Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro

by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

  In the silence that followed Cesar’s introduction—“Ma, I want you to meet my girl”—Coco noticed that Cesar had inherited his mother’s bubble lips. “From all the girlfriends he brung here, from all the girls you seem like you okay, you a nice person,” Lourdes intoned. “But let me tell you, I’m going to tell you one thing. One thing I don’t like about you.” The darkness of Lourdes’s eyes emphasized the paleness of her skin. She wore her waist-length black hair in a single braid. The lady knew how to make a pause count for something.

  “How you going to say you don’t like me, for you just met me?” Coco asked sincerely.

  Lourdes ignored her and continued, “That eyeliner, it’s got to go. It don’t go with your eyes.” She paused again. “To be honest with you, baby, it looks like shit.” The insult was a gesture of inclusion. “What’s your sign?” Lourdes added solemnly.

  “Sagittarius,” said Coco.

  “No wonder! Cuz I’m a Sagittarius!” Lourdes exclaimed. With that exchange, Lourdes and Coco became coconspirators on the subject of Cesar, whom they both loved. Lourdes found a fresh audience for her old stories, and Coco, just coming up, found a veteran guide for the bewildering turns her life was about to take.

  Jessica, who was also home the day Coco met Lourdes, was the most beautiful girl Coco had ever seen: light-skinned, with dead hair like a white girl’s, the bangs and feathered edges blown forward like a commercial for shampoo. She also had a perfect body: a big butt without a stomach, nice breasts, and nails polished by a manicurist in a beauty salon. Her wide smile was like Cesar’s—sexy—crowded with those same white, even teeth. She smelled like a rich girl—not of the sharp scents you got at the dollar store, but of a name-brand perfume. She was friendly, which surprised Coco, because a girl with all that could have been a snob. Even across the room, the way Jessica spoke felt pressed up close. The day they met, she wore thigh-high black leather boots with pointy toes.

  “You could kill mad roaches with those boots,” Cesar said.

  “Right?” Jessica said, her laughter breathing out like a sleepy joke.

  Jessica tried to chat with Coco, but Cesar kept interrupting, and he finally closed the bedroom door. “I don’t want you and Jessica hanging out,” Cesar told Coco. Cesar liked Coco exactly the way she was. Jessica was an entryway to a lifestyle he didn’t want Coco to even understand.

  Jessica’s life was getting bigger. She was one of Boy George’s girlfriends now. She’d head out to the store for milk and not come back for five days. George had already taken her to Puerto Rico and to Disney World. “Here comes your portable sister,” Lourdes would quip to Cesar whenever Jessica materialized. She no longer traveled by bus or foot like she used to; she came and went by cab.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Boy George’s earliest childhood memory is of hot water burning him during a kitchen-sink bath. His next is looking out a window over Tremont and seeing his cat get hit by a car. He remembers crying for the dead cat. “I loved pets. I tried to keep dogs, but they were always getting hit, too,” he said. Electrical fires were also common in his neighborhood. Once, while he and his little brother, Enrique, were watching Laverne & Shirley, the TV burst into flames. That day, George managed to save his cat. From the sidewalk, he and Enrique and the new cat watched their apartment burn.

  After his father left when George was six months old, his mother changed apartments frequently. The family lived on St. Lawrence, on Prospect, on Tremont, east and west. They stayed in the Soundview Projects. They had an apartment across from Woodlawn Cemetery. “We were always moving around,” George said. He recalls no childhood friends. Enrique was a sickly, fearful boy. George was the solid one. He was decisive. Said Enrique, “My mother is a heartbroken person. My own heart gets broken quick. But when it comes to heartbreaking matters, George knows how to deal with it professionally. He was the bravest in the family.”

  George quickly grasped the importance of solving the small problems that can quickly become big problems in the ghetto. Poverty raised the stakes of even ordinary activities, such as walking down the street. George instructed Enrique how to carry himself in public, how to be cautious without looking cautious: “He would always say to me, ‘Choose what you want in life. You got to be serious when you do things. You have to stop being a little faggot boy.’ ” George also taught his brother how to read. He would tell Enrique, “Look, you don’t know the words? Break it down.”

  George said that his mother, Rita, beat them, sometimes with an extension cord. Most mothers hit their children; what was more disturbing to George was the unpredictability of Rita’s rage. He ran away for the first time when he was ten. Enrique dropped blankets and clean clothes out the window when his brother appeared on the sidewalk below. George wandered around the wastelands of Hunts Point. He slept on a bench in St. Mary’s Park and washed his face in the dribble of a fire hydrant. He also slept in abandoned cars and once camped out on a bus. At the time, he must have been terrified, but George recast the hardship as an opportunity. “I wasn’t a mama’s boy no more. I was out on the street by myself. I had to fend for myself. I had to make money for myself,” he said. “That taught me responsibility.”

  When he was twelve, his mother requested a PINS from family court. PINS, the acronym for Parent with a Child in Need of Supervision, gave a judge final say in a child’s care and discipline. A PINS was one of the early markers of a troubled kid’s life, and it usually meant there had been steady trouble for a while. The authorities sent George to a diagnostic center called Pleasantville, where he stayed for three months. George crossed paths with Mike Tyson, who had also landed in the system. They once argued over a pool game but became friends afterward. George was transferred to St. Cabrini’s, a group home in New Rochelle, New York, where he was to stay until he and his mother worked things out. He lived there for three years that he later called the most important in his life.

  George welcomed the new routine at the group home, and he was relieved to be away from his mother’s dramatic mood swings and capricious violence. He also enjoyed the companionship of the male counselors and credited St. Cabrini’s with turning him into a man: “When you’re home with your moms and stuff, it’s you and your mom and your brother, that’s it. I had a chance to spread out, wide, like a wide-angle lens. I got hip to everything that I would need to get hip to and I started analyzing and analyzing.”

  The four-bedroom ranch housed eight boys. George was the youngest, not yet thirteen. The house sat in the corner lot of a residential street of a working-class neighborhood aspiring to the middle class. The rich folks lived on the hill. St. Cabrini’s had a lawn, and fruit trees. George enjoyed his first exposure to raccoons and skunks. He missed the Bronx but resigned himself to life in New Rochelle. “Well, you long to be home, but the reality of the matter is that you’re not—that’s one,” he said. “Two, if the other fellas see you crying and all that—whining—that’s gonna be one sign of weakness that they are going to prey on forever and a day. So why cry over spilled milk? You’re spilled already.”

  The Cabrini kids attended the local schools. Most of the residents, who were poor and minorities, kept to themselves, but George didn’t aim just to get by. He deployed his sharp sense of humor to make himself a place in his class, and he became known as a practical joker. He joined the New Rochelle High School football team. The local newspaper published his photograph. Invitations came to him for parties held by the popular kids, and he always brought the Cabrini boys along. “George never forgot that his friends were his friends,” a counselor remembered.

  During one party, George and a few of his Cabrini buddies made off with some silverware. That same night, they burglarized a few other homes. The next day, the police caught up with George at a pawnshop, where he was negotiating with the proprietor. George chose to take the rap for the entire group. He spent thirteen months in detention at Valhalla, a secure juvenile facility upstate, and from there he was sent back to the Bronx.

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p; George returned to his mother’s and briefly attended Morris High School, but the arrangement didn’t work. She had remarried, and George had his own rules. Morris High School did not hold his interest, and apparently, he wasn’t alone; during those years, only 40 percent of its incoming students were sticking around to graduate. He dropped out of school, onto the street again. “I put it on full turbo,” he said.

  George later tried to explain his ambition: “You can’t read about it in books, and you can’t look at it in movies. I was born with something inside of me that says, ‘George, that’s a pretty girl. Go and get her. George, that’s a pretty suit—go and get that suit. George, this is something out here, it’s for you. We don’t know exactly how long you’ll have it, or how wide a span it’ll get, but you could get it and all you gotta do is just put your mind to it. Don’t think of nothing else. And ask about it, think about it, think with it, act like if you were it and change the shoes around like it was you. And then you’ll see.’ And when you get a feel that you’re almost that thing, you reach out and grab it and it’s yours.” He paused. “You have to have a lot of sleepless nights, but Lord behold, it’ll paint a picture.”

  George’s first opportunity, however, seemed to have as much to do with happenstance as with ambition. During those months he lived at home, he sometimes passed by a doughy, bearded guy named Joey Navedo on his way to school; Joey ran a cocaine operation, and one of his spots wasn’t far from George’s mother’s apartment. Joey was a successful businessman. He woke early to ensure that his spots were open and running efficiently. But he was also a sadist with crazy amounts of money. Joey’s idea of a practical joke was to fly toward his dealers with his foot on the gas and a bazooka aimed out the window of his latest car. His Thanksgiving turkeys and bags of toys at Christmas did little to allay the threat of his presence; Joey terrorized the neighborhood.

  George asked Joey for work, and Joey hired him as a lookout at his spot on 156th and Courtlandt. “I idolized the guy,” said George. “He was running around in Benzes and all that good stuff—Porsches, BMWs, he had it all.” He had even given one of his girlfriends a silver Cadillac. “I said, ‘Shit, I want to be just like him.’ ” It was Joey who gave him his street name. “It’s different,” Boy George said. “It’s not like calling somebody Chino, or calling them Red or Lefty or Fingers. When you say Boy George, you’re talking about the singer or you’re talking about me.”

  Boy George soon became friendly with another of Joey’s workers, a boy named Talent. Talent had a female relative who worked in the heroin trade. George decided to switch over from selling coke to selling dope: “Less time and faster money.” Boys arrested with heroin received less jail time, too. George worked for the Torres brothers, who dominated the South Bronx market, becoming a lookout on Watson Avenue. He was soon promoted to the position of pitcher, which involved handing out glassines. Before long, he had hooked up with Talent’s relative and become a manager. George oversaw the sale of a brand called Blue Thunder at a spot on 166th and Washington.

  It was a profitable, desolate location. Rusted stoves jutted out of broken windows. Scrap yards interrupted block after block of garbage lots. At night, packs of wild dogs roamed the streets. The businesses, other than narcotics, were run by tired men in garages that resembled crumbling caves: there were mattress shops, where soiled mattresses were hocked and reupholstered, and auto-repair shops, which did the same with cars. Gunshots and shouts of “Radar!” were regularly heard in the streets. (Radar was one of the ever-changing code words warning customers and dealers of approaching police.) The only uplifting sounds, aside from children’s voices, came from the determined gospel choir of a nearby storefront church.

  Boy George had scaled the hierarchy quickly; he soon learned how to talk the talk, even when he didn’t know what he was talking about. One Hundred Sixty-sixth and Washington was an excellent place for the driven young teenager to further prove himself. Lots of managers rolled out of bed at noontime, but Boy George got up early, like his mentor, and made sure the spot was open for the day. He didn’t spend the day smoking weed on the corner, or visiting girls. In a business full of deception and conning, George projected reliability and trust. He kept close tabs on the street dealers and maintained the supply. If he received $30,000 worth of work, $30,000 was returned; 166th and Washington cleared an average of $65,000 a week. George paid his people from his 10 percent and delivered the remainder to Talent’s relative. At one point, there was a turf war, an innocent bystander ended up dead, and George’s reputation was secured. He was only seventeen.

  George recruited several of his old Cabrini friends. He also pulled into the driveway of his old group home to show off his first Mercedes and invited the counselor on duty out to eat. “He knew how to present himself,” the counselor recalled, “and knew when people were playing a con game on him.”

  George’s living situation was still precarious, though. For a while, he moved in with Talent and his mom, but he also fell in with girls who gave him a place to stay. George and Joey Navedo sometimes shared breakfast at a Crown Donuts, where George had his eye on a smart green-eyed girl named Miranda who worked behind the counter. Miranda lived near his friend Rascal’s mother’s building. For their first date, George took Miranda and her baby son with him to Rikers Island; while he visited a friend, she napped in the parking lot. George sometimes stayed with Miranda, but Miranda soon discovered that he had another girlfriend—who was pregnant—and she kicked him out. George’s other girl, Vada, lived with her mother in Rascal’s building. George moved in and Vada gave birth to a son. George named him Luciano. Another girlfriend, Isabel, gave George a second son, but George considered Vada his main girl—his wife.

  Meanwhile, Joey Navedo exposed Boy George to other features of the good life. They visited Great Adventure, a New Jersey theme park. Joey introduced George to Victor’s Café, the Cuban restaurant where he would later take Jessica and Lourdes. Joey also hooked up George with his jeweler at Norel’s, a store in Chinatown. The boys sampled the seats of the exotic cars at car shows and inspected the fine custom work on other drug dealers’ expensive cars. They practiced shooting at a firing range in Mount Vernon. They skied the Poconos. George paid attention. He said, “Like a lint brush, I pick up.” From Joey, George learned to anticipate the sudden opportunities that characterized the drug business and to be prepared to act decisively. Joey’s preferred managerial tool was fear. George picked that up, too.

  “It’s like a fisherman with a little boat, that’s the drug dealer,” George later said. “I want to catch the whale. I want it big. I don’t want to go through the steps. I want it big because I know I can handle it. Where’s the fisherman gonna fit that damn whale? He’s gonna have to tug it! But he wants to bring in the mother lode, the catcher, everybody eats, everybody’s happy, we can relax. I didn’t need a high school diploma to do what I did. I did what most people are too scared to do, and that’s to take control of something very powerful.”

  In June 1987, the Drug Enforcement Administration, in conjunction with the New York Police Drug Task Force, brought the Torres brothers down. Boy George moved swiftly. Instead of delivering $65,000 to his connection, he set up a processing mill. He bought heroin, mannitol (a dilutant), a glass table, six chairs, a triple-beam scale, and glassine envelopes. Then George, Miranda and a friend, Rascal and one of Rascal’s girlfriends, and an older Jamaican man named 10-4 gathered around the table and settled in. The next day, 166th and Washington reopened for business with Boy George’s new brand. He named his heroin Obsession. The Obsession logo, stamped on the glassines in red ink, was a miniature king’s crown.

  10-4 handled the administrative details of the expanding operation, including payroll and personnel. George had met 10-4 during his tenure with a brand called Checkmate. 10-4 drove a livery cab. Before hooking up with George, he had shuttled another well-known Bronx drug dealer on his rounds. Drug dealers often used cabs to make deliveries because livery cabs—a comm
on mode of transportation in the ghetto—were less conspicuous than pricey cars. George had been one of 10-4’s biggest tippers. 10-4’s war stories impressed George, and whenever he needed a cab, he requested him; 10-4 was his dispatcher code. Sometimes George kept 10-4 on hold for days. 10-4 worked the relationship. A seasoned hustler, he supplemented his income running welfare schemes. Before driving cabs, he’d been fired from the post office for stealing envelopes with donations to religious charities. 10-4 had a knack for helping Boy George with what he needed—phony guarantors for leasing cars; friends in real estate who’d rent apartments under other people’s names, to be used for mills; fraudulent business certificates. It was 10-4 who bought Boy George his stamp for Obsession. Shortly after George launched the brand, 10-4 became the organization’s right-hand man.

  Business grew steadily. Boy George and Joey Navedo stayed in touch. George appreciated that Joey treated him as a peer. Joey provided an introduction to a contact for weapons; he also lured a buyer for some low-quality heroin George needed to unload. Joey even escorted the man to the meeting place, the Baychester Diner, and oversaw the exchange himself. To have found a friend and business ally in the man who had given him his street name seemed to Boy George an auspicious sign.

  But Joey Navedo’s generosity extended in both directions: for years, he’d been moonlighting as a confidential informant, filing reports with the New York Drug Enforcement Task Force and the DEA. Perhaps Joey’s flamboyant disregard for the law had something to do with his confidence in his usefulness to investigators, which granted him a measure of immunity. Duplicity was a taxing fact of ghetto life. The high expectation of betrayal raised the premium on loyalty.

  By the time George met Jessica, in 1988, he owned five selling locations and was the youngest major-league heroin dealer in the South Bronx. Obsession ranked as one of the market’s most popular brands. He parked a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Bentley, and a Porsche in his garages. Through a phony business of 10-4’s called Tuxedo Enterprises, George leased a stable of Jettas, Maximas, and other cars for daily use. James Bond, one of George’s heroes, inspired the $50,000 worth of special features added to the 190 Mercedes in which he’d taken Jessica on their first date: radar detectors manned the car’s front and rear; the license plate slid into a side compartment and a strobe light blinded anyone following him; secret compartments in the door panels and the floor hid weapons and suspicious amounts of cash. One device gushed gobs of oil from the tail, while a hidden switch flipped a box in the trunk that sprayed nail-like tacks.