Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro (14 page)

In some ways, Four Man Posse was better than blood family. Family always brought with it inherited problems and allegiances, whereas FMP created beefs that they stood a chance of fixing and set their own rules. Loyalty was paramount. Nothing was to come between them—not other guys or crews, and never girls. Sisters were off-limits. All moms automatically got respect. The steps of Rocco’s building on Tremont served as the official meeting place. The boys pledged to take bullets for each other, never ask questions if asked for backup, and never rat each other out. Girls could be shared, but if you took another guy’s girl, you had to tell the boy face-to-face. If a member really liked a girl, the other FMP members could try to kick it to her, but if she remained true, the other boys had to leave her alone for good. If an FMP member ever fell in love, FMP still came first. “Your friend is going to last forever,” Cesar said. “Your girl ain’t. If you shoot somebody for your girl and you get twenty-five-to-life, she won’t last. You do it for a friend, he will.”

Live by the gun, die by the gun
was their motto,
Scarface
their favorite movie. Cesar’s favorite scene was of Al Pacino lecturing the patrons of a fine restaurant. The diners stared at Pacino and his entourage, frightened but mesmerized. By being scapegoats for all that was bad, Pacino told them, criminals fulfilled people’s need to believe they were purely good. Cesar liked talking about the bond between Pacino and his partners. He felt that way toward Rocco and Tito and Mighty—his homeboys, his crimeys, his family, his crew. Everyone swore by FMP’s rules, which weren’t so different from those of previous generations of Tremont kids. Only Cesar and Mighty, however, took the vows to heart.

Since winter, George had been dating a shy, chubby girl named Gladys who had straight silky hair like Jessica’s. Gladys lived with her Catholic parents in a single-family home in a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx. “From a straight-up
Little House on the Prairie
neighborhood,” said George, both pleased and charmed. He was proud of Gladys. He needled Jessica by saying how much he preferred Gladys’s ladylike company. Gladys worked as a teller in a Manhattan bank. He drove her downtown some mornings, on his way to Gleason’s Gym. Gladys believed George’s money came from his father, who “worked in construction.” George had promised to take Jessica to Hawaii, but he took Gladys instead.

George didn’t bother to hide the photographs of the vacation: Gladys leaning lazily on George’s shoulder; Gladys smiling beneath palm trees; Gladys’s thick fingers clutching fancy neon drinks. It was Gladys he jetted
to San Francisco on a day trip to fetch a pair of Nikes that weren’t in stock in New York. It was Gladys he took to restaurants. But when he invited her to the black-tie company party he’d planned for Christmas Eve, Jessica had reached her limit: Vada could have him in Puerto Rico and Gladys could take the best of him, but on that special night, Jessica was determined to be the girl on George’s arm. He didn’t put up a fight.

Jessica shopped along Fifth Avenue and found the perfect dress—an off-the-shoulder white satin gown. She treated herself to a manicure and a pedicure. The day of the gala, she spent the afternoon in a hair salon. She took so long getting ready that George threatened to leave without her. She teetered after him in her satin white high heels and finished putting on her makeup in the car. Then she slid her hands into the white satin gloves that matched her dress.

Meanwhile, at the World Yacht dock in Manhattan, Obsession employees and their dates waited and waited for their host. The 121 guests had arrived by the modes of transportation proper to their caste: by BMW and Mercedes, by rented limousine, by livery cab. Gladys and a girlfriend milled about in the anxious crowd. Finally, the car pulled up, the valet opened the door, and Boy George stepped out in his Bally shoes. The crowd cheered and clapped. He strode up the ramp of the
Riveranda
yacht in his silk tuxedo and waved to his people. Jessica hung on his other arm. The DJ announced, “Mr. and Mrs. Boy George!”

Jessica relished Gladys’s reaction. “You shoulda seen that girl’s neck snap,” she recalled. “She had pretty hair, I’ll give her that. But she wasn’t as pretty as me. I looked like Cinderella, with the prince right next to me.”

Before dinner, George gave a short speech that one manager remembers as characteristically succinct: “Let’s go out there and make some money. Thank you for coming.” The menu included steak tartare, skewered lamb, prime rib, and $12,000 worth of Moët. Loose Touch and the Jungle Brothers performed. George paid Big Daddy Kane $12,000 for a fifteen-minute rap. Safire never sang a note, but she supposedly pocketed $3,000 (without a private dressing room, she claimed, she couldn’t be expected to perform).

10-4 had ordered printed raffle tickets listing prizes for the Boy George Christmas Give Away (“winners to be announced by the host”). First prize was a loaded Mitsubishi Galant; second, $10,000; third, a Hawaiian trip for two; fourth place, Disney World. Door prizes included a home entertainment center, a Macy’s gift certificate, a “nite on the town,” and $100 bills that the captain of the ship noted none of the guests bothered to claim. 10-4 received a gold Rolex and $50,000; George gave Snuff
a brand-new BMW 750. To four of his top men, George presented diamond-studded gold belt buckles, appraised at $7,500 each. Jessica didn’t win anything, but she wasn’t thinking about material things. “What I need a prize for? I had him,” she said.

The seating was organized by drug spot; managers sat among the pitchers and dealers who worked for them. One had all his boys wearing fedoras, which they called Godfather hats; another table sported red cummerbunds. Plenty of guests mugged for the roaming photographer. He snapped lots of pictures—of guys leaning forward, toasting, their eyes bloodshot, grinning above abundant tables, of the girls beside them in slinky satin and taffeta swirls. It was like prom night, but with an open bar and no chaperons. Boy George paid for everything—in cash. The bill from World Yacht alone ran to more than $30,000.

Fights erupted as the night wore on. One guest challenged a drunken dealer, who had perched on the tip of the ship’s bow, to swim ashore. Another guest was dragged to the deck, stripped to his underwear, and beaten brutally for trying to steal a diamond pendant from a female guest. Jessica fantasized about inviting Gladys to the deck and tossing her overboard. “I was around him so much that I started thinking like him,” Jessica later said. But she was having too much fun dancing to start a fight.

For George, of course, the party had a purpose: pleasure reinforced loyalty, and loyalty was essential to his business. He said, “It’s good to bring them together, so they know, ‘Listen, man, you have a family here. If anything ever goes wrong, this is the type of force that’s coming behind you.’ ” That force would soon be tested. The professional photographs of each table, so meticulously arranged by drug location, would prove invaluable in identifying the players in the Obsession hierarchy.

After New Year’s, Boy George’s best heroin source once again dried up. George called Lourdes’s, looking for Jessica. She had been staying at Vyse, following another beating. Cesar answered the phone.

“Whassup, homie?” George asked.

Cesar answered, “I signed up for school.”

“Meet me at Tremont,” George said.

Cesar had just spent a week at Spofford Hall, a juvenile detention center in the South Bronx, for a robbery he hadn’t committed. (He’d instructed Coco to bring his Nintendo to her sister Iris for safekeeping, so it wouldn’t get hocked while he was gone.) One of the terms of Cesar’s probation was that he return to school. George pulled up to the
corner of Tremont in a white BMW. Cesar was still hoping that George was going to offer him a job. Instead he said, “Want to go to the Poconos?”

“I’m just a little kid. I can’t go to the Poconos,” Cesar replied. His exstepfather, Big Daddy, had taken his mother there.

“We’re going to the Poconos,” George said. Signing up for school merited encouragement. George might also have felt the need to smooth things over with Jessica, who had been in exile at Lourdes’s for almost a month. George added, “There’s got to be some pussy involved in the trip. Get a girl.”

Cesar called Coco. Coco had only been outside of the city twice—once, on a family trip to Disney World, when her father was alive, and to Binghamton, New York, where she’d once gone as a camper with the Fresh Air Fund. Coco told Foxy that she was going away with Cesar’s older sister. Foxy called Lourdes to double-check. Lourdes covered for Coco, but Foxy hesitated until Jessica called and warmly assured her that Coco would be fine—a girls-only trip.

Off the foursome drove in a white stretch limousine. The car even had a name—Excalibur. The white lights on the roof looked like crystals. The winter day was clear. Coco and Cesar sat beside each other in red leather seats. The leather reminded Coco of the jacket Cesar had worn when they’d first met. Jessica and Boy George sat across from them, but they seemed very far away.

The chauffeur drove right over the potholes. Coco wished they could loop around her block so she could show the car off to her friends. The limousine joined traffic on the Major Deegan, then crossed over the majesty of the George Washington Bridge. They were now in another state.

To celebrate Cesar’s return to school, Boy George opened the cooler and pulled out a bottle of Moët. He wanted everyone to drink. He himself wouldn’t, because alcohol disrupted his training regimen. Coco wouldn’t, because alcohol made her queasy. Jessica wouldn’t, because she wasn’t a drinker and wasn’t in a partying mood just yet.

“Whoever doesn’t drink has to walk—I’m leaving you on the side of the road,” Boy George told them.

“He means it,” Jessica whispered. “Listen to him cuz he say he’ll leave you and he will, he did it to me.” During one excursion to Atlantic City, he’d abandoned Jessica beside the highway. Another time, he’d left his spot managers at Great Adventure as a practical joke.

Coco could tell from the funny face Cesar made that the champagne
nauseated him, “so I drank mine and I drank his.” Jessica had to drink until the champagne ran out. George told the chauffeur to pull over to the breakdown lane. Jessica stuck her head out of the power window and vomited, clasping her hair at the nape of her chain-draped neck.

Excalibur had its own VCR. They watched a videotape of Andrew Dice Clay, George’s favorite comedian. George had a big, echoing laugh. Cesar remembers thinking, “This is some rich shit going on.” He was surprised at how friendly George was. “I didn’t think he’d be talking to me, you know, cuz he was rich.” Coco thought that Boy George’s laughter sounded fake.