IT WAS TIME TO GET OUT THE PARK AND OUT THIS nickel-and-dime hustle. We had to get our own corner. It meant loading up. The pistols we were packing weren’t going to cut it if we were really going to start pushing coke on a major level. We had to fend off the obvious threats from rivals. Having a brick in Liberty City was like having the only canteen of water in a crowded desert.
The brick made you a target. Back then, dope boys rode around in Chevys with AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles. They were living the same life as those Cuban and Colombian cats in the early eighties. If a rival dope boy caught you without your fire, that was on you. Miami’s streets exceeded the mayhem in John Wayne’s wildest westerns. From Opa-locka to Ghouls and all hoods in between, dope boys were setting the streets ablaze.
As dope crews battled over turf in Miami, the streets remained stained in blood. The Beans was prime real estate. That’s where the smokers grazed. The rest of Miami went on with their day-to-day amid the sunshine while my corner of the city died a slow, crack-induced death. “I got that good green brown! Boulders, boulders!”
Dealers sought customers around the clock. If a smoker overdosed, word spread like wildfire. That dope hole had the good stuff. Smokers would rush that dope hole like a moth to the bulb. We held Liberty City’s street corners hostage.
Folks drove into the Beans from the suburbs, Fort Lauderdale, and other parts of the county just to get high. Liberty City offered one-stop shopping for all vices. If a customer wanted a blow job while he snorted some lines, we had that. Everything was for sale. Sadly, though I didn’t know this then, we were also selling our humanity. Pushers didn’t discriminate on who could buy nickel rocks. Pregnant women. Grandmothers. Schoolkids. If customers had the money, they could suck their life away on a crack pipe.
Staking out a corner for my crew didn’t prove difficult. I was raised in the Beans. Furthermore, I was still tight with Darryl and O’Sean, who were now moving major weight. At first there wasn’t much beefing going on because everyone respected the rival dope boy’s hole.
The Haitians had fought to gain their street credibility and did. When they first moved to the area in Liberty City known as Little Haiti during the late 1970s, we gave them hell. We bought into the hype mainstream American media was selling, like blaming them for bringing AIDS to America, and found ourselves fighting with the Zoes. Later I would learn that Haitians were the first black folks in our part of the globe to gain independence from white folks. They kicked the French out. No wonder the world is still giving them a hard time. A nigga that comes out on top is a hard pill to swallow for most folks. However, the global support Haiti received after the recent earthquake shows that the powers that be may finally be making reparations for the bad hand dealt to that country.
Colonizers have always pitted colored folks against each other. It’s called divide and conquer. The media reports made us believe that the newly arriving Haitians had diseases and worshipped Satan. African-Americans bought into the lies, and soon enough we were battling with Haitians like pit bulls in a dog pound. Haitian kids were afraid to say they were from Haiti. They were getting jumped and beaten all throughout Liberty City. It was safer for Haitians to say they were from Jamaica or the Bahamas. So they formed a crew called the Zoe Pound to protect themselves from attacks from other black folks. Zoe in Creole means “bone.” And those dudes were hard as bones. When a Haitian kid was being picked on, the Pound would seek out the culprit and retaliate. It’s like I said: niggas don’t like niggas.
That crew was and still is one of the coldest crews in Miami-Dade. Soon enough it became the season of the Zoes in Miami. They pushed the powder out of a dope hole called the White House. Some of the realest cats I know are Haitian. Visitors to Little Haiti can’t peruse certain spots without a pass from the Pound. They did their thing over there while we did ours in the Beans. Black Zoe was at the helm. He was taken aback that the dope boys sometimes went to Santana Red for their dope instead of him when Zoe was short on supply.
“We are all African brothers,” he used to say.
I know that pitch sounds crazy, but that was the crazy world I existed in. It was all about moving the coke. Everyone was desperate for money.
My crew set up shop and began serving smokers. At first no one beefed because every hustler was getting paid. This conglomerate had codes of conduct. Customers couldn’t talk in the dope hole. Get your rocks and keep moving. The smokers knew which drug they wanted that day and sought it out, so there was minimum drama on their part. In the downtime, dope boys passed time playing craps. It was all gravy.
Tubbs cruised by now and again to see what was hot on the block. He was always scheming. He extorted his fair share of dope boys in his time. It’s probably how he paid for his kids’ college education.
My crew toiled day in and day out. We were making anywhere from $4,000 to $5,000 a night. It didn’t come close to what Hollywood was making, but it felt good nonetheless. The more we stacked, the harder we hustled. That’s the thing about coke money. I wanted more of it because it was coming in so easy. I also spent it as fast as I made it.
We stayed fresh. Ironically, a dope boy spends so much time trying to make more money that he doesn’t make time to enjoy spending it. All the while I stacked my bread, others were waiting to take it from me. The same way we were preying on the weak, serving them their street medicine, someone was eager to prey on us.
In the criminal world, some prey on fellow criminals. Every industry has its share of opportunists.
Enter the jack boys.