His father described himself as an entrepreneur. He had a firework stand in July, a parking lot of Christmas trees in December, teddy bears, and Black History calendars in February –- a hustler for all seasons. Fats never saw either of his parents go to a payroll job for longer than three months.
Fats inherited that entrepreneurial spirit.
He was too slight and too scared to play sports but he showed up at every athletic event - the high school homecomings, the public school basketball championships and especially the amateur boxing events.
He couldn’t fight at all, but he loved to watch other people mix it up. He didn’t care if it was professional men, little kids, or girls. Fats loved to watch people fight. Every year during the Golden Gloves tournaments he would make his crew ride out to Palmer Park and watch the kids box. That’s where he first saw Will.
He couldn’t believe how fast Will was or how many punches he threw per round. He laughed. “Yo, this mufucka is a machine.”
“That’s Six Hands. He was in Oak Hill with me,” Blinds said.
“Oh yeah,” Fats smiled. He liked Six Hands. He remembered him ten years later when he came in the club asking for a job.
Fats was in the beginning stages of a kingpin’s run. He was traveling to all of the NBA All-Star games and partying at the best night spots in the biggest cities across the globe. He won and lost tens of thousands of dollars a night in gambling houses around the city. When he got tired of spending thousands a night in his favorite nightclub, he bought the spot. He turned it into the best nightclub DC has ever had. And that’s how he met Will “Six Hands” Johnson.
Will walked in the club one morning looking for a job as a doorman. Fats told him he was looking to hire a personal bodyguard and Will was visibly nervous.
He said, “Well, I really just know how to be a doorman and a bouncer.”
“Ain't much difference,” Fats said.
Will shifted his weight and stared at the floor while he thought about the difference. He considered the trouble being Fats’s bodyguard would inevitably inherit.
“It pays more,” Fats added.
“Ok.”
Fats made a mental note of how easy it was to negotiate with a man with no money. He didn’t really need a bodyguard. Fats carried a snub-nosed .357 which made him feel more secure than any other man could. He wanted a piece of Will’s boxing career. He thought Will needed a manager. And Fats needed a fighter to get him inside the world of boxing. He even had a foolish investor who would bankroll the whole ride.
It took less than two weeks.
Will sat in the office as Fats counted tens of thousands of dollars, several times a week. He rode and watched Fats as he did business in several different banks. He watched Fats shop, he watched him gamble, and he watched him get pissy drunk and dancing in Big Boys’ night after night.
One night Six Hands looked into the rearview mirror and asked him to do a favor.
“What’s that?” Fats asked.
“Manage my boxing career for me?” Will said.
That was the whole plan.
Fats brought in the dumb investor, Theodore Pearson, who had big bucks and a broken heart. They drafted a few contracts, incorporated a company, and sat Will down to plan his future. Fats didn’t know anything about the business of boxing, but he was positive that if he applied his business acumen and street hustle, then he would succeed.
He did. He got Six Hands a couple of easy fights that fit his style of boxing. He made a couple of questionable decisions and a few downright shady deals. Then, finally Hector Santiago’s manager called to negotiate a fight.
Through boxing and Big Boys’, Fats was becoming a champion hustler in professional sports, illegal drugs, and the Black entertainment industries. He knew all the players, pimps, club owners and celebrities. He also knew the people extorting, bribing, and bullying them.
He shopped around for the best deals. He was getting his coke from LA, weed from Texas, and heroin from New Orleans. Everything was fine until a girl arrived at National Airport and her bags were empty. Fats’s friend in LA swore he saw the girl check the bag under the plane and board at the gate without any problems.
A month later, another girl went to LA, met with the same connect, and he never saw her again.
These two incidents made Fats want to take a more hands-on approach to what should have been the easiest part of his hustle. He wasn’t sure if a baggage handler had gotten lucky the first time and the mule got slick the second, or if the connect in LA was playing him for a sucker all along. He had heard of a San Juan supplier and now his recent string of bad luck made him interested in seeing the Puerto Rican system.
Blinds was his most experienced and loyal smuggler. He told Blinds that they were going to Puerto Rico to meet a new connect and that if this trip went smooth he might continue using him instead of trying to play detective in California.
A week later, Fats and Blinds flew to San Juan and caught a cab to a nondescript but specific hotel downtown. The hotel was shabby and did not pretend to cater to tourists. It was in the middle of a street in a business district. The rooms were small, and the air conditioner had been on blast for too long.
Fats went straight for the phone. He sat on one of the beds and pulled a small, wrinkled piece of paper out of his shirt pocket. Blinds looked at Fats and frowned when he started dialing the numbers.
Fats mumbled a few words in Spanglish before Blinds took the phone from him. Blinds knew how to speak Spanish. He talked to the guy for a few minutes and then hung up. He shrugged and said, “be right back” and left the room.
Fats was amazed at how relaxed Blinds was. He had done these transactions so many times that he was dull to the danger. Fats thought about how smugglers are like bank robbers. They simply have more nerve than most people. Anyone would want to get their hands on a bank vault or a teller’s draw, but most people don’t have the nerve to walk into Bank of America and hand the teller a note. Similarly, there are millions of Americans who wish they had the nerve to smuggle a kilo of pure coke into the country.
Blinds was that kind of smooth operator despite the glasses. He didn’t know any clever way of concealing drugs from the screeners, X-ray machines, and dogs. Nor did he have any connections at the airport that allowed him passage. He simply had the balls to put 10 years of Fed time under his shirt and act normal. Blinds was very slick. And he had been gone for far too long.
Fats looked at the clock on the nightstand between the two beds. Blinds had left the room more than an hour earlier. Fats figured he had earned the reputation of a weak boss and now everyone was stealing from him. But this was a bit much. This story would be hard to live down. He had traveled out of the country with his smuggler and gotten ditched in Puerto Rico. After getting ditched in Vegas by his boxer.
He couldn’t sit still anymore. He wondered if Blinds had gotten arrested. Or he had run off with his coke. Either way, sitting in the room was stupid. He started packing his clothes.
And then Blinds walked in. He had a brown grocery bag in his hand and an indifferent look on his face.
“That’s it?” Fats asked.
“Yeah,” he said. Blinds tossed the bag on to the bed in front of Fats. Fats opened it and saw two kilos of powder.
The bags weren’t neat like they look in the movies. One was skinny and long and the other was round and plump. Fats smiled and placed them back in the bag, rolled up the top, and put it under the bed.
Blinds wanted to go out to a club but Fats didn’t want to draw any attention, so he made him relax. He didn’t want to leave the goods alone in the room either. Instead of a club, they went out for dinner and played in a casino. They met two girls who worked tourists and Fats paid for Blinds to get a separate room.
The girl Fats retired with said her name was Angelica. She was beautiful, never said “no” and she drained him. He gave her a tip and she was very appreciative. She promised to bring more girls the next time he visited. She ga
ve him her phone number and made him swear to visit her often. Several times, she mentioned that she had never traveled to DC or New York.
In the morning Fats left the hotel thirty minutes before Blinds. He didn’t want anyone to know they were together. He arrived at the airport and bought a one-way ticket to Orlando with cash. He went to his gate, stopping at a newsstand to buy a Sports Illustrated, and waited.
Nearly an hour later he saw Blinds across the room. Blinds was motioning his head for Fats to go into the bathroom. Fats was irritated and ignored the request. Blinds insisted. Finally, he folded his newspaper and headed for the restroom.
In the men’s room Blinds told Fats that the noon flight to Orlando was sold out. The only way home was a non-stop flight to DC that departed at 4pm.
“No way,” Fats said. He paced back and forth twice, one hand on his hip, the other on the back of his neck.
He didn’t like the change in plans. He didn’t want a non-stop flight from Puerto Rico to DC. Puerto Rico just screamed drugs. He wanted to fly to Orlando and buy another ticket from there. If authorities questioned a mule, a vacation in Orlando seemed more plausible than Puerto Rico. He also didn’t want Blinds carrying the coke around for an extra four hours. The chances of any bad luck event increased the longer he carried it in public. The cops could just walk through the airport with dogs.
“Take my ticket,” he said, and he handed Blinds his boarding pass. “You go on and I’ll see you when I get home.” Fats walked out quickly. He bought a ticket for the 4pm flight and went outside for some air. He called the girl who said her name was Angelica and then hailed a taxi to a hotel near the airport.
When he arrived at Baltimore-Washington International Airport it was late, and he was exhausted. Yawning at the baggage claim, he fretted the forty-minute drive from Baltimore to DC.
At his apartment he grabbed the mail and flipped through looking at the senders and decided to check the answering machine the next day. He wanted to tell Blinds to hold the bricks until the next day but he didn’t want to use his home phone or talk in his home, just in case either was bugged. Fats showered and got in bed turning Jay Leno on for background noise.
Because packages kept disappearing, he couldn’t sleep until he at least heard Blinds’s voice. He just wanted to hear him say “Whassup”. He steeled himself against calling Blinds’s home phone. Leno signed off and Fats switched to a local cable news channel.
Blinds was the lead story.
He had been arrested at BWI. He looked suspicious and when questioned he was found to be flying under an alias. The name on his ID did not match the name on his ticket. The DEA got a search warrant for the bag and detained him. He was being held at the Baltimore County Jail awaiting arraignment.
Fats fell back on the bed and closed his eyes.
He laid on the bed trying to think. He ran several different scenarios through his head for the remainder of the thirty-minute broadcast. He wondered about what questions the police were surely asking Blinds. What kind of deals they were offering him. He wondered if Blinds was saying nothing or telling everything.
Nothing the reporters or weatherman said could rouse him from his thoughts. He resigned himself to pray and go to sleep. He knew the police weren’t going to kick in his door that night so it was nothing he could do. He took three Lorazepam and decided to go see his lawyer in the morning.
Just before he drifted to sleep, he heard the sports reporter announce that local boxer Will “Six Hands” Johnson had severed ties with his manager and promoter and signed with Short Circuit Promotions.
Chapter 7:
Shorty wanna be a thug
T here was nothing professional about Terrance Stone. He was a nutball. The day he came home from doing a three to five, he asked Killer Ty, the rapper, for a pistol.
“For what? You’re on parole,” he reminded him.
“I just gotta bust somebody real quick.” He was biting his nail like there was crabmeat inside it. Every time Massacre asked him a question he winced.
“Who?”
“I dunno. I just gotta bust somebody to prove ta myself that I still got it, you know.”
“Fuck na. You just gon’ go out and drop an innocent man?”
T thought for a two ticks and calmly said, “I’ll shoot a pipehead.”
That’s just how he was. Gun toting and thugging were Terrance’s skill set. It’s all he could offer his famous rapper friend. He couldn’t rap, make beats, negotiate contracts, or promote tours. So, whenever there was a beef in the club or another rapper dissed his man Terrance took the lead to prove his worth. So, when T overheard Fats’s dilemma, he volunteered to freelance his services.
So, T had finally been hired to do a job and he was determined to make it look professional. In fact, his goal was to have the news reporters describe the murder as “a professional execution-style hit.”
He drove around H Street the night before and parked two blocks away before he walked past the barbershop twice. He surveyed the neighborhood for blocks and drew a map of the area highlighting alleys and one-way streets. T was ready.
The morning of, he wore loose-fitting, nondescript clothes. He parked in the same spot and waited for his call. Terrance sat and reviewed his plan. He would walk into the barbershop, hit his target walk out. He’d jog up the street to his car. If that option was closed he had a bike chained to a fence on 14th Street. If pursued by police, he had planned to race the bike against traffic down the one-way 15th Street. That would prevent cruisers from following and he could out race foot pursuits.
He thought about his target. He had met him a few times before. A guy everybody liked actually. He had been a smuggler. He remembered at a party the guy told him smuggling was “the easiest part of hustling.”. The guy got paid $5,000 a trip and he got to go to places like Miami and Los Angeles. Terrance remembered how he thought the guy was really smart. But he didn’t seem too smart now.
The DEA had caught the guy at the airport with two bricks of coke. His parents had put up a property bond to keep him out of jail until his trial. If the family was willing to lose their home to keep this kid out of jail, surely they’d risk anything to keep him out of prison. Yeah, dude was going to snitch on everybody. He had to go.
At 9:21am the Trac phone rang. He saw the familiar number and reached for his gun. Tucking the .45 in his waistband, he got out of the car and threw the phone in his pocket. T walked down and around the next block. As he turned on to H Street, he noticed the Benz in the middle of the street and hesitated. Who was that? He fretted at the unaccounted --for variable.
Terrance looked inside and saw his target. He was sitting in the second of four chairs from the door. He was wearing those big funny-- looking glasses and running his mouth. Terrance proceeded past the shop and hugged the corner.
He gathered himself and said a prayer that angels would protect him from police. Then he turned and started around the corner. A champagne-colored BMW stopped in the middle of the street and two huge men exited the front driver and back passenger side of the car. They headed toward the barbershop and T hesitated. Another small man, wearing gaudy jewelry and sunglasses, got out of the back passenger side and the linebackers held the door of the barbershop open for him. One of the bodyguards stared at T before he went inside, while the little guy was oblivious.
T thought twice about who they could be and if they could affect his plans. He didn’t want to abort his mission and look scared so after they went in he started walking toward the barbershop again.
Inside the barbershop, he quickly scanned the room for distractions. All of the patrons, including the two big boys, were seated, and there was nothing in between him and his target. Moochie was out of the way talking on the phone. He pulled out his pistol and heard his phone ring once before he unloaded three shots and walked out.
* * * * *
Brooks left Big Boy’s Nightclub at 1pm. Fats Harrington was calling the mayor before the detective could get out of the
door.
Mayor Roland Brown was on a campaign stop in the projects when his aide got the call. Mayor Brown had his jacket and tie off, sleeves rolled up working the campaign trail. To be exact he was playing three-on-three basketball with some kids in Potomac Gardens. The news stations were filming and people were crowded around the halfcourt. Everytime the mayor touched the ball the crowd roared.
His aide answered the cell phone, ”Mayor Brown’s office?”
“This is Fats Harrington. I need to speak to the mayor immediately.”
The aide rolled his eyes and winced when he recognized the voice. “The mayor is in an important meeting with constituents right now...” he said.
Mayor Brown had the ball at the top of the key guarded by a lanky shirtless teenager. The mayor held the ball on his hip, crouched and eyed his opponent before he whipped a pass to a teammate who was cutting towards the basket. The teammate scored a layup and the crowd cheered.
“Is there something I can help you with?”
“No, I need to speak to the mayor directly, as soon as possible,” Fats screamed.
The mayor blocked a shot. People started jumping around and laughing at the other player. Residents high-fived the mayor. Mayor Brown yelled, ‘that was a veto!” and everyone screamed.
“I’ll be sure to give him your message”.
“Tell him his fundraiser aint gonna happen if I don’t hear from him in the next ten minutes,” Fats said.
An hour later a sweaty Mayor Brown was at a firehouse in SW. “Ay fellas! Do you mind if I wash it?” he yelled. The firemen all stood and dropped their sandwiches, magazines or game controllers. “Mr. Mayor”
“At ease, at ease. Hey, you guys need to go down to Potomac Gardens and put out the fire I just left on the basketball court.”
The men laughed like they were being paid to laugh.
“Y’all mind if I shower and change in here?”
Killing a Snitch: The first of the Christopher Aiden Mysteries Page 8