The Book of Luke

by Luther Campbell

  One day I was in my office at the club working when this kid’s brother and a couple of his guys came to see me. They parked their car right in front for a quick getaway. They wanted to call some kind of truce. I was not in a forgiving mood. I wasn’t intending for any shit to go down. I left the gun locked up in my office while I went out to talk to them. I told them to leave. They got hot, and pretty soon the verbal shit was flying. They were flashing the guns in their waistbands, saying they knew how to use them. I was unarmed, and most of the DJs were off doing other shit.

  Fortunately, one of my guys showed up, saw what was happening, went around the side, broke into my office, and grabbed my AR-15. He ran out, tossed it to me. These guys took one look at my weapon with its thirty-round clip and they ran for their fucking lives. They got to their car, but by the time they started fumbling with their keys I’d already aimed the barrel dead at the car’s windshield. They ditched the car and took off on foot.

  At that point they were gone. I could have just turned around and gone back to work. I know that’s what I should have done. But instead I just saw red. I was filled with rage for my dead brother. I emptied the whole clip into that fucking car, sprayed it with high-powered military steel jackets the same way I’d water my lawn. Window glass was spraying. Blue water was spewing from the radiator out of the front grille. The whole car sank to the pavement as the tires went flat.

  Cops heard the gunfire, called it in, and patrol cars came swarming the club. Next thing I knew, I was in cuffs, bent over the hood of some police vehicle. They dragged me down to the station and locked me up. At the end of the day, no charges were filed. The gun was legal and registered, and I was defending myself after being threatened on my own property.

  It was stupid. Stupid, stupid thug bullshit. Shooting up that car and getting thrown in jail wasn’t going to bring justice for Harry. Here I was, building a successful business, well on my way to my first million dollars, and I nearly threw it all away over some stupid beef with a couple of punks.

  That was a major turning point for me. I had to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, what direction I was going to go. I couldn’t be doing all that wild shit. It was a decision that the whole hip-hop community had to face. Right around the same time, in September of ’86, at a Run-D.M.C. concert in Long Beach, California, rap’s first-ever major arena tour, a bunch of LA gang members broke out in a riot with knives and snapped-off legs from the stadium chairs, put dozens of people in the emergency room with stab wounds. Same thing would happen to 2 Live Crew a couple years later, doing a show in West Palm Beach in ’88. It was a Luke Records show with us, MC Shy D, and a few other acts, and these two rival gangs went after each other in the audience. It would have turned into a riot if the cops hadn’t come in and broken it up.

  These rival gangs in West Palm Beach chose our concert to start that shit because they wanted to use our fame to get attention for themselves. Shit had nothing to do with us. Of course the way the white media twisted it, they got it all wrong. They said that hip-hop had a culture of violence, that we were promoting violence. That was never true. Hip-hop started as a way to get away from violence, a way to channel all the pent-up energy of these black youths into something positive. Afrika Bambaataa used his music and his concerts in the South Bronx to bring rival gangs together and stop warring against each other. We started the Pac Jam II to keep kids off the corners and give them a safe place to go at night. But the violence follows you. It’s all around you. It’s inside your own head, because you were raised with that mentality. If you grow up in Beirut, you’re going to act like you’re from fucking Beirut. That’s how I found myself cuffed in the backseat of a patrol car, next to some shot-up piece-of-shit car, wondering if I’d just fucked up my whole life.

  I was lucky that time. Nobody got hurt. But I knew that was the day I had to leave all that thug shit behind me. I couldn’t let my future get dragged down by all the bullshit from the past. I turned that part of my life around, and I knew from that day forward my life and my career would have to be about more than just making money for the sake of being successful. I need to use my name and my money and my influence not just to save guys like Handsome Harry, but to save the kid who felt he had to pick up an automatic weapon to solve his problems. If somebody had helped that kid early enough, my friend would still be alive today.

  III

  THE HURRICANES

  I was always a Miami Hurricanes fan. They were my team. On the cover of The 2 Live Crew Is What We Are, me and Brother Marquis and Fresh Kid Ice were in a Jeep wearing Hurricanes jackets and Hurricanes drawers. Part of that was marketing, to let everyone know that we were from Miami, to get the attention of people in south Florida. But it was also because I was just such a huge fan.

  My whole time growing up, Miami was terrible, just the worst team you could imagine. There were several years the administration thought about shutting the program down, it was such an embarrassment. Then they hired Howard Schnellenberger. He’d been offensive coordinator under Bear Bryant at Alabama and was doing the same for Don Shula and the Dolphins when the University of Miami hired him to be head coach in 1979. Schnellenberger came in and he turned everything around, not just the program but the whole damn city.

  Florida A&M, the historically black college up in Tallahassee, had always been my second college team, after Miami. When one of my brothers was at FAMU, every year at homecoming we would drive up to Tallahassee to watch the games. At that time, FAMU was beating the dogshit out of everybody. People were saying they were so good they should go into Division I and play against the white schools. During one of Schnellenberger’s first years, Miami played FAMU, and FAMU just destroyed them—the privileged, middle-class white kids at Miami were scared of all the tough black kids at FAMU.

  Schnellenberger saw this and he said to his players, “Y’all scared of these black guys? Okay, I’m gonna bring in the toughest and the hardest black guys I can find. They’re going to rough you up real bad. Toughen you up.” He went and found some semipro teams with these hardcore black players to come in and scrimmage with Miami. I remember going to one of those scrimmages. It was a big deal. That was probably the first time blacks ever started going down to Coral Gables. At that point, Schnellenberger realized that he needed to recruit some black kids. He got out a map and said he was going to build a fence around south Florida and make it his own. He started looking at every black high school in every black neighborhood in and around Miami. He wasn’t just looking for players for the team. He was building a fan base of loyal families to support the team. It wasn’t just good coaching, it was brilliant marketing.

  Today they call a top high school prospect a five-star player. Back then they were called blue chippers. Those were the players all the recruiters would fight over. These black kids, they weren’t blue chippers. Their stats weren’t always that impressive because their schools didn’t have competitive schedules. Lou Holtz and Joe Paterno, those coaches and those programs weren’t even looking at these kids. They were out looking for the blue chippers: the next Joe Namath, the next Johnny Unitas, white-bread, All-American-type motherfuckers. But Schnellenberger and his scouts, they recruit from black schools and find kids who were hungry, who had real talent, who came out of tough environments and played real football like it was life or death because it was all they had in the world. They came into Liberty City and recruited all the best guys, including Melvin Bratton, who I knew from the neighborhood. He’d gone to Northwestern, one of the best running backs ever to come out of Dade County. Same with Brett Perriman, a wide receiver from Northwestern.

  Schnellenberger did three things. One, he built himself a ruthless, powerhouse team that would go on to be one of the biggest dynasties in college football history. Two, he was giving all these black kids from the worst neighborhoods and the worst high schools a chance to get an education at one of the top private colleges in the region. And three, he married the University of Miami to the inner city. He
took this institution from the richest, whitest part of the city, and he made it something that black and brown people could take pride in, too. After four years of rebuilding like that, in 1984 Miami won the national championship against Nebraska right here in the Orange Bowl.

  It was insane. That moment right there, winning the championship, that was the moment Miami started to come back. As bad as the riots were, it was like that in reverse, everyone celebrating. I mean, you’re talking about a city where, at that period of time, it was like a fucking civil war. It was whites against blacks. It was kill or be killed. People in Liberty City just hated white people—white or anything that looked white, white Cuban or whatever. Because as far as the judicial system was concerned, it was legal to kill black people in Florida. For every Arthur McDuffie there were dozens of young black men every year who barely made a mention on the obituary page of the Miami Herald, and their killers were getting off scot-free. Even though the cops were doing the killing, the white juries were the ones letting the cops off. Every white person walking down the street could be one of those people on those all-white juries. So when black Miamians looked at white Miamians, they looked at them with the idea that all white people were responsible for the constant injustice.

  And at the time, black people couldn’t even go to parts of Miami Beach. There were certain places you just couldn’t go, because you’d be profiled, dragged from your car, arrested, and possibly killed. So when Schnellenberger finally said, “Fuck it, I’m a take some of these black kids and bring them to Coral Gables,” he not only changed the course of football in Miami, he changed the whole city. He said, “I’m not just gonna bring these guys to play. I’m going to bring some black people over to a barbecue at my house in the neighborhood. I don’t care who likes it or not.” And when you have somebody in Schnellenberger’s position doing that, white folks just have to accept it—and black folks, we have to learn how to adapt to it, too. We couldn’t just hole up in Liberty City and hate white people. We needed to be inclusive of everyone so we could win a championship and do it together. We had to look at this lily-white university and understand that it could belong to us, too, that we could be a part of it. That was hard.

  Schnellenberger left the team in ’83, and Jimmy Johnson took over. But the change was already underway, and Jimmy was committed to the same methods of recruiting and coaching the team. I credit Schnellenberger with turning this whole place around. I look at him as more than just a football coach, because he brought people together who were never together before and who never cared to be together before. What he did with that school was one of the greatest things to happen in the history of the city of Miami. It was revolutionary. But just like every other form of racial progress in this country, that change brought with it a whole new set of problems—problems that would draw me closer to the team and change the relationship of sports and hip-hop forever.

  A lot of the local black kids who played for Miami in the eighties, they’d started out coming to the Pac Jam II as teens. Now they were in college and they were coming to Strawberries Too, a new club I’d just opened in Hialeah, and they were bringing a lot of the players from the team. Strawberries became the place to go for after-game parties. Through Melvin Bratton and some of the other guys I knew from coming up, I was meeting all of these players and getting to know them. I started hearing a lot of stories. They were having these issues on campus with guys selling drugs and carrying guns. They were also putting on ski masks and going out and boosting stereos from the cars of all these rich white folks in Coral Gables. Every week there was something.

  They committed these crimes because they needed the money. These kids were coming from the poorest communities in Florida and going to this rich private university. They were scoring the big touchdowns and winning these games, but then they’d come off the field and be like, “Oh, fuck. I’m broke!” They’d go home and everybody in the dorm would be screaming and hollering and celebrating, and they’d be back in their rooms, hungry, couldn’t even buy a pizza. They needed money for clothes, for food. Some of these guys already had families; they’d knocked some girl up in high school and needed to buy diapers. It was great that Miami was giving these guys scholarships, but scholarship money doesn’t buy diapers.

  It wasn’t just the money. It was also the culture change. You’re talking about the toughest kids from the toughest neighborhoods in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville. Those guys were coming into one of the wealthiest, whitest communities in all of Miami. Whenever black people first go into that type of situation, there’s always tension. These players didn’t have any positive experiences with white people, and that’s if they had any experiences with white people at all. A lot of them were angry, resentful. These players weren’t looking at the white kids like, “Hey, you’re all right. You’re good guys. You and me are classmates.” No. They were looking at them like, “Motherfucker, your police shot my uncle.” They still had that anger, that thug mentality that stayed with them from the streets. They had to learn how to let go of it, just like I had to learn how to let go of it.

  This wasn’t every black student at Miami. A lot of the black kids over there came from middle-class families who grew up in better neighborhoods. Or, like me, they’d been bused to a place like Miami Beach where they’d been around white people and worked a lot of that anger out. This wasn’t even a majority of the players I’m talking about. It was maybe about 10 percent of the players. But it only takes one. It only takes one to screw up, and everybody’s fucked.

  But at the same time, it only takes one to be a leader, to set the example for the hard cases to follow. When I started hearing the stories of the trouble these guys were in, I realized they could make us all look bad. I knew this was bigger than football. I felt like I had to take it upon myself to do something. I wasn’t alumni. I wasn’t a booster. I just knew a lot of them frequented the club and looked up to me. Let me just go down there and have a conversation with them.

  I reached out to Melvin Bratton and asked him to bring some of these dudes by the house. I explained to the players that they had a huge opportunity to get an education and they were about to fuck that up.

  I spoke to them from a larger, historical standpoint, not just about the team. I’d say, “Do you know these people never wanted blacks in Coral Gables from the beginning? That they put clauses in the deeds to the houses over there that made it illegal to sell houses to black folks because they think we’re animals? They want us to look bad. Here you got a guy like Schnellenberger opening up opportunities to bring y’all down there and y’all doing wild shit? There’s a lot of people on that side of town saying, ‘Don’t bring them niggers down here. Why you brought them niggers down here?’ And if y’all fuck this up, then they going to say, ‘Yeah, they are fucking animals. Those are some fucked-up people.’”

  I schooled them, “You have to think about the black kids coming up after you, because when you fuck this up, another black kid after you won’t be able to have the opportunity to get an education. And on top of that, you’re going to get your ass thrown in jail and any chance of you going to the NFL is going to be done. Y’all need to get your shit together. Y’all need to think about this as an opportunity to better yourself, get your education, and be able to move on to the next level.”

  I would deal with the toughest of the toughest on the team. Jerome Brown was a tough guy, Winston Moss was a tough guy. Warren Sapp was a tough guy. I would keep tabs on them. I’d mentor them. The nice guys didn’t need any help. The tough ones? I was looking out for them. Every year, the freshmen were coming in and I’d ask, “Who’s the gangsta? Who’s the hard case? Tell him to come see me. Bring that crazy motherfucker over here. Let me make sure his head is screwed on right.” I’d bring him to the club, show him a good time, try and keep his mind on the positive.

  The hardest of the hard cases was Mark Caesar, who played defensive tackle. Mark was a good kid, but crazy. Lots of bad ideas in his head, a lot of anger. He
didn’t hate every individual white person—he had white friends on the team—but he hated the Man, the establishment. He was always wound up about it.

  I could see it getting worse the longer he was out in Coral Gables, full of anger and resentment, surrounded by all these rich white people.

  Tough situation, tough kid. I knew he was a fuse waiting to blow. I knew I needed to keep him close by me, keep him occupied, keep his mind right. Any downtime he got, I told him to bring his ass by my office, to come to the club, to stay out on my boat for a night or two. At that time I’d just bought my yacht. After As Nasty as They Wanna Be sold a million copies, I bought a fifty-foot yacht and named it Scandalous. I put “Liberty City” on the back, so when the police saw all these black people on a boat they’d know that we didn’t steal it. I’d send Mark Caesar to go spend the night out there because I knew staying in the dorm, being in that kind of rich, white environment, it just wasn’t comfortable for him. He spent most of his college life not necessarily living in the dorm but staying out on the boat because he needed that space. I would take him out there and make sure he was all right.

  Mark Caesar and Warren Sapp, those were the main guys I was working with. I had to keep an eye on those two. They couldn’t have any downtime or they’d end up in some kind of trouble. I had to make their life comfortable, even brought them on the road with me. Those fuckers would play on Saturday, leave after the game, and get on the jet with 2 Live Crew. If I was in Dallas, they would be in Dallas. If I was in Detroit, they were in Detroit. We’d fly out Saturday and they’d be back Sunday night for school the next day. They were playing football at the University of Miami and living the life of a rock star on the side.