That whole shit in Brownsville straight up should never have happened. But we got greedy. Mundo had that semi-industrial garage just sitting there, like it had been sitting there for years- his parents gave it to him on his fifteenth birthday, “so he could start building his property portfolio early,” as his bougie ass mama put it.
Mundo and I were both young, well-educated and socially mobile. Nothing about either of our upbringing screamed “destined for a life of crime,” but Doe was offered a rock-solid entry into the world of international trafficking, and I got pulled in. Mundo’s Tío Bolo had been a big player in Central America since the late 70s, early 80s. He controlled a full portfolio of legal businesses, mainly real estate development and political campaign management, with some last vestiges of agricultural properties in his home country of Panama, but the bulk of his money- all of it illegal- ran to and from New York.
By the time we’d graduated university, Bolo was ready to bring the two of us into the fold. His fold.
Tío Bolo already had Hopeton Silva in place. Hopeton ran Panamanian Star Shipping & Logistics Limited, which was the legitimate “business front” side of things. I’ve never straight out asked him his age, but I’d say he was somewhere in his 30s when we met. A little too young to be my father, and not exactly a father figure. More like my mentor on the logistics and operations side.
On face value, Hopeton was what you’d call the adult in the room. But he could get as fuckin’ gully as the best of them. He was Cuban/Jamaican. Worked customs in the Port of Kingston. Saw a lot of drama, did his share of dirt. Handling a legitimate shipping barrel company with a shadow business in wholesaling Bolo’s heroin deliveries was probably semi-retirement compared to the shit Hopeton undoubtedly dealt with in Jamaica.
And then there was Mundo, ready to dive right the fuck in. Mundo wasn’t Tío Bolo’s blood relation exactly, but you know how it goes in the Caribbean. Doe was being set up as the heir apparent. The golden boy.
And way quicker than I’d expected – so fast I wasn’t even given a chance to say yes or no, Mundo managed to get me assigned to the role of his right-hand man. Not something I’d ever want for myself, but I went along with it at the time. Maybe I should’ve applied to grad school like my parents, a Certified Public Accountant and a school principal, wanted.
So, by the time 1999 rolled around Mundo and I were twenty-five years old. We’d put in more than two years working for Bolo in New York. We did good and made names for ourselves by keeping things tight and non-violent, which in that era was almost unheard of. But we had Bolo’s patronage and Hopeton’s on the ground experience, plus we weren’t really doing street sales like that, so people didn’t really know us.
Doe and I were always together. He kinda forced me to become his driver and advance man, which I guess I was okay with. He had the Bolo connection and I had common sense- and I was by far the better driver. Before long, everyone- streets, crew and family were looking at us like a package deal. The Heir and the Spare. That’s cool if you’re the heir, but when you’re the spare? That shit gets tired fast. I learned all about it from watching G-rated documentaries on the British Royal Family in the prison television room. White collar criminals. They love that shit.
Anyway, Mundo and I had our rhythm, but it was in support of the older guys and we wanted our own thing. We’d petitioned Hopeton to convince Bolo to let loose some start-up capital for a small apartment space in a semi-off grid area that we could use as a headquarters for the younger kids in the crew. People we’d brought in. Let them start flipping dimes and twenties of weed and some occasional over-spillage of coke and dope that may need a home. Break them in, let them earn their keep. Once Bolo agreed to a test run, I found a rundown basement apartment in Prospect Heights and got it as operational as it ever was gonna get. Then I more or less handed it off to two kids who ran with us, and then Doe and I were onto the next thing.
And that next thing was Mundo’s garage. We were driving around one day, in, like April 1999- I know it was the spring of 1999, when Doe was like, “Yo, let’s drive out to Brownsville.”
“Brownsville?” I asked. “What the fuck’s in Brownsville?”
“I’ll show you.”
We could see the potential the second we pulled up the roller gates.
I challenged Mundo’s soft, pampered ass to fill the space with whatever he could come up with- anything we couldn’t bring to Panamanian Star or trust to leave at HQ. And he said, “Just watch, son!”
Before I knew it, Mundo had it stocked to the rafters with guns, bullets, bulletproof vests. Dumb shit like truckloads of fireworks. I was shocked that he actually made good on his promise, and hoped he didn’t wind up sticking me with the day-to-day management, even though I was sure that’s how it would play out. But it did help us get out from under Bolo and Hopeton and have our own thing going. For a minute, at least. And that’s as far ahead as we were thinking, back then.
Summer of 1999 was a really fun time. Very hectic.
Hours and hours were spent driving. Bolo, by way of Hopeton, had me and Mundo on the road all over the tri-state. We called it “running errands.”
The two of us pretty much divided and conquered, each of us carving out our own little territory and conscripting whatever tolerable side-kick we could find at that moment. Doe, usually with his road dog, Biz, in tow, took care of Hartford, Connecticut and all of upstate New York. I handled Port Newark and Paterson, anything uptown from Harlem to Mount Vernon and any little one-offs that Hopeton felt might need “a delicate hand,” as he always phrased it. I was less volatile than The Heir, plus I spoke four languages- so I was always assigned the “shit details,” as I phrased it. And I tended to travel solo, because there was usually no one around that I could stand to be stuck in a car with for hours on end.
The holding bay in the garage was humming that summer- we made a KILLING selling bulk boxes of fireworks that had fallen off the truck somewhere between Florida and Brownsville. I even convinced Doe to cool out on the arms dealing for a while- we were making more than enough money just dealing in something that, although it could get us jail time, wouldn’t necessarily derail our entire adult lives. He tried to persuade me that his weapons clientele was worth catering to.
“Bro, we can’t just shut it down like that,” he argued. “Especially not over Fourth of July cherry bombs and bottle rockets! These people’s money will carry us through the winter if we rock with them.”
We were making money. But we were getting greedy. And careless.
I shook my head.
“C’mon ‘Brón, don’t be stupid,” he tried. “I know you wanna trade in that hand-me-down Acura that your cousin’s husband sold you. Let’s just do this until December and then we can pull the plug!”
“Nah, Olmando,” I replied. “First of all, I’m not down with jail time. I’m cool with storing them here, but I’m not down with moving them like you seem to want me to.”
Mundo tried to interrupt me, but I held up my hand. He backed down.
“Secondly,” I continued, “I see how this story goes. You’re the faceman- you make the connect, you spin your tale and then you stick me with the errand boy shit, while you disappear into the dark of night.”
“I would never son you like that, ‘Brón.”
“You do it all the time, Mundo. I just want to keep this situation here at the holding bay as contained as possible. And you might not’ve noticed, but we’re starting to draw attention. Remember last week when Biz and Lucci were out here like at three am on a Saturday and you let them rip through half our supply of M80s?”
Doe laughed. “Biz fuckin’ loves that shit.”
“Yeah well,” I said, “half the neighborhood of little kids on dirt bikes were here the next day, trying to get me to sell them cherry bombs.”
Mundo made a weak attempt at showing concern.
“This is why I didn’t want to fuck with you on this,” I reminded him. “You don’t take security seriously and you’re anything but low key, breddah. You want to stock this place to the roof with guns but you don’t give a shit who knows what we have going on. We need to dismantle this place before September and find something more secure. You should just start renting it out to neighborhood people, like monthly parking or something.”
It will probably come as no surprise when I say that Mundo completely ignored my advice and it came to bite us in the ass.
