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  “You know for what . . . I’m sayin’. Remember what we talked about this week?”

  “Oh you mean . . .”

  “Yeah, kid, that’s what I mean,” Latiefe quickly interrupted. “It’s on. A’ight? We’re all going out to breakfast like big time Mafioso.”

  “A’ight, bet,” I said. “I’ll be there, no diggidy. Peace.”

  Before Latiefe hung up, he sternly warned me to get dressed and not to go back to sleep.

  At ten o’clock we were to discuss how we were going to build an empire of illegal activities that was gonna get us paid during the summer of ninety-one. I was very tired. I knew that the meeting was important, but the bed was calling my name. I rolled back into bed, pulled the sheet over my head, and before I knew it, I was knocked out—sound asleep.

  When I finally did wake up, I realized that it was five minutes to ten. I couldn’t believe it. I lost total control as I scrambled to get up and out of the house. I darted to the bathroom, brushed my teeth, hopped in and out of the shower, raced back to my room, and threw on some clothes. I was out the door.

  By the time I’d finally made it out the house it was about ten fifteen. I jetted to Tee’s grandmother’s crib. Most of the crew members were already there and waiting. Donnie, Erik, Randy, Tee, Dwight, Kwame, and J.P. were all there. Earl and Wiggie were also there. Although they were originally from 229th Street, you might as well have considered them as part of Fourth Crew. See, Earl lived in the same house as Dwight and Latiefe because he was the father of Latiefe’s aunt’s baby. Latiefe’s aunt was Audrey. They all lived with Tee’s grandmother. Confusing, right? Even I sometimes got confused trying to explain all of the relationships of the inhabitants of that house. But to make it simple, Earl and Wiggie were blood brothers and they chilled with us all of the time, so basically they were down with us.

  “Holz, what took you so long?” Latiefe asked. “Even Randy was ready before you.”

  “Yo, I fell back asleep, “ I said, smiling. “But I’m here, so what’s the deal, fella?”

  Randy suggested that we go to IHOP for breakfast. So we all jumped into cabs and headed for the IHOP on Hillside Avenue in Jamaica, Queens. Once we got there we all sat down and waited to order. Although no one had given us permission, we pushed three tables together so that we could all eat at the same spot.

  Everyone ordered food except for Earl and Wiggie. They held some superstitious theory that eating breakfast caused them to have bad luck, whatever that meant. But to hell with that, because the rest of us weren’t holding back, the food was good, and it was filling.

  “Yo, y’all, we didn’t come here to eat,” Latiefe said after sipping his orange juice. “We came here to discuss this narcotics thing.” All eyes were on Latiefe, who no one had seen since we had come back from the Apollo earlier in the week.

  “I’ve been here and there the past couple of days, trying to get everything situated and set up,” he continued. “I’ve been talking to some people, trying to figure out just how we’re gonna do this. And I got it figured out, so check it. This is how we’re gonna do this . . .

  “Now Donnie, you’re the only one of us that’s out there hustling already. You ain’t big time yet. I mean you’re selling drugs hand to hand for that cat Montana. And you know Montana is paid, but you, you’re making out a’ight, enough loot to buy you some new clothes or whateva, but come on, tell me, don’t you want that big loot? That 850 BMW loot? Big time, baby, that’s what I’m talking about! Big time! We don’t have time for that hand to hand nickel and dime watch out for Five-O nonsense.

  “Montana, Fat Cat, Supreme, all of those big time hustlers are already out there and established with a firm grip on their spots. They’re paid and they plan to keep getting paid. They have spots sewn up and those niggas don’t want no extra competition. It took them too long to get to the top and they plan on staying there. But you know what? They never really had to worry about competition until now. And no, before y’all even ask, I ain’t talking ’bout us trying to knock one of them off ’cause that drug war slash turf war violence ain’t necessary. We can save that for the movies. And even if we did start a war, there are mad heads waiting in line ready to take their places, so if we started a drug war, we would be fighting that war forever.”

  “So then, Tee, how are we gonna get out there?” Randy asked. “We can’t just start off boom! Straight to the top. Everybody in the drug business started off low level like Donnie, going hand to hand on the street, and then they worked their way up until they controlled blocks and became kingpins.” All eyes shifted from Randy back to Latiefe.

  “Randy and everybody else, listen. Montana, Supreme, Fat Cat, and all them niggas are paying their workers twenty dollars for every one hundred dollars worth of drugs that they sell. See, money goes to money. Hand to hand kids don’t understand economics, and that’s why Montana is so paid. Now listen, that’s what we have to take advantage of. We have to play with the economics.

  “See, we go buy some weed, coke, heroin, or whateva, and bag it ourselves. Then we give it to those niggas going hand to hand on the corner. We could hit all of Merrick Boulevard, all of Laurelton, all of Far Rockaway, all of Montana’s territory. See, we’ll have Montana’s workers working for us on the low.”

  “Latiefe, you know what?” I butted in disrespectfully. “We should go into the candy store, play Lotto, and hope that tomorrow we’ll be millionaires, ’cause we probably have a better chance of hitting Lotto than we have of doing what you’re sayin’. I mean, I don’t know, but your plan sounds too easy, and things just don’t click like that on the street.”

  Tee barked and raised his hand as if he was gonna smack me. He snapped back at me.

  “Holz, what the . . . Yo, you think I’m stupid or what!? I know what I’m doing! Now let me finish. Damn! A’ight, see now, if we pay Montana’s workers forty dollars for every one hundred, they’ll sell for us on the low. I’m telling y’all they’ll do it for that kind of money! Money talks and everything else walks. I guarantee you that they’ll pump for us. We’ll just tell them to keep pushing Montana’s garbage for him and at the same time they’ll be knocking off our work. The only thing is that they would have to keep it on the low. Donnie, what do you think?”

  Donnie was deliberately slow to respond as he thought about the question. He looked toward the ceiling, bit a piece of his bacon, and then replied.

  “It could work, but peep this. You own a business and you’re grossing a hundred thousand a week consistently. Then for no reason at all you consistently start grossing twenty thousand a week, yet your store has the same number of customers coming in as you did before your drop in sales and there’s no shortage of inventory. How do you explain that? And if you’re the owner of that business what do you do?” Tee paused before answering.

  “Yeah I see where you’re coming from,” Tee said. “But, yo, life ain’t perfect and there’s drawbacks to everything. Doctors work bad hours, priests can’t have sex, and we just have to deal with Montana making less dough. But hey, everybody knows that the greater the risk, the bigger the return on your investment. Y’all feel me on this?”

  We all agreed as we started to see where Tee was coming from with his John Gotti-like mastermind plan.

  “Now, Donnie, you gots to get like twenty workers who you know that would do this for us and wouldn’t open their mouths and rat us out. ’Cause I’m sayin’, a kid could easily say, ‘Yeah I’ll do it,’ and front like he’s down with us, then out of hopes of getting promoted to lieutenant, go back and tell how we’re scheming. So when you approach them cats you gotta come at them with mad game and sell this idea like it’s surefire. In your pitch make sure you remind them how Montana has been jerking them for all of this time and how they could literally double their earnings overnight! And oh yeah, make sure you remind them of what they could do with all of the extra loot that they’ve long deserved to make.”

  “I see where you’re coming from,” Donnie resp
onded. “Don’t worry, kid. I got game, no doubt about that. If I can get people to try crack for the first time with them fully knowing how addictive it is, then you know that I got game. ’Cause I’m yo pushaaaa.”

  After a brief second of laughter from the crew, Donnie continued.

  “But for real, though, I know mad dealers, myself included, that Montana has been jerking. Sometimes he’ll give us five dollars for every hundred, you know what I’m sayin’? So niggas be like what the hell am I risking going to jail and getting shot up and all of that for got damn McDonald’s and Burger King type wages? So, Tee, all we gots to do is get the work. Knocking it off ain’t gonna be a problem. We know the risks, so what’s up? Whatcha waaant, nigga?”

  “Ahhh! We gon’ get paid!” we all happily said in unison as we clasped each other’s hands.

  “Hold up. Hold up,” Latiefe said. “Don’t get too excited yet. We ain’t finish mapping this thing out. Now my man, Gangsta, runs a little something in Far Rockaway. He promised me from an old solid that he would give us a spot out there in the projects. So all we have to do if find some boyz to go out there for us and pump the work.”

  Earl informed us that his cousin had spots uptown and in Brooklyn, spots that he would be willing to give to us for a certain kickback of whatever we made. We all agreed that we would hit Brooklyn, but we weren’t going to mess with uptown because we unanimously felt that the niggas out there were just too ruthless.

  I went on to pessimistically tell everyone that it wasn’t going to be as easy to come out like we were planning on doing. Besides the fact that we would be stepping on toes, risking our own lives, and risking the lives of those who we would recruit to work for us, but we also had to start from square one with absolutely no cash. We needed loot and a lot of it to kick off the operation. Purchasing kilos wasn’t like purchasing Cheerios. Kilos cost big dough and we had no money whatsoever.

  Montana and the rest of the big time hustlers and players all had crazy cash coming in, so they, with one phone call, could go out and buy weight, aka large amounts of drugs, like it was nothing. Our crew didn’t have any money, nor did we have any money coming to us. It would be tough for us to get started.

  Dwight suggested that we only deal with crack and marijuana. The true heart of the crack era had reached its peak probably during the summer of ’87, but there was still a faithful enough remnant of crackheads to make us rich. Marijuana seemed to be making a resurgence. Every time I turned around I heard someone talking about smoking weed or Phillies, or puffing on Ls. The latest term that I’d been hearing to describe the use of marijuana was the saying “smoking trees.” I even saw brothas walking around with pictures of marijuana plants on their T-shirts. We couldn’t have passed up that kind of free promotional marketing. We just had to execute a plan to profit from it.

  Dwight was on point with his suggestion. He went on to say that, on the streets of Queens, marijuana and crack sold the fastest, so that’s what he suggested that we concentrate on. See, if we were dealing in Washington Heights, a section of Manhattan known as Spanish Harlem, the drug of choice would be heroin, aka heron, and we would have to concentrate on pushing that. Just your classic case of what you learn in Economics 101 about supply and demand.

  Dwight added that if we were planning to have a spot in Far Rockaway, a spot in Brooklyn, and heads working for us all over Montana’s territory, which consisted of Laurelton, Rosedale, Cambria Heights, and Hollis, then we would need at least four pounds of weed and twenty eight balls of cocaine. We all figured that we could get the four pounds of marijuana for about seventy-five hundred dollars and the twenty eight balls of cocaine for about twenty-five hundred. In all, we estimated that ten thousand dollars would be a good amount of money to get us started.

  See, one pound of weed went for about two grand. But we’d get back three grand in return, or a 50 percent return on our investment. One eight ball of coke could be cooked up into crack rocks and sold on the street, netting us somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred dollars on a two hundred dollar investment—a 150 percent return on our money. It didn’t take a Wall Street genius to figure out that if you could make those kinds of flips with cash within a week’s time and pay no taxes, that it wouldn’t be long before you’d have a house on the white sand beaches of St. Thomas if you wanted it.

  The thing with the drug trade, just like with any investment, was the more money you played with, the more you stood to make. Or the higher your risks, the greater potential of your returns. Like if all went well with our plans, we stood the chance of making close to a 200 percent return on a ten thousand dollar investment. Just imagine if we made that kind of return on a one hundred thousand dollar investment. And see, that was our plan. But we’d first have to start small. In this biz you could be large overnight. If we played our cards right, before we knew it, we could have one hundred grand to play with.

  Erik, who had been quiet all along, came up with the idea of us dealing with “weight out of state.” That meant selling pounds of weed and ounces and kilos of coke—very large volumes of drugs. His plan was that we could be wholesale suppliers to drug dealers in states like Virginia. Selling weight out of state was quickly becoming a growing trend. What it did was cut out the retail portion of the drug business. We would deal strictly on a wholesale scale with drug kingpins from other regions.

  Like I mentioned earlier, dealing with large quantities definitely meant larger profits. And for that reason, selling weight out of state was becoming commonplace amongst New York drug criminals. Many dealers paid females like five or six hundred dollars to get on a bus, ride to DC or wherever on the East Coast with drugs in their suitcase. They would have them make a drop, get the cash, and head back north to New York on I-95 with a pocket full of cash and no hassles from state troopers.

  I-95 was a drug dealer’s and gun runner’s highway to riches simply because state troopers didn’t pull over buses and check each and every suitcase and every carry-on piece of baggage. Some drug dealers were bold enough to drive out of state with drugs in their car. But I personally wouldn’t have done that because it would have been like pressing your luck. With a commercial bus, the only real risk was not getting paid or getting robbed when you got to your destination and attempted to make the drop. I guess it was that fear of getting jerked around that led drug dealers to drive armed in a regular car to close deals themselves.

  Erik’s idea was a good idea considering Reggie already knew some heads down in Norfolk, Hampton, and Virginia Beach that were in the drug game. Even the crew, although we didn’t live in Virginia like Reggie, knew people who had relocated from Queens to Virginia for the sole purpose of selling dope.

  Latiefe agreed that dealing with weight was a good idea. But our main focus, he said, would be to come up with the ten thousand in order to get things rolling in New York. He predicted that after we started, and if things went well, it would be about a month or two before we would be ready to sell weight out of state.

  So that was it. Fourth Crew was going to be one big conglomerate of dope pushers, or better yet, one big drug kingpin. We had to set the operation off fast, but at the same time slow enough so as not to make any mistakes. We, as a crew, had to keep everything on the low and amongst ourselves. Whoever worked for us would have to be kept in strict check. If necessary we would have to literally control their lives. We couldn’t, for the sake of what we were trying to achieve as a conglomerate, have workers coming up short with our money. And we couldn’t have them opening their mouths and singing about our cutthroat way of doing business.

  We kept this vital business meeting going. We moved on to what I call the cash flow segment of the meeting where basically we discussed how we planned to stay in the black. The plan was, after paying our workers, we would throw all of the profits back into a pot. That way our business could flourish and grow. If we were to consistently do that, and if things went according to plan, we would be able to purchase kilos with ease.

&n
bsp; Latiefe was sure to remind us that although we would be making what would seem like a lot of money, that in actuality it would take a little time before we really started flipping loot and seeing the Pablo Escobar type dough.

  “If we do things right,” Latiefe informed us, “we’ll be living fat before we know it. One thing we have to do is promise to live by our mission statement which is, ‘FOURTH CREW BEFORE CASH.’ Our mission is to be ‘THE MOST DOMINANT DRUG HUSTLERS IN THE NORTHEAST.’ Yo, we’re in this together, so that means that no one or no thing is bigger than the crew! A’ight?”

  “No doubt,” we all agreed in unison.

  “All of this talk sounds good,” Randy said. “Matter of fact, we sound like we’re some Fortune Five Hundred executives and all that. But how in the world are we going to get ten grand to set this off? How!? Big executives, tell me where do we get the start up capital from?” Latiefe attempted to put Randy at ease.

  “OK, OK, see, me and the Godfather already discussed that. And the most logical conclusion that we came to was the fact that we gots to become strictly ruthless, all out illegal criminals to get the money we need in order to pass go. This is the deal. We’re taking anything and everything that we want, from whoever we want, when we want! Anything valuable that we see we’re taking it, housin’ it, taxing it, whateva! We ain’t stopping until we get the ten grand that we need.” Then with the most satanic look in his eyes Latiefe continued. “We’ll be robbing cats, and if we have to, we’ll be murdering cats!” I was amazed at the conviction with which Latiefe spoke.

  “We have to be slick and we have to be smart,” Latiefe advised us. “If we do that, we have nothing to worry about. We’re all in this together! No rats! If one of us gets caught and goes down that doesn’t take us all down!”

  Latiefe paused and slowly looked everyone in the eyes.

  “I don’t think any of y’all is soft,” he said. “But if any of y’all are soft, and y’all feel yourselves starting to get shook, tell me now.”