The Plot Against Hip Hop Read online

  Woodson burst out laughing. “This Dwayne dude says all that with a straight face? This ain’t the ’80s. There’s no antinigga machine—with all due respect to Chuck D, there’s no plot to kill us. Bad shit happens to stupid people. Always has. Always will.”

  Both men turned toward a sudden flash of light, followed by the trill of excited girls and the bustle of those who genuflected to celebrity for a living. Kanye was in the building, resplendent in odd Japanese shades and some eclectic ensemble of BAPE and Gucci, with retro British Walkers on his feet. For D this distraction was well timed. Woodson had just insulted his dead friend and made a lot of what he believed in sound silly. Time to end this convo. Don’t even get into the fact that Dwayne was dead. No need to even go there.

  Woodson looked at Kanye and then asked, off-handedly, “You have a copy of the Sawyer memorandum you mentioned?”

  The question surprised D. He shifted his gaze from the rap superstar back to the video game executive, who seemed different now. A bit lean and hungry. A touch anxious around the eyes. It was a look D had seen many times before at clubs just before someone got sucker punched.

  “Yeah, I do,” he said casually.

  “Tell you what …” Woodson reached into his pocket and pulled out his card. “I gotta go talk to Kanye and his people, but send me a copy, okay. I’m sure I’ll get some laughs out of it, like reading ancient hieroglyphics.” He pushed the card into D’s palm. “Get at me about that and I’ll send a messenger over for it. You stay up now, dude.”

  “You do the same.”

  And then Woodson was down the steps and into the crowd of self-important souls who surrounded the MC. D watched as his peeps manned their positions, visible but unobtrusive, just as he preached at D Security meetings. He peered once again at Woodson, smiling, shaking hands, whispering to someone, and didn’t know what to think. The man was welcome to his opinions about Dwayne, hip hop, and every other damn thing. He didn’t dislike Woodson. He recalled him as a decent guy back in the day. One night in Denver, D had even played wingman for him, helping keep company with an obnoxious sista while Woodson wooed her better-looking friend.

  Still, he wondered, why would the man want a copy of something he’d just sneered at? As D watched Kanye getting settled in on a makeshift dais, a video game console behind him and a dozen Sharpies laid out before him, he decided that he wasn’t gonna give Woodson shit.

  CHAPTER 14

  MADE YOU LOOK

  D hated interview rooms at police stations. He could feel the fear and manipulation of scores of investigations, like they were seeping from the walls. Still, he was happy to be there. He’d thought Fly Ty had forgotten him, but then the dapper DT had always been there for him.

  It was a good recording, except for the fact that the radio was on, playing Nas’s “Made You Look,” and cars were honking like crazy.

  “It sounds like they had this conversation by a tunnel at rush hour,” Fly Ty said quietly.

  D nodded, but said nothing. He was straining to hear the conversation. He didn’t recognize the man speaking, which pissed him off since he very much wanted to.

  “You want me to help you do some kind of book, huh?”

  “Yes. That’s what I do: write books.” It was Dwayne Robinson, sounding like he was close to begging.

  “That would be dangerous.”

  “I have the report,” Dwayne said. “I can use that. I don’t need your permission. I’m asking for your cooperation. You could help me expose the whole thing.”

  “I understand what you wanna do and why. I actually have no problem with it. But my coworker—I don’t think he’ll understand.”

  “Why aren’t you afraid?”

  The other man chuckled. “We’re all afraid of something.” Said like a sage. “I’m just not afraid of this.”

  “Okay. I’ll take you at your word. But your coworker feels different?”

  “Yes, he does. Me? I tried to remix things but you can only do that so much.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “As truthful as I can be, Dwayne. There’s no real value in exposing our activities. Only the truly determined conspiracy theorists are gonna pay attention. All these young people who buy today’s music and the concert tickets and the cologne—they are not gonna care. They got a million Southern rappers to hear and two million Southern dances to learn. The only thing you should be paying attention to is staying safe.”

  “You threatening me, Malik?”

  “No. I wouldn’t touch you. I respect you a great deal, Dwayne. I mean that. But I can’t protect you. You continue on this path and there could be consequences. Maybe you should call that bodyguard friend of yours, E.”

  “D? D Hunter?”

  “Yeah, make a deal with him for security. It could be money well spent.”

  “So your not gonna help me?”

  “No, but I’m not gonna stop you.”

  A car door opened, the noise of the big city filled the audio track, and then Dwayne could be heard saying, “Shit.” And the tape ended.

  “So,” Fly Ty said, “that was Dwayne Robinson?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Robinson called the other man Malik. That name ring a bell?”

  “I know some Maliks but they are young guys. This guy sounded at least forty. And you know something else? He sounded like a cop to me.”

  “Okay, Mr. Holmes,” Fly Ty said. “How’d you deduce that?”

  “Well, maybe not a cop, but some kind of government worker. There was something sneaky and bureaucratic in his voice. Am I wrong?”

  Fly Ty clicked the eject button on the cassette player and slipped the tape into a plastic bag. “I’ve been in law enforcement nearly twentyfive years, D, and ‘sounds like a cop’ does mean something to me. But I couldn’t cosign that in this case. On the other hand, the name Malik—that’s actually useful. I’ll call Robinson’s wife and ask her if they have any friends with that name.”

  “I bet that’s why his office was ransacked. Malik was there looking for any references to himself. Looking for the manuscript.”

  Fly Ty sighed. “All this tells us is that a man named Malik was involved in some project that Robinson was investigating about a book that had something to do with hip hop. We also know he wasn’t gonna cooperate with Robinson in his research and that he knew someone who’d feel threatened by what Robinson was writing. That’s all helpful.”

  “What’s also helpful is that the person who was threatened probably wasn’t two teenage Bloods. That was a hit, Fly Ty.”

  “Okay, Mr. Detective. You are making a leap. Maybe it’s a smart one, but we are a long way from having any evidence linking those two killers to anything else.”

  “What about Truegod’s death?”

  “Lots of loose links. But NYPD isn’t in the business of saving hip hop. If you can find some more substantial link between these two deaths other than an obscure marketing plan, we’ll dig deeper.”

  “I’ma hold you to that, Fly Ty.”

  D caught a bus on Fifth Avenue; as it rolled downtown, he sat there thinking about money, secrets, and hip hop. The first two were the chief reasons many people were killed. Hip hop now seemed to be reason number three.

  So who made money off the Sawyer memorandum? Who would benefit from hip hop becoming a highly marketable commodity and sapped of any political edge? A taxi paused next to the bus with an ad for Cîroc vodka on top; Diddy posed suavely next to a bottle. That was gonna be the problem trying to solve Dwayne’s death. So many different kinds of people were getting paid off hip hop in so many different ways that it made the whole industry suspect. D needed to put himself back in the late ’80s/early ’90s and see what people and corporations had benefitted during that transitional period.

  What the hell could they have done that justified two murders twenty years after the fact? The memorandum was a starting point and Diddy’s alcohol ad was one possible end. What was the through line in the history of hip
hop that results in Dwayne Robinson being stabbed dead on Crosby Street in Soho?

  CHAPTER 15

  ANTE UP

  Brownsville was still awash in blood. Despite New York City’s alltime low murder rate and crime figures that made the metropolis one of the safest big cities in America, in good old Brownsville—a Brooklyn neighborhood of endless public housing tracts, generations of poverty, and restless, hungry youth—folks were still getting killed regularly for stupid shit.

  On the walls of apartment buildings, elevated subway stations, and malt liquor billboards, the C and B of Crips and Bloods were ubiquitous. Pint-sized gangbangers, strapped, insecure, and terribly thin-skinned, perpetuated self-genocide with a ruthlessness too reminiscent of Rwanda. Though they shared the names of infamous South Central gangstas, the menace involved wasn’t drive-bys or the economic imperatives of crack-era cartels.

  In twenty-first century Brownsville, the landscape was littered with minigangs—cousins, project floor neighbors, homies who met in juvie—who were organized around low-level drug deals, extortion, and assault. Some were as young as ten and had the nasty intelligence of the kids from Brazil’s City of God, with whom they shared dismal prospects and the same desire for validation.

  Ever since the days of Murder Incorporated, when tough Depressionera Jews from Brownsville carried out hits for the Mob, the neighborhood had spawned more than its share of hard-eyed, violent men. It’s one reason Brownsville had a long tradition of adroit, dynamic fighters, with Mike Tyson both the most well known and notorious. Sometimes, walking down Livonia or Rockaway avenues, it felt as if the threat of violence was seeping up out of the ground, like the vapors from an overrun sewer, infecting the populace.

  It was this legacy that D Hunter was part of, and it hurt to know that deaths—Brownsville deaths—had molded him as much as his mother’s love or the books he’d read or the places he’d traveled to. Wherever D went, Brownsville was there with him, and unlike the BK MCs he sometimes protected, he knew this wasn’t a good thing.

  When D was growing up in the Ville, his subway stop had been Rockaway Avenue, right on the corner where Livonia intersected with the Samuel J. Tilden housing projects. Saratoga Avenue was the stop before Rockaway, and D had rarely gotten off there unless he was stopping by Betsy Head Playground, a New Deal–era athletic field and pool.

  In the two decades since D had escaped the Ville, the city government, in its infinite wisdom, had constructed the Marcus Garvey Houses between Betsy Head and Tilden. Named after the visionary “Back to Africa” leader of the 1920s, the low-rise public housing complex had not exactly become a source of pride for the people of the diaspora. Garvey’s construction had coincided with the crack era and so the buildings had been overrun by the epidemic, turning Brownsville an even grimmer shade of crimson.

  In the ’90s people would have laughed if you said there were Bloods in Brooklyn. But around the turn of the century, black inmates in New York City correctional facilities, tired of getting their asses kicked by the well-organized Latin Kings, used the Bloods brand to organize themselves under a banner. Supposedly, two OGs in Rikers were the key men behind this move, and as D sat on the Saratoga platform, he prepared to meet one of them. He’d gotten Ray Ray’s call that afternoon.

  “I’m about to earn that money, D.”

  “Go.”

  “I need you to come out to Brownsville tonight. I have a Blood I want you to meet.”

  “How much?”

  “Just bring two Gs for him. But don’t bring mine. Don’t bring my cash out to Brownsville.”

  “I hear that. You sure this is serious?”

  “This man is a real OG. Plus, he knows you from the Tilden projects, so it’s all good. Meet me at the Saratoga Avenue IRT station at seven.”

  “Cool, I know it well.”

  Ray Ray came up the steps at seven-twenty p.m., fifteen minutes later than he’d suggested, but by ghetto standards about a half hour early. “What’s good?”

  “I dunno,” D replied. “Anytime I have to do business in Brownsville, it’s never a good thing. Is he meeting us up here?”

  “I told you we have to go over to Garvey.”

  “Yeah. Shit.”

  As they walked down Livonia past Betsy Head, D asked for the quick bio on Ice. Since getting out of Rikers two years ago, he had rotated between three residences in Brownsville and East New York. This one housed Shaliya, the mother of two of his five kids. Because of this, Ray Ray figured things would be cool.

  Even since D had prevented Ray Ray and two of his buddies from setting fire to a homeless man at the Canal Street subway station, the young man had become a very useful asset to D Security. He wasn’t big enough to work the door or do personal security, but Ray Ray knew how to blend in a crowd and let D know when and where trouble might come from. D was proud he’d kept Ray Ray from becoming another African-American statistic, though the kid still knew too many gangstas for his life to be trouble free.

  “You don’t have to stay,” D said as they walked up to the Garvey projects. “Just introduce me to Ice and go.”

  “And leave you alone? Naw, dog. I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Yo!” The voice came from the roof of the nearest Garvey building. It was a youth, maybe seventeen or eighteen, wearing a Yankee cap and a scarlet Cincinnati Reds jacket. “Stay right there.” Then he spoke into a cell phone. From the building entrance, two equally young, equally red-garbed youths, came up and, without a word, frisked D and Ray Ray right there on the sidewalk. Ray Ray was going to say something but D shook his head. One of the two, about six feet, rail thin, with yellowed freckled skin, pulled out a Beretta from his waistband and gestured with it for his prisoners to move into the building.

  Wordlessly, all four walked past the lobby and up a narrow staircase—the taller Blood in back, the shorter, darker kid, solid as a fullback with big, broad shoulders, leading the way. D’s nose filled with familiar scents: rotting food in overflowing garbage bags and fried bananas, piss and pussy, too much perfume and not enough deodorant. For poor folks in cramped living conditions, the smells are always pungent and mixed up like bad gumbo on a Saturday night.

  Reaching the roof was a relief for D’s nose, though the visual was none too comforting. Three other Bloods, including the kid who’d yelled down—early twenties, cocky, smoking a joint—and a chubby, nondescript man of around thirty who had that flunky vibe. The third man was around fifty. Bald head. Some gray in a beard that was really just a thin line that curled around his cheekbones into a slender mustache. Clearly this was Ice.

  He looked at D but spoke to Ray Ray. “This is your man right here?”

  “Yeah. This D Hunter.”

  “So,” Ice said, turning to D, “you from 315 Livonia?”

  “Yes. Grew up in apartment 6C.”

  “You know Little Z.”

  “No. Not personally. But my brother Jah used to speak about him.”

  “Jah?” Ice surveyed D coolly. “What are the names of your other brothers?”

  “Matty and Rashid.”

  “They both dead, right?”

  “Yes. Right on the corner of Livonia and Stone.”

  “They call it Mother Gaston these days.”

  “Same damn corner.”

  Ice took a few steps toward D. “You know, your family’s kinda famous around here. At least to people my age. So you made it out. Good for you.”

  “It’s a hell of a way to get a rep.”

  “True dat. You got the money?”

  D reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a white envelope. He was impressed that neither of the two kids who frisked him had touched the envelope, a sign of discipline in the ranks. Ice gestured to the other older Blood who came over and removed the envelope from D’s hand.

  “Ray Ray says you can help me.”

  “Malik Jones. He died in a fire at Rikers about three years ago.”

  “What about the two kids who stabbed my friend?
”

  “Can’t help you with them. But you ask some of your police friends about Malik Jones.”

  “What’s he got to do with my friend’s murder?”

  “You gave me some money and I gave you a name. Once you start asking about this man, there’ll be no turning back. Right now your friend is dead and you been cut up a couple of times. When you start asking about this man, it’ll get more serious for you. But you already know the streets are cold. That’s why I gave you this name. I knew Matty and Rashid.”

  “This Malik Jones has been dead so long.”

  “True dat. But his life will take you where you wanna go.”

  Ten minutes later D and Ray Ray were walking toward the Livonia Avenue subway station.

  “Ice had mad respect for your family.”

  “I was a child when they were alive. Don’t remember them as well as I’d like.” The sirens of an approaching police cruiser silenced them. D turned and watched the car scream down Livonia, under the elevated subway tracks, past the Rockaway station, and down toward the cavernous public housing.

  “What next?”

  “Ice knows those two kids who stabbed Dwayne. I’m sure of that. But Malik Jones? The name Malik has come up before. Is he just a red herring, a way to guide us away from the two kids? I gotta look this guy up.”

  “I don’t think Ice would have had this meeting if this wasn’t real.”

  “Good point.”

  “He wanted to check you out. Maybe he’ll come back with more.”

  “Maybe. But don’t ask anything else right now. Just lay back. You’ve already earned your money. I don’t want you stabbed up.”

  “I’m with that.”

  Ray Ray gave D a hug and then disappeared into Brownsville’s darkness.

  Standing on the Rockaway platform, D glanced down toward 315 Livonia Avenue. “Malik Jones,” he said into his cell.

  “Well, now we have a last name,” Fly Ty said. “Now it’s an actual lead.”

  After he’d put the cell away and watched the Tilden projects for too long, D turned and walked to the other end of the long platform. Thanks, Brownsville, he thought. Thanks for too damn much.