The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (40 page)

Shawn switched over to Big Daddy Kane, a legendary Brooklyn rapper with a bus tour,
and was given the mic at intermissions, rapping as Jay-Z for his meals. Everyone who
heard Jay was blown away by his verbal cleverness, his confidence, his speed-rhyming
in that high outer-borough deadpan—so good so easy he didn’t take it all that serious.
When the tour was over he went back to hustling.

His crew extended their distribution chain down to Maryland and D.C. where the profit
margins were high, riding Lexuses up and down I-95, moving a kilo of cocaine a week.
His loyalty was to his money, but he had a fear of running the streets into his thirties,
of being nothing. One day in Maryland in 1994 a rival fired three shots at him point-blank
and missed—“divine intervention.” After a decade of hustling he decided to see if
he could make as much money selling records as he did selling rocks.

I figured, “Shit why risk myself I just write it in rhymes

And let you feel me, and if you don’t like it then fine”

A Brooklyn producer named DJ Clark Kent put him with a Harlem promoter named Damon
Dash, who was skeptical until he saw Jay’s Nike Air Force 1s. But none of the labels
wanted Jay-Z—maybe it was too crafty, maybe too real—so he took his hustling profits
and started his own label with Dash. They called it Roc-A-Fella, in case anyone doubted
their intentions. They were going to take over the world.

Reasonable Doubt
came in 1996, twenty-six years in the making. It was complex and sinister, dense
with rhymes laid over lush samples from the records his parents had loved in the seventies,
a portrait of the rapper as a young hustler from the next, lost generation, ready
to kill and live with regrets and sick thoughts or die trying for big money, diamonds,
Rolexes, fine champagne, fine girls, escape.

This shit is wicked on these mean streets

None of my friends speak

We’re all trying to win

It didn’t take over the world, but it was big. Jay-Z swept the clubs and sold tapes
to corner stores until he landed a distribution deal. He gave Marcy a voice, and the
nightmare that America had locked in the basement was suddenly playing in kids’ bedrooms.
They wanted to live the American dream with a vengeance, like Scarface, like Jay-Z,
they wanted to break the laws and win because only fools still thought you could do
it in an orange uniform or a cheap suit when that game was fixed, and there could
be a shortcut with a big payoff. It was paying off for the former Shawn Carter. Everyone
who knew rap understood that Jay was going to be huge.

Music was just another hustle. He was a reluctant artist, still about the money and
not apologizing for it, but to make this hustle work over the long run you needed
art. He was as cold and focused as he’d been on the streets—seven more records in
seven more years, all platinum. He softened the tracks and dumbed down his lyrics—more
large living, less regret—to hit a bigger audience and double the dollars. It turned
out lots of young whites could relate to
money cash hoes Gs cream Cristal Lexus mackin poppin pimpin bitches grams rocks nines
niggaz.
Jay-Z told rap’s eternal story—“why I’m dope, doper than you”—a hundred different
ways, no two couplets alike, and the kids believed him, so they wore what he wore,
drank what he drank, and made him rich.

He launched a clothing line and it brought in more revenue than his music company,
hundreds of millions. Started his own movie studio, got his own Reebok sneaker, distributed
his own vodka, put out his own cologne, trademarked his own shade of Jay-Z Blue, cross-promoted
everything. Stabbed a record producer in the VIP section of a Times Square club in
1999 for bootlegging his fourth album and quoted Pacino in
Godfather II
as he drove in the knife: “Lance, you broke my heart.” Holed up in the Trump Hotel
with his lawyer and crew playing guts, a three-card game that rewarded self-possession.
Vowed never to lose his shit again and later copped a plea, getting away with probation.

He became a corporate rapper, an outlaw entrepreneur, wearing sneakers to the boardroom
like in a Silicon Valley start-up, working in the legit world while living the hustler’s
dream. He retired from rapping in 2003 at Madison Square Garden (but that didn’t last
long) and became a music executive, president of Def Jam, the biggest label in hip-hop.
He cut his old partner at Roc-A-Fella loose, taking the name with him—“It’s just business,”
Jay-Z told Damon Dash, sounding like another screen mobster. And he rhymed the point
in his own words:

I sold kilos of coke, I’m guessin I can sell CDs

I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man

Let me handle my business, damn!

It was the same hustle all the way up—he was doing the same thing on the twenty-ninth
floor in midtown that he’d been doing on the corner in Trenton. The mainstream embraced
rap while rap copied the mainstream, and Jay-Z played the game better than the suits
because he’d learned it on the streets. When critics called him a sellout or materialist,
he had the answer: selfishness was a rational response to the reality he faced.

Everything has to be put in context.

He did the things that top celebrities did: became a lifestyle brand, opened a sports
bar chain, got sued by his workers for back wages, met Bono in a London cigar room
with Quincy Jones, put his name to philanthropic causes, made the Forbes 400 (net
worth 450 mil), hung out with presidents, carried on beefs with other stars, hooked
up with a singer every bit as big as he was, bought her an island for her birthday,
rented a wing of a maternity ward before she was due and made it their private suite,
tried to trademark their baby girl’s name for future use (the U.S. Patent Office refused),
and released a single when Blue Ivy Carter was four days old, rapping: “My greatest
creation was you … You don’t yet know what swag is.”

The more he won, the more they loved him everywhere, lived through him, celebrated
his money and power as their own. At concerts fans raised their hands together and
flashed his Roc-A-Fella diamond logo as if they owned a piece of the deal. He was
a mogul and a revolutionary, an icon and a thug (that was the perfect hustle), worshipped
for getting to the top with a big fuck-you and no standing in line, still telling
the world why he was dope, doper than you. And if he ever failed—when his sports bar
in Vegas went bust, or his summer tournament basketball team stacked with NBA ringers
lost, or his deal with Chrysler to put out a Jay-Z edition Jeep Commander painted
Jay-Z Blue fell through—every trace of failure was hidden, as if the revelation might
be fatal to his spell. He had to keep winning. Success wasn’t about anything except
itself.

When Jay-Z bought a slice of the Nets and fronted the team’s move to Brooklyn, he
became the boss and the star, the black Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson with sins.
When the new arena opened, he sold it out eight straight nights. In the smoky dark
he told sixteen thousand fans, “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this is where
Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play professional sports and break
the color barrier. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I was part of the group
that brought the Nets here from New Jersey. You’ll hear people say I only own a small
percentage of the team. It doesn’t matter what percentage—the story is that a black
kid from a single-parent house made it from the Marcy projects about six minutes away
from here. So the fact that I have any ownership in this franchise is fuckin amazing.
The fact that I have any ownership in this venue is fuckin amazing. Don’t let them
diminish your accomplishment or dim your shine.” Jay-Z held up his middle finger.
Sixteen thousand middle fingers answered him.

There were times when he looked around at his life and thought he was getting away
with murder.

TAMPA

By the thousands and thousands the foreclosures came. They came to Country Walk and
Carriage Pointe, to inner-city Tampa and outermost Pasco, to Gulfport and northeast
St. Pete. They arrived at houses where three months of mail lay in a pile at the front
door, and houses where children were watching
Dora the Explorer
and adults had stopped answering the phone, and motels with 20 percent occupancy,
and obscurely named investment entities with no known street address. They came like
visitations from that laconic process server, the angel of death.

The foreclosures started out as complaints, all of them the same complaint:
You owe me money!
The complaints were filed by such transparently named financial institutions as HSBC
Bank USA, and EMC Mortgage Corporation, and BAC Home Loans Servicing, L.P., formerly
known as Countrywide Home Loans Servicing, L.P., and LSF6 Mercury REO Investments
Trust Series 2008-1, and Citibank, N.A., as Trustee for the Holders of Bear Stearns
Alt-A Trust 2006-6 Mortgage Passthrough Certificates Series 2006-6, and Deutsche Bank
Trust Company Americas f/k/a Banker’s Trust Company, as Trustee and Custodian for
IXIS 2006-HE3 by: Saxon Mortgage Services, Inc. f/k/a Meritech Mortgage Services,
Inc. as its Attorney-in-Fact. The complaints of these institutions were drafted by
foreclosure mills such as Law Offices of David J. Stern, P.A., and Marshall C. Watson,
P.A., and Florida Default Law Group, and they were delivered as summonses by process
servers such as ProVest, LLC–Tampa, and Gissen & Zawyer Process Service, and the Hillsborough
County Sheriff’s Office. The summonses were personally served on, or nailed to the
front door of, or left with a neighbor of, or tossed in the trash near the empty house
of, Olivia M. Brown et al., and Jack E. Hamersma, and Mirtha De La Cruz a/k/a Mirtha
Delacruz, and Aum Shree of Tampa, LLC, and LSC Investor, LLC, and John Doe, and Josephine
Givargidze and Unknown Spouse of Josephine Givargidze. The summons stated:

A lawsuit has been filed against you. You have 20 calendar days after this summons
is served on you to file a written response to the attached complaint with the clerk
of this court. A phone call will not protect you; your written response, including
the case number given above and the names of the parties, must be filed if you want
the court to hear your side of the case. If you do not file your response on time,
you may lose the case, and your wages, money and property may thereafter be taken
without further warning from this court.

Thus set in motion, the lawsuits converged on downtown Tampa, where they assembled
on the fourth floor of the George E. Edgecomb Courthouse of the Thirteenth Judicial
Circuit. Across the bay they gathered in hordes on the third floor of the St. Petersburg
Judicial Building of the Sixth Judicial Circuit. They were transformed into millions
of pages of legal documents, and the documents were crammed into thick dull-brown
legal folders, and the folders were stacked in boxes, and the boxes were loaded onto
carts, and the carts were wheeled into courtrooms by bailiffs who looked weary from
the effort. There, the black-robed judges—some of them brought out of retirement for
this purpose, their six-hundred-dollar per diem largely paid by foreclosure filing
fees—went about the work of clearing Florida’s backlog of half a million foreclosure
cases, as earlier generations had cleared the mangrove swamps that made way for Tampa.

There were so many foreclosures, and the pressure from the state Supreme Court to
dispose of them quickly was so great, that one senior judge, aged seventy-five or
so, might carry three thousand cases at a time. A December morning’s daily docket
in Hillsborough County consisted of sixty cases, beginning at 9:00 a.m. with National
City Mortgage vs. Christopher Meier and ending at noon with Chase Home Finance vs.
William Martens, allowing each case three minutes, and usually less, for justice to
be served. After lunch, starting at 1:30 with Wells Fargo Bank vs. Stephanie Besser,
and ending at 5:00 p.m. with Deutsche Bank vs. Raymond Lucas, the judge ruled on sixty
more.

If Ms. Besser or Mr. Lucas happened to be represented by counsel, the rocket docket—for
so it was called—might temporarily slow down and fall behind schedule. Worst of all
if Ms. Besser or Mr. Lucas appeared in person, for then the court would have to confront
the human face of a foreclosure, the particular lineaments of anxiety etched there
by the prospect of losing one’s home, and embarrassment would settle over the proceedings,
as if a terminal patient had wandered into a room where doctors were coldly discussing
her hopeless prognosis, and the judge might be more likely to ask a few hard questions
of the plaintiff’s attorney. Fortunately, this almost never happened. Most of the
cases were unopposed, the only lawyer present the bank’s—almost always an attorney
from one of several law firms around Florida, known as foreclosure mills, assigned
the case by an automated computer system—who was sometimes not even physically there,
just a voice with a law degree on the court’s speakerphone, knocking off fourteen
cases in a half-hour call, and each case ended with the judge asking, “Anything unusual
about this file? Anything missing?” and then setting a date for the foreclosure auction,
two floors down in Room 202. At times the courtroom was empty except for the judge,
a court assistant or two, and a bailiff wheeling the cartloads of cases back and forth.
And, to save time, and perhaps to keep this judicial stockyard out of public view,
many hearings weren’t even held in a courtroom, but confined to the obscurity of the
judge’s private chambers.

In the summer of 2010, in Courtroom 409 of the George E. Edgecomb Courthouse, officers
began to notice a woman at the daily foreclosure docket who had no apparent business
there. She sat in the back row, never saying a word, but taking copious notes. If
she had a case it never came up, and she looked more like a legal secretary than a
lawyer, in her snakeskin-patterned V-neck top, black slacks, embroidered jacket, and
tortoiseshell glasses. She was a short dumpling of a woman in her sixties, with dry
straw-colored hair cut to her neck and a tired expression—the kind of person no one
noticed, unless she happened to do something unusual.