Before Pierre Dorvil Tavares ever touched a deal, before Mundo Henriques left Brooklyn for Panama, there was Hopeton Silva — the quiet architect who built the system that would accommodate their world.
Born in late-’50s Cuba to Jamaican parents, raised between Habana Vieja’s cobblestoned streets and downtown Kingston’s portside lanes, with detours through prison and the English countryside, Hopeton learns early that survival depends on structure.
By the time he arrives in Crown Heights in 1986, he’s mastered the rhythm of border economies — where customs, currency and contraband all move through the same doors. Drawing on hard-won knowledge, it takes him little time to establish Black Star Shipping & Logistics, a small Pan-Caribbean freight company, sustained by the local community.
When Rafael “Bolo” Montilla purchases the building that houses Black Star, Hopeton faces a choice: hold his ground as an independent operator or allow himself to join someone else’s empire for exponential gain- and infinite pressure.
Unable to pass up the opportunity to establish himself on an international level, Hopeton allows Black Star Shipping & Logistics to be absorbed into Panamanian Star- Bolo’s highly illegal and incredibly lucrative business enterprise. In an effort to maintain some semblance of autonomy, Hopeton keeps his operation small and his crew tight, surviving every pivot that would certainly consume a less disciplined man.
And what follows, from 1990 to 2002, is a study in determined pragmatism.
After six turbulent years managing PanStar’s complex criminal network, one that stretches from Panama City to Brooklyn and back, Hopeton finds himself tending to an aging system. Although he can clearly see the operation is foundering, his partner, Bolo, is reluctant to diversify. The profit margin is too great to justify a pivot. Every suggestion Hopeton makes to change lanes is met with a polite but firm “no.”
Biding his time, Hopeton decides to turn his focus inward- and to develop his own outside interests. He strengthens ties with his network of contacts across Brooklyn and Panama City- men whose access to a variety of resources greatly helps him operate a shadow network within and beyond the greater PanStar machine. His relationship with Mundo’s father, Téofilo Henriques, begins as a close friendship and develops into an important alliance. He also makes a greater effort to set down roots in a city he’d never chosen as his own.
In the late 90s, after Bolo strong-arms him into giving Mundo and Cabrón substantial roles in the organization, Hopeton is able to utilize the younger generation’s chaotic energy as proof of concept that PanStar’s old ways of doing business are not sustainable. With time, Hopeton allows the kids to self-select. After the fall-out settles, he strategically removes Bolo’s chosen heir, identifies the right successor, and forces one final pivot that redesigns his relationship to Bolo entirely.
Once the path is cleared, Hopeton is able to commence constructing the operation Pierre will eventually inherit, as well as take the time to answer his own life’s biggest question: where was Hopeton from, really, and where in the world did he want to be?
Running parallel to the earlier HQ BK books, Black Star Origins fills the gaps that Eula’s unreliable narration and Cabrón’s youthful blindness could never bridge.
