upstate), and like to talk about them as the purest of the pure, and it's mostly guys who have just been released. Now I understand that it may be just hype in some cases, as the guys who talk about it the most, are guys who went in one thing, and came out something else. You rarely see any pure UBN sets these days, at least in NY. Everybody is either W/S, meaning they claim a california set or they're Brim (NYBBA, NYB, W/S). Some guys are still "misled" and claim a NYBBA Brim hood, but use W/S Literature and history. I know in Long Island, as far as W/S goes, the only true W/S group at one point was Rollin' 20s in Roosevelt, they've been here since at least the 60s and were started by actual NHB 20s from California, and even that group has had their core misconstrued and fell in with the whole "5" stuff when it became popular, and eventually evolved into Terror Street and other E/C "UBN 20s" mixed type entities. About '05-'06, the Westside, "California way" became the craze out here, and it started with the MOB Pirus, guys used to fight it out every single day because all they were surrounded by were UBN-inspired sets, and guys back then simply weren't trying to hear "I don't ride the 5". Looking back this stuff tickles me, as things are so different, yet more of the same. Like I said, now everybody is W/S, and you'd be hardpressed to find anymore UBN hoods in the surrounding boroughs. Even SMM in Castle Hill claim to have dropped the "blood" and claim they're back to being a neighborhood crew. Mack Ballas claim to no longer be Brim, because they fell under the NYB, now they go simply by Mack Balla Family, yet still say "Hats up" and shit like that.