Undisputed Truth: My Autobiography (4 page)

Some people might read some of the things I’m talking about and judge me as an adult, call me a criminal, but I did these things over thirty-five years ago. I was a little kid looking for love and acceptance and the streets were where I found it. It was the only education I had, and these guys were my teachers. Even the older gangsters said, “You shouldn’t do this. Go to school,” but I didn’t want to listen to them, even though they had respect in the street. They were telling us to stay in school at the same time they were out there robbing. All the guys respected me because I was a little moneymaker. I’d break off some for my friends who needed a little cash. I’d buy us all liquor and food. I started buying pigeons. If you had good birds, people respected you. Plus, it was a rush to steal things and then go out and buy clothes. I saw how everybody treated me when I came around and I was dressed up nice with my shearling coat and my Pumas. I had a ski suit, with the yellow goggles, and I’d never been to a ski slope in my life. I couldn’t even spell fucking Adidas but I knew how they made me feel.

One of the Rutland guys taught me how to pick locks. If you get a key that fits the hole, you just keep playing the key and it wears down the cylinder and you can open the door. I was, like, “Fuck!” Man, when we opened some of those doors, you’d see silverware, jewelry, guns, stacks of money. We were so happy we were crying and laughing at the same time. We couldn’t get it all. You couldn’t walk down the street with that shit, so we just filled up our schoolbags with as much stolen goods we could stuff in them.

One day my friend Curtis and I were robbing a house. The people who lived there were from the Caribbean and so was Curtis. I was in this pitch-black house and I heard “Who’s that? Is that you, honey?” I thought it was Curtis playing around, trying to scare me. So I said, “I’m trying to find a gun and the money. Look for the safe, all right?” “What, baby?” I realized then that it wasn’t Curtis talking. It was the guy who lived there who was lying on the couch. I rushed to the door. “Curtis, this shit don’t look right. Let’s get out of here, somebody is in here,” I said. But Curtis was a perfectionist. Curtis wanted to lock the door instead of just running away. I ran the fuck out. The owner opened the door and smashed Curtis in the head and knocked him out cold. I thought he was dead. It wasn’t until a year later that I saw him again. He was alive, but his face was all shattered, he got hit that hard. Yup, it was the hard-knock life for us.

When we stole silverware or jewelry, we’d go to Sal’s, a store on Utica and Sterling.

I was a baby, but they knew me from coming in with older guys. The guys at the store knew I was coming in with stolen stuff, but I knew they couldn’t beat me because I knew what shit cost back then. I knew what I wanted.

Sometimes we’d be in the streets and if it was noon and we saw a school, we’d just go into the school, go to the cafeteria, grab a tray, get in line, and start eating. We might see someone we’d want to rob, someone who had their school ring around their neck. So we’d finish the food, put the tray back, get by the door, grab the ring, and run out.

We always wanted to look nice on the streets because normally if you’re a little black kid out in the city looking bummy and dirty, people harass you. So we looked nice and nonthreatening. We had the school backpacks and little happy glasses and the Catholic school look with nice pants and white shirts, the whole school outfit.

After about a year, I started doing burglaries by myself. It was pretty lucrative, but hanging in the street and jostling was more exciting than robbing houses. You’d grab some ladies’ jewelry and cops would chase you, or what we called heroes would try to come in and rescue the day. It was more risk-taking for less money but we loved the thrill. You normally had to have a partner to be a successful jostler. Sometimes it wouldn’t even be planned, but you’d see someone you knew, so you teamed up.

Sometimes you’d find that you had competition for jostling. You’d get on a bus and there might be someone already on the bus waiting to pickpocket some people. But you might be more obvious. That was called “waking the bus.” The bus was quiet before you got on, but now that you’ve come aboard, the bus driver makes an announcement. “Ladies and gentlemen, there are some young men who just got on the bus. Watch your pockets. They will attempt to steal from you.” So you get off at the next stop, but the quiet jostler gets off and comes after you.

“Motherfucker, you woke the bus up!” he’ll scream. And if he’s an older guy, he might start beating on your ass and taking your money or the jewelry that you stole.

People didn’t like to go pickpocketing with me because I wasn’t as patient or as good as they were. I was never smooth, like, “I’m going to play this nigga, I’m going to do this, right up and close in person.” I was much better at blindsiding people.

Any strong guy could blindside someone. But the trick was to be cunning and outsmart them. Most people would think,
They’re onto me, I’m going to walk away.
But not me. A lady might have her hand on her wallet all day, and we’d be watching, watching, and she never takes her hand out of her pocket. And we’d follow her and then move away but we’d have one little kid still watching her. And she’d let down her defenses for a few seconds and go do something and he’d get it. Then he’d be gone. And before we got out, we’d hear a gut-wrenching scream, “Aaaaahh, my money, my money!” It was crazy. We didn’t give a fuck.

The most primitive move was to snatch somebody’s gold chain. I used to do that on the subway. I’d sit by the window. That was when you could open the windows on subway cars. I’d pull a few windows down, and then the car would stop and new people would come on and sit by the window. I would get out and as soon as the train slowly started moving, I’d reach in and snatch their chains. They’d scream and look at me, but they couldn’t get off the train. I’d fix the clasp, hold the chain for a couple of days, look good and sport it, and then I’d sell it before the older guys took it from me.

Even though I was starting to look the role, I never could get on with the girls back then. I liked girls, but I didn’t know how to tell them I liked them at that age. One time, I was watching these girls jump rope, and I liked them and I wanted to jump rope with them, so I started teasing them and, out of nowhere, these girls in the fifth grade started beating the shit out of me. I was playing with them, but they were serious and I was just taken by surprise. I got serious about fighting back too late. By then, somebody came and broke it up and they’d gotten the best of me. I didn’t want to fight them.

It was no surprise to my mother and my sister that I was robbing and doing antisocial things to bring money in. They saw my nice clothes, and I’d bring them food – pizza and Burger King and McDonald’s. My mother knew I was up to no good, but by that time she knew it was too late. The streets had me. She thought that I was a criminal and I would die or never turn out to be shit. She’d probably seen it before, kids like me being like that. I would steal anything from anybody. I didn’t have any boundaries.

My mother would prefer to beg. She embarrassed me a bit, because she was too honest. She was always asking for money; that’s just the way she was. I gave my sister a lot of money for the house to help my mom out. Sometimes I’d give my mother a hundred bucks and she wouldn’t pay me back. She didn’t respect me like that. I’d say, “You owe me some money, Ma.” And she’d just say, “You owe me your life, boy. I’m not paying you back.”

The big kids in the neighborhood knew I was stealing, so they would take my money and my jewelry and my shoes, and I would be afraid to tell my mother. I didn’t know what to do. They’d beat me up and steal my birds, and they knew that they could get away with bullying me. Barkim didn’t teach me how to fight. He just taught me how to dress in nice clothes and wash my ass. Normally when someone was screaming at me in the street or chasing me, I would just drop my stuff and run. So now I was getting bullied again but I was more of a mark.

Growing up, I always wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted to be the guy talking shit: “I’m the baddest motherfucker out here,” “I got the best birds.” I wanted to be that street guy, the fly slick-talking guy, but I was just too shy and awkward. When I tried to talk that way, somebody would hit me in the head and say, “Shut the fuck up, nigga.” But I got a taste of what it was like to bask in the adulation of an audience when I got into my first street fight.

One day I went into this neighborhood in Crown Heights and I robbed a house with this older guy. We found $2,200 in cash and he cut me in for $600. So I went to a pet store and bought a hundred bucks’ worth of birds. They put them in a crate for me, and the owner helped me get them on the subway. When I got off, I had somebody from my neighborhood help me drag the crate to the condemned building where I was hiding my pigeons. But this guy went and told some kids in the neighborhood that I had all these birds. So a guy named Gary Flowers and some friends of his came and started to rob me. My mother saw them messing with the birds and told me, and I ran out into the street and confronted them. They saw me coming and stopped grabbing the birds, but this guy Gary still had one of them under his coat. By then, a large crowd gathered around us.

“Give me my bird back,” I protested.

Gary pulled the bird out from under his coat.

“You want the bird? You want the fucking bird?” he said. Then he just twisted the bird’s head off and threw it at me, smearing the blood all over my face and shirt.

“Fight him, Mike,” one of my friends urged. “Don’t be afraid, just fight him.”

I had always been too scared to fight anyone before. But there used to be an older guy in the neighborhood named Wise, who had been a Police Athletic League boxer. He used to smoke weed with us, and when he’d get high, he would start shadowboxing. I would watch him and he would say, “Come on, let’s go,” but I would never even slapbox with him. But I remembered his style.

So I decided. “Fuck it.” My friends were shocked. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I threw some wild punches and one connected and Gary went down. Wise would skip while he was shadowboxing, so after I dropped Gary, my stupid ass started skipping. It just seemed like the fly thing to do. I had practically the whole block watching my gloryful moment. Everybody started whooping and applauding me. It was an incredible feeling even though my heart was beating out of my chest.

“This nigga is skipping, man,” one guy laughed. I was trying to do the Ali shuffle, to no avail. But I felt good about standing up for myself and I liked the rush of everybody applauding me and slapping fives. I guess underneath that shyness, I was always an explosive, entertaining guy.

I started getting a whole new level of respect on the streets. Instead of “Can Mike play with us?” people would ask my mother, “Can Mike Tyson play with us?” Other guys would bring their guys around to fight me and they’d bet money on the outcome. Now I had another source of income. They’d come from other neighborhoods. I would win a lot too. Even if I lost, the guys who beat me would say, “Fuck! You’re only eleven?” That’s how everybody started knowing me in Brooklyn. I had a reputation that I would fight anyone – grown men, anybody. But we didn’t follow the Marquis of Queensberry rules in the street. If you kicked someone’s ass it didn’t necessarily mean it was over. If he couldn’t beat you in the fight, he’d take another route, and sometimes he’d come back with some of his friends and they’d beat me up with bats.

I began to exact some revenge for the beatings I had taken from bullies. I’d be walking with some friends and I might see one of the guys who beat me up and bullied me years earlier. He might have gone into a store shopping and I would drag his ass out of the store and start pummeling him. I didn’t even tell my friends why, I’d just say, “I hate that motherfucker over there,” and they’d jump in too and rip his fucking clothes and beat his fucking ass. That guy who took my glasses and threw them away? I beat him in the streets like a fucking dog for humiliating me. He may have forgotten about it but I never did.

With this newfound confidence in my ability to stand up for myself, my criminality escalated. I became more and more brazen. I even began to steal in my own neighborhood. I thought that was what people did. I didn’t understand the rules of the streets. I thought everybody was fair game because I sure seemed to be fair game to everybody else. I didn’t know that there were certain people you just don’t fuck with.

I lived in a tenement building and I would rob everybody who lived in my building. They never realized that I was the thief. Some of these people were my mother’s friends. They’d cash their welfare checks and maybe buy some liquor, and they would visit my mom, drink some liquor, and have some fun. I’d go into my room and go up the fire escape and break into their apartment and rob everything from their place. Then when the lady would go upstairs, she’d discover it and run back screaming, “Lorna, Lorna, they got everything. They got the babies’ food, they got everything!”

After they left, my mother would come into my room.

“I know you did something, didn’t you, boy? What did you do?”

I’d say, “Mom, it’s not me. Look around,” because I would take the food and stuff and leave it on the roof and my friends and I would get it later.

“How could I have done anything? I was in the room right here, I didn’t go anywhere.”

“Well, if you didn’t do it, I’ll bet you know who did it, you thief,” my mother would scream. “You’re nothing but a thief. I’ve never stole nothing in my life. I don’t know where you come from, you thief.”

Oh, God. Can you imagine hearing that shit from your own mother? My family had no hope for me, no hope. They thought my life would be a life of crime. Nobody else in my family ever did stuff like that. My sister would constantly be telling me, “What kind of bird don’t fly? Jailbird! Jailbird!”

I was with my mother one time visiting her friend Via. Via’s husband was one of those big-money showing-off guys. He went to sleep and I took his wallet out of his pocket and took his money. When he woke up, he beat Via up real bad because he thought she had stole the cash. Everybody in the neighborhood started hating my guts. And if they didn’t hate me, they were jealous of me. Even the players. I had nerve.