by Ice-T
I managed to get an honorable, and four months ahead of schedule. And then I’m on a flight back home to L.A.
Little did I realize how much the game had changed since I’d left Crenshaw Boulevard.
PART TWO
NIGHTMARE WALKING
“I SPEAK ON THIS WITH HESITATION
EVEN THOUGH WE’RE PAST
THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS.”
—“THAT’S HOW I’M LIVIN’ ”
4.
WHEN I HIT THE STREET in South Central, I barely recognized my old neighborhood. I checked in with my homeys and they told me the deal: The gangbanging had intensified. The firepower had escalated. Dudes were spraying their enemies with fully automatic weapons. Day-to-day life was constant murder and retaliation and more murder. It was nothing to be hanging on the corner and witness a drive-by where three or four bodies got dropped from the spray of an AK or an Uzi.
When I got home from the Army, I wanted to stay the fuck away from all that gangbanging and gunplay. While I was still in Hawaii, I’d been amassing all kinds of stereo equipment. At Schofield we could buy it from the PX dirt cheap. So I had two Technics turntables, a decent mixer, and some big speakers. My whole goal was to make a name for myself as a DJ. And the timing was good, because the L.A. club scene was thriving. There were production companies around L.A. who’d rent venues like the Veterans Auditorium and get a few thousand kids in the crowd. They’d take home a good chunk of cash. So I decided to make that my hustle. I started to get my gear and my flyers together to throw a few parties.
Meanwhile, during my four years away, the cats from my ’hood who’d been small-time criminals had started to make a mark for themselves. They were robbing jewelry stores, pulling daylight bank robberies. A younger brother of a homey from Crenshaw High set a record in California for the most banks ever robbed by a juvenile. All my closest homeboys, people like Sean E. Sean, Sean E. Mac, my man M.C., they’d all changed their game and were taking down jewelry stores. And it went from burglary to daytime bashes—what they call today “snatch and runs”—ultimately to gunpoint robbery.
Over a few months, my neighborhood created various teams of cats—squads made up of two guys and a girl—who’d enter a jewelry store and run diversion asking a bunch of distracting questions, while another member of the crew trimmed the jewelry case.
There was such a level of secrecy in my neighborhood. Certain cats were getting it. Other cats weren’t getting it. You had to be admitted into that part of the clique. I was coming home from the Army, and even though I was down with the clique, I wasn’t allowed to go on any jobs—we called them “licks”—right away.
But I had a friend named Nat the Cat. I kept bugging him about it. Finally, he told me how the shit worked.
“Listen,” Nat said. “This is how it’s going down. This is how we gettin’ money.”
Nat showed me the hustle of “trimming” a jewelry case, which was basically picking a lock. In those days, they used to have a special lock on jewelry cases called a pop-lock, and with nothing fancier than a nail file—we called that a “trim”—you could slide it into the lock and pop it. Clean and easy.
We called ourselves players—meaning nobody gets hurt. When we were finished robbing them, the store employees were dumbfounded. They didn’t know what happened. A lot of times, a trim was done so slick, we didn’t even have to run at the end. If it was done real smooth, the store wouldn’t even notice until we were long gone.
But like everything else, the trimming started to escalate and became more aggressive. And I really didn’t want to be in the drama. I just wanted to focus on making some kind of name for myself on the music scene.
DURING MY LAST YEAR in the military, not only had I learned to spin vinyl on my Technics, but that’s when the Sugar Hill Gang dropped “Rapper’s Delight.” The record blew my mind. Not because rapping was something brand-new to me. Actually, the opposite: It blew my mind because I’d already been writing my own rhymes since high school. These weren’t really raps, and we didn’t know it as hip-hop. They were what we’d call Crip Rhymes. I can still reel off two or three of them at the drop of a dime.
Strollin’ through the city in the middle of the night
Niggas on my left and niggas on my right
Yellin’ C-C-C-Crip to every nigga I see
If you bad enough come fuck with me
I seen another nigga I said “Crip” again
He said, “Fuck a Crip nigga—this is Brim!”
So we pulled out the Roscoe
Roscoe said crack
I looked again nigga was shootin’ back
So we fell to the ground aiming for his head
One more shot, nigga was dead
Walked over to him, took his gun
Spit in his face and began to run
So if you see another nigga laying dead in the street
In a puddle of blood from his head to his feet
I hope this time all you niggas get hip
That it’s fuck a Brim, nigga—
This is West Side Crip!
I was saying this shit at Crenshaw back in ’76, you dig? Which was way before I’d heard recorded rap. It was just something to do, these Crip raps, to entertain the set when we were chilling. It’s a style that derives from hustlers toasting, putting their fly talk to rhyme; it’s been part of the player code with guys like Iceberg Slim for ages. Iceberg did a record called Reflections, which had a lot of slick rhyming. Toasting and talking shit in verse is something that’s always been a part of black culture—long before folks started calling it hip-hop—you can hear it in some old blues records, in some James Brown records, even the way Ali would boast in rhymes.
This was the same time that the early hip-hoppers were developing their styles in the Bronx, cats like Cold Crush, Busy Bee, Hollywood, Starski. But my rhyming wasn’t connected to any kind of music. For me it was just a spoken-word style. All my boys would be sitting around, chilling, drinking, smoking weed.
“Yo, say one of your Crip rhymes, T.”
These rhymes would be told among guys, but they weren’t written to a beat. I never had a backing track, just a rhythm in my own head. When I heard “Rappers Delight,” I immediately flipped the record over. It had an instrumental and I attempted to do my rhymes over it. But none of my rhymes would fit a beat. They wouldn’t flow properly.
Still, that’s how I got the rap bug. I thought I already knew how to rap back in ’76. Now I had to rethink it a bit, had to tailor my writing and storytelling to come in over a beat. And I developed my own distinctive style. I’d taken my name as a tribute to Iceberg, and then it hit me one day—dude is a writer. I thought he was fly because he was a pimp, but I realized that I really admired him because he was a writer. There were a thousand pimps on the street but I liked Iceberg because he was able to articulate the life. And I started to develop those same skills in my rhymes, painting these dark portraits of the world of pimps, hustlers, and gangbangers.
On my second album Power, I laid it down:
I’m livin large as possible
Posse’s unstoppable
My style is topical
Vividly optical
Listen and you’ll see ’em
Sometimes I’ll be ’em
That became the signature Ice-T style—rhymes that were “topical” and “vividly optical.” To me it was street-level journalism, real-life observations told in poetry. That’s the vision I tried to bring to all my recordings.
Now, I was going to parties around town with my DJ equipment. But I found that I was getting way more attention picking up the mic and rapping than I was from carrying them damn speakers! So what happened was, instead of busting my ass to throw my own parties, I started to go around from party to party, just to pick up the mic and rap.
My style was still really raw. But since everybody else was terrible, I was considered all right. That’s when I first dipped my feet into the rap scene and hooked up with Evil E
. and Henry G. Those cats were from New York, and they were called the New York City Spin Masters. We first met at a rap contest, and we immediately vibed. The New York City Spin Masters were already throwing these big parties. I went along with them on the party circuit, and while they would DJ, I’d get on the mic and spit. That’s how I got my rap name going.
But while this was going on at nighttime, simultaneously, in the daytime—fuck it, I needed to get paid. Rap wasn’t paying me shit. So that’s when I got into the criminal game fulltime. And that’s how I nearly got my ass killed.
I’D DONE MY SHARE of petty crime in high school—boosting car stereos, selling dime bags of weed and bullshit—but it wasn’t until those first months back from the Army that my life of crime kicked into high gear.
It was easier for me to get into the life because Adrienne and I had broken up. Times had changed; we’d both changed. Adrienne was my first relationship, but we weren’t under any illusions; we both knew I wasn’t her life-long partner. We were together because of a pregnancy, and when I came home with my honorable discharge, we separated.
By the time my hustling life commenced in earnest, Adrienne had already started dating other people, and we weren’t living together. I liked it that way, because hustling is a lifestyle best undertaken solo. Of course, I had to take care of my daughter, and no matter what, I would always support her. Hustling is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. There are no vacations or downtime. Things were constantly crazy and hectic. For me, this was a serious transition from the regimented, structured time in the Army. I was essentially homeless, bouncing from place to place, living in the streets. I didn’t want to bring that hustling world, with the constant risk and danger, around my baby daughter.
I was now running with some serious criminals. Understand: We were all hustlers from Crip neighborhoods—cats from the Rollin’ 30s Original Harlem Crips—but we weren’t about the gangbanging. We were hustlers.
Gangbanging and hustling are polar opposites. Gangbangers are about territory, power, and instilling fear in their enemies. Hustlers are about making money, twenty-four-hour scheming, always trying to get paid. From the minute we woke up, we were constantly scheming to rob someplace. Pulling licks. We’d stand around, playfully taunting each other. “What? You scared of money? Nigga, you scared of money?”
That one phrase sent more people to prison in my neighborhood than anything else.
I was hitting the street with four years of training as an elite soldier. I also had four years of pent-up energy and frustration. Life at Schofield Barracks had been so tightly regimented: up before dawn, constantly marching in formation, spit-shining boots, out on the firing range, getting my ass chewed out by the sergeant. I never regretted my four years in the Army. It definitely gave my life some discipline and structure. But after four years, I was ready to break out of that fucking mold.
There’s something civilians often don’t realize about the military. You’re really only trained to do two things: Kill people and take over shit. You’re not coming home with too many other useful skills, unless you plan on becoming a police officer. Today, we’ve got young vets touching down from Iraq and Afghanistan who’ve killed a shitload of people, and if they’re not properly reprogrammed to come back into society, it’s not like that “kill switch” is an easy thing to turn off.…
I quickly found that the operational theory hardwired into me from the years of Army life could be put to use on the streets. I got a reputation as the guy who could lay out a criminal operation with precision. Some of the licks we pulled are legendary, still talked about in the Cali streets. I always tell people there’s no reason to lie about my past: The truth is much more insane.
THERE WERE HUSTLERS who liked to pull licks on the spur of the moment, but for me the art of the hustle was putting days—sometimes weeks—into the tactics and strategy. Most hustlers in South Central never strayed far from the block. Or the furthest they’d go to rob was the Crenshaw Shopping Center. Their reasoning was, the closer they stayed to home the less likely the cops would be to find them.
That wasn’t my crew’s style. We wanted to rob as far away from our ’hood as possible. If we robbed anywhere near L.A., we’d pick a spot in, say, Pacific Palisades, a twelve-mile drive on the freeway from Crenshaw Boulevard. But I was very choosy about the licks I’d organize. Sometimes a cat would come in and say, “Yo, I found a spot on Wilshire.”
“You crazy?” I’d say. “Right in the middle of Beverly Hills! A nigga can’t even jog down the street there without attracting the police.”
For sure, Beverly Hills was a prime target. The whole area reeks of money, but my crew would never touch it. One day, these cats did try to take off the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. That was a hardcore crew from another neighborhood. They went in there with a mess of guns, and that shit got hectic. Real ugly.
See, nobody smart fucked with Beverly Hills. You could try to rob some ritzy hotel or caked-out jewelry store, but you’d never get out of there.
People from the crew were always looking for a perfect lick so we had a semi-permanent system of out-of-town scouting. We always tried to deliberate long and hard. We were serious criminals at this point. We’d wake up in the morning, thinking, Where’s the next lick? It’s twisted, I know, but this was our career choice.
Once we committed to that life, it was on. For about a year, motherfuckers wreaked havoc, first in Cali, then all the way across the United States. We went out to Salt Lake City. We went out to Arizona. We hit jewelry stores and boutiques all up and down the Pacific Northwest Coast. We saw that, security-wise, the rest of the country wasn’t as tight as L.A. We crisscrossed the whole country pulling licks, went all the way east. Some cats even left the United States for Europe and the Caribbean. We had our own little international crime spree. One of my partners got captured a few years later, and the cops fingerprinted him and ran him through the system. He had fifty-two aliases. Fifty-two fucking aliases! He gave a different name during each arrest.
He’s in prison today doing twenty-five years.
5.
I WASN’T PLANNING ON getting locked up for a week, let alone hearing some judge handing me down a prison sentence with football numbers. As I mentioned, I’d spend days—sometimes weeks—planning a lick. We’d have to case the store, do our surveillance and recon. If it was a high-end spot, a few days before the lick I’d go in there with a girl hustler from our clique. We’d dress up in tennis outfits, K-Swiss and Polo, flashing Rolexes on our wrists. Of course, when you case a spot, you want to look like you’ve already got money. We’d pretend to be browsing, talking to the salesgirl, “Yes, miss, I was thinking of getting this piece as an anniversary gift for my great-aunt.” All the time, we’re taking mental notes, sizing up the alarm system, the layout of the store, the vulnerable points of entry, the make and model of the safe.
That’s one thing I’ll give to my four years in the Army. The military had given me that sense of articulating the mission and knowing how to delegate tasks: who was going to be the wheel man, who was going to be lookout, who was going to be the “basher”—the cat responsible for making the actual entry.
Without giving up too much game, the real trick to any crime is figuring out where you’re going after you do it. In other words, if you’re going to target a store in a big mall, you don’t just do the lick and run. That’s a guaranteed ticket to jail. No, you start where you want to end up, two blocks over, and you walk that path backward. That way, your escape route is your route to the lick. So if we’re going to go in the mall, we’re going to park two floors down on a motorcycle. Then we’re going to figure out how we’re going to go through the catacombs of the building and come up the back entrance. We’ll pop out that entrance into the mall, and look for a target very close to that exit. The minute we hit it, we’ll take about five steps and be out of that main area of the mall. We’ll be back in the catacombs, going through doorways with security at our backs. But wherever there are locke
d doors, we’ve taken the extra step to duct tape the locks backward, so when we’re leaving, we can prevent security from chasing us.
The getaway is actually more important than anything that happens during the robbery itself. If you practice your getaway, if you visualize yourself in the role of the person in hot pursuit of you, you’re making sure that they can’t follow this maze that you’ve created.
I took my time and planned so carefully for one simple reason: I did not want to get caught!
Now, when I got into the game, it was the dawn of the “bash” robbery. In fact, I think I went on perhaps the first recorded bash, which took place in a mall in Carson. It might have been done someplace else before us, but I know my crew had a lot to do with spreading the craziness across the country. The stores weren’t ready for the bash. This was pre-Plexiglas. Most jewelry stores didn’t have armed guards. They weren’t ready for a bold, blatant robbery crew whose only tools were brains, balls, and an easily concealable baby sledgehammer.
The beauty of the basic bash was that there were no guns involved and it was lightning-quick. Three of us would walk into the jewelry store. One of us would take off a nice gold chain and tell the one lady working, “Would you please clean this chain?”
She goes to the back, and before she knows it we’ve whipped out the baby sledge, broken the display glass, grabbed a couple of trays of Rolexes, and bounced.
I laid it all out in my record, “That’s How I’m Livin’ ”:
Baby sledgehammers were the tools
I speak on this with hesitation
Even though we’re passed the statute of limitations
Yeah, baby sledgehammers were our tools. We were like hawks and those trays of high-end Rolexes were our prey. Rolexes were selling for $2,500 a piece on the street, and you could move them quick. So Swiss watches were cake. If you could take ten Rolexes during a bash, you could clear $25,000 in one day. That’s another thing about robbery as your vocation: Just as essential as mapping out your escape routes is having established, safe networks to move the goods. If you sell that shit out of your trunk, you’ll get caught. No question. See, everything in the game is highly specialized. Very rarely do you run across a successful all-around criminal. There’s cats who specialize in robbery. There’s cats who specialize in fencing. In the ’hood, there’s networks of drug dealers and ballers who’ll buy the stolen merchandise wholesale—doesn’t matter what it is: jewelry, fur coats, designer clothes—and then they’ll resell it on the street at a nice profit.
