Split decision, p.4
Split Decision, page 4
One thing that’s very authentic is the way I’m dressed in the movie. We were wearing Louis Vuitton and Yves Saint Laurent long before any cats in the hood had even heard of them. We taught the hood about Gucci and Fendi and Neiman Marcus. In Breakin’, I’m wearing a Neiman Marcus cap. That wasn’t a hip-hop look. Kangol was the cap all the B-boys rocked. I’m wearing a Neiman Marcus cap because that’s the shit we used to steal!
Over time I started to run the stage at the Radio—I’d introduce performers and try out my new rhymes. It was where I practiced my craft in front of a live crowd. The hip-hop culture was so new to everyone—especially out on the West Coast—you just tried to figure out where you could fit in. Whether you thought you could be a graffiti artist, break-dancer, DJ, or rapper, the doors were wide open—and you tried your luck at it. I happened to find my niche as an MC at the Radio.
Back then, you were into hip-hop for the love of the culture. It was truly about the art form, more so than now, where kids see it as a viable way to make money. I often say that when I started out, no rapper had made enough money to even buy a car.
* * *
Now, I was out getting pulled in two different directions. Still out doing all this negative shit during the week, jewel bashes and burglarizing stores, and then I show up at the Radio on the weekend and play the role of a star. That’s what most criminals want anyway: to be stars. They want that ego boost. People in the hood saying, “Yo, he’s the cat who hit the biggest jewel lick.” It’s negative attention, but it’s still attention.
Most of my player friends were pressuring me to stay in the game: “Ice, why you gonna waste your time with that rap bullshit?” they said. “Player, you better come get this money.”
See, it wasn’t the same way the streets embrace rap now. The early rap records seemed goofy to the street cats. Hip-hop was just about dancing and partying. I was the one who injected the L.A. street shit into rap, when I made “6 ’N the Mornin’.” Prior to that, street dudes weren’t hearing rappers talking about gangs, guns, prison. They were just hearing throw-your-hands-in-the-air party music. Street cats in South Central didn’t connect to the Fat Boys, but they could connect to “6 ’N the Mornin’.” And a little while after me came artists like N.W.A and Too $hort.
Performing and hanging out at the Radio, I started liking this positive attention more than whatever status I had built up in my criminal exploits. Bit by bit, I felt myself being pulled away from the game.
I remember one time Spike rolled through when I was at Nat the Cat’s place and he said he had a lick up. I told him, “Nah, man, I ain’t with it.”
I wasn’t thinking of leaving the game for good, but I was already getting bitten by that little taste of fame I found at the Radio.
I could feel myself slipping away into another life.
SPIKE
Since Ice was focusing on his music and moving away from hitting licks, I found myself going out of state with Cousin Rich and some players like Diamond X, another close friend of Ice’s. I didn’t think Ice had made any big decision to go legit—I figured he was just taking a break from the game.
In November 1983, me and Rich and Diamond X went up to Seattle to do this jewelry bash. We were right there at the display case; I had the sledgehammer ready, but there was a guy who looked like a cop nearby. Wasn’t a good bet.
We figure we’ll fly back to L.A. and come hit the lick another time. But then X gets apprehended at the airport while trying to buy our tickets with a stolen credit card, and when Cousin Rich follows him in, he gets locked up, too. I barely got my ass out of there in the rental car. I drive from Seattle all the way back to L.A. Since Rich is still a juvenile, I know he’s going to be okay—in fact, his mom ended up going straight up to Seattle to get him out of the jam—but Diamond X is definitely going to need some bail money.
That was part of the code: if a player in your crew gets locked up, you’re supposed to be there to help out financially. That whole long-ass drive I’m looking for another lick so I can drop some money off for X’s family.
I’m on the 101 Highway, cutting past Santa Barbara, and I stop off in an upscale community called Montecito. I scope the place out and see this mall with a high-end jewelry store. There’s this Christmas display window near one of the mall’s exits, filled with Rolexes and diamonds—I case the place out carefully. Looks like a perfect lick.
I line it up to do the bash with my cousin Rich as soon as he’s free from that credit card bullshit in Seattle. It’s a Monday night, mid-December 1983. We’ve got the Adidas sports bag, a sledgehammer, and our gardening gloves—we called them “brownies.” Once we’re in motion there’s no fucking stopping us. We’ve got a G-ride. I gave this crackhead a bag of rocks to steal a deuce and a quarter—that’s a Buick Electra 225—but the shit is out of alignment and breaks down before we can even get on the freeway. Again, we’ve got to improvise.
“Why don’t we rent us a limousine?” I said.
We did business with this one limousine company in South Central. A lot of times after we hit a lick, we used to rent stretch limos, just driving around the neighborhood celebrating, drinking champagne, acting like we were ballers. No one had ever tried using a limo as the actual getaway vehicle, but I figured, why the fuck not?
We plan to park the limousine near the mall in Montecito. All we need is a second car to do the switch. Rich goes and borrows a Mustang from this chick named Michelle—a square girl in the military who Rich was messing with.
Now we hit the freeway, I’m in the back of a white stretch Lincoln Continental, and Rich is following in this chick’s Mustang. We get up to Ventura County, pull the limousine onto this cul-de-sac filled with gated mansions, Benzes, Jaguars, and BMWs. Perfect surroundings—I mean, the limo doesn’t look out of place. The chauffeur was a middle-aged Black dude we knew well named Percy. We didn’t give him all the details, but we had to let Percy know we were up to something and would take care of him with a cut of the merchandise. Me and Rich taped a rag over the license plate of the Mustang; then we pull into the mall parking lot, leave the engine running and the doors unlocked so we can make a fast escape.
We’re both wearing sweatsuits and our brownies and I pull my terry-cloth cap down so the brim covers my eyes. I’ve got the sledgehammer inside the Adidas bag, and we enter through the side fire doors. The jewelry display case is right there by the exit. There’s a Christmas tree ornament with a whole array of Rolexes, diamond bracelets, Krugerrand coins.
It’s crowded as hell in that mall, holiday shoppers everywhere, but I erase everything except the display case. Faces become blurs, voices just a hum. On a lick, I’m in my zone. I’m at work. I put the sports bag down and turn to Rich.
“Is it a bet?”
“It’s a good bet.”
I pull the hammer out of the bag and hit the glass like I’m crushing a fastball, caved in the whole motherfucker on the first swing. We’ve got four gloved hands in rapid motion, grabbing everything we can, mostly Rolexes, shoving everything into the bag and filling our pockets as well. The clock in my head is ticking and after a few seconds I realize we’ve got to go. Everybody’s staring at us. Mouths wide open. I know they’re screaming but I don’t hear shit. Just a loud hum—white noise.
Rich and me both turn and bolt through that same fire exit. Outside, there’s a bunch of civilians—employees and good Samaritans—chasing us from the main entrance of the jewelry store. We’re moving like running backs through the parked cars trying to fake them out.
I’m a bit ahead of Rich—he’s got the Adidas bag—and I get to the brown Mustang, passenger door’s unlocked, jump inside, and I see Rich running right past me. What the fuck? Then I realize I’m in the wrong car! What are the odds? A nearly identical brown Mustang is parked two rows over, with the doors also unlocked.
Now I’m trapped—three or four guys surround the Mustang I’m in, banging on the windows—so I start talking like a square, pretend like I’m surrendering: “Okay, you got me, you got me! I give up!” But when I go to open the door, I smash it hard into the body of this big white dude, then I break out toward Rich in our actual getaway car. Before I can jump in the passenger side, these guys are grabbing on me, tackling me, yanking on my legs, and I just jump on the bumper, holding on, and tell my cousin to drive that motherfucker.
We barely escaped that parking lot by the skin of our teeth. In the scuffle on the back bumper, the rag we’d taped around the license plate came loose and the witnesses got a partial plate number.
Rich drives over curbs and medians, speeding out of the parking lot and pulling the Mustang into that affluent neighborhood. We ditch the Mustang down the block, then calmly walk over and get in the back of the limousine with the Adidas bag full of loot.
The only way out to the freeway is back in the direction of the mall. In just those four or five minutes it took us to get away and switch from the Mustang to the limo, an all-points bulletin went out and the police blocked off all traffic approaching the freeway.
Cops are all over the place with rifles and dogs. They’re stopping every vehicle, looking inside. The limousine is merging into traffic onto the freeway. There’s a red light and Percy gets out, pops the hood as if he’s having engine trouble, then closes it—but he makes sure to give the cops a good glimpse of him in the whole chauffeur’s uniform and cap. He looks just like Kato in The Green Hornet.
We know the cops are looking for two young Black males in a brown Mustang, and when they see this long-ass limousine and a Black chauffeur, they just wave us through, nodding to the driver, while Rich and I are sitting stone still behind the tinted windows. We drive right down the center of the yellow line, get on the freeway—there’s helicopters and highway patrols still looking for that Mustang. The whole time, we’re in the back of the limo, high-fiving, busting open the bottle of champagne, looking through the Adidas bag filled with at least forty Rolexes. I tapped on the partition and gave Percy a Rolex Presidential worth about $18,000 for his fast thinking.
“Here you go, man—good lookin’ out.”
When we get back to L.A., I tell Rich, “Yo, call your girl, tell her we’re buying her a brand-new car. She’s gotta report that Mustang stolen.”
We meet Michelle at a liquor store on Adams and Western, give her three Rolexes, more than enough to buy a new Mustang, and she reports that her car was stolen while she was inside the liquor store.
Next thing we know, the robbery was all over the national news for the craziest fucking reason. Not long after me and Rich got away in the limo, the cops arrested three members of the Harlem Globetrotters, who were just in Santa Barbara for an exhibition game. They were out Christmas shopping, left a different jewelry store, got in a taxi, and the cops yanked them out of the cab, handcuffed them, put them spread-eagled on the sidewalk. I’m five-ten. At the time, my cousin Rich was shorter than that. One of the Harlem Globetrotters was six-ten! I mean, the only thing we had in common was being Black. The jeweler immediately told the cops they’d arrested the wrong guys. These Globetrotters filed a civil rights lawsuit against Santa Barbara for $2 million—and the city ended up giving them a healthy settlement for the wrongful arrest.
So now the Ventura County authorities are doubly embarrassed because not only did this very high-end jewelry store get robbed in broad daylight, but the Santa Barbara Police Department was being called racist for arresting the three Harlem Globetrotters. Obviously, they’re not going to stop until they’ve solved this fucking case.
The cops start working on that partial plate number they got when the rag came off the Mustang, and they realize that a car from South Central Los Angeles was reported stolen and left abandoned in Santa Barbara. LAPD detectives tracked down Michelle and started questioning her hard. The cops did their homework, and the timeline of when she reported her car stolen didn’t add up.
During interrogation, they told her she’d go to jail and get kicked out of the military if she didn’t spill the whole story. They offered her immunity and, being a square chick, Michelle panicked. She gave up both Rich and me. We didn’t know she was cooperating, of course. We had no idea the cops were on our trail.
We came up off that lick. I went to one of my regular fences downtown and cashed in all these Rolexes. I remember a few nights celebrating, hanging out at Carolina West with Ice and watching him do his thing on the mic at the Radio. One of the things I remember clearest is how all of us were steadily pumping his record “Cold Wind Madness” in our cars—I’d be cruising around in my Cadillac, playing that tape over and over. That shit was so fly! He was describing things from our lives, rapping about getting freaky with a chick at a motel called the Snooty Fox right there in the 40s on Western.
My cousin Rich ended up getting knocked in San Bernardino on some other shit—a lick that didn’t involve me—and was fixing to do some time as a juvenile. If I’d known that whole winter there was a bench warrant out for me in Ventura County, I’d have laid low, gone underground. One morning in March 1984, about four months after the robbery, I’m in my Cadillac—I think I was on my way to check on Ice and Nat the Cat—when the cops pull me over on Seventy-Sixth and Broadway. They ran the plates, drew down on me with pistols, told me to get on the ground. They cuffed me and took me to the station on Seventy-Seventh and Broadway.
I was extradited to Ventura County, convicted of the robbery, and sentenced to four years. Next thing I know I’m on a bus to Soledad, this old, rickety-ass prison up in the Salinas Valley, about to do my first bid.
When I arrive, the yard is deserted—no inmates anywhere, just a bunch of guards in military-style camouflage and body armor running toward us. I quickly find out there’s been a major race riot between the Blacks and whites and the whole place is on lockdown.
I’m twenty-one years old and I’m about to get a crash course in the cold fucking realities of prison life.
CHAPTER 3 6 ’N THE MORNIN’
I’m a self-made monster of the city streets
Remotely controlled by hard hip-hop beats
—ICE, “6 ’N THE MORNIN’ ”
ICE
By late 1984, a lot of cats I respected in the game were getting knocked. Spike was under. Our homie Al Patrome—known as Al P. or Trome—was under. Sean E. Sean, Michael Carter, Vic—like dominoes falling, I watched all of these homies getting locked up.
I didn’t stop hitting licks but, like I later told Spike, I found myself working with a skeleton crew.
I put together this one jewel bash at a mall—I brought guys with me I’d never worked with before. We pull out the hammers, smash the case, and get all the Rolexes and chains we can carry. But I’d laid out an obstacle course to get to the G-ride. We’re sprinting, turning, and every time we hit a corner, this one dude falls on his motherfucking ass. He’s a finesser—knows how to take a trim—but this is his first jewel bash. I glance down. Instead of sneakers, this dude has on Gucci loafers!
By the time the rest of us get to the G, he’s nowhere to be seen. The getaway driver’s revving the engine, ready to bounce, but I’ve got to go back out looking for the dude. He’s stuck below this little hill covered in grass and ivy and shit, slipping and falling in his fucking Gucci loafers. I literally need to grab his arm and help him make it up the hill.
When we got home, we didn’t want to pay him his cut. “You fell like a thousand times, nigga. Plus, you came back empty-handed—you didn’t have shit when you got to the car!”
Between trying to hit licks with these third-string motherfuckers, I was still doing my thing as an MC at the Radio, and then I would go hang with my pimp and hustler friends at Carolina West on Century Boulevard. Carolina West was one of the few after-hours spots around. Didn’t close until 9 a.m. All the pimps and players would go there to chill. After the Radio crowd thinned, I’d hop in my Porsche, get to Carolina West at 3 a.m. right as the scene was getting good.
One night I’m there, hanging out, macking to some chicks, and I leave when it’s already bright morning. I’m in my Porsche 914, and I stop at the light at the intersection of Slauson and West Boulevard. I’m exhausted and I vaguely remember half dozing at that light—feeling like if I can just close my eyes for a second, I’ll be fine to drive home.
After that, everything is a blank.
My foot slipped off the brake and my Porsche rolled into the intersection. I got T-boned, the Porsche flipped and rolled a few times. I didn’t have my seat belt on but somehow wasn’t thrown clear—I was knocked into the empty passenger seat. The impact demolished the driver’s side, snapped the steering wheel clean off.
Bystanders thought I was dead. The wreck was so bad, it was initially reported in the news as a fatality. The car was almost folded in half; I was slumped there in the passenger seat, bleeding profusely and looking lifeless.
I was unconscious in L.A. County Hospital for over a day. I had no ID on me. When you’re hustling, you never carry anything with your real name so you can always give the cops an alias. I didn’t even have a fake driver’s license. All I had in my pocket was a fat knot of cash.
The hospital and the cops had no clue who I was, so I was John Doe’d up in L.A. County Hospital for a long time. County is not a good place to be laid up. When I came to, I was in a room with about ten people moaning, screaming. I remember watching one dude die right there in the room with me.
The doctors and nurses weren’t explaining anything to me. Orderlies just wheel your ass around on gurneys. I was barely conscious but heard an E.R. doctor telling a nurse how lucky I was to have pulled through. I had a broken pelvis, broken ribs, and a fractured femur. Everything on the left side of my body was smashed.
