The Hustle (15 page)

“It crushed me,” JT says of Tyrell's murder. “It was like losing my best friend, a friend you've been knowing since childhood. And you're hearing about legs and arms and stuff, like a leg was chopped off, they was trying to chop his arm off, wrapped up in carpet.”

It was impossible to understand why someone would want to kill Tyrell. If anyone would have been a more likely target at the time, it would have been JT; while Tyrell was going sideways, JT was moving up.

JT's friendly personality and large network proved to be good qualifications for the drug trade—people naturally gravitated toward him. “I was always the guy, if there was a new Starter jacket out—this was back in the break-dancing days—my uncle would give me this fly jacket and they'd be like, ‘Wow, where'd you get that one from?' ” JT says. “I was always, as a kid, someone who could come up with it, get something that other people couldn't, so they would attach to me, you know?”

At the time, that meant hooking up through a relative with a Crip from L.A., who became JT's connection for cocaine. JT soon moved off the corner and became a supplier. He rented a place out in the North End and simply watched his pager. When someone needed a hookup, he put some in his trunk and delivered it. At any one time, he'd have as much as $100,000 in cash hidden in his basement and in his grandma's house. There wasn't much he could do with it, so he spread it around, spending it on partying and the costs of living. It came so easy he figured he could always make more. You don't really respect drug money, anyways, JT says—it doesn't feel like you've really earned it.

JT took a huge blow in 1989 when his grandfather, who had moved up from Louisiana decades earlier and opened a dental practice, became sick with lung cancer. The plans for family succession in the practice had fallen apart when JT's dad and uncle got hooked on heroin, but JT's grandfather remained his primary male role model. As he was getting sicker, JT's grandfather asked him if he was selling drugs. Since his grandfather had always told JT, “Don't lie, don't ever lie,” JT didn't. His grandfather erupted and screamed at him to get out of the house. “That hurt, man, that really hurt,” JT says. As his grandfather deteriorated, JT's aunt smoothed things over and JT returned to his bedside, but his grandfather soon passed away. “I still wish he was here, just so I could ask his advice about things,” JT says.

As the calendar rolled into the 1990s, the situation in the Central Area and the South End—as in urban areas throughout the rest of the country—became more violent. Seattle's homicide rate spiked up from an average of about fifty murders a year through the 1980s and early 1990s to nearly seventy in 1993 and 1994. In March 1993, JT was inside a nightclub in downtown Seattle. James Credit, a teammate from Willie McClain's old CAYA team—he didn't make our mixed team but sometimes came to practices and games to hang out—was outside. James had cut up some Ivory soap, which happens to look just like crack, and sold it for $6,400 to a kid named Otagus, whom they had all known from childhood. When Otagus arrived at the club that night and saw James, he pulled out a handgun and fired several shots at him. James died on the way to the hospital.

“My thing was, ‘I want to make money.' I wasn't into shooting at people or hurting people,” JT says. “This was a way to buy a car, get an apartment, get some clothes.” At the same time, he says, some guys couldn't hustle but found they were good at fighting, brandishing guns, and acting tough. They were looking for trouble. Of course, you also had to project at least a certain capacity for violence or you would put yourself in the position of getting ripped off, which is what eventually got JT.

When he got some money, he fulfilled his earlier dream of getting a nice car, and bought a '62 Chevy Impala with Dayton rims and hydraulic shocks to bounce it up and down. Unfortunately, it wasn't all he thought it would be. “That car became a headache because people kept stealing it,” JT says. One day in March 1993, it went missing from the house where he was staying, and his friend tracked a trail of hydraulic fluid to the garage of a place nearby. It turned out that an eighteen-year-old kid had stolen it and was removing the stereo and the rims to outfit his own car. JT and several friends went by, grabbed the guy at gunpoint, threw him in a van, and beat him up while driving around Seattle. After threatening his life, they eventually let him go. The kid reported it to the cops, and JT and his friends got picked up on kidnapping charges. JT pled guilty and was sentenced to a year in prison.

As he says now, JT was looking for the same sense of “family” on the streets that he'd once found through playing basketball. Rolling around in his '62 Impala with his pager, he was the center of a social network. Damian, in contrast, approached the drug trade according to his own cautious personality—he was, in his words, a “freelancer.” After starting high school at Seattle Prep, Damian hardly ever ran into old teammates like JT and Tyrell, who were doing their thing on Union Street. “Those guys were trying to get rich off of it,” he says. “So it was like the rent is dope money, the car, everything. I wasn't trying to be that dirty.”

Damian sometimes saw Myran, who also was living in the South End. A few times they both went down to sell in Belltown, a neighborhood just north of the downtown business district that in the early 1990s was home to a number of homeless shelters, artists' lofts, and rock clubs. It also was an open-air market for anyone looking to score crack. In general, though, Damian liked to work on his own, selling to people he knew. “I always slid under the radar, never tried to make myself seen, never tried to be flamboyant. Kept my hair cut, shaven, you wouldn't know,” he says. “I got pulled over a couple times, but I was legitimate, had my license, insurance, registration.”

After he started at Seattle University in the early 1990s, Damian started to sell $20 bags of marijuana in clubs on weekends, which he discovered was more lucrative—and safer—than dealing crack on the street. He saw it as a side business to make some extra cash—he estimates he was pulling in about $600 a month. “I wasn't doing it because it was fun,” Damian says. “I was doing it to take care of things. I didn't enjoy the danger, and I didn't have a conscience about it. I was just doing it strictly to make money.”

In the end, his mom, Helen, got him to stop. Although Damian—who was never busted and was still living at home—had kept everything so low-key that Helen didn't even suspect what he was up to, she had a dream that two men were going to set up her son and kill him. When she told Damian, he had a feeling she was right. He decided to get out. He discovered later, through the grapevine, that two men he'd known had been planning to rob him—and possibly worse—for his drug supply, just as Helen had warned. “I think the only thing that kept me from the penitentiary or being dead was my mother's prayers. I believe that to this day,” Damian says. “Those guys could have put me in a ditch and nobody would have known.”

In about 1993, at the same time Damian was getting out of drug-selling, something unexpected happened: Crack use in Seattle and around the country began to decline. By 1995, the rise in violence that had come with the introduction of crack cocaine to places such as the Central Area rolled back as suddenly as it had hit.

The reasons for this are still contested. The arrival of crack and its prominence in the media prompted a legislative reaction that imposed severe penalties on crack dealers and users. Before the elections in the fall of 1986, Congress passed the Drug-Free America Act. Two years later, as Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush campaigned to succeed Ronald Reagan, each accusing the other of being “soft” on crime—this was the time that the Bush campaign ran the infamous Willie Horton ads—Congress enacted more antidrug legislation. The bills included mandatory sentencing for powder and rock cocaine based on the idea—backed by no scientific evidence—that the smokable version is fifty times more addictive than the kind you snort. Congress doubled that number and came up with sentencing guidelines to reflect a 100 to 1 ratio. For example, getting caught with 500 grams of powder cocaine would get you a five-year sentence, while only 5 grams of crack would do the same. The result was that thousands of low-level crack dealers and users began to get shipped off to prison, and the rate of incarceration in America—especially for African Americans—began a relentless climb that has yet to abate.

Conservative social scientists, such as James Q. Wilson, claim that more vigorous policing and the rise in imprisonment accounted for the decline in violent crime since the mid-1990s. Those on the more liberal side of the debate point to the improving economy during the Clinton years and argue that job creation gave opportunities to people who might otherwise have been on the streets. A group of University of Chicago and Harvard economists take another tack, claiming that the hardening of drug-selling territories—essentially establishing “property rights” to deal drugs in certain areas—meant that violence was no longer as necessary. Steven Levitt, the coauthor of the book
Freakonomics
, advanced the theory—now widely debunked—that the legalization of abortion in 1973 resulted in less “unwanted” children born to families unable to give them guidance, hence less crime when that generation reached its late teens and early twenties.

As far as the decision to get out of crack dealing, JT's experience after his release from prison in 1994 suggests that many factors played a part, but the harsh penalties tied to the drug took a primary role. Upon his return to Seattle, JT went right back to doing what he'd been doing. By 1995, though, the feds—the DEA and the FBI—were stepping up their infiltration of drug networks. Three of JT's friends got busted, and he became almost certain he was going to be next. His friends each got ten-year-minimum sentences in a federal penitentiary. JT, who still doesn't know how he stayed free, figured he had pushed his luck far enough. “I got out of the game, quit selling it because I was so nervous and scared that they were going to come get me,” he says.

At the same time, a social stigma became attached to crack use. The older generation had been the chief users when it hit in the 1980s. Younger people looked on and realized that being a crackhead was not very glamorous. Snoop Dogg and Tupac began to wax poetic about the mellower pleasures of weed and cognac. In fact, as both Damian and JT found, selling weed was a better option than crack—it wasn't really harmful to the user, so you didn't have to feel guilty about it, and the punishment if you got caught was far less severe. Using his skill for making connections, JT hooked up with a white guy who had a line on some powerful and colorful bud that was grown in basements on a commuter island across Puget Sound from Seattle. JT became the only black dealer around with this certain type of coveted weed, so it became his trademark. He was “the purple bud guy.”

In 1997, a friend told him that one of his connections, a Crip in Los Angeles, wanted JT to bring the purple bud down to California. He said they could make a lot of money selling it there. JT and his friend put two pounds in the trunk of a car and headed south. When they arrived, though, the guy wanted them to take it to the 'hood and move it themselves. JT thought that stepping on someone else's territory would be a good way to get killed. They told the guy to forget it and began the drive back to Seattle, the cargo of premium marijuana still in the back. As long as they were down there, they thought they might as well do some sightseeing, so they headed up the coast, enjoying the vistas of the Pacific Ocean along Highway 101. They made it to Oregon before they were pulled over. The road trip came to an unhappy end when the cops searched the trunk. “Busted again,” JT says. “Back to the penitentiary.”

…

On a cold, sunny winter day in February 2003, Damian and I drive to Belltown, the neighborhood north of downtown where he came down to deal a few times. It has transformed since the early 1990s. Now, every block seems to house at least one restaurant offering “Northwest fusion” cuisine. New luxury condos, complete with panoramic views of Elliott Bay, have sprouted up. A small park on the corner that used to be a basketball court and a hangout for dealers and the homeless has become a dog park where owners, plastic-lidded cups of coffee in hand, watch their pets frolic off-leash. Somehow, amid all the development, dealers and users—out of habit, tenacity, or just because they don't have many other places to go—still do business in the neighborhood.

Damian pulls his Nissan sedan into a parking lot. We walk over to a busy corner on Second Avenue and stand in front of an office building with tinted-black glass windows. Damian, who has been heavily involved with the church for a decade, wears a black suit and pressed white shirt. As people pass by in their winter jackets, Damian talks about dealing on this corner with Myran a decade earlier.

“It was rough up in here,” Damian says. “There were a lot of people looking for drugs all up and down these streets. The police would ride up around this corner on their bikes. Bikers, that's what we called them. I used to case the place to see if it was hot.

“One time, I was out here with Myran and the bikers rode up and had me jacked against this window”—Damian points to the office building—“but I'd left my dope in the car. Myran, he'd hold it in a brown paper bag in his hand. When the cops came, Myran would act like he was dancing, like he was crazy”—Damian twirls around and waves his arms in imitation—“and he'd throw it away. If they catch you with it in your pockets, that's when they have you.”

Damian stops and nods at a gaunt, middle-aged woman in a hooded sweatshirt shuffling down the opposite side of the street. “See, she's looking for some dope right now.”

We climb back in Damian's car and drive half a block when Damian says something I at first assume is a joke: “I think that's Myran over there on the street.”