by Ice-T
Now I had my own show. But like they say, “Be careful what you wish for.” It’s one thing to be a guest star, or even have a recurring role on network television like I’d experienced on New York Undercover. But if you’re the star of one of these network dramas, there is no harder job in Hollywood: A lead actor will work fourteen hours a day, five days a week, shooting for eleven months out of the year.
One of the perks of the gig was that I had my own trailer on the Universal lot. I used to get up in the morning and the tram would be rolling by and I’d hear the P.A. booming: “This is Ice-T’s trailer. He’s shooting his show called Players.”
I was usually running on fumes; four hours of sleep. The tram would roll past and make the announcement. I’d wipe the sleep out of my eyes and stare out the trailer window.
“Yo, I’m a stop on the tour.”
We had a good run with Players. We lasted a year. If there’s any reason it failed it was that it was on too early. Our slot had us up against Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Urkel from Family Matters. We did fine; after a few months, we knocked Urkel out. But NBC was really cocky back then. They had Seinfeld and Friends. They were the top dogs. Back then it was normal to get ratings numbers in the twenties—today, they’re dying to get a four-share.
So NBC was real hardcore; if we wasn’t winning our time slot—and at one point we made it up to number two—then we weren’t getting renewed. At the end of the full twenty-three episodes, they canceled the show.
I’ll never forget how I got the news. Dick Wolf called me personally and said, “I wish I had a stronger vehicle for you, Ice.”
I’d learned a lot. I was a producer on Players, so I got to sit in on the production meetings, got to see the inner workings of TV. I began to realize how different movies and TV are. If you make a movie, it either hits or it flops. Television is like making a movie every week. You have all these competitors, ratings numbers coming in every week, it can be nerve-racking. There’s only so much you can do. There are so many variables: Is the network spending enough on promotion? Is your picture on the side of every city bus? All you can do is just try to be the best actor you can be; the rest of it is really out of your hands.
One thing about Dick Wolf: he’s never crossed me, never lied to me. If he makes a deal with you verbally, then that’s the deal. You don’t have to wait for a bunch of lawyers to draw up the contracts. We appreciate that straight-shooting style in each other. He once said, “Ice-T is the least-pain-in-my-ass.”
Dick works from a pool of actors that he likes. Guys like Costas Mandylor and Frank Hughes had been on Law & Order. They came over and co-starred on Players. After the cancellation, Dick Wolf hired me for a new show he had called Swift Justice—then he called me back to do Law & Order Exiles, the full-length television film with Chris Noth making his comeback.
The good thing about the Wolf team is that if they like you, they’ll return to that pool to hire from over and over.
I WAS STILL KNEE-DEEP in the fast-changing record business. I was running my own label, Coroner Records, and we were trying to be the first company to do hip-hop on the Internet. We’d inked a deal with Atomic Pop. My manager, Jorge, Sean E. Sean, and me were doing some Coroner Records business and for some reason we decided to go to Roscoe’s. Now, understand, I never eat at Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles. Despite what most people think, not every black person in L.A. eats there. I like some chicken and waffles, but Roscoe’s is not one of my hangouts.
Soon as we walk in the door, who’s there eating chicken and waffles? Dick Wolf and his publicist.
I haven’t seen Dick in a long time so we said what’s up. How’s it going. Then we left.
His publicist later told me that’s where Dick got the idea to put me in his new show, Law & Order: SVU. “The show was struggling to get its footing, just out the gate, and Dick was trying to figure out what to do, and when he saw you, a light went off, and he said, ‘Let’s put Ice in the show.’ ”
That’s how it’s done. In this business, when people say, “Out of sight, out of mind,” it’s real—and a lot of times there’s a million-dollar check hanging in the balance. Just having your face pop in front of a Hollywood heavyweight randomly at Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles can break your career open in a new direction.
Now when I got the call to come do Special Victims Unit, believe it or not, I really didn’t want to do it.
I was sitting on the fence with the scripts for a long time. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do Law & Order, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to move to New York. Secondly, I’d come off Players and I was a star. And like I said, that’s a brutal work schedule, fourteen hours a day, five days a week—you have no life.
I’d rather have less money and more freedom.
But they kept reassuring me. “This is an ensemble cast. You don’t work all the days. Just come do four shows, Ice.”
“Okay, that sounds cool.” I agreed to do four shows. I’ve stayed eleven years.
STAY ON THIS EARTH long enough and life will definitely come and bite you in the ass.
In was a beautiful afternoon in April 1999, and I was sitting in my office in Hollywood, feeling like I was on top of my game. Feeling like things could not get any smoother.
By the mid-nineties, after all that heat for “Cop Killer” and my struggles with Time Warner, I was running my label, Coroner Records, the way I wanted to run it. We’d hooked the office up: black sofas, black rugs, framed gold and platinum records. Even a replica on the ceiling of Michelangelo’s rendering of Adam’s outstretched finger touching the hand of God. I always loved beginning my day staring up at that image of the birth of man from the Sistine Chapel.
In spring of ’99, I found myself at a major transition: Up till this point, I had made my name as a gangsta rapper. The godfather of the West Coast hip-hop scene. I’d made a lot of waves, and sold a lot of records, both as a solo artist and with Body Count.
My day-to-day was primarily as a music exec. I was putting in long days running Coroner Records from my ninth-floor office on Hollywood Boulevard. Behind the scenes, I was constantly bringing my old criminal partners out of the street life, showing them that there was a legal way to make money. I had Sean E. Sean working as my right-hand man. I was known as being one dude from the streets who didn’t forget his homeboys. Between bail and legal fees, I literally spent millions of dollars helping friends of mine get back on the street.
I was about to go to New York to start shooting my first season of Law & Order: SVU. I had a pile of SVU scripts that Dick Wolf had sent sitting on my big oak desk.
I was rereading one of the SVU scripts, trying to visualize how I was going to portray Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola, when around one PM I got word that one of my old partners was coming up to the label.
His name was Deon, but on the streets of South Central everyone called him Baby D. He was about ten years younger than me and, when I was hustling, he became one of my crime partners. I put him in the game. We did a lot of licks together. He got locked up for a gun charge, and while he was in the pen, I looked out for his family. When he came back home, I told him he could work for me. I even gave him a rap group to manage.
Baby D was what we called a transformer, a cat who dresses like a square by day—straight-up business attire, like he’s got a manager’s job at Office Depot or owns his own towing company—but in reality, he’s an O.G. Crip.
So on this particular April afternoon, Baby D comes up to the label. And while we’re kicking it, he casually shows me his gun: a semiautomatic, two-tone pistol, brushed aluminum with a black slide. He asked me if we had any guns up in the office. “No, we ain’t got no heat up in here,” I said. “A lot of my friends are on parole and they can’t be around no weapons.” I didn’t think much more of it at the time.
Baby D split, and five hours later, we were just chilling out in the office, about ready to head home for the day. It was DJ Evil E, Sean E. Sean, my man Rich, my daughter,
LeTesha—then twenty-three years old—and one of her girlfriends. Suddenly, we saw on the closed circuit monitors that three guys had come into the lobby unannounced. They looked like rappers. We used to have rappers rolling through all the time, looking to get signed. I sent my boy Rich to the front door to let them in.
A few minutes passed. Rich hadn’t returned. Next thing, these two cats bust through the door with their Roscoes out. I thought it was some of my people playing around, because I got friends who’ll mess with you like that. But these were some serious dudes. For a second, I thought I might get the jump on them, but then I realized that the third guy had my boy Rich on the ground with a pistol to his head. So if there’s any kind of struggle or commotion in my office, they’ll definitely rock Rich.
We underwent what I call the jacker’s protocol. When dudes come through the door with guns, I understand the psychology only too well—I know how they’re going to get down, because I’ve been on the other side of the gun. They’re either coming to kill you or they’re not. They’re not going to decide halfway through—on the spur of the moment—that they’re going to execute five, six, seven people.
The deal is this: If they come through the door with masks on, they’re probably not going to kill you. If they don’t have masks on, more than likely you’re going to die. These cats didn’t have masks on. But for some reason, I didn’t think they had it in them to murder us.
It was precision work. I almost had to admire their efficiency. They lined us all up, screaming orders.
“Yo, run that muthafuckin’ watch! Run that muthafuckin’ chain!”
They snatched my Rolex Presidential, my gold medallion, and my ring that everyone called “the power source”—a huge, flawless diamond piece that was worth about seventy thousand dollars.
They ordered us all into the kitchen, and then I saw one of them wiping the fingerprints off the doorknobs with his shirt. My thoughts were racing.
For a second, I saw all these TV stations breaking in with the news that Ice-T had joined the ranks of Biggie and Tupac—another rap icon murdered by unknown gunmen.
But I snapped out of it and focused on the here-and-now.
Okay, what’s their next move? I was down on one knee, like a sprinter at the starting blocks, ready to lunge at one of them if they started busting shots.
And then my eyes focused on the little dude’s gun. It was the same two-tone brushed aluminum pistol that Baby D had showed me earlier. They flicked off all the lights, and just when I thought they were going to start busting shots, they turned and ran. We could hear them in the lobby, laughing and yelling, “Yo, I can’t believe we did it!”
THAT NIGHT I CALLED a meeting at my house in the hills. My place was swarming with fifty or sixty dudes. Heavy-hitting cats from all kinds of gang sets—dozens of O.G.’s and shot callers. It was like a massive gang summit: everybody showed up saying, “Ice, are you all right?” The news of the robbery had traveled like a brushfire around L.A. Everybody was perplexed. They kept saying, “Ice got so much love in the streets—who’d have the balls to do this shit?”
We started doing our detective work, and I told my people that one of the jackers had used a two-tone semiautomatic piece identical to Baby D’s.
That was the coldest blow—when that realization sunk in. I didn’t want to believe the facts at first. My mind was rationalizing it, playing tricks on me. I mean, who can protect themselves from betrayal? The day your brother wakes up and plans to do you dirty—there’s no defense against that.
All my people were telling me, “Ice, just put the green light out on him—everybody knows Baby D crossed you. Cats are only giving him a pass because he’s your friend.”
I was even more pissed because my daughter had been in harm’s way, but still I didn’t want to order this dude killed.
After some “street therapy”—some calming words from my closest friends—I chilled down a bit. But the situation was still very volatile.
Three weeks later, we were in line outside the Palace Theater. We were five deep. I had four other guys with me. And I was also carrying a .380 Pocketlite. L.A. is not like New York; everybody carries guns. L.A. is the wild fucking West. There’s heat always. It affects the way you move. You got to handle life like that. Any argument can turn into a shootout.
So we were at the club and I got my .380 in my front pocket. We were on high alert because memories of the robbery were still fresh in everyone’s minds.
“Yo,” one of my boys said, “dude is standing right behind us.”
I turned. Baby D was about forty feet behind us with a girl.
The clown had the nerve to send the girl up to us in the line. “He said, ‘Tell Ice I want to talk to him.’ ”
I nearly flipped. “What?” I said. “You tell that bitch-ass nigga if he got something to say to me to come up here and talk to me!”
It was a standoff. He thought I was about to walk back to him.
And, honestly, if he had walked up to me—me and all my boys being strapped—some unforgivable shit might have went down right there in front of the Palace Theater.
But he didn’t move. And I didn’t move. I told my friends, “Come on. Let’s break the fuck out.” We just had to pimp past it.
I probably saved Baby D’s life right then and there. If I’d even given the nod to my boys, it would have gone down on some O.K. Corral–type shit.
A few days later, I confronted Baby D. I called him up from my office at Coroner Records.
“Yo, I’m not even angry at you, man,” I said. “I’m just hurt. But I got bigger things to deal with right now.”
“Naw, man. It wasn’t me!” he said. “Niggas is spreading shit about me.”
“I got bigger moves to make with my life.”
Baby D never copped to it. He couldn’t cop to it. But we all knew what he’d done.
The next morning, I jetted out to New York to start shooting my first season of Law & Order: SVU. While I was on location in Manhattan, I got the call from my boy Sean E. Sean back in L.A.
The streets had caught up to Baby D. He was found murdered with two shells in his dome. Rumor had it, he’d robbed some big-timers of their drug stash and these dudes didn’t waste any time exacting their revenge.
I learned a lesson that day—a real jewel. Keep your eyes peeled for every sign of betrayal. I mean, there were little hints of disloyalty from Baby D that I ignored; truthfully, I didn’t want to see them.
A lot of times in life you’ll run into snakes and assholes, and you’ll feel it’s your job to straighten them out. But remember this: If a dude is a snake to you, odds are he’s a snake to everybody. That’s what we call his “get down.” Eventually, he’s going to cross the wrong person. You don’t have to make it your job to be the hand of God.
13.
AFTER THE SETUP, I knew I had to close my circle. I had to tighten up the people I considered worthy of trust.
Right after that heavy situation with Baby D, everything in my life flipped. There was upheaval on every level: physical, professional, romantic. First off, I permanently relocated, from Los Angeles to New York. Second, I was starting a new job at NBC. And, though I didn’t realize it right away, my relationship with Darlene was coming to an end.
IN NEW YORK, my life became all about work. I didn’t have a lot of time to ruminate or feel bad about our relationship ending. I was losing myself in my new job. Working harder than ever as I leapt into my new role on Law & Order: SVU.
I’d always had a fondness for New York; I’d had a solid connection to the city ever since I linked up with Afrika Islam, Grandmaster Caz, Melle Mel, and the other New York hip-hop pioneers. Now I was not only moving to the Big Apple, I was heading into the cast of probably the definitive New York TV franchise of our time.
Right away, I fell in love with the show. There’s nothing like shooting on location on the New York streets. People walk up to you in between takes, telling you whatever’s on their minds. New Yorkers
don’t give a fuck. They’re not starstruck. They’ll tell you if they think you’re the bomb. They’ll tell you if they think you’re wack. But mostly—overwhelmingly—we get mad love from New Yorkers when we’re out on locations. The streets and buildings of Manhattan have such a presence—like another character actor on the show—both on the original Law & Order and Special Victims Unit.
I don’t think I’d like my job on SVU as much if we didn’t do so many location shoots. Acting in a closed room, at least for me, sometimes feels boring and corny. You want to go out in the streets and see the people wave and hear them holler at you. My debut season on SVU, we were out doing scenes in the middle of Madison Avenue at first daylight, before the rush-hour madness makes it impossible to shoot, and people were stopping on every corner to watch. We were closing down sections of Central Park, throwing our lines back and forth, standing over pretend corpses in the grass. That was a trip.
When I joined the show, they had this backstory written for my character, Detective Tutuola: Fin’s parents were supposed to be Black Panthers. I was an officer who studied for a law degree but decided not to take the bar exam. I mulled all that over, trying to let it seep into my consciousness. But none of that shit was really helping me with the character. At the end of the day, we found another motivational hook. One of the producers took me aside.
“Ice,” he said, “you don’t really like the cops, right?”
“No, man. I don’t.”
“But you admit you need them, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s your role on this show: Play the cop that we need.”
When you see me running around chasing fools on SVU, that’s exactly the mantra I keep in my head. Play the cop we need. Whenever I show up on set, it’s like I’m a little kid making believe I’m the police. There’s really nothing more complicated to it than that. I’m no method actor; I never spent months riding around with real-live NYPD detectives to get inside their brains, to turn myself into a pretend version of them. Hell no. I’ll break it down: Fin is just Ice-T pretending to be police. All my scenes, all my lines, are filtered through my own personal perspective.