Keshari parked her Range Rover in the public parking structure at Vignes Street, crossed over to Men’s Central Jail, and went inside. She stored her purse in one of the lockers in the lobby. She was subjected to metal detectors by sheriff’s officers. She was required to show identification and sign in. Then she was escorted to the visitation room to await the inmate she’d come to see.
She looked around her at the fluorescent-lighted, windowless surroundings with its metal tables bolted to the floor. Televisions were bolted high up on the wall on either end of the large room. Although she’d never seen any of the cell blocks, Keshari could imagine the suffocating frustration of the inmates locked away in this place. She had no criminal record, not even a misdemeanor offense, and she had Richard Tresvant, largely, to thank for that, but, in her line of work, she knew that she had been pressing the full extent of her luck for a long time and, eventually, that luck would run out.
Richard “Ricky” Tresvant was escorted into the visitation room from the segregated housing unit. Ricky was thirty-eight years old, six feet three inches tall, with long, lean, muscular legs and enviable six-pack abs rippling underneath his orange, inmate-issue uniform. His intense, brown eyes sparkled with extreme intelligence, charisma and danger, even after weeks of confinement in a jail cell. He was equal parts “sex symbol” and “menace to society” and it was this mesmerizing combination of attributes that had attracted Keshari to him when she was only fifteen years old. A whole host of factors kept her locked under his Svengali-like spell fifteen years later.
Ricky was preparing to go to trial for a high-profile murder that he was adamant he did not commit. His “dream team” of attorneys was working around the clock and calling in favors everywhere to ensure that he was exonerated once the trial commenced.
Keshari rose from the table at the rear of the room as Richard approached. She smiled and kissed his lips before the two of them sat down. The sheriff’s officer who’d escorted Ricky to the visitation room joined the other officers at the room’s control station. Keshari and Ricky were left in virtual privacy. Keshari smiled at him reassuringly. As powerful as he was and as effortless as it usually was for him to separate himself from his emotions, the fact that there was a large possibility that he would spend the rest of his life behind bars must have been starting to weigh on him mentally.
“How are you?” Keshari asked.
“How do you think I’m doing, Keshari? I’m about to go crazy in this shithole. Every day that I wake up here is like a fuckin’ nightmare that keeps rewinding. When I find out who set me up…”
Ricky’s eyes darkened. Keshari reached across the table and stroked his face, unable to squeeze his hands because they were cuffed behind him.
Richard Tresvant had painstakingly schooled Keshari to become the woman she now was. From the tenets of fashion, fine jewelry, cars, real estate, food and wine, art, architecture, right down to how to fire a gun, Ricky Tresvant could confidently claim responsibility. No matter how the world perceived him and the dangerous path he’d chosen in life, Ricky was clearly a genius. While he hadn’t spent a day in school beyond high school, he was constantly reading, “constantly expanding his intellectual repertoire,” he said, and getting very rich through high-stakes criminal activity that he rolled into completely legal enterprises.
Ricky had put Keshari through college at UCLA, where she studied economics and accounting and graduated summa cum laude. Then Ricky pushed Keshari to continue her studies and acquire her MBA from the Wharton School of Business in Phila-delphia. All the while, she was flying back and forth to Los Angeles, earning her stripes in Ricky’s operations, The Consortium.
“My organization will come to the table educated enough to make dirty money clean,” Ricky had told her. “We’ll show the world that crime really does pay. We’ll know and be able to play corporate America’s game better than they do and we’ll build a billion-dollar empire without getting locked up in the process.”
Richard Tresvant had seen something very special in Keshari Mitchell many years before, before she was even a woman, before she was capable of seeing anything special within herself; and he’d capitalized on and exploited all of her extraordinary qualities in more ways than one. Theirs was a very complex relationship. Love, business, control, and fear were intricately intertwined.
“Bloomberg will be here in an hour. The assistant district attorney and the polygraphist appointed by the D.A.’s office are also coming. The D.A. wasn’t satisfied with the results of the lie detector test from the polygraphist I hired. For whatever reason, even though I hired a very highly qualified polygraphist with indisputable credentials, this asshole believes that the results were rigged…that I may have paid or coerced my polygraphist into rigging the results. I should sue this minimum wage-earning motherfucker for slander.”
“How much longer is it now before the start of the trial?” Keshari asked.
“Three more weeks. The D.A. has been pushing to move forward with the trial immediately. He’s feeling confident of a win, but Bloomberg secured a continuance for further development of my defense case. The legal team is viewing the situation from a lot of different angles. They’re telling me that there is a chance I may have to take a plea bargain. I am NOT going to jail for something that I didn’t do!”
He broke off again. Fury over his predicament had him close to the edge of completely losing control.
It was just too difficult for Keshari to understand how Ricky could continue to vehemently deny his guilt when his fingerprints were at the crime scene as well as on the murder weapon. True enough, the results of the first polygraph test he’d taken had gone solidly in his favor, but Ricky was a master of manipulation. What if he’d tricked the polygraph test?
Ricky calmed down and promptly changed the subject.
“How’d everything go the other night?” he asked, referring to the transaction in which Keshari had purchased seventy-five keys of cocaine from their new, Mexican supplier.
“For the most part, everything went smoothly,” Keshari answered.
“What do you mean ‘for the most part’?”
“The Mexicans are very apprehensive about your current charges and the trial.”
“I hope you assured them that they have nothing to worry about.”
“I did,” Keshari responded, “but I’m left to wonder if you’re not being too cavalier about this situation. Despite your very powerful and well-placed allies, this is not your run-of-the-mill murder charge. This case is receiving a tremendous amount of media coverage. The Mexicans could issue hits on all of us to ensure that their interests are protected.”
“Do you think that I would sit here and allow years of work and millions of dollars of my money to be jeopardized without taking preemptive measures to safeguard against situations like this? You know me much better than that, Keshari. You’re overreacting.”
“You’re under-reacting. Federal authorities could indict all of us any day now while this spotlight is all over you, or all of us could be murdered without a moment’s notice; and I think that this murder charge has you too overwhelmed to see that that’s a greater probability for us now than it has ever been.”
“That is the nature of this business, Keshari. Now…I need liquidation of this product that’s scheduled to arrive within one month after its delivery,” Ricky said, dismissing Keshari’s concerns. “Winning this trial is not going to come cheaply. Oh, by the way, I’ve been doing some reading on waterfront condominium developments down in Florida. Miami Beach. Get with Strauss and do some shopping. I want to fly down and get my feet wet as soon as this trial is over. I’ll pick up a few units, get the contractor and my interior design people in to upgrade the amenities, and then I’ll flip ’em for twice the purchase price. I may even eventually join the roster as a developer myself.”
Keshari stared at Ricky incredulously as if he had lost his arrogant mind. He vacillated from barely controlled fury over what he claimed was a trumped-u
p murder charge to cool over-confidence about its outcome. She couldn’t keep doing this.
“R, there’s something that I’ve been needing to talk to you about and I can’t continue to put it off. It’s the main reason I came today.”
“What?” Ricky asked, noticing that Keshari was growing increasingly tense.
She stared down at the huge, Tahitian black pearl on her right hand with its spray of flawless, pave diamonds that cascaded over the pearl and around the band. It had been a gift from Ricky. She hesitated before continuing.
“R, I’ve been doing some thinking…a whole lot of thinking…and…I…I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“You don’t want to do what?” Ricky questioned.
“THIS…The Consortium…I don’t want to do it anymore.”
Ricky tilted his head to one side as if looking at Keshari from a different angle might make her look like she had not taken complete leave of her good sense.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?!” he snapped venomously, loud enough to draw the sheriff’s officers’ attention. The officers looked ready to head in their direction to assess the situation.
Ricky lowered his voice to an angry whisper.
“You mean to tell me that, with all the shit that I have raining down on me right now, you are going to come in here with some shit like this?! I’m in here facing a first-degree murder charge. This is not some corporation where you can just submit your resignation when you no longer like the company’s politics. You are in this for the duration.”
Keshari was silent. Ricky glared at her furiously, like he might attempt to physically attack her. Then he just as quickly calmed himself. His mind ticked away in calculation.
“You remember when you put me on? My mother had just passed. I didn’t give a damn about anyone or anything…not even myself. You were there for me. I didn’t have anybody except for you and Misha. You understood me. You taught me everything I know. Everything you did seemed so exciting to me back then and I wanted to be a part of it. My life and my mind are in a different place now and I have got to get out of this business.”
“Let me tell you something,” Ricky said. “With the exception of your mother’s passing, I don’t give a fuck about any of that shit you’re talking about now. I groomed you to take the position you now hold in this organization. You are the most powerful woman in the United States. I made you that and this is the repayment I get?! When loyalty and commitment are lost at the top of this organization or any other, it trickles all the way down. I love you and you better always know that, but I will off you and anybody else who seriously jeopardizes my business.”
“So, you’re threatening me now?” Keshari asked.
“You know me far better than that, Keshari,” Ricky responded. “I don’t issue threats.”
“You know what?” Keshari said. “This was patently bad timing to bring up this subject…just like you said. After the trial, when all of this has calmed down, we can sit and discuss it again and come to an amicable compromise.”
“There will NEVER be a right time to broach this subject again, Keshari. This is a blood in-blood out commitment that you made. Now, I don’t know what happened between your meeting with Machaca the other night and you coming here today, but what I do know is that I’ve got eighty million dollars worth of work arriving in three weeks and you had BETTER get your head back in this business well before that time.”
Ricky shook his head in disbelief.
“You are second in command in this organization. Surely, you have not gone and forgotten just how very deeply that ties you into this game. Your first obligation will ALWAYS be to me and to the business affairs of The Consortium. Do you understand me?”
Keshari didn’t answer him. She glared at him angrily, wanting to just get up, walk out, and take her chances with whatever happened after that.
“I go to trial in three weeks and, at the same time, we are scheduled for delivery,” Ricky said. “This is not the time for you to decide to grow some kind of a moral compass, get all self-righteous and careless, and make a foolish mistake where my money is concerned.”
Ricky got up from the table.
“You’d better handle my shit, Key! Then take yourself over to Raffinity or Cartier, pick yourself out something nice, charge it to my account, and forget this little discussion that you initiated today…for your own good. The only way that you’ll terminate your obligations to The Consortium is in a body bag.”
Ricky signaled the sheriff’s officer and was escorted out to a holding room to await the arrival of his attorney and the D.A.
Keshari arrived at her Century City offices following her visit with Ricky and told her assistant to hold all of her calls. She definitely needed some time to regroup after what she’d just done.
Shutting herself away in her huge, plush inner sanctum, Keshari sat at her desk and stared pensively out her thirtieth-story window at the expanse of Century City and the surrounding West Los Angeles area. She shook her head and laughed to herself at the irony of it all. Richard Tresvant had killed people and had ordered people killed without losing a night’s sleep…and would probably attempt to kill her, whether she liked facing that reality or not, but if she had it to do all over again, she would have told Ricky the very same thing that she’d just told him that day. She wanted OUT…out of The Consortium, out of the life, out of the game.
The SOURCE magazine did a cover story on Keshari Mitchell at the beginning of her career, titled “The Greatest of All Time?” In a black, pinstriped Armani suit and red Everlast boxing gloves, the new kid on the block in the music industry was stunning.
Five years later, Keshari Mitchell was thirty years old and Larger Than Lyfe Entertainment, which she founded, was a $300 million entertainment company…no longer merely a record label…specializing in hip-hop and boasting representation of a steadily building list of certified platinum artists. Young, beautiful, gifted and Black, Keshari had appeared on the scene out of nowhere and, in a very short time, had become an indomitable force. Her goal from the very beginning was to take the art form of hip-hop that she loved so much and turn it into a mega financial enterprise that was owned and controlled by the very same people who wrote, produced, performed, originated, and developed it—Black folks; and she built from the ground up the first major record label in history solely owned and controlled by an African-American WOMAN.
Most record labels are owned by stockholders and controlled by a board of directors. Keshari Mitchell was the “stockholder” and “board of directors” for Larger Than Lyfe Entertainment. Not since Berry Gordy and Motown had anyone done what Keshari Mitchell did. When Larger Than Lyfe Entertainment’s debut artist’s CD hit record stores, the entire music industry could only stand back and watch in collective daze and amazement as Keshari Mitchell and her very appropriately named record label made their meteoric rise to the top. Within weeks, her debut artist’s CD, Rasheed the Refugee’s Land of the Lost, was certified platinum. Weeks later, the label’s second hip-hop artist, T.E.N., dropped his album and immediately went platinum. The woman had the Midas touch.
Keshari was a perfectionist and a workaholic who went from twelve-to fourteen-to eighteen-hour days in her never-ending quest to be the best in the business. Contract negotiations, album release deadlines, artist promotion, concert tour schedules, and meetings with a host of attorneys and accountants to discuss, allocate, and grow more legal money than she’d ever anticipated dealing with over an entire lifetime were only the beginning of her rigorous day-to-day activities. Publishing rights, ownership issues, artist management, music production, public relations, flights back and forth to cities all over the country for business meetings as many as ten times in a single month, all while sheltering her intensely private personal life from the vulture-like scrutiny of the media were whole other feats onto themselves. But Keshari was not averse to the challenge of such immense responsibility. Larger Than Lyfe had been a huge dream for her for as long as s
he could remember and she couldn’t think of a better feeling than going to work every day and seeing the tangible results of her dream. She was what success stories were all about. She was a little girl from South Central Los Angeles who’d become the New Millennium version of the “American Dream.”
For a moment, Keshari’s contemplative, green eyes took in and savored the magnificent, 180-degree view that her office’s ceiling-to-floor windows afforded her. The mazes of glass and concrete buildings surrounding her and the Downtown Los Angeles skyline in the distance were marvels that never ceased to amaze her. Millions and millions of dollars exchanged hands daily, hourly, in all of these tall buildings and she was a part of it all. The next moment, Keshari’s gaze grew grave. For the past few weeks, she had been closely examining EVERYTHING about her life and wanting to extricate herself from the worst parts of it. When her mind drifted in this way, her thoughts always turned to her mother and she was consumed by the intense mix of emotions she always felt when she thought of her—love, hate, and wondering what her life might be like if her mother was still alive.
She knew that her mother would be immensely proud of her for her tremendous success with her record label. She also knew that it would break her mother’s heart to know of her daughter’s involvement in the very criminal enterprises that destroyed so many lives and so many communities. She must be spinning in her grave right now, Keshari thought, at some of the things that Keshari had done and had played a part in as a member of The Consortium.
Keshari’s whole life was about to change. Something at the very core of her told her that. She was the only woman who Richard Tresvant had probably ever trusted and, with her visit to him that day and the revelation that she’d made, she had betrayed him. Despite his current troubles, Ricky was not going to just dismiss that and there was no way for Keshari to know what nor when the repercussions would be.
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