CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
2001 – Business Never Personal
By February, Hopeton and I had established S-T Real Estate Group. Hopeton and I had a partnership agreement in place- he put up the bulk of the capital, I kicked in some of my commission money and was in charge of client management and closing details. My father was onboard as our business manager and Hopeton’s cricket team buddy was our lawyer.
We’d had some quick hit wins, successfully selling two properties in Canarsie and one in Bergen Beach. I took a slightly lower profit percentage on these first deals, but, according to my father, I was on track to becoming a full partner before end of year if Hopeton and I kept it up.
On the shadow side of my fractured professional life, Bolo had been successful in sourcing a few Panama-based weapons brokers who were willing to deal at the level we needed. After New Year’s, shipments started pouring into Port of Newark. I was very happy that I’d been promoted out of my old “fixer” role. Between my real estate hustle and studying for the GRE, the last thing I wanted to do was haul my ass to and from Port of Newark to go deal with paperwork and bribes. Anyway, my position as the new Mundo, designated face man, kept me busy enough. I was dressing nice, wearing suits, taking meetings all over Manhattan and staying on Biz’s ass to make sure invoices were prepared correctly and payments funneled through the proper channels.
For the most part, Biz was doing okay once he got ahold of the what of what we were doing and the why of why paperwork needed to be routed a very certain, specific way. Biz was a bureaucrat at heart and, in order to feel like he was in control of his role, required a flowchart with bright graphics and bulletpoints and shit. And Biz even had his own built-in minion- Lucci. Whenever there was something a little bit more technical that needed to be done, Biz would outsource the assignment to his hacker genius pseudo-nephew.
I gotta say, I was impressed. It all felt so much more stable than our earlier, bootleg HQ/Brownsville set-up. I was almost tempted to offer to front them a little storefront office space to work out of, but decided to give them some more time to fuck up, before I made that type of offer.
The third thing I was juggling was working on the GRE. I’d completed my six-week review course in December and took my first pass at the test in early February. I did a’ight- better than I’d done on any of the practice tests, but not quite as good as I’d wanted. So, I signed up for another test date in early summer and stepped up my studies.
End of February I was getting ready to head out to Panama. Mundo was happy to hear I was coming to visit. “Yo, bro, you sure you can’t make it out for Carnavales?” he’d asked. I told him I had to hold it down here in NY while Bolo’s team worked out initial kinks in their shipping process.
“That’s fine,” he replied. “There will be plenty of stuff to do. Clubs, river picnics, et cetera. You know how we do!”
“Oh yeah, I know exactly how you do,” I laughed. “Anyway, you know I’m not a Carnavales type really. You all can’t even get me to Eastern Parkway anymore.” I used to love the West Indian Day Parade, but sometime during my late teens, early twenties I developed a phobia of being in large crowds.
About a week before I left, I called a meeting with Hopeton and Biz. I knew Hopeton was more than on top of things, but just wanted to have one last touch base before I headed out. I told them to meet me at Madiba for dinner and drinks- I was so tired of conducting Ocean’s Eleven-style briefings in the backroom of PanStar, especially now that it was ram packed with guns and bullets.
The meeting was uneventful- we had drinks and dinner, went over the next two weeks to do list, and then slipped into general conversation.
“Oh, I meant to tell you guys,” Biz suddenly exclaimed. “I looked Eula up in the inmate database website the other day.”
“Yeah?” Hopeton asked. “What did you find?”
“They moved her to Beacon Women’s Prison a couple months ago. She’s still got a few years left on her sentence,” Biz replied.
“What’s going on with her- are you still putting money on her books?” I asked. I really hoped he said yes.
“Nah, dude, me and Luciano ran through her apartment and she got evicted. And then she got moved from Rikers,” he told me. “That's it, I haven't heard from her since.”
Hopeton shook his head and took a very long, dry sip from his dark and stormy.
“That’s fucked up, Biz,” I said. “Why’d you do her like that?”
“I dunno. It was too much work,” he replied. “I’m sure she’ll be okay.”
I let the matter drop.
And to keep it all the way real- after that, I just put Eula out of my mind.
