RAW

by Lamont U-God Hawkins

  I thought we were really on when RZA and GZA got their individual record deals. When that happened, we thought it was about to just happen for all of us. The industry had other ideas, though. RZA and GZA ended up flopping because their labels were trying to make them something they weren’t. Both of them had bangers on their albums, but the CC execs went with “Come Do Me” for Genius. At Tommy Boy, they settled on the “Ooh I Love You Rakeem” single. It was obvious the labels were trying to re-create the success of artists like Big Daddy Kane and Eric B. & Rakim.

  That’s got to be the worst feeling in the world—being an artist with no real creative control over your art. Labels at that time were trying to get that crossover popping. They wanted something that took the grit out and made their music a little more accessible to the mainstream. A record about having mad girls or inviting hoes to fuck was the label’s idea of what could make them money. They passed up on two of the illest lyricists that ever rapped because they were trying to fit them into a box that was all wrong for them.

  When their deals went south, RZA and GZA both came back to the hood. We’d all been sharpening our swords all along, ready for any opportunity. We were beyond ready when RZA came and got his wolves. He knew we were where it was at. We kept rhyming over RZA’s beats and building our skills. It started coming together really well. The core members started formulating and conspiring on songs together. It started from humble beginnings; the recording started off real small. Then, gradually, dudes started putting in work, putting in work, putting in work. RZA and GZA took what we were doing and enhanced it.

  Unfortunately, some guys who should have gotten in at the ground level of the Wu-Tang got taken out of the game before they could even get started. Cappadonna was one who, if things hadn’t gone the way they did, might have played an even bigger part in the formation of the Wu.

  His rhyme style was amazing, really ahead of its time. I remember this talent show/rap battle that was going down at the Wave. Cappa destroyed everybody to win that battle; even RZA and GZA were no match. He just ate everybody. He melted the mic that day, rapping over “Impeach the President.” GZA, RZA, and Dirty didn’t stand a chance. It was Cap’s hood, plus he was rhyming about shit that people from that hood could relate to. All his references were Park Hill related. I was right there with him. The crowd was unanimous in its choice.

  Then Cappadonna got locked up. He was in front of the building one day, and this dude called Boo-Yay ran past him with the cops chasing him and dropped a package at Cappa’s feet. The cops ran down on Cap and pinned the drugs on him. It really wasn’t his stuff—the cops locked him up for somebody else’s shit. That’s why he said in one of his rhymes, “They locked me up. / They said it was mine, but it was Boo-Yay’s stuff.” Cappa wound up doing three years for a crime he didn’t commit.

  That shit fucked me up. Me and Cappadonna used to hang out pretty much every day. He was the rapper to my beatbox, my rhyme partner. Knowing he was innocent didn’t help instill any faith in the justice system. The hood was like that a lot, though. There was so much wrong shit going on all the time, the chances of being caught in the wrong place at the wrong time were pretty good.

  When Cappa went to jail, I had to move on with my life. I started going down to Stapleton more with Method Man to see RZA. Years later, when Cappa came home from prison, he got caught up in some other shit charges and got sent back. Altogether, I think the system took eight years of his life. Because of that, he missed getting on 36 Chambers entirely.

  I became an adult while he was locked up. That’s just how that is. You come home after being away for a few years, dudes are different. I’m driving a car. I got big gold chains on. He didn’t even know we were going down to RZA’s house and recording. People didn’t know we were doing any of that shit at the time.

  But they were about to find out.

  10.

  TURBULENCE

  To this day, more than twenty-five years later, I wish I’d never gone uptown in the summer of 1991. I was twenty years old.

  It all started one afternoon with one of my dealers: “Yo, I need this package, bruh! I’m losing customers.”

  “Damn, I just came from uptown yesterday. Why didn’t you see me then? You know how fast shit’s going right now.”

  “I didn’t have all the bread, right? Just hold me down. Go see your man.”

  “He’s not around today. I’d have to see someone else.”

  “Do that, then. For me, bruh. I need this.”

  So I headed back uptown to hold dudes down. Again. This time, though, I fucked around and went outside my connect, and this guy hit me with a bunch of wack-ass pharmaceutical shit. When it came back, it wasn’t what it was supposed to be. I remember getting so pissed, mostly because I should’ve known better than to fuck with these dudes in the first place.

  So I grabbed the burner. I don’t know why, I guess I can only attribute it to being angry, but I also grabbed the crack to show the bullshit connect it didn’t cook up right. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

  Me and this dude Mitch hopped in the Pathfinder and drove uptown. I spot the guy who sold me the bad coke on the block right away. His name was Jesus. I pulled up on him. My original plan had been to hop out the Pathfinder, give him the shitty crack, get my money, and then give him the bullet.

  I hopped out. “Yo, you ain’t right. You know that shit you sold me was garbage. Gimme back my money!”

  “Nah, man, I—”

  “YO! Don’t play with me, dawg. You ’bout to catch a hot one. Now gimme back my bread!”

  “O-o-o-okay. Wait here, I’m just going to the stash upstairs.”

  Mitch was talking to me from inside the whip, trying to get me to chill. I’m halfway to getting in a right mind-set and realizing what the fuck I’m doing is stupid. Next thing I know, the cops have surrounded the car. The scumbag connect who I copped that bullshit from ended up calling the police on me!

  Now, I knew the deal. Whenever you get knocked, you keep your mouth shut. You don’t say shit, ’cause everything you say will be used against you. Not until you’ve seen your lawyer or Legal Aid. It’s not easy for some people, though. People get jammed up, and right away they get mad nervous. If you’re doing dirt, you got to keep a cool head. Can’t fall for that bullpen therapy, getting jostled from holding cell to holding cell while the cops scare you about how much time you’re gonna get. A lot of people get shook, and try to get chummy with the cops, and end up saying more than they need to say.

  They tried to flip me, too, of course. Basically, they wanted me to tell on all the other drug dealers uptown. I was like, “For what? For what? To get out of my time and then I’ll be caught up in all your little snitch shit and all this other shit for the rest of my life? Get the fuck outta here.” I copped out to the first thing that they gave me—I knew I was guilty, so why would I take it to trial?

  Let me tell you something; people are always talking about snitching. But in order to be a snitch, you’ve got to actually see a motherfucker do something with your own fucking eyes. You’ve got to literally have it done in front of your eyeballs in order for you to know what’s really going on. Nowadays motherfuckers go by what somebody else said or what somebody else think they said. I got a problem with that because I’m from an era where, “Nah, man. I didn’t see that dude do shit because I didn’t see him do it with my own eyes.” Fabrication is a motherfucker. “Oh, shit, yo, I heard this … I heard that … I heard this …” If you didn’t see it with your own eyes, shut the fuck up. Just stop it. You got to see it with your own eyes for you to even be a part of the equation.

  It turned out that my man Mitch said more than he needed to and ended up implicating himself—I found that out when I saw his statement later on. I’m a stand-up dude, and he knew that. If I get caught doing something and I was doing it, I’m taking the charges. I’m not going to have my man who was riding with me all jammed up in my shit. I know what I’m into. I know the risks. I’m gonna handle it by mys
elf. My word is Bond, as stated in Degree 1-11: “Have you not learned that your word shall be Bond regardless of whom or what? Answer: My word is Bond, and Bond is my life, and I will give my life before my word shall fail.”

  So I took the rap, saying as little as possible in the statement. Mitch was going home anyway. He knew he didn’t have to say shit to the cops. But that bullpen therapy is a motherfucker, and he talked.

  I also learned a big lesson when I spoke about my case with my lawyer. It turned out that everything I said to the court-appointed Legal Aid defense attorney while I was behind bars would be used against me. Unless you already have your lawyer on deck, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to contact him in a timely fashion, as the police don’t have to give you a phone call.

  So, like most people in jail, I was anxious to see a lawyer, so when the Legal Aid lawyer called my name, I talked to him. The Legal Aid lawyers all work for the city. Whatever I said was supposed to be used by him to help my case. But if you fire the dude, he’ll turn over the file to the same officer who arrested you!

  Anyway, as far as I could tell, he ended up turning everything I said over to the D.A. From that experience, I learned it’s best to not say shit ever. To anyone. If you get a Legal Aid lawyer, just tell him, “Get me bail, or get me the fuck outta here.” Don’t tell him what happened, don’t tell him anything. Get your bail set, or your R.O.R. (released on your own recognizance), and just talk to your own lawyer. Don’t tell cops or Legal Aid shit, because anything you say will be used against you in court. I can’t stress that enough.

  Basically, it’s the police’s job to lie and try to stack as many charges up against you as they can, even if those charges have nothing to do with your original case, in hopes of making something stick to you. Your lawyer’s job is to knock each lie, each charge down. And if you don’t have the money to pay a good lawyer, you’re fucked. The public defenders don’t have the time or the focus to really work on your case.

  This is why there’s such a divide between the public and the police. I respect the cops—I’m a grown-ass man, I want to respect the cops, but how can I when they don’t respect me back? It has to go both ways. I know too many people who went to jail on trumped-up charges and lost eight or ten years of their life before they got an appeal and got back out. And they can’t get that time or money back—it’s gone forever.

  So if you’re guilty—or even if you’re not—and you don’t have the resources to fight it, if you get jammed up in that kind of situation, it’s often not worth going to trial because they’ll railroad you either way. They’ll nail you, and you’ll spend the rest of your life trying to file an appeal, which you also can’t afford. And if you’re guilty, you might as well take the plea—take the first offer they give you, and handle that shit the best way you can. Because you won’t be able to get out of it in a trial. The courts will chew you up and shit you out right into prison.

  But there’s always some dumb motherfucker who thinks they’re so goddamn clever, they can outsmart the court. It never happens. One of my peoples from Brooklyn—his name is Blizz—got it in his mind that we needed a professional mixing board to do some recording shit.

  So this motherfucker went to a studio, tied up the two dudes that were there, stole the mixing board and put it and the two dudes all in a U-Haul truck. The guys he tied up got free and called the cops. He got caught with them and the board on FDR Drive and got locked up for grand larceny, kidnapping, and some other shit.

  Blizz was a repeat offender who’d just gotten out after doing three to six years. Even with that and all the new charges, they offered him a plea bargain of eight years. But that wasn’t good enough for him, so he took it to fucking trial—and blew up his sentence to thirty fucking years. He thought he was so smart he could outsmart the courts.

  Another guy I met in my cell in Manhattan House. He told me how he was taking his case to trial, and was already facing thirty years. Now, at that time, he looked like me, just a regular young man.

  Fast-forward two and a half years; I ran into him again as I was coming out and he was coming in. Dude had blown his trial, got sixty years. Now, his whole head—face, hair, everything—had turned stone gray. Last time I saw him, he’d looked just like me, good skin, jet-black hair, just another brother in the system. Thirty months later, he’d turned ash gray from everything he’d gone through.

  *

  The most important thing I learned from reflecting on that experience is that like most people, I make bad decisions when I’m angry. I got angry once and made a decision that cost me my freedom, and I’m still dealing with its consequences more than twenty-five years later.

  Who in their right mind would travel with crack and a gun to a coke block in Harlem? I didn’t need to bring the package back to the connect. But I was so angry I just wanted to grandstand on him a little bit before I plugged him. Now the cops had me on a weapons charge and criminal possession of a controlled substance. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

  Back then, a gun charge would only get you six months on Rikers. That’s where the whole “I’d rather get caught with a gun than without one” mind-set came in. We had guns on us like it was part of our uniform. However, “metal attracts metal”: In other words, cops knew when you were carrying by the way you walked. If I wasn’t holding heat, the cops would glide on by. If I was holding, they would do a U-turn and roll back up on me. That’s when I had to run.

  I could’ve been home in six months. But because I got caught with a controlled substance as well, I had to cop out to a one-to-three for possession. I copped out because I was guilty. I’m not stupid: I was carrying a gun; I was holding drugs. Just gimme the deal, and I won’t waste your time.

  They actually wanted me to go to trial, where if I was convicted, I could wind up doing five to fifteen. There was no way I’d go that route. “I committed the crime, I’m guilty, what’s the offer?” When you’re not guilty, that’s when you take it to trial. But I’m not stupid, so I pled out and got the one-to-three. If I hadn’t taken that, the next offer would have been two to four years. You do the math. The police wanted to put me away for the whole fifteen if they could, but I wasn’t gonna give ’em the satisfaction.

  Even then, I was lucky to get busted where I did. The crazy shit about Manhattan, it was more lenient with coke charges than Staten Island. Staten Island will bury you with any type of drug shit. That’s why I never got locked up on Staten Island. I got locked up uptown in Harlem. That’s why I only got a one-to-three for three and a half ounces of coke and the gun. If I’d gotten caught on Staten Island, I probably would’ve done two to four years. Maybe five.

  While I was at home waiting for sentencing, things almost got worse. In order to pay my lawyer, pay for my bail, and pay my everyday bills, I was posted up in front of 160 hustling harder than normal. I knew I had to get money since I was going away for a bit.

  This motherfucking fiend Dupreme came up on me around the building, asked me for some shit. At the same time, he dropped a stem on the ground, and before I can blink, woop woop—the cops pull up.

  I had the pack in the toe of my sneaker. Not a crazy amount, but coupled with my standing case, it’s enough to send me away for a good while.

  “What’re you doing out here?”

  “Just waiting for my girl.”

  “Bullshit. You’re coming down to the precinct. We’re gonna strip search you.” They bagged both of us. My heart dropped down to my stomach. But I was cool. I didn’t panic, I just played it smooth.

  We get down to the precinct, and they’re searching through my clothes as I take them off. They’re turning my sweater and coat inside out looking for something, anything.

  “Take off your sneakers.”

  I thought I was done for. I sat down and took off my sneaker, but the bomb was so wedged in there, it just stayed stuck up front. Off straight instinct, I shoved the sneaks right under his nose. He turned away, and I chuckled like I was enjoying putting my funky, hustled-in-all-d
ay shoes in his face.

  “Drop them on the floor,” he said.

  I dropped them on the floor and by the grace of God, nothing fell out. I kicked them to the side and took the rest of my clothes off.

  “A’ight, get your clothes and those funky-ass sneakers of yours and get the fuck outta here.” I grabbed my shit, they wrote me a little summons for loitering in front of the building, and I bounced. When I got out, I ran my ass off to the cabstand and got the fuck outta there.

  Later I saw Dupri, who had gotten locked up with me, and who, I found out later, had ratted on me in the first place. “Yo, God? What’d you do with that crack? I thought the cops had you for sure!”

  I just looked at him like, “Yo, you a fucking idiot.” I took my shoe off and peeled the crack from the front of my shoe.

  When he saw it, he was like, “Daaaamn, God! I cannot fucking believe you still got the shit! You are the luckiest motherfucker ever in the whole fucking world!”

  I couldn’t help thinking about the Rasta who’d given me that candy. He’d said nothing could harm me in front of the building or in it. The cops had overlooked the crack. Maybe the voodoo shit was real. Either way, I figured I’d best stop pushing my luck.

  *

  On April 17, 1992, I was convicted of criminal possession of a controlled substance.

  When I got charged, I had to turn myself in. The judge said I had to come back and be remanded. That’s a fucked-up feeling, when you know you have to walk into court and you’re going to jail. People were telling me not to report to the judge, that instead I should just go on the run.

  That’s some bullshit. You can’t run from shit in life, especially if you’re gonna be living the street life. You have to accept that there’s gonna be dues you have to pay for making fast money. All that money you’re making and jewels you’re flossing (showing off) comes with a price. Those dues come in the form of robberies, death, and, of course, jail. I figured if I just did my time now, I’d get out fast enough. Probably one of the smarter decisions I’ve ever made.