When crack first hit Staten Island, Park Hill was still a community, albeit a dysfunctional one. At first there was more than enough money to go around, and the fiends weren’t completely desperate yet. Heroin and base had done some ravaging in the community, but my hood was still relatively unified.
Then the hood went straight to hell.
For those who don’t know, freebase and crack are the exact same thing. It’s simply cocaine that’s free of the hydrochloric acid added to powder cocaine (cocaine hydrochloride). This purified version is much more potent and addictive.
Crack is street slang for freebase. It got that name because the cooking process breaks it down into its purest form, turning it into a solid form that looks like little chips of paint that cracked off a wall. Hence, crack. The fastest, most powerful way to get high on crack is to smoke it. Powder cocaine is smokable, but people prefer to snort it rather than smoke it.
Keep in mind there is no difference in the chemical makeup of powder cocaine and crack—it’s the same drug, just one is more pure than the other. However, penalties for crack offenses are more severe because our government decided to create what is known as the War on Drugs. So all the thousands, maybe millions of people (such as myself) convicted and sentenced for a crack offense got an enhanced prison sentence because of drug terminology, not facts. The federal statute penalizes cocaine hydrochloride and cocaine base the same, and this hasn’t changed since 1914, when cocaine became illegal to possess, no matter what chemical form it was in. The government introduced mandatory sentencing for crack offenses simply because crack was more popular among poor people.
*
The whole drug game just seemed to come into the hood outta nowhere. In the early seventies, it was all about cocaine. Coke was for rich people. When freebase—a purified, smokable form of cocaine—came around, it was still a plaything for the elite in the late seventies. By the time the eighties rolled around, regular working-class people were smoking freebase.
In the early eighties, there was a huge glut of powder cocaine from South America, which drove the price of coke way down. To maximize their profits, the dealers flooded the inner-city neighborhoods with crack, which was simple to produce, cheap, and could be sold in smaller quantities to more people. And when it hit in force, the neighborhood went straight to hell.
Before the epidemic, as a kid, my day was always planned out. I’d wake up, head over to the grocery store, and bag some groceries. A good bagger could clear five or six dollars in a couple hours. After that, I might hit the corner store, maybe hit the arcade, then head to the pond out back and make some mud cakes. From dawn till dusk, we were always moving, always active. By the time we’d come home, our clothes would be a dirt farm—we’d be covered in it; our tongues would be red from candy; our hair would be messed up—all signs that we’d had a good day.
Next thing you knew, fucking dreads—Rastafarians, typically from Jamaica, but also some folks from Guyana—were comin’ out of nowhere. Illegal motherfuckers were poppin’ up everywhere, and drugs were every-fucking-where, too. What the fuck just happened?
There was so much money floating around, the temptation would just suck you in, especially if you were poor. Crack took advantage of the community, of the fucking dirt poor who had no food in their refrigerator—I’m talking about having no refrigerator at all, having to put the fucking milk outside on the windowsill in the winter so it gets cold. Roaches, mice everywhere. Roaches in your cereal box. Welfare. Hard cheese. You-ain’t-got-shit poor. You’re-living-in-the-projects-and-your-mom’s-a-crackhead poor.
The drug game is the last stand for survival, where you have nothing else on the streets. You don’t even know what the fuck you’re doing. You don’t have an education. You don’t have a job. How you gonna eat? Welfare pays three hundred dollars a month—what’s that? You can’t live off that. You need to do something to survive. That’s what hustling provided. It’s a subculture that regular people with jobs and who are middle class just don’t understand. They just don’t understand poverty on that level. That’s where I came from, that’s where motherfuckers in my neighborhood came from. We clawed our way up outta that shit.
Think about it—if you can make thousands upon thousands of dollars in just one hour, would you turn that down? You put that shit in the hood, and I can make ten fucking thousand in thirty fucking minutes. What would you do?
And it was everywhere.
*
I was about fourteen when I first really got into the game. By that time I was too old for playing in the back of the building, and my Summer Youth pay was long gone. I couldn’t ask my mother for change for ice cream anymore, or even for fresh school clothes. Material stuff is so enticing when you don’t have shit. It’s not that we were even materialistic like that, but when you’ve got old-ass clothes and last year’s boots on in winter, it’s hard to have a righteous attitude. My mom provided the bare minimum, but that was all she could afford. If I wanted to get fresh and have some money to eat, I had to come up with my own plan. And since things I wanted were out of her budget, the fastest way to get them was to hustle.
The dreads came to my hood wearing fly shit like Fila suits and gold chains and gold teeth, while we were dead broke. They were making money and driving flashy cars, and they would come up to a guy smiling, flashing those gold fronts.
The very first dread I worked with, Dusty, had his gate at 55 Bowen. “Yo, red mon [because I was so yellow]! Yo, me wan’ see if you wan’ work in the gate.” When they said “work in the gate,” that meant working in the drug spot. Simply put, a drug spot was an illegal store that sold drugs. It could be set up anywhere on the street; in an alley, on a corner, or even in the lobby of a project.
So I was like, “Okay.” I didn’t know a goddamn thing about selling drugs, all I knew was that I had to get me some of that money they were always flashing.
The list of reasons why not to sell drugs is endless, but I ran through it in a few seconds and accepted the dread’s pack. Even with all these deadly factors, I decided to hop in the drug game.
My first time in the gate, that shit was spooky. It was a little hole in the door, and people would shove their money through the slot and demand their drugs. This was at the top of the crack game, so these motherfuckers were pulling like a hundred thousand dollars in a matter of hours. There was so much traffic coming to this fucking spot. Every few seconds there’d be a knock at the door and some fiend asking for some shit. The constant knocking was making me nervous.
To make things worse, I’d already started smoking woolies, so I was extra paranoid. Woolies are a mixture of weed with coke or crack rolled up into a blunt or joint. Before the dreads brought blunts into America, we were all just smoking joints. But the Jamaicans brought Fronto leaf (a dark, wrapper-grade tobacco leaf) with them, and rolled the weed in that, and when you couldn’t get the Fronto leaf anymore, you started cutting open Phillies. So Jamaicans were responsible for the blunt sensation.
Anyway, I was too paranoid in the spot that night. I couldn’t relax. Everything about the situation had me on edge. Thing is, I’ve always had a little sixth sense, though. Dudes always used to say, “U-God can see the cops coming over the top of the Hill,” as they were on their way to raid us. This particular time, there was so much traffic coming through and so much money exchanging hands that I got really nervous. I could just feel it—I had to get the fuck up out of the spot. A part of me was trying to ignore the voice in my head telling me to get out; the hungry hustler part of me wanted to ignore that voice and keep right on clocking (working) out of the gate.
Soon my inner voice got the better of me, and I knew I had to go. So I shut the spot down and locked it up. Me and my man Choice packed up the drugs and the money and we walked outside. I barely got around the corner, and here come the police with the battering ram, pushing me out of the way to raid the spot. I remember one cop yelled at me to get out of the way as they charged right past us. I watched them run right to the spot and smash in the door I’d just come out of.
When I got back around the way, the dread I’d been working the gate for saw me and came over to get the scoop on the raid. “Red mon! I thought you was in the gate when the cops rushed!”
“I had to get out! Shit was just too hot, dread. I could just feel it,” I told him.
He asked me where the money was, and I gave him the mad stacks of cash we’d clocked that day. He broke me off a little bullshit three hundred dollars.
After me saving all that cash and work for him, and he only gave me that little punk-ass three hundred, I was mad. This drug game was for chumps. Almost getting arrested and shit for that bum-ass three hundred dollars?
Fuck the dope game! I thought.
*
There weren’t many other options out there at the time, though. So at fifteen, I decided to get a little nine-to-five job at the Statue of Liberty with Method Man. They hired Staten Island dudes because we were right by the ferry. We then had to take another ferry to Liberty Island, but I guess the bosses figured we didn’t mind the ride, since we were always taking a ferry everywhere anyway.
Meth and I worked that job for almost two years. It saved my life in a lot of ways. It helped me get on my feet. During that time, Meth and me also got real close.
When we did click and started hustling together, Method Man really started coming into his own. He wasn’t just talented at hustling, either. That boy had already produced a beat on a little Casio and rapped over that shit. He named the song “Panty Raider,” and it was a smash in our hood. He made another one called “My House, My House.” I had it on repeat in my tape deck even back then.
We were both writin’ at that time, kicking around ideas together when we weren’t mopping the floors and hauling garbage and doing all this crazy shit for Mr. Hill, our boss. We used to write rhymes on the back of coasters, just sitting in the back of the shit on garbage detail and writin’. We’d pick up these little paper coasters to write on, and one day Meth said, “Yeah, C.R.E.A.M.: Cash Rules Everything Around Me.” He started tagging everything with that acronym—the project walls, Dumpsters, train cars, whatever he could find. I remember when I said that should be a fucking hook; we made that fucking shit up way back then. True fact: The title of Wu-Tang’s first hit single started with Meth and me sitting at the Liberty Island garbage detail.
I wasn’t making enough money there, though. Even though we’d steal cases of soda, we’d steal camera film and resell it on the street and skim money here and there, I just wasn’t making enough money. Plus, we were stealing so much the owners started getting wise to us. Before they fired us, I quit. That was the last regular job I ever had.
I’ve always wanted to go back and see Mr. Hill, ’cause we did a lot of shit we weren’t supposed to back in the day. Now that I’m older, I respect the business hustle and the business-minded way Mr. Hill was thinking. I do feel a little sorry for doing him dirty back then.
*
I was seventeen when I came back to the streets after the Statue of Liberty job. And I came back hard. I met up with my Puerto Rican man, Bright, who lived in either 185 or 225 Park Hill, I can’t remember which.
It seems like a no-brainer now, but at the time not many black kids thought to have a Puerto Rican emissary when you went uptown to cop cocaine in weight. Bright spoke Spanish, and he took me uptown to meet the connects, the coke distributor who wholesaled base to the street dealers. That was how I first met my connects. They were pretty heavy. In the drug game, I learned there’s always somebody bigger and heavier out here. It’s best to not even try to be the biggest. That’s a setup for a lot of drama and disappointment.
Supposedly, my connect was the one getting BMF (Black Mafia Family) their shit. He was supplying them for years, I think. I found that out years and years later, of course, but I definitely wasn’t surprised when I did find out. Simply put, they had access to a lot of coke.
They sold me my first brick for seventeen thousand dollars. I had some money saved from my Statue of Liberty job, and I hustled up the rest on the block. I came up from an eight ball (one-eighth of an ounce) to seventeen stacks (one stack is one thousand dollars). Back in the day, you could get an eight ball for a hundred dollars. You chop that up, cook it, and you can sell that for two hundred dollars. Then you’d go buy more coke, chop that up, cook it, sell it, you make four hundred dollars. That’s how you flip. You flip from two to four to six to eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty-four, and you make your motherfuckin’ way.
I chopped that eight ball to three hundred dollars. The three hundred went to six hundred dollars. I kept flipping until I could cop the quarter key, also called a “big eighth.” Then I really started to flip, and got to half a man, then to a man (a full kilo). You kept flipping and flipping and flipping. The thing about it is, you could make that money in four or five hours easy. I went through my two hundred, boom, fast four hundred, boom, eight hundred, and so on. In two weeks I’d be up to seventeen stacks.
The whole time, for the two months or so I was out there hustling up the money for a brick, I wore the same pants every day. I’d be out all night, then up early in the morning. I’d change my socks and boxers and just throw the same shit on and go back to hustling. I scraped up every dollar I could in those days getting to that brick quota.
The first rule of hustling is to stack your money, as in you don’t spend it. You don’t spend no bread. You eat, maybe cop a pair of Timberlands so you don’t get cold, get some T-shirts to be hustling in, and you save the rest, every last dime. Every day you hustle, but you keep saving that bread until you reach that quota.
I reached that goal, and I was good. I took my seventeen thousand dollars right uptown with my man Bright to see my connects. Once I met them, I didn’t want for nothing after that. Once I got good with them, they just loved me. These dudes were taking care of me. Because of them, I always had it, and I didn’t have to worry about having it, either.
I was also too smart to have to do all that sucker shit the rest of these fools were doing building up territory and all that. Like I said, I’m the ambassador, so I didn’t have to do horrific things for territory. I had three or four different territories rocking, and they made up one big territory.
See, the whole thing about it is, you got the kingpins, you got the workers, and you got the enforcers. That’s how that shit works. The enforcers don’t do nothing but come in and clear the block of dumb fucking dudes. The workers come in and hustle. They get all the bread, they make sure the money’s rocking. The kingpins go back and forth with the heavy shit—they bring the bombs in, they take the money, they keep it moving.
It was easy after that. I could just come back to Staten Island and mark up whatever I got. I’d have like half a brick just for selling weight. Without even leaving my house, I could make twenty-five hundred dollars in a night or two. Then I’d run back uptown and get back on the clock.
“Yo, I need another one of them thangs.”
“I’m flying uptown right now. I’ll be back by six.”
That shit was a steady flow of traffic. I learned about the importance of that traffic. Customers didn’t have to cop heavy, but if enough of them cop, you’re gonna make a lot of money. And that’s how it was for me at first.
The whole situation, the reason why it was so easy, it was about convenience. It was convenient for me to come outside and make that type of bread. That’s why I was able to get over the poverty level. We weren’t broke no more. We weren’t struggling. Even though it was wrong, I could provide and also go to school. I was hustling and going to high school. I couldn’t have a regular job. It was a choice: either go to high school broke and struggle along every day with no food in the refrigerator and starve, or hustle and go to school eating steak and eggs and all that fly shit in the fucking refrigerator.
And again, just because I was doing this to survive didn’t mean I was going to fully embrace the criminal lifestyle. Yeah, I was committing a felony every time I sold drugs, but it wasn’t one that, if I got caught for it, I’d never come home again. I still recognized those lines that marked going too far and took care not to cross them—although I came real close more than once.
*
I was hustling with the 26 Mob from the 260 Building in Park Hill. It was me and a bunch of dudes from my neighborhood and New Brighton. This was my first crew of young hustlers. We were really just learning the game as we went along. We would watch some of the older hustlers and listen when they came around to drop some knowledge about the game.
There was this one dude, Barry Blue, that we all wanted to be like. He was a bit older than us and doing it big. We would try and soak up some of his wisdom and emulate his style. The crazy shit about Barry Blue was the way he got killed. He got shot up on this block in Staten Island that was historically known for drugs. Sadly, dudes getting killed on a drug block wasn’t very dynamic. What was dynamic about Barry Blue’s death was that he died the exact same way his father was killed, doing the very same thing on the very same block. Two generations living the same life, going out the same way. Can you imagine? What are the odds of that?
Back then it didn’t really strike me as odd. Most of us were going to live and die hustling on this block. You had to accept that cold hard fact, or else you were just lying to yourself.
I also pulled Meth into drug peddling so he could make some money to keep himself fed and clothed. He had lost his job, had gotten kicked out of his house, and was going through a really rough time. He’d dropped out of high school, and back then there were very few opportunities for inner-city youth. Often they ended up with their back against the wall and would do what they had to do to survive.
Meth’s transition from the nine-to-five grind to the street was rough. When he first came out on the block, he couldn’t make a sale to save his life. At first he had to fight to boost his clientele. To get his stripes up, he had to fight to show motherfuckers he wasn’t weak. I told him, “Yo, dog. Dudes ain’t gonna respect you unless you stand up for yourself out here.” Remember, at the time, he was still going by Shaquan, his 5 Percent name. Dudes pulled guns on him and all that fly shit, but Meth stuck through all of it.
Meth also had to learn how to deal with the fiends and the shit they’d try to pull to get their fix. Hustlin’ on the street was insane. You’d have the sneak-thief dudes who’d try to boost your stash. You’d have the women who’d proposition you for a hit.
One day, this familiar fiend rolled up. Meth came over, the fiend rolled his window down, and Meth put the crack bag in. Instead of paying, the fiend slapped the crack out of his hand and started drivin’ off while Meth was hangin’ on to the car door! Finally he had to let go and went rolling down the street, all scraped up and shit. He definitely lost the sale that time.
But after going through all that drama, by the time it was all said and done, every time Meth came out, he would shut the block down. You couldn’t even get a sale off when he was putting his work in. Maybe after he was done, you could get your little money, but while he was there, all the junkies were reporting to him for that shit. All you could do was wait until his stash ran out and he had to go back upstairs for more. Even then you weren’t guaranteed a sale in his absence.
He started winning because his clientele was up there. About two or three weeks into the game, he started taking over. Me and him was Batman and Robin on the block. We’d come in and we would just shut it down. We’d make our couple stacks in a couple of hours and be out. Then it was back to the crib to smoke weed and whip up some more work while Meth would write rhymes. This transformed him into the rapper we know as Method Man. He incorporated the street life into his rhymes, about guns and drugs and all that, because he was living that experience to the fullest.
We were scooping up so much money, there was nothing left over for the other dealers. You have to understand, there would be a dozen dudes out on the block, all selling crack against each other. But Meth and me were the only ones who partnered up—all these other guys were hustlin’ solo.
We would do all types of shit on the block to make our stacks. We would double-team customers, with me at one end of the block and Meth at the other end, so no customer could get by us. When he was dealing out of a car, I was hustlin’ from a building. It was crazy. It got to where we could feel when the fiends would rush for their fix, and we’d be there, givin’ it to ’em.
Saturday mornings between six and eleven thirty were killer. Like six in the morning to eleven thirty was off the fucking chain, just fiends lining up around the block. Then around noon to 2 or 3 P.M., it would slow down to trickles. Then around 5 P.M. to 1 A.M., it’d be poppin’ all night long, just rush rush rush rush, crazy traffic comin’ through, bombarding us. Then Sunday would slow down, so much that you might not even get one sale that day. But on Monday, they’d be back again.
It also always got busy around the first of the month. That’s what the Bone Thugs-N-Harmony song “1st of Tha Month” is about. That’s when the welfare checks arrived, so the fiends would come out ’cause they had money to spend.
That’s the hustlin’ rules right there. Now, the weed dudes didn’t have to do all that. They’re on a twenty-four-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week grind, morning, afternoon, night, that’s nonstop traffic, slower than the crack fiends, but steadier, too.
Coke and crackheads didn’t move like that. When it was too hot, for example, the fiends didn’t come out for the shit. There were certain times of day when peoples were sleeping, and they weren’t coming out for that.
It got to where we were dominating the block so much that the other dealers had to call the police on us. The police weren’t stupid; they knew people were selling, they just didn’t know exactly who was selling, or how much. We’d hear ’em driving down the block and they’d be on the loudspeaker, calling people out.
Police used to call Meth by his government name: “Clifford, what are you doing with your money?” Punk-ass Elvis used to call him Shaquan. “Shaquan, what are you doing with your money, Shaquan? You look like a bum all the time.”
The police really underestimated us. They thought we were just some dumb thug street kids. They had no idea what we were up to, we were so far underneath their radar. They knew we were out there doing what we were doing, but they had no idea we had seven, eight grams in the fuckin’ house, that I was droppin’ packages in five neighborhoods. We weren’t flashy, which is exactly how I wanted it to be—if I popped up on their radar, then they would have come after me with everything they had. They also didn’t know we were in the studio trying to get out of the goddamn game, too, but that’s for later …
*
I learned all I could about the game. I still remember who taught me how to cook crack and freebase shit up. I got so nice with it I could cook half a kilo in a pot and lose maybe three grams at most. But before I got that ill with whipping work in the pot, this junkie taught me how to do it. It was my man Choice’s (RIP) mother. She was a real coke connoisseur.
“U-God, I’m gonna teach you how to cook that shit up. Pay close attention now.”
See, basically you cook the cocaine to get the shit out of it. By the time the kilo gets to New York, it’s already been stepped on, cut with other ingredients to make the drug go farther. So you gotta cook it. In the process of cooking up that shit, you add baking soda. Baking soda clears out all of the impurities in cocaine. That’s why crack is so powerful and potent.
Anyway, she was the one who taught me to cook, but she was so meticulous with her shit she’d cook it ounce by ounce. I’ve got thirty-six ounces to cook, and she wants to cook each one individually. But I picked up the overall process from her, and soon I was doing a quarter key at a time, and then a half key. Eventually, I was cooking the whole kilo at once.
One of the techniques she taught me was that after I’d cooked the shit up, I would drop it in ammonia. The ammonia would clean out the remaining impurities. Then I’d let it dry. And my goodness, Lord have mercy, them fucking fiends used to go crazy for that shit. By the time I was done, fiends were smoking the purest shit on the block.
“U-God, my ears are ringing. What the fuck is that you just sold me?”
“I need two more, U-God, I need two more.” They were going crazy.
We had clientele so loyal that they’d walk right past anybody else to see us. It helped that I’d give my old babysitter some free work spreading the word about our shit. And all that was because we had the baddest crack. And that was due to that technique Choice’s mom taught us.
“Dip it in ammonia!”
“Dip. It. In. Ammonia.”
I dipped it, then dried it, and my tester blew it. We always had someone test a batch before we would put it out on the street. Man, she started clicking and talking all crazy. She couldn’t sit still. That’s when I knew we had some serious shit.
My babysitter would see me coming from way down the block after that, and start flagging me down from far away. I used to give her some free joints on occasion. I gave them out here and there because there were a lot of dudes posted up on the block, so you had to make sure people knew you had that killer shit so you could steal other dealers’ customers.
We would take other people’s customers almost guaranteed once they tried our shit. We were getting our shit off in Park Hill, plus I was in other projects, too. That’s when my diplomatic immunity really started coming in handy. I could drop off a ten-thousand-dollar package in New Brighton and another one in West Brighton, and come back and scoop my cash at nine that evening. I had about five projects in Staten Island clicking. While other thugs were shooting it out with each other in the projects, I’m just sliding through different projects, humble and quiet, to see my mans so I can hit him with this package and move on. I was making like ten thousand dollars a day easy. Well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was easy. It wasn’t easy at all, really, but the drug game did feed me for a time.
I did put in work when I was hustling, though. Five o’clock in the morning, I’m eating my breakfast. Get ready to go out in the streets when the sun comes up at six. Why? Because that’s when all the fucking fiends come out. That’s when everybody trying to get their fucking drugs. The big rush is early in the morning. You have to get up early to get them. So, you’re out there at six o’clock in the morning. Drug dealers are not lazy. You get up early doing all this shucking and jiving. Now from six to one o’clock, I ran through at least eight thousand dollars’ worth of shit. By time one o’clock came around, I’m chilling for the day. I don’t want to come outside the house anymore. I’m going shopping. I’m gettin’ fly. I’m getting ready for the night. I’m goin’ out on the town and having a good motherfucking time.
*
There were a few times that, for different reasons, there were droughts. When droughts would hit, the Island would get even more crazy. We’d have to go uptown and get coke that was stepped on with B12 or other adulterants to make it go farther, aka garbage. The whole Hill would lose clientele because we were pushing garbage. All the fiends would be over in New Brighton or some shit copping their work. I might have a package in Brighton, so maybe I’m still getting a little piece of that, but it was slow in Park Hill.
News of drugs, bad or good, travels fast. Your rep for having some killer shit is only as good as the last fiend who copped. And if you got a bad consumer report, shit could get slow. Packages ain’t moving. Dudes getting desperate and mad. Then we’d be able to score some raw uptown again, and we’d be back clicking, the Hill flooded with junkies like it was supposed to be.
We survived a few droughts, and I began moving up the hierarchy. My good connects had me doing more and more consistent business. The coke was regularly good now, and with the ammonia technique, our clientele had us bringing home competitive salaries at the very least. Especially for some high school kids who had been getting wedgies from the Avenue Crew in our younger years. The Baby Crash Crew and Wreck Posse were all grown up now.
We also saw a lot of older dudes we respected succumb to drugs, though, and that made us feel funny in a way that we were making the drugs work for us, not the other way around. It still boggles my mind that we were young dudes still in our teens and had grown men taking orders from us. We had the vision and the strength to be leaders, I guess.
People think selling drugs is easy money. That’s why so many are willing to try, and then they get killed in that shit. They think you just gotta come outside your building and post up and as long as your product is proper, the shit will sell itself.
Let me tell you straight up—it’s not easy.
See, the drug game, when you’re really really in it, is nothing but heartache and frustration. These punks thinking they selling drugs because they’re doing a couple of hand-to-hands, or moving a little weight, they’re not doing anything.
Full-time drug dealing is hard. Harder than regular working people can ever imagine. You need to have some trustworthy workers and a connect, and you need to know when to fall back and when to go hard.
You had to break down the weight accurately.
You had to make sure the packages kept moving out on the streets, every day.
You had to have clientele.
Your product had to be up to par, or the junkies wouldn’t come back.
You or your workers had to be on post almost all day to ensure your clientele kept coming back to you.
You had to watch your workers, to make sure they weren’t shorting you or dipping into the package.
You had to watch your back for the fucking police.
You had to watch out for informers trying to set you up for the police.
You had to watch out for crackheads setting you up to get robbed by the stickup kids.
You had to watch out for kidnappers trying to snatch you for ransom.
And you get very few second chances on the streets. You fuck up once, that’s your life. You make one mistake or false move, and you could get hurt or killed or end up in jail with some serious time on your head.
And Staten Island was just a totally different hustle to add to all the other variables you had to factor in. For one, you had a lot of white people coming through copping eight balls and things, so you could move a good amount of coke. You didn’t have to just pump capsules all day.
Besides that, though, when I would go uptown to see how my mans and them were hustling, they’d sell these big ol’ tall caps for five dollars. Uptown, you move so much and so fast that you’re gonna make a profit anyway. You’re only making a certain amount of profit there, though. If you came to Staten Island with that same cap, you’re gonna make ten times as much. That makes things worse when competition comes into play.
It’s fucked up when you think about it, because even though me and my friends and other crews were making money off base, things got bad in our hood, like savage. Not in their hoods, rarely in their hoods. It’s like the line in The Godfather when one of the dons says they should sell drugs only to the “dark people” because “they’re animals anyway.”
Very few people were unaffected by drugs in some way. Even if you didn’t sell or use drugs, you might have had your bike stolen by a crackhead or your crib burglarized or maybe your uncle sold your Sega Genesis. One way or another, you were caught up in the storm.
*
And, of course, with more drugs came more cops. That’s just the natural order of the drug trade.
For a long time, the police were getting at the wrong people in my hood. They were running up on the older dudes, thinking they were the kingpins who had the projects clicking. But it was us, the fifteen-and sixteen-year-old dudes, who had all the bread.
Once it became known, they sent their 21 Jump Street cops in. By that time, we were already moving on, already on our way to doing something else. We were rhyming. I was in school. I was always moving.
One thing I always had was respect for law and authority. That’s another reason why police never really fucked with me on the Island. They respected me. They knew I was jingling—just not the level I was jingling on.
They were always watching me, seeing me do this shit. I tried to keep the building clean, no bullshit goin’ on. No empty vials in the fucking halls. Swept the shit up, kept it clean all the fucking time. You got to keep your shit right. And whenever I saw the heat, I left.
I never served to any pregnant women. I helped the elderly upstairs with their groceries, their food, their clothing, whatever they needed. If they needed me, they called me from the window, I’d go and help them. If anybody needed some money, I gave them bread. That was my ritual every day. They respected me for that, I guess.
It’s a double-edged sword to be known on the block, though, because both the stickup kids and the cops know who you are. I’m sure police knew who I was, but for whatever reason they would hop out to run up on other motherfuckers, and they almost always ran right past me. Officer Delpre, he ran past me all the time. Gallo, Pistol Pete, Elvis, Hopkins, Collins, Marshall. They’d run past me a lot when they blitzed. I think that’s due to the fact that I tried to not always be on the fucking block. If I was hustling, I was in the building. I didn’t wanna always be seen. You’re there every day from noon to night. You think they don’t know who you are?
As far as bribing cops, I got approached a couple of times—I can’t say the officer’s name, but I did get approached by one—but he didn’t know how to approach me. As I got older, I realized he wanted to come to me and ask because he liked the way I moved. Like I said, as soon as I saw him, I’m gone.
Another police dude, he looked like Rocky from the movies. He used to lurk in the bushes all the time. Always be in the fucking bushes. I’m the only one out in the front of the building, and he’s in the bushes. He looking though the bushes and shit, and I don’t move. I was doing my thing, but he was in the wrong area if he wanted to find my shit. He’s always in the wrong area. He kept doing the same shit every day.
One day, he dropped a brown paper bag on the ground with nothing in there. I didn’t pick up on it until I said, “Damn, this dude wants me to drop some money in the bag.” He wanted a couple grand. That’s what he wanted, but it didn’t go down like that. ’Cause once you feed the devil, he will never go away.
*
One day when I was fifteen years old, I was enjoying a day to myself and didn’t have any drugs on me. No gun, either; I didn’t like to carry unless I was working or if I was in a vehicle. All I had were some brass knuckles I kept around for emergency brawls. I was coming back from uptown, driving through the hood, and I got caught while trying to park my car.
I remember that day clearly because I’d rented a Ford Taurus from the Africans at the cabstand around the corner. We were mobile from our early teens because there was this crew of Africans that used to rent us cars on their credit cards. I remember sideswiping a few parked cars while learning how to drive. By our mid-teens, though, we were whipping them shits all over NYC. Yeah, I took a few side-view mirrors with me once or twice, but by the time I took my road test, I was whipping that shit like a pro. Well, usually, anyway.
Now, you never drove your car into the drug zone or parked it there. It was one of our rules, because there was so much surveillance going on. You parked on the outskirts, and then you walked into your projects. It’s all just part of the certain rules and regulations you moved by.
I’m making a turn to park my shit, and the fuckin’ cop sees me and pulls me over. Now, I looked a lot younger than I should have looked behind the wheel, ’cause I thought I was the shit. I had no license. The car wasn’t in my name, and I later found out it was reported stolen, as well as being rented on a stolen credit card, and was the subject of a hit-and-run investigation. I had no idea of any of that, or that I wasn’t even supposed to be driving it because of its record.
I wasn’t dirty, either. I wasn’t carrying any drugs or guns. I didn’t have anything but my bankroll and my brass knuckles. Two fucking things I always carried was the BB: bankroll and brass knuckles.
I had on all red Polo gear, red pants, red Gucci sneakers, three gold fucking rope chains, heavy as a motherfucker, and about five thousand dollars in my pocket. I was comin’ back from uptown and chillin’ with my peoples, so I was dressed to a fuckin’ T that day.
The cop walks up to the car. I didn’t have a license, so he gets me out and searches me. Finds the brass knuckles and the five K. He puts me up against the fucking car. I’m standing there, my hands on the fucking hood. He puts everything on the hood.
“I’m going to have to take you in.”
“Okay. Lead the way.”
Soon as the cop took his eyes off me, I grabbed the money and jetted. I didn’t care about the car because it was rented from the Africans. I just took off runnin’. There was a straightaway that went all the way down to the ’jects. All I had to do was reach the buildings. If I could make it there, I would disappear like a fart in the wind.
He took off right after me. He was right on my tail, but I knew if I could make it to the projects, I could disappear on his ass. So I cut through the basketball courts. I’m tearin’ across the courts with the police right on my ass. I’m running, running, running—almost got this motherfucker beat.
I come around the corner with him right on my tail, there’s two behind me and two in front of me. I Allen Iversoned, crossed over on the two in front. In other words, I did the shaky leg on them, made them fall on the floor. You learn how to do these things playing tag as a kid, so you shake them. I faked out the cop so hard, I think he injured his knee. Later, I saw him with a scraped-up face and bloody knee.
I laughed over my shoulder at them and kept bolting. Shouldn’t have gloated so much. Some Good Samaritan stuck his damn foot out and tripped me up while I ran past him. Boop! I crash to the ground and get smothered in police. The cops were on me in a second, hitting me with their walkie-talkies and kicking me. They tried to kick my teeth out, but I was able to protect myself. They still fucked me up pretty good, though.
They took me to the precinct and booked me; I was all bloodied up. I got accused of grand larceny (basically driving a stolen vehicle); I got assault on a police officer (the pissed-off fallen cop with the bloody knee and face); all these charges are on my public arrest record. I would have gotten away completely if it hadn’t been for that Good Samaritan. I could’ve gotten away with it all if it was just no driver’s license.
Back then, getting caught driving without a license just got you a fine. It’s a whole other story now. The funny part was that when I actually went in to get my real driver’s license, I had to pay off twenty-five hundred dollars in parking tickets and still had to wait two years for my suspended license to be granted, even after passing the test and everything! All because of the tickets I got while learning to drive those African whips as a teenager.
Instead, they charged me with grand larceny, which fortunately was a misdemeanor back then. I’ve got all this shit on my fucking record to make me look more dangerous than what I really am. Lucky for me, I was a minor with no previous record. I pled out to the grand larceny charge, they dropped that bullshit assault charge, and I wound up with a weekend in the Manhattan Detention Complex, otherwise known as the Tombs, and 150 hours of community service. I had no lawyer representing me—if I had, I probably could have gotten the whole thing dismissed.
So I get out of jail and I do my community service. Soon as I come home, I walk up the street, and the African dude named Bengali who rented me the car is out there in his little silk shirt and gold chains looking all slick.
“Yo, dog, you rented me a stolen car!” I told him.
“I didn’t know, man—”
I broke his fucking jaw. I just punched him dead in his face with my brass knuckles and told him, “Man, don’t ever disrespect me like that again. Don’t you ever rent me a fucking stolen car! If you gonna rent me some shit, then rent me some shit that isn’t stolen! Now I got possession of stolen shit on my record!”
Last I heard, he wound up doing fifteen years for heroin possession, then came home and died of AIDS.
*
I witnessed a lot of great escapes from cops on those streets. There were three types of runners in the hood. What I mean by runners, I’m talking about Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis–type runners. You had the slow, galloping steady mover—that’s how I move. I’m slow to accelerate, but once I get my stride, you aren’t catching me. Then you had the semifast pace. And you got them Carl Lewis-fast, gone like the wind types. What I mean by Carl Lewis is the ones that run like lightning the moment the pistol sounds off. They got that speed that when they take off, you just forget about it, you aren’t gonna catch them, period. Then you have runners like my man Kaze, who went zero to sixty like a fuckin’ Ferrari.
Method Man had speed. Back in the day, he was a jack-in-the-fucking-box. I used to call Meth the “klutz genius” on the basketball court, because he would trip and do some shit and it would still go in the basket. Now, mind you, Method’s a tall motherfucker, about six foot three, but he was fast as fuck. He had the Carl Lewis speed, too.
I’m Batman, he’s Robin. Just because I’m small, and he’s bigger than me, that don’t mean nothing. One day we were standing in front of the building, as usual. We dealing with our usual one-two step, trying to get our money for the day, and it just was mad police flying up and down the block. It was just hot that day. We didn’t care. We didn’t believe in hot because when you’re a hustler, you don’t give a fuck because you know your customers. You had to practically have a photographic memory. You had hundreds, even thousands of different customers, and you had to recognize every single one of them. I knew every one of my customers on sight. To this day, I might recognize someone from back in the day. If you didn’t keep tabs on your clients, you were gonna get busted fast. Undercover agents would try to come up and buy shit from dudes all the time, but they’d tell ’em to get the fuck outta there.
Now, one of the rules I had—this is another reason why certain police probably respected us dudes—when it was hot, when I saw certain po, we would shut it down. We left. I would just leave. I would give them they space and let them go. This day was a different day, for some reason.
Anyway, Meth had this long deep-green Polo coat. Long one, down to his knees. We used to rock real long trench coats back in the day.
One day we in front of the building. It was crowded out front. Dudes were hustling, fiends were running around, and Lounger Lo, the building’s practical joker, was there as well.
Something you should know about Lounger Lo, aka Lounge. First, he’s Cappadonna’s brother. Second, this dude was the hands-down slang king motherfucker of Staten Island, and made up a lot of the terms the Wu kicked. Lounger had slang for every fucking thing under the sun, he was a walking slang dictionary. If you heard him talk, unless you were from Park Hill, you wouldn’t understand a word he said because he speaks in all slang.
I rep him because I knew where he came from: Jelly, or jell-t, means to move in a sporadic motion; darts, that means rhymin’ with precision; and bungee means we’re about to get up outta here, we’re about to bungee out of here. Politicking means talking to someone else. All that is Lounger, that’s Cappa and Lounger and their family’s shit. Cappa’s notorious with slang, too, but that shit really comes from his brother.
The “Ooh” Building and all that, that’s also Lounger. They called it the Ooh Building because dudes were coming out of there like, “Ooh,” or lit the fuck up. That’s the Ooh Building. Yeah, another one. Ooh, Ooh.
You just had to sit down and listen to him talk. You’d start saying shit like, “I’m at the store. I’m about to jell-t. I’m a bungee over here and bing. Pop a little. Yeah. We gonna do that.” Ninety-nine percent of the slang that came out of New York City came from that dude’s mouth. Most people don’t even fucking know it. And he’s never stopped, either, he just keeps coming up with new words and new terminology every day.
Anyway, Lounger would yell off the roof, “The cops is coming, the cops is coming,” and the cops wouldn’t be coming. He’d cry wolf all the time. We used to hate him for that.
But that day, for some reason, he was doing the opposite. In other words, he’d say the cops coming, the cops ain’t coming. Then when he ain’t saying nothing, the cops’re fucking coming. Fucking asshole.
Anyway, this was how connected me and Meth were. We were so in tune with each other back then that he could read my thoughts from across the street. I’m serious. All I had to do was just look at him, and he could tell by the look on my face what to do.
So we in front of the building, and I used to get these, to this day I still get these little chills, like a whoosh! I get like a whoosh inside of me. I can’t tell you what it is. It’s almost like Spidey-sense. It’s like a spiritual feeling when trouble’s coming.
All I knew was that things were happening. Weird shit was going on. So I stepped off the curb in front of the building. Something was just telling me to go. Soon as I’m stepping off the curb, both the cops and the TNT, the Tactical Narcotics Task Force, are pulling up. They only show up when an undercover agent makes a buy with marked money. And they brought the whole team out that day.
Meth is dirty as a motherfucker. I turn around and look at him and give him the eyeball. I didn’t even have to say a word. Carl Lewis in motion. He was gone. He didn’t even waste time looking around, he just knew to book ’cause I gave him the eye. The moment I turned around and looked at him, he did the Darkman. You just saw his fucking green coat go flapping into the fucking building.
By the time he got inside, the police were coming through the back and in the front. He made it past these motherfuckers and made it up in the staircase and got rid of the shit and came out the side of the building.
He was like, “Woo!” He was like, “Yo, yo, dawg, I read your mind!”
I just grinned and said, “I know you did, man. I know you did.”
*
The Africans renting us whips helped us out a lot. We were mobile now. We could get uptown easier to cop those drugs. We could get around the city more just in general. Now we were meeting dudes in different hoods and just conquering land. Every weekend we’d be out and about. The block would be a ghost town. This shit was like a real nine-to-five for hustlers. On the weekend, we didn’t really want to hear about junkies and all that shit. Of course, whoever stayed to hustle on the block on Saturdays and Sundays was gonna get all that paper. Because we were all off the clock out trying to bag numbers and ride around and smoke weed, the crackheads would be lining up to see whoever was out there in our place.
During all this time, running back and forth uptown and going to different projects to drop packages, I still managed to keep going to school. I went to McKee Vocational High School. To attend I passed an entrance exam, like an aptitude test or whatever. It was a specialized school, and I did more than well enough to get in.
As I got older and started hustling more, I still stayed in school. I realized I didn’t have to be in the streets to get money. I was giving dudes packages, and they could have my money moving while I was in class. I’d get up at eight in the morning and put those packages in the street. By three o’clock, when I’m home from school, they were finished. So I’d just collect my money after school and put more packs out.
Then it was upstairs to do homework and be back either late that night or early in the morning on my way to school to collect my funds and replenish the packs. Same routine, day in and day out. I’d let the hard heads who just wanted to be home and uneducated get rid of those packages for me while I was in school. I knew those dudes weren’t ever gonna be shit anyway, because they just wanted to lay up and sell drugs all day. Never go to school, never leave the block. They were happy just doing what they were doing.
We’d all hustle on the block, but I never liked being on the block all the fucking time. I didn’t want to be known like that, by the cops and the nosy neighbors and snitches, especially since I was doing mad dirt. Anyway, aside from school, I didn’t want to be out in front of the Hill all day. Not when there was so much of the city to explore.
On weekends, we’d go uptown to cop more, or we’d drive out to Brooklyn to the weed gates and cop some good greenery. We’d go to an area of Bedford-Stuyvesant called Hancock. The whole block would be lit up with Rastafarians and Jamaicans. Or we’d go uptown to Edgecombe Avenue and get a chicken bag, which was like you’d pay twenty dollars, and get fifty to sixty dollars’ worth of weed. It was so competitive up there that the dealers had to sell that much product for cheap to make sure their customers came to them. It was so damn much weed over what you’d usually get, and you could bring that back to the Island, break it down, and flip it, too. We made good money for a couple of train rides. There were all types of ways to come up, and we tried damn near every last one of them.