Split decision, p.15
Split Decision, page 15
LWOP—life without parole—means you’re not coming home. Ever.
LWOP is another form of death. A slower form of death. Whatever digits are in your sentence—twenty-five years, thirty-five years, forty-five years—it doesn’t matter. With LWOP at the end, there’s a body bag waiting on you. You’re dying behind that wall.
My head’s reeling: I just lost the trial and I’m waiting in the holding cell as the jury is out redeliberating. They come back two hours later. The officers lead me back in to hear the decision. The courtroom is packed, but you can hear a pin drop. As the jury walks in, I’m thinking:
These twelve people have your life in their hands. You’ve been given twenty-five to life. At a minimum. Now they’re about to decide if you’re going to die in prison.
The judge asked, “Have you reached a verdict?”
My heart is pounding like a twelve-inch woofer.
The foreman announced that the vote was 7–5. I didn’t understand what any of it meant. My attorney explained it was 7–5 against applying the special circumstances to my case. He said that unlike the trial verdict, it didn’t have to be unanimous.
Tears streamed down my cheeks and I bowed my head, praying. Because now at least there’s a chance—however remote—of me coming before a parole board. Someday. I didn’t want to die in jail.
They led me back to the holding cell, and my attorney came to see me ten minutes later. He blew my mind by telling me that the trial wasn’t over.
“Here’s what’s going on. The judge has me and the DA in chambers right now—the DA wants to refile on the special circumstances.”
“Wait, I thought the jury deliberated? I thought we got a verdict.”
He explained that there was an option for the DA to refile, basically reshuffle his cards, present new evidence—maybe bring forward the guys who did the actual robbery to make new allegations about me, in open court, in front of the jury. And any outcome was possible. All the DA would need to do is persuade two of those jurors to switch their votes to give me LWOP.
I waited in that holding cell while they went back and forth with the negotiations. My attorney came back and asked me, “Would you be willing to take another ten?”
“Another ten years?”
“Yes, ten years on top of the twenty-five to life.”
In other words, if I accept those added ten years, the LWOP goes away. But also, if I take the deal, there’s no appealing it later on. My back was totally against the wall. We didn’t have much time to decide.
“It’s now or never,” he says. “What do you want me to tell them?”
“Man, do whatever you got to do.”
The victim’s family needed to agree to the deal that the DA was offering. I waited while they talked it over privately. My attorney came back to the holding cell one last time.
“The family said they don’t want to go through this anymore. They agree to the ten on top of the twenty-five.”
“So I’ll get thirty-five to life?”
“Thirty-five to life.”
“Take the deal,” I told him. “All I ask is that I have a chance to address the family in court.”
They led me back inside and I got on the stand.
“I just want to let you know, I’m sorry. I take full responsibility. I never meant for this to happen.” I looked directly at the victim’s parents. “Your son didn’t deserve to die this way, and you don’t deserve to go through all this pain. Nothing I say is going to bring back your son. But I am sorry—I am sorry for the pain I’ve caused you.”
The judge pronounced the sentence, and those words kept echoing in my head:
Thirty-five years to life.
His gavel came down and the court officers led me back to the holding cell.
As I walked out of the courtroom, my head was spinning with confusion, shock, regret.
I honestly never expected to see the free world again.
ICE
When I was in the game, I had this vision of myself running down a road—this race full of other players and hustlers—and yelling at everybody to my left and right:
“You’re not gonna win! Yo, I’m the baddest! I’m Crazy Tray!”
But when I got to what I thought was the finish line, at the end of that hustling road, there was no winning—there was nothing but a steep cliff. And all the dudes who were hustling with me, one by one they kept falling off that cliff.
I managed to stop just in time—I put the brakes on, just before I went over the edge.
Now I have a different vision. I see myself as the guy who’s spun around, running back up that road, against the traffic, yelling at people, but this time I’m warning them, telling them the truth about the game.
“Ain’t nothin’ up there but a cliff! Turn the fuck around!”
Mostly I just get smirks and slick glances. And dudes keep on running.
I understand them. I’ve been them.
Some cats just aren’t ready to accept the truth.
But everyone finds out eventually.
Spike found out in his own way, in his own time: at the end of that road, there’s nothing but a cliff.
CHAPTER 9 BOWELS OF THE DEVIL
Bowels of the devil
Let me tell you what that sucker eats
Its stomach’s filled with my homeboys
Guts made out of steel and concrete
—ICE, “BOWELS OF THE DEVIL”
SPIKE
For the first six years of my life sentence, I was in Calipatria State Prison, a Level IV facility in the Imperial Valley. At the time, it was the most violent prison in California—hands down.
For me, Calipatria personified the hellish reality of being locked up.
You had some of the coldest and craziest guys from the streets of L.A., the type of guys you never want to see in a dark alley, and you’re side by side with them every single fucking day. In that Imperial Valley, under the desert sun, it’s literally an inferno. It can get up to 120 degrees. Calipatria was the first prison in the state with an electrified fence, so any dude even thinking about escape knows he’ll get fried to death trying.
As in most Level IV prisons, there’s constant racial politics. Guys are always beefing, getting stabbed. And the police are constantly getting attacked, too.
That’s what gave Calipatria that reputation for being so dangerous. There was this notorious incident that happened while I was there in March 1995. A group of East Coast Crips who were lifers—dudes who felt they had nothing to lose—banded together and ran up in the program office on the A yard. They stabbed a sergeant, injured all these officers—captains, lieutenants, every officer they could find. It was like a hostile takeover. Eight cops got badly hurt.
For security reasons, the police have no handguns on the yard. The only guns are the M14s at the top of the tower. Reinforcements came rushing in from every yard in riot gear and finally got control of the situation, and Calipatria went immediately on lockdown.
And then the retribution came. Anybody on any yard who was affiliated with the East Coast Crips, even dudes who had nothing to do with the incident, all got rolled up in the middle of the night. It was two in the morning, you heard all this shouting on the tiers, and they grabbed thirty-six dudes and put them on a bus to Corcoran in nothing but their underwear. When they arrived at Corcoran, the cops were waiting with their welcome wagon. All of these dudes got the dog shit beat out of them, Rodney King style. Cops were cracking ribs, grabbing dudes by their balls, smashing their faces into the pavement. There ended up being a major investigation, and a bunch of the cops at Corcoran lost their jobs behind that shit.
So that was my new reality. That was my new day-to-day. For those first few years in Calipatria, I just had my head down. I didn’t contact nobody. Besides my mom, I didn’t call my family, didn’t call Ice or Trome or any of my other friends.
The first thing I needed to do was get my mind right. I had to adapt myself to the cutthroat mentality. I had to condition myself to living that Level IV lifestyle. In a place like Calipatria, it’s dog-eat-dog. You get respect or you take respect. The yard is always on the verge of violence. You can’t trust nobody in there.
During rec time, I became a monster on that weight pile. Channeled my focus and aggression into getting stronger. It was back to what Jamo had taught me years before at Soledad. That iron pile kept me sane. It keeps a lot of guys sane. In a place like that you can lose your mind in four or five months—never mind five years. Twenty-five years. Thirty-five years…
The Sureños had the largest and most unified organization, but there were strong factions of Crips and Bloods from various sets. Again, nobody gives a fuck if you were a player out in the streets. There are no distinctions between an affiliate and an active gang member. We had a couple of Harlem OGs on my yard. Any serious internal issues being made about the Harlem car, I was usually part of the decision making.
Every day, you’re trying to go about your routine, productively, while in the back of your mind, you’re also prepared to go to war. If it’s a racial situation, if the Sureños or the whiteboys have a problem with us Blacks, you don’t stop to ask questions; you’ve got to immediately fight alongside your race.
A racial situation might happen at eight in the morning and the Sureños’ shot-caller would say: “Tonight, mandatory, everybody come to the yard. We takin’ off on the Blacks.” They make sure every last motherfucker that’s Hispanic is on the yard with their knives on them and their boots tied. Or the Blacks can do the same thing. Every motherfucker has to fall in line, or he can expect to get DP’ed by his own people.
The main reason I wasn’t in touch with anyone—for years—was because I had such a “Buck Rogers” number, I still hadn’t wrapped my head around it. In the street, when you catch a long-ass sentence, we call it a “Buck Rogers” bid. It’s like, “Damn, motherfucker, by the time you come home, they’ll have flying cars and shit!”
We used to joke about it when I was out in the free world, but inside Calipatria—shit, there wasn’t nothing funny about it.
For a long time, I just needed to be alone.
Finally, after more than three years, I decided to call one of the numbers I had for Ice’s office, not sure who was going to be there.
Trome answered. “Spike!” he shouts. “Everybody wondered what happened to you!”
I brought him up to speed. “Yeah, man, I got convicted at trial. At first the DA wanted to give me the death penalty. Beat that, but we had a second trial with special circumstances—they was trying to give me LWOP. They gave me twenty-five to life plus I had to take a deal for ten more years.” I remember telling him, “I don’t know how the fuck I’m supposed to do thirty-five to life, Trome. You know I ain’t no weak-ass motherfucker! I ain’t gonna take my own life or nothin’ silly like that—but how the fuck am I supposed to do thirty-five to life?”
I wanted to talk to Ice that day, but he wasn’t around. Trome gave me a few windows to call back.
At that time, Ice was still talking to guys calling from inside. Later on, Ice changed the policy—only certain designated people would answer the phone. Mostly Al P. or Sean E. Sean or sometimes my cousin Rich would be at that number. Then they would pass your message on to Ice. Just to provide a buffer for him.
I’m calling from a wall phone at prison, and the calls go through the tower—meaning, the police listen to everything you say—so we’ve got to be careful. Especially talking directly to Ice, since he’s the backbone of our whole organization.
Finally, I reach Ice in his recording studio, and I can hear the pain in his voice.
“Man, we heard what happened, Spike,” he said. “Where you at now?”
“I’m at Calipatria State Prison, Imperial Valley, right near the Arizona border.” I told him about my original sentence, plus ten more years. “Thirty-five to life. Like I was telling Trome, I don’t know how I’m supposed to do this kind of time.”
“Man, you should have called me,” Ice says. “Maybe I could have helped. Why didn’t you reach out?”
“Listen, I didn’t have nobody come to the trial, I just faced that shit solo, the way a motherfucker is supposed to face it. I stayed down, man. I didn’t want nobody there—my mom, my sisters, nobody. I damn sure wasn’t going to call you, because I know you’re out there doing your thing. Your career is going great. And you know me, man, I ain’t never gonna bring no heat on you. I wasn’t gonna call your phones and bring shit on you that has nothing to do with you. If the cops asked me anything about you, I said, ‘I don’t know no Ice-T! Go fuck yourself!’ ”
He didn’t know the whole story of how I was facing the death penalty, but I told him. He kept saying he wanted to help, but besides sending a little money for my canteen, what could he do? There was nothing he could do. The only person who could help was me.
I could hear it in Ice’s voice—the hurt. I was telling him the details about my case and my sentence, but what could Ice say? He was just listening. All he could do was listen.
Because, really, what can you say to a guy doing thirty-five to life?
ICE
Honestly, when a guy goes to prison on a life sentence, to a lot of people it’s like he died. That’s when you find out who’s really got your back. A lot of people you thought were your homies leave you for dead. Pretty soon, they forget you even existed.
Think about it for a minute. How many people do you see on a regular basis that would notice if you simply disappeared? If you went completely off the grid? Of course, your family would be affected. But if it’s a friend and someone you hang out with socially and one day you vanish, they might not even notice for a long time. And when they do—well, for a lot of people, “out of sight, out of mind.” When these guys get Buck Rogers numbers, bids of twenty-five to life, thirty-five to life, LWOP, they technically are out of your life—because you’ve got to keep doing your thing. You’re out there grinding, making moves, progressing, having your own ups and downs. Meanwhile, they’re stuck. It’s like they’re frozen in time.
Hearing from Spike behind the wall after so many years, to me that was the starkest realization of the fact that we were two very similar guys who’d been on the same path, going in the same direction, and now our trajectories had split so radically.
We’re not in different parts of Southern California—we’re in different fucking universes.
Spike’s calling me from that phone on the wall in a Level IV prison and I can hear it in his voice: he’s strictly in survival mode. Every day inside he’s making life-or-death decisions. Even the littlest shit in prison can be a mandatory fight to maintain respect. He’s holding his own, no doubt, but he’s stuck in the bowels of the devil.
And my universe? Shit, when I got that call from that penitentiary in the Imperial Valley, I was in my new house up in the Hollywood Hills. The place was huge—about ten thousand square feet, surrounded by palm trees, indoor swimming pool with retractable roof, all kinds of sculptures and paintings and aquariums. I had about ten cars, including a Lamborghini Diablo, a Range Rover, and a Rolls-Royce. I mean, as far as material things go, it was probably the peak of my high-rolling era. I was financing a real expensive lifestyle.
We’d invested a lot of money to build a state-of-the-art recording studio right in the crib—the Crackhouse we called it—and we could make our albums at home. Behind the mixing board, I had a button I could push and the whole back wall would retract to reveal this shark tank—I mean, I was playing at some James Bond villain–type shit!
But those calls from my boys in the penitentiaries were always like my reality check. They kept me grounded. It wasn’t long after I talked to Spike that I went into the studio and made the song “I Must Stand,” one of my most autobiographical records:
Streets of anger, trouble and crime
I had it hard, had to sleep in my car sometimes
But I never let another player see me down
I kept my front up, my gear clean
Even when checkin’ minor green
The musical track is down-tempo, somber. I’m breaking it all down: being orphaned at a young age, ending up in L.A., being a teen parent, going into the military, becoming a hustler and player—basically how I came from where I came from, how I ended up where I ended up at. We had an interlude that was like a snapshot of that moment in my life:
What?
Daff is dead?
Carter got twenty-five years?
Spike, thirty-five to life?
Nah, don’t tell me B.O.’s dead, man
I don’t wanna hear that, man
I was just with him
We just reenacted all the bad news I was getting at that time over the phone. Michael Carter, M.C., another close player friend, had caught a long bid. B.O., one of the dudes I was close to in the Zulu Nation, had just gotten murdered in the Bronx. All this stuff was happening at the same time we found out Spike got thirty-five to life.
We know that music reaches them on the inside, so that was more than just a shout-out on a record; it was a way of sending some love to Spike, letting him know, “Yo, we’re thinking about you, homie. We know you’re stuck and we’re here in the studio in Hollywood, but you’re still on our minds.”
And to the world, it was me adding yet another chapter of the cautionary tale I’m always telling in my music: These are Ice’s real friends. These are real players and gangsters who used to be out in the world with Ice—balling, hustling, doing big things—and now they’re either dead or in prison.
In the final verse I say:
The game is vicious, no retirement, you die young
Listen to a fake, he might tell you to grab a gun
I get phone calls from condemned row
