by Ice-T
The pimp takes that same energy and harnesses it. After the girl works the trick out of his money, the pimp relieves the girl of her money. Not by threatening her. He gets the money by creating an illusion in her mind that he’s some kind of boyfriend. “Baby,” he tells her, “give me the money—I’ll give you what you need, whatever you want—but I’ll manage this dough better than you.”
What the pimp says to the girl is, “Hey, if you really like me, you’ll give me your money. You won’t give me sex; you give sex to the tricks. To prove you love me, you’ll give me paper.” Also, almost all pimps have some big creative master plan. They act like streetwise geniuses. Carry themselves like the masters of the universe. “Yo baby,” they say, “we’re going to make this big money. We’re going to do big things.” The girls buy into this mega-plan—even if it’s all a delusion—and that’s what bonds them to the pimp, the notion they’re going to elevate themselves by staying with him.
Pimpin’ isn’t necessarily sending a girl to the track. It’s sending the girl anywhere to get money from a trick and bring it back to you. Doesn’t even need to be full-blown sex, as long as she’s using her feminine ways to get that paper. Take a stripper. We call stripping “the indoor track.” A stripper in a decent club can make $500 a night. So an average stripper will go out the first two nights, make enough money for the week and then she won’t work. She’ll chill until she needs more money. But not when she’s got a pimp. A pimp’s got three feet: Two on the ground, and one in your ass. He motivates the girl to get out there the other five days of the week, too, just to maximize the hustle.
Like I said, pimpin’ is a very negative aspect of our society. But I think my man Kenny Ivey put it best in an episode of Pimps Up, Ho’s Down. “If there wasn’t no pimps,” Kenny said, “there’d still be a hell of a lot of hoin’ going on.”
THE GAME IS AN ENTIRE BOOK unto itself. But this is probably the best window I can give you into the pimpin’ dynamic.
If you could be invisible, sitting inside a car with four women on the way to some club, what would be the conversation?
“Oh, I hope I see homeboy with his girl. I’m’a tell!”
“I’m gonna go get pregnant by this dude.”
“He’s gonna take me shopping this weekend.”
“Girl, I hope I meet a millionaire.”
Not a nice-looking guy. Not a decent, hardworking dude. No, I hope I meet a goddamn millionaire.
Now let’s take four guys on the way to the same club. What are the guys talking about?
“I wanna fuck.”
“I wanna fuck.”
“I wanna fuck.”
“Man, if you fuck, can I fuck?”
It’s one-dimensional. Simple and obvious. And it’s harmless—truthfully. Guys on the way to a club sound like cartoons, like Yogi Bear and Boo Boo talking about getting laid.
The girls’ car is far more diabolical and cunning. Sex is set up as if it’s the big determining factor in the male–female dynamic. But to me—from the pimp point of view—it’s not sex. It’s always money.
Now—you make the guys’ car have the girls’ conversation, then you have a car full of pimps.
6.
IN HUSTLING WE ALWAYS SAY, “You raise the risk, you raise the profits.”
Of course, the bashes were bound to escalate. Cats wanted to stay in the store longer; they wanted to steal more and more. Greed is such a primal human characteristic. Give a dude a chance to clear $10,000 a day, he’s going to start saying, “Why can’t I make $20,000? Why can’t I take $40,000?”
So as the bashes became more dangerous, more violent, a lot of my friends went under—because they got a little too aggressive. Violence is always going to bring heat from the cops.
Even as deep as I was in that life of crime, I never wanted to hurt anybody. And despite the military training—or, who knows, maybe because of it—I was never into using firearms during a robbery. I always felt if I pulled a gun during a crime that gave somebody the right to shoot me dead.
The licks escalated to another level; they morphed into what were called “pistol bashes.” A pistol bash is an armed robbery, plain and simple. You still smash the display glass with the sledgehammer, but one of your crew simultaneously holds everyone in the store at gunpoint. That to me was just too high-risk. What if some innocent bystander panics? What if someone decides to play Good Samaritan? What if an off-duty cop is shopping for a tennis bracelet for his anniversary? It just wasn’t worth it to me to go on any pistol bashes.
I got challenged a lot by my boys for backing away from those gun jobs.
“Ice, you scared.”
“Yeah, nigga, you scared of money.”
And I’d say, “Naw, I’m just not with that.”
All criminals have certain things they don’t want to do; you’ve got to follow your gut in the game. You don’t ignore your gut instinct. Otherwise, that’s when you end up in jail sitting, muttering, “Shit, I knew I shouldn’ta …”
I didn’t leave the game overnight. But I refused to go on any of the pistol bashes, and most of the cats I really respected got cracked. One by one, I watched them all get locked up. Eventually I started working with second-string players. It wasn’t the same caliber crook.
I remember this one day: straight baby sledgehammer jewelry lick. I had this cat I didn’t know too well named Jimmy working it with me. We got out of the mall with all the Rolexes we could carry. But we had a pretty complicated escape route to the getaway car. And we were sprinting, twisting, and turning. Every time we’d hit a corner, Jimmy would fall on his fucking ass. I paused and glanced down. This fool had on some fresh Gucci loafers. He was too stupid to wear sneakers like the rest of us.
“Stupid muthafucka!” I said, and then I kept running, whipping around corners. Our escape route really required some athleticism, ducking and hopping and going through all kinds of trick shit.
By the time we got to the car, this clown Jimmy was way behind us—couldn’t see him anywhere. We got in the car and I was steaming because we should have been long gone, but we were still waiting for asshole in his Gucci loafers. Finally, I got out of the car looking for this dude. I saw Jimmy still trying to climb up this ivy-covered hill. I’d just run up the hill in my Adidas Shell Toes, but his dumb ass was stuck scrambling on the side, and I had to go back and get him. I grabbed his arm and helped him make it up the hill.
At the end of that lick we didn’t want to pay him his cut. Jimmy started complaining but I told him to shut the fuck up.
“You fell a thousand times, nigga. Why’d we even bring you? Useless fuck. Plus you didn’t have shit when you finally got to the car.”
There’s a basic rule to the robbery game: If you don’t bring anything back to the getaway car—shit, you ain’t getting nothing.
I WAS STUCK TRYING TO DO licks with second-string clowns like Jimmy, and at the same time, at night, I was still going out into the clubs and rapping. Hip-hop wasn’t paying me, but it was an entertaining sideline to my criminal life. It’s like I had a split-screen on my daytime and nighttime exploits. And in the lyrics, I was talking all about the game—but always in a certain, very deliberate way. I’d been warned by other hustlers, the boys in my crew. “Yo, yo, Ice, don’t say too much.”
Today they got a term for it. Dry snitching. My boys put it this way: It would be a real bad move to put yourself or one of your boys in jail because of this rap bullshit.
“Don’t worry,” I told them. “I know how to do this.” That was a skill in itself, being able to rap about the reality of crime without getting too specific.
Mostly, I was rapping live in the club, but this one day, I was sitting in Good Fred Beauty Salon on 54th and Western. Good Fred’s was where I always went to get my hair done. As I waited for them to finish my perm, I started spitting some off-the-dome rhymes to the girls in the shop. I don’t even remember what I was spitting: I’m the hula dula, the whorehouse ruler.… Back then I was only rapp
ing about fly clothes, jewelry, and rides. It was confident player shit, because we were living it!
Out of the blue, this guy overheard me rhyming and stepped to me.
“Yo, player. You sound tight. You want to make a record?”
I thought the dude was trying to clown me. “Who the fuck are you?” He told me his name was Willy Strong from Saturn Records. “We got our own recording studio,” he said. “We could get you in the studio right now.”
I didn’t know if he was running a game on me or not, but what the hell? We went straight into the studio and we made my first record, “Cold Wind Madness”—also known as “The Coldest Rap.” Willie Strong was the producer. He had a beat by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. There were girls singing on one track—they erased the singing and I laid down my own vocal. Making the record was cool, but it was a novelty to me. I really didn’t think I could make a dime rapping. Willie Strong pressed up the vinyl. Saturn had its own retail store called VIP Records on Crenshaw Boulevard and they started selling the shit out of “Cold Wind Madness.”
But what happened next was kind of crazy. Alex Jordanoff and his boy K.K. owned a club in MacArthur Park called The Radio, which became a hugely influential nightspot in L.A. Alex and K.K. heard my record and started playing it in their club. I didn’t know anything about it. I’d never even heard of The Radio. But my record was becoming real popular in the spot. Eventually, Alex and K.K. hunted me down through the VIP Records retail store and asked me if I’d come do a live performance.
So I showed up at The Radio, expecting nothing. Went in there to do my first performance of the record and I was bugged out. I’ll never forget the scene: I got up to take the microphone, looking out at about three hundred people—almost all white, trendy kids—and from the opening lines, I saw everybody in this club nodding, waving their arms. They not only knew my song, they knew it word-for-fucking-word. And they were rapping it in perfect sync, too:
I’m a playa, that’s all I know
On a summer day I play in the snow
From the womb to the tomb I run my game
’Cause I’m cold as Ice and I show no shame
The ladies say that I’m heaven-sent
’Cause I got more money than the U.S. Mint.…
“The Coldest Rap” hadn’t been on any radio—most of the lyrics were way too hardcore for that. Certain clubs have a playlist, with the DJs spinning the same records every night, and they’d been playing my song every night in The Radio. After a few months of that heavy rotation, all The Radio regulars had it memorized.
That was another turning point in my life, seeing all these total strangers with their hands in the air, singing word for word what I’d written. Up to this moment, I’d never taken rapping seriously. I was too into hustling, too into having money. I was mad cynical and arrogant. I already had all the expensive jewelry and clothes I could wear. I already had a brand-new Porsche—I’d bitten the criminal apple, and when you bite that apple, you think everybody who works for a living is a sucker. You think they’re all squares and you’re flyer, you’re slicker. Your ego just goes through the fucking roof. You’re just a monster.
But that night in The Radio stripped away my hustler’s attitude for a night. It brought me back to being a little kid. Like when you’re dividing up teams for pickup football and one of your friends picks you first. Man, the coolest kid thinks I can play! It was a kind of validation—this more innocent validation—that was so foreign to the hustler’s life.
After that little taste of success, I started to go back to the spot every weekend and perform. I had that swagger already; I had a performer’s “presence.” Alex Jordanoff put me in charge of the stage. I was their MC, the house rapper, and I selected who could come up onstage. And it was perfect timing; The Radio was becoming the club to be seen at. One night, Madonna came and performed. Adam Ant. Malcolm McLaren—rest in peace—came through a few times. The Radio was on the cutting edge of a new underground phenomenon, mixing hip-hop with a punk sensibility. All these white punks and new wave cats were trying to link up with hip-hop’s edgier vibe, our rapping, our break-dancing, our street fashion.
When I became a fixture at The Radio, the club clientele was virtually 100 percent white kids. But over the weeks, I started to bring some of my black hustler friends from the ’hood. That was a weird warp. We had all the jewelry, the fly shoes, the expensive rides parked out front. We had all the entrapments of stardom already.
And even among L.A. hustlers, my clique—you have to remember—felt we were elite. We only stole top-line jewelry, we drank Dom Pérignon, wore Louis Vuitton long before any cats in the hood had even heard of it. We knew about brands like Gucci and Fendi and stores like Neiman Marcus. If you want to track the movement, look at the movie Breakin’—that was shot in The Radio—and when I did my cameo, I had on this black Neiman Marcus hat. Dudes asked me what the fuck I was wearing. What was I doing in some Neiman Marcus hat? That wasn’t a hip-hop look. Kangol was the cap all the B-Boys rocked.
But our fashion sense came from doing the licks. We’d go rob these expensive designer stores, so we had to have the expensive designer clothes. Meanwhile, a lot of my crime partners who’d been locked up when the licks started getting more violent were calling my crib. Every morning, I’d get these collect calls from the correctional facilities. My boys were all telling me the same thing: to be careful; prison had been heating up, too.
“Steer clear of this penitentiary,” they said. “This ain’t no place for no player, Ice. You got niggas here tying blue rags around their heads every morning. Niggas banging hard in here. Niggas here don’t even know Dom Pérignon. Don’t come to the pen, player.”
I’D LISTEN TO THE WARNINGS, but the reality didn’t really hit home until Sean E. Sean went under. Sean E. Sean was the weed man in the crew. Sean E. had been the weed man since high school. Sean and my man Vic—later known as Beatmaster V from Body Count—had a place down in Inglewood right off Crenshaw Boulevard that became this full-blown crime house. They were slinging serious amounts of weed. Not nickel and dime bags, but dozens of pounds stacked up everywhere.
I never was too down with the drug game. As I said, I never did weed or coke or any kind of drugs, but for a really brief time I tried to sell coke. Big headache. Everybody that I gave a bag of coke to never brought me my money. I was handing out blow to all my friends. A couple ounces here and there. And then you need to enforce that shit. I was trying to flip a key, but everybody came up short, and I realized I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t hurt my friends. Because if niggas don’t pay you in the drug game, you have no choice but to hurt them. There is no layaway plan. There is no other option. You have to go straight to violence. I barely recouped the money I’d spent, and I said, “Naw, fuck that.” I wasn’t cut out to be a drug dealer.
But Sean E. Sean had a tight weed game, and his place in Inglewood was the spot. They’d just gotten twenty-six pounds of weed on consignment. I wasn’t fucking with the weed end of the operation, but I was out doing licks on the other side of town. We did this truck lick—a hijacking—where we boosted tons of Technics turntables and stereo equipment and a gang of Canon cameras. All brand-new shit, still boxed up. We unloaded it all at Sean’s crib in Inglewood.
It was the perfect drop house for us to use until we could figure out how to unload the swag. We also had a hot car—a Spitfire—parked in Sean’s garage. Sean was so busy with the weed-slinging, he didn’t know anything about all this shit from the hijacking. The hijacking charge alone carries twenty-five years, and the boosted Spitfire in the garage—well, that’s grand theft auto.
Somehow the LAPD was tipped off, and before long, the cops raided the place. Busted Sean E. Sean and Beatmaster V with hella weed, plus all that hijacked swag and the stolen Spitfire.
When Sean E. got cracked, he said “Fuck it,” and he took the case. He just stared at the cops. “Yeah, man, whatever. The shit’s in my house, give me whatever you gotta give me. Fuck it.”
They had him dead-to-right for the weed, but Sean held water. The LAPD tried to sweat him hard but they couldn’t pin any hijacking on him. How could they? He wasn’t fronting. He honestly didn’t know jack shit about no truck hijacking! I hadn’t told him; it was safer to compartmentalize our various hustles that way. The Feds tried to pressure Sean to snitch on whoever pulled the hijacking but he wouldn’t tell. They hit him with possession of stolen merchandise, but those charges were eventually dropped. So Sean and Vic just ended up doing two years on the drug case.
Sean E. Sean’s my boy for life. He could have hemmed and hawed. He could have said, “I don’t know … some other cats left some of their shit here.” But no. He held his own.
I don’t even know if you call it loyalty. It’s the code we lived by. In fact, didn’t make much difference that we’d been homeys since Palms Junior High and Crenshaw; Sean never once considered telling. That’s just how he’s cut.
I would have done the same thing for him. If I’m sitting in a house full of your stolen shit and I get cracked I’m not going to tell. I’m not going to put the weight on the next dude.
I’ll say this, without any hesitation: If Sean E. Sean hadn’t taken the weight, there would be no Ice-T today. Nobody would have heard of me. There’d be no records, no movies, no TV shows—you wouldn’t be reading this book. I’d just be another brother who fucked his life up, spent his best years—twenty-five of them—in the pen over some dumb shit.
7.
WHEN I WASN’T RAPPING in The Radio, I would hang with my hustler friends in another club called Carolina West on Century Boulevard. All the big-time pimps in L.A. used to hang out at Carolina West. It was one of the few after-hours spots around and the club was open from 9 PM to 9 AM. The right time to get there was real late, like three in the morning. So I’d leave The Radio after the crowd thinned, hop in my Porsche, and get to Carolina West right as the club was getting good.