By April’s end, Hopeton’s visits had a rhythm- fly in at the start of the last week of the month, fly back to Brooklyn after the first week of the next. He was in Panama City when Gianina gave birth.
Mundo texted me from the hospital. I was at home, working on spreadsheet shit with Wilkie and Hopeton when the message came through.
El bebé ya llegó. Es un niño!
“The golden boy got his boy,” Hopeton commented.
I texted Mundo back
Congrats, bredda! You want company at the hospital?
Would love that!
Okay, te veo pronto.
I told Wilkie we needed to head out, gave him some cab money and said “get yourself home as soon as you’re done with spreadsheeting.” Then I grabbed Hopeton and we took off for the hospital.
Mundo met us in the waiting area. He was the happiest I’d ever seen him.
“It’s a boy!” he yelled.
“Haha, you told me that already,” I laughed. “What’s his name?”
“Teófilo Pierre Gianfranco Henriques Peralta,” he said proudly. “I got to name him,” he added.
“And Gianina gets to name your girls?” I asked.
“Exactly,” Mundo said. “But I got her father’s name in there, as his second middle name.”
“So, you’re loading this kid up with your father’s name, my name and your father in law’s name.”
“Voy a hacer que este niño tenga el mundo,” Doe replied.
“Amen,” Hopeton said quietly.
“Okay, Doe, we’re gonna head out now,” I told him. “Kiss Gianina for us and tell her we’ll come over to the house to meet Teófilo whenever she’s ready for company.”
Mundo was completely MIA for the remainder of Hopeton’s April/May trip. And by that point, the four construction projects under my oversight were all entering their final stages of completion. I had plenty of time for my grey area activities.
“I think we’re ready to bring Wilkie into the process a little deeper,” Hopeton dropped on me one afternoon, a few days after we’d congratulated Mundo at the hospital.
“I’m happy to hear that,” I replied. “Can we get him up to speed before you leave? I’d like to be a little less hands on with the books, if at all possible.”
“You’re always going to have to be hands on with the books,” Hopeton reminded me. “But, yeah- I want to show him a very small part of the street operations so he can understand how his clean books tie back to the actual numbers.”
“So, you trust him?” I asked.
“Yes,” he told me. “I saw in his eyes that he’s not going to fuck us over.”
Hopeton and I spent the next week bringing Wilkie to meetings with trusted crew leaders, giving him the opportunity to see how the actual numbers were reported on the street level. We also allowed him to help us count out the cash at the end of each day and positioned him to take over managing PanStar’s client facing repayment cycle.
All of this was a huge load off my shoulders, and would make it easier for me to start planning a July trip to Haiti. Not only did I want Wilkie to succeed, I needed him to. It was a huge point of pride for me to have successfully brought someone into the operation that raised me, but it was time for me to start focusing on myself again.
