Google Maps still paints a four-block stretch of East New York red after dark. It is not construction. It is a slow parade of cars shopping for women on Pennsylvania Avenue, the open-air sex market locals call the Penn Track, or the Blade.
Omari “Prince” Scott, 45, was sentenced at the end of July to 50 years in federal prison for trafficking women and ordering the murder of a rival. The women are still standing in the street in neon thongs and see-through tops. The pimps are still parked up the block. The going rate is as little as $85.
One man went to a cage. The market did not blink.
You Think You Chose Him
Scott’s trial pulled the curtain back on a system that was never a secret to anyone who drives that industrial pocket of Brooklyn. He demanded $1,000 a night. Women who missed the quota stayed outside until they hit it, rain or 4 a.m. He tracked them on Life360. He took the cash out of their hands before it reached a pocket.
Two women still working the same strip told the New York Post the arrangement has not changed.
The pimp will say, “We building something.” But it’s you building and him collecting. You think you chose him. Then you realize you gotta ask to leave, ask to eat, ask to keep some of your own money.
Another put it simpler. “He takes it right out your hand. You don’t even put it in your pocket first. If you do, that’s a problem.”
Walk the sidewalk without a pimp and you are a “renegade.” Amanda Vizcarrondo-Ortiz came from Massachusetts in 2022 thinking she could work alone. She was maced for that mistake. Scott then made his pitch. Every dollar after that went to him. He punched her. Other women showed up with black eyes.
When a woman named Henny texted that Sunday would be her last day, Scott answered, “Oh, that’s the day of your funeral. You not leaving and that aint no lie.” She still had to ask him for money for her child’s diapers.
That is not “sex work.” That is ownership.
A White Castle Parking Lot and a Rival in the Way
Henny tried to leave Scott for another pimp, Cleveland Clay. Scott grabbed her by the hair, dragged her through the street, and threw her into his car. Then he handed a wiped-down gun to Michael “Victory” Simmons and sent him after Clay.
Simmons shot Clay five times at close range in a White Castle parking lot on May 1, 2023. He reported back to Scott, who was waiting in a nearby laundromat lot. A federal jury convicted Scott of murder in the course of sex trafficking. Prosecutors said he was the first defendant in the country convicted at trial on that charge.
NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch called him “a predator of the worst kind.” She was not wrong. She also described a city that still treats the street he ran as a counseling opportunity.
Outreach While the Cars Keep Circling
The department stations officers on the Track to identify trafficking victims and offer services. The Human Trafficking Squad says it has made contact with 170 to 200 women a year since 2023 and has run four “outreach operations” on the Penn Track this year.
When patrol cars rolled through the night the Post visited, the women and the men watching them simply shifted a block. “One week they leave us alone, next week it’s every night — lights on us, run our names, move along. Then they gone again and it’s back to business,” one worker said.
The city concentrates on outreach over busting johns. That is a choice. Demand is what keeps the cars circling. Pimps sit in those cars to make sure the women do not stop, do not talk too long, and do not pocket a dollar. If a date turns violent, the pimp might come. If the money is at stake, he comes fast.
Two years ago the Post already reported the Track exploding, with parents covering their children’s eyes on the way to school and used condoms scattered in condo lots. Nearby shelters were part of that picture then. The street did not get cleaner. It got bolder.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani once said he favored decriminalizing sex work. His office now insists he does not support legalization and that city policy has not changed. No change is the problem. The market is still there, in public, after a 50-year sentence.
For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.
A magistrate who will not use the sword against the buyer and the pimp is not rescuing women. He is managing a bazaar. Scott is gone. Other men have already taken the corners. The women still have a quota. The cars still roll. East New York still has a place where a human being can be rented for less than a hundred dollars while the city talks about services.
That is not compassion. It is surrender dressed up as care.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
