The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Surviving Harlem's Most Dangerous Housing Project | Ep #29

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

Johnny visits the Polo Grounds, east Harlem's most notorious housing projects, and gives a history of the violence of the crack era along with Unique Mecca, the former drug kingpin who was responsible for much of that violence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Remember Amnibald Bihar, they moved in the house. After they got in, they found out that the people went crazy. The guy killed everybody, but they already moved in. Well, that's where we at now. Right. Then you had to be strong to be up there. If you was weak, you couldn't survive. That's when I see lights behind me start to flash.

I didn't even think. I just hit it. I was driving like my life depended on. Then I parked the car, popped out, closed the door, and I started running. And he pulls out a burner, shank. It's like six inches. And he passes it to me. And he goes, here, that's yours.

Don't ever leave the cell block without this. He was the reason I made it out of that place alive. What's up, guys? Welcome back to The Connect. My name is Johnny Mitchell. As always, follow us on all social media. Subscribe to the channel and turn on alerts to get notified whenever we drop new content. You can listen to us on Spotify and iTunes.

It listens great, too, if you prefer it that way. And then, of course, patreon.com slash the Connect show for all the bonus content. We're cooking over there, you guys. Go support us. It's the best way to help out our. our show if you love the show. All right, let's get into the episode. Okay, so if you've been following along, you saw that we went out to New York City last month and filmed with our friend Unique, the kingpin from Harlem that came of age in the 80s and early 90s. We went out to film his story,

but in the process, we discovered that he was from a larger generation of young men from the 80s and early 90s who were part of the most violent era in American history. And it's what we're calling the lost generation of Harlem. It was a group of people who virtually disappeared from the streets, either through death or incarceration, for decades, and who are now finally returning to the neighborhoods that made them to try to give back to the death and destruction that they reeked for so long back in the day. So starting in the mid-80s through the early 90s, the homicide rate in New York City was astronomical. It's hard to even fathom it today. Each year, there were over 2,000 murders. I think in 1993, that saw the highest murder rate that year.

It's about 2,500 murders. That's like six or seven a day. Compare that to today when there's like a seven. There's about a body and a half that drops in New York every day. So it's to give you an idea just about how much murder was happening in that city. You had to be strong to be up there. If you was weak, you couldn't survive. And one of the epicenters of that violence was Uptown, Harlem. And much of that violence was perpetrated by people like Unique, who were driven by the mad scramble for the crack money that was coming so fast that the hustlers didn't even have time to count it.

You do what you want to do. You take a deep breath and you just bow through everything because you could do anything you want, you know? And we got a pistol on it. This crack era was a really interesting phenomena in American history. It was kind of like the perfect storm. So people like Unique and his friends, his crew, who were born in poverty-stricken, very violent places,

either the American South or in Unique's case, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic. These are third-world countries where political violence and street violence are normal, everyday parts of life, and they're brutal, right? Like in the Dominican Republic, people get chopped to death with machetes. So when people from those places immigrated to, to the U.S., to neighborhoods like Harlem, they brought that kind of violence with them. It was embedded quite literally in their DNA.

In Jamaica, in the 70s and 80s, the possees were literally armed by the two wings of the government, the JLP and the PNP. They would fund these gangs and sanction killings that became so normal that people would see bodies every day. People would witness police killings and political murder. So of course, when these posseys immigrate to Brooklyn or Harlem and they're making millions of dollars selling crack, it's very easy for them to shoot somebody to death or to bury somebody in an abandoned building. It was seen as quite normal and even tame compared to the shit that they saw happening in their home country.

When crack first hit in 1985, it started in L.A., but New York City really, it became the mecca of crack dealing and crack using. And it was a boom for the streets. It was a gigantic economic opportunity for many young men who would never have had an opportunity like this otherwise. It was kind of like a once-in-a-lifetime get-rich-quick scheme. So different crews from all over the neighborhood could set up in a building and make up to $50,000, $70,000 in one day. Our spot was 24 hours, and it was copping gold.

And we had what we call baseball. They didn't call it crap. We called it bass, and it was little balls. We had the cellar mail. We had in the bottom with a red top and the stamp on the baseball. And we were doing 20,000 a shift. And again, these are children born in the 60s who grew up in the 70s and early 80s, watching the heroin dealers make money and get rich. And these are the guys that they looked up to. Because back then, the athletes and the musicians who Urban America looks up to now,

those guys weren't making real money back in the day. I mean, professional athletes had to get summer jobs back in the 70s. That's how little it actually paid. Back then, like from the 60s to the 70s, it wasn't like a promising that he was going to go to be an NBA playoff or something like that because you've got to realize back then they wasn't making a lot of money back over the street dudes. So the stars were the hood stars.

Those were the people that the kids looked up to. and now it's 1985, and these kids are in their late teens, early 20s, they got a chance to become the hood stars themselves. And people like Unique, who grew up in Jamaica, a guy didn't own a pair of shoes until he was eight years old. Now he's making hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars a week. He would rather die than go back to the poverty that he experienced on that island. So it's really not a stretch to imagine how this money, this corruption of easy money, turn people into murderers. It turned good kids into killers. Unique is a good guy. I can say that after spending a week with him in the process of making all these videos. We see the human in him. But, you know, he was turned

into a killer. It was in his environment that turned him and his generation into murderers. Hey guys, let's take a minute to thank our amazing sponsor, long-time sponsor of The Connect. Hello Mood. You guys, Hello Mood is truly the best CBD and Delta 8 and Delta 9 products company in the United States of America. They have an array of amazing products, including their new strawberry cheesecake, flour, Bubba Cush, Afghan hash, so many different assortments of Delta 9 and Delta 8 THC Gummies and Solution. It's an entire arrangement of things, you guys. If you live in a state where marijuana is still illegal, you can go get the Delta 8 and Delta 9 right off their website and have it delivered to you legally, discreetly, and you don't

have to worry about feds. I mean, we love these guys. I cannot recommend Mood enough. You guys, right now, they are offering an incredible promo for you. If you go over to hellomood.co, that's their website, hellomood.co, and use promo code connect 20, you get 20% off anything on their entire website. Plus, that's not all. If you use promo code connect free at checkout, they will throw in a five-count pack of gummies entirely free with your order. You guys, do yourself a favor and go over to hellomoot.co and get the best

Delta 8, Delta 9, CBD products on the market. Thank you so much for sponsoring us. Let's get back into the episode. So as we're kicking it with Unique and his friends from back in the day, we meet a guy named Lou Sims. This guy's a street legend in Harlem. He ran 142nd Street. He had a crew called the Lynch Mob. By the time the feds came down on him in the early 90s, Lou Sims had earned the name Homicide Lou. When did you get that nickname?

Oh, man, I don't know. And who gave that to you? I would like to say the streets, but I, you know, I, you know, I'm not a, I wasn't. I wasn't accepting it like I'm accepting it now, you know, like it's just like a he-he-he-he. But back then, now, I ain't allowed people to call me that, you know what I'm trying to say. Right. You know, my name is Lucin's. That's what it is.

You know, I ain't go by that name in the jail, or on the street. His crew was indicted for 15 murders, but the fed suspect that number is much higher. This man was on death row. You understand what I'm saying? He was on death row. You know what I mean? And then he had 30 years on top of that. In fact, when they finally went down.

the Harlem precinct saw homicide numbers shrink by 54%. Kind of like Unique, we really saw the human side in Lou. He was a very mellow, friendly guy, had a great sense of humor. One night, Unique took us up to the Bronx to this nightclub where a DJ was spinning. It was packed with people. It was live. It was a real party. And Brian and I were the only ones who couldn't get to the club.

I wonder why that is. But Homicide Lou waited with us outside of the club. us outside of the club and the freezing New York winter to make sure we got in safe before he walked in. So we talk a lot about environment and historical forces like the abundance of crack money in the 80s, which caused a lot of people to turn into killers. The sick of kids was real. And they was all, so the wolves was out. So they had to know that we had wolves to it.

Right? So it takes a wolf to know. The Wild Cowboys is a perfect example of that. We had the Wild Cowboys, is what we called them. The Wild Cowboys, those were a stick-up crew with white guys, you know, Dominicans and some blacks and things like that. And they were feared by all of the drug dealers uptown. Actually, when Unique was getting chased by the feds,

right before he got arrested for the final time, he thought it was the Cowboys that were chasing him. So then, you know, I told the homies, I said, yo, I think the Wild Cowboys tried to make a move of him. You know what I mean? So now I gotta find out who they is, because now I gotta go make a move on them, being that they're already thinking about making a move on me.

You know what I mean? But it wasn't the Wild Cowboys. This was the real feds. And what these cats would do is they would mimic undercover cops. The Wild Cowboys, they went out, they got LTDs, with the police light, put it on the top. And they would pull over suspected drug dealers, kidnap them and toss them in the trunk,

then hold them for ransom. A car pull up on you and got the police lights on the top of the car. and they pull you over. And when you show them your license registration, they pull the pistol out and they put you in the Trump. And they, you know, give you a big GI Joe cell phone. They tell you to call your people, tell me to bring $100,000. Stuff like that happened all the time back in the day.

But it was that bad back then. And I think that's probably why nobody pulled another stunt like the Wild Cowboys. Because that put the police, you know, in a dangerous situation. Right. You know what I mean? When you got guys pulling them over, acting like police, who you're going to trust? Yeah. Day weekend is almost here, and it's time to kick off summer right. When I'm getting ready for the

first big weekend of summer, Total Wine and More is my go-to, especially when I'm firing up the grill with family. I'll grab refreshing beers, easy drinking wines, and some hard seltzers for the cooler. And with everything that goes into summer, it's nice knowing you're getting the lowest prices. Total Wine and More, your Memorial Day, Made Easy. Shop Total Wine and More in store or online. spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly must be 21. Part of the reason that homicide was so prevalent back in those days was that it was just easier to get away with.

There was little or no surveillance cameras, no DNA evidence, and tons of abandoned property in Harlem to dump bodies in. It's hard for anybody watching to understand being able to kill somebody, and unless there's a witness, nobody knows. Listen. Like Bradhurst.

Unique took us to the infamous Bradhurst Avenue in Harlem that runs parallel to Frederick Douglas Boulevard just a couple of blocks away from the polo grounds housing projects. These little streetlights, you see, they was broken out. They broke out all the streetlights, and this is where they used to be at with the dope during the crack era. And it was so infamous that even hard rocks like unique would never go down that street without their pistol out, cocked, ready to shoot. If I walked on Bradhurst, I had my pistol in my hand. when it was dark. Right.

Even me with all my Jews. I got my joy in my hand. And even with my join in my hand, you'll still see people walking by to see if I look like I'm weak enough that they could still tribe me. And there was one building in particular, which was known as the burial grounds

for drug dealers and rival crews to dump people they had killed. Groups like the wild cowboys and the Jamaican posseys who were beefing on edgecom Avenue. It was nothing for them to dismember bodies and dump them in the burial grounds on Bradhurst. It was just crazy, man. This is a crazy time. Like I said, this is the world famous Bradhurstead, you know. What, they call it a tombstone motel? Twostone motel. You check in, but you don't check out. Today, the building has been converted into half a million dollar apartments, such as the story

of Harlem. There's also a Starbucks, of course, on the first floor. You see that Starbucks right there up the block? Yeah. We're going to pass it in a minute. They found a debt body. rolled up in carpet. Get the fuck. From back in the day? No, no, recently. Recently. This just happened.

Dang. And you know what? They got it on camera. The two guys pushing the dead body in the Home Depot carpet. I mean, in the Home Depot shopper cart. Rolling the body up there, they dropped them off right front of Starbucks.

But the people of Unique's generation know the true history of it. Remember Amnivill Harder, they moved in the house after they got in, they found out that the people went crazy. The guy killed everybody, but they already moved in. Well, that's where we're at now.

Right. These people that's living in here, we're the old historians that know the history of Bradhurst. Harlem wasn't just abandoned buildings and storefronts. It was also the projects, which then and now are a cornerstone of the ghetto, and especially in New York City,

where the projects are the largest in the country. Unique gave us a tour of the Polo Grounds housing projects, a place that he spent a lot of time in back in his day, to cross the street from the famous Rucker Purs, park and it's home to tens and tens and thousands of Harlem families who still live and work in the area. Right next door to the Polo Grounds are the colonial houses they're called. And those were the original buildings that were there back in the early 20th century. And right next door to the Colonials was the original Yankee Stadium, which is where the polo grounds are today. Like Bay Booth

hit his 714th home run here. They still got the plaque over there in the wall. And actually the Polo grounds are laid out like a baseball diamond. Every building is a base. Like, this is home plate. That's first base, second base, third base. That's how he designed his projects. And back in the day, the residents from the Colonials could look down onto Yankee Stadium and watch the game from their windows.

So my grandmother and grandfather used to watch the basketball games, the fights, and the baseball games out the window. They got free tickets. They have free tickets. I think the stereotype that most Americans have of the projects is that they're just drug-filled, ultra-violent war zones. When in reality, there's a lot more community to them. We get the money on the street, we eat together, you know, like my man Mo Grimdy, that's family.

You know, you create your own family. Because the blood, the bloodline that you're with, that don't mean they're going to be as loyal to you as the people you meet on the street. You got now to judge your characters. You know what I mean? So when I say family, this is my family that I ate with. Now, I know places like Cabrini Green in Chicago were infamous for these kind of daytime shootouts, where civilians would get killed, and all sorts of horrors that we associate with urban poverty. But the polo grounds was different.

There's a sense of community there. But when we're in here, we respect each other because this is a family in here. I mean, everybody, every building we all know each other. We respect each other. And, you know, it was loved that. I don't know what's going on now. My man, Moe Grime, I have to tell you that, because I've been gone for 26. So now we're walking up into these buildings, and it's pretty wild because you see, you know,

movies and television and images of these places, and they feel exactly like a government building. They're drab, they're old, they haven't been updated since the 70s probably. Unique's generation had a code of conduct. One of them was that you don't sling drugs in the projects. You set up off-site. You didn't have no... Nobody had no spot in the... No, could they respect each other.

Right. You know what I mean? Meaning your neighbor might get high, and let's say the next person's neighbor don't get high. You don't want them to see that. And secondly, you don't sell when kids are going to and from school. We didn't even sell drugs in the morning out here. You know, like doing, like school time, going to school and kids getting off of school, we respected the kids enough that their parents was the ones getting high,

and the kids was with the grandparents. So when the grandparents would take them to school, we wouldn't sell drugs, but we wouldn't allow them to see it. That's how much we respect the neighborhood, even though we're poisoning the neighborhood. And you don't drop bodies in the projects. That's a big no-no, at least for unique and his crew. You don't bring the problems back to where you live.

If we had a beef, we'd go outside the fight. But we never take it to the gun game and the night. We never murder nobody in our building. Right, because this is where you guys got to live. We got a living. Now, don't get me wrong, there was plenty of murders happening in those buildings, though. Now, this thing is where a lot of homicide happened. But it's usually beef happening between people from rival projects.

People usually get their revenge on these staircases right here because this is like a secluded area where these staircases is not really used for nobody. You know, so a lot of people come back here, you know, somebody might be sleeping back here, whatever, and the guy catch up to him, whatever the case may be. And then this is where the tragedy, it all happens. Did you guys growing up here, did you ever find, like, stumble across a body early in the morning? Oh, plenty of bodies, man. Plenty of bodies, man. Plenty of bodies.

Yeah. I just one couple of them. Sometimes you might think the person in his sleeping and he's dead. Right. Right. I hate to like, I always, you know how this. You always think about how to get away of murder. You could body somebody in this hallway and then pretend like you found him.

Right. Well, if I find him, keep going. Yeah. Where the hell want to turn in the body? Because then they always say the first person to find the body didn't. Is it a person who is? Oh, okay. So I don't come out with anything revolutionary.

Right. I'm dead serious. The first person he's poured the body. He goes. He knows something. How the hell you find out of you? They're going to bring you in the question. You know what I mean?

Okay, fair enough. Don't let me plan the burden. We are going down. Unique and his people tried to make the projects a safe haven from the harsh realities of the street just a few blocks away. I can take from the rich to give to the pool so we took from the street or we poised the street to give to the pool. He likened himself to a Robin Hood. He was extremely generous, as we said before, he would walk through the project. with a pocket full of money,

and by the time he got to the street, he would have given it all away. It felt great giving. You know what I mean? It felt great. I had people used to run up on them to say, man, I'm behind five months rent because my husband stopped working

or my husband started getting high, and you know what I mean? I need $5,000 to pay the rent. It was about family. The people in those projects were family to unique, even if they weren't related by blood. And he tried to look out for him like that.

So, you know, when I started making money, I didn't shine on them. I made sure they made money so they could eat and, you know, they could have their own. So when I go out, I'm not going to go out and be the only one with money in my pocket and I got to pay for everybody. I'm going to give everybody a couple of stacks and you know what I mean? Let's be honest. Those people in the buildings, many of them addicted to crack, were putting money into Unique's pocket.

So he had a respect for them in a very weird sort of way. He acknowledged that these people were. buying drugs that made him rich, but he viewed them as human and he treated them with the respect that they deserve. I think that's kind of lost on today's generation. Today, the projects are pretty mellow. It's a lot of people still struggling, barely paying the rent. A lot of people, third and fourth generation, still living in those buildings, paying almost nothing. Now, the people that I was here for generations, they only pay like 400. The way that the New York City Housing Authority works is that if you're a Section 8 tenant in one of those buildings,

your rent is a fourth of your income. So whatever you make, if you make $400 a month, you're gonna be paying about $100 a month in rent. So of course, what the city is trying to do is they're trying to buy those people out so they can hike the rents up to the market rate. You know, they're always doing construction here. They're trying to get everybody out.

I think they offer them what more like 15 grand? 15 grand to get everybody out. Yeah, they buy, you know, to get everybody out because they want their property back. Okay, so by now, 1995, the murder rate in New York City starts going down pretty dramatically. And there's a bunch of different reasons for that. One, guys like Unique and his generation of killers are all dead or doing life by this time. Two, the demand for crack wanes a little bit. So less people are using

drugs, people are getting clean, and there's just less money involved. So now people aren't killing each other as much. And also more cops in the advent of technology. I mean, you go to New York now and you're on camera virtually everywhere you go. That mixed with a softening of the culture a little bit. Unique and those old heads like to lament about how soft this new generation is. Well, in part, that's a good thing, right? You don't want people running around killing each other at the levels that we witnessed back in the 1980s, obviously. They can't hold their own because they're not used to fight and they steal off these video games.

The problem was, now there's an entire generation. of men, leaders in the community that are suddenly missing from Harlem. And as consequence, people that came up in the 90s and the 2000s, people of my age, had no direction. They had no leadership, so to speak. Family values, it just seemed like it just, and it wasn't the same. It was in the same way. The code of the streets is pretty much gone.

And the rules that the old heads put in place are just not there anymore. Things like not committing violence in the projects, respecting. the drug users, leaving the civilians alone and giving them money and making them feel safe in their communities. All those went out the window when Unique and his generation got locked up. Because we from the era that it was all fun of, nobody was hating. Nobody was getting killed because I didn't like him. Or you live over here. Oh, because you had to die. Nah, it was none of that. You don't know what I'm saying. You're done of what I'm saying. We had brothers that was coming to Harlem from Queens

from Brooklyn. And we'd be at the Palo Theater. We don't know how saw it together and drinking together. And it was all along. They get money over there. We get money here. We respect the fact that we get money.

There's enough business for everyone. Exactly. Gentrification played a big part in this too. So as New York started to get more and more gentrified, those families that lived uptown moved south, where the cost of living is cheaper. And consequently, those cities like Atlanta and New Orleans saw

a big spike in homicides. side. People are still getting killed in Harlem all the time, but it seems so senseless compared to the violence of the 80s and the 90s. Not that any of it was right, but it kind of made sense that thousands of people would be getting killed because there was such a lucrative crack market that it caused violent competition between drug gangs. Today, that drug money doesn't exist. There's all different kinds of goofy shit, fentanyl, M30, synthetic drugs, percocets, I mean, the The biggest kingpins are the pharmaceutical industries. The shootouts that happen in Harlem are between 18-year-old kids that are battling it out over little corners.

I mean, the killing is just senseless. It's ridiculous. And part of the reason for this senseless violence is that the kids today grew up without father figures. An entire generation of leaders was wiped out by crack and the crack laws. This was the lost generation of Harlem. We got it wrong with this. with these laws. We made a mistake.

But the damage is already done. Then I got two dickens out of this. But now unique, and people of his generation are starting to get out. They're coming home. I've been home approximately 10 years. And they're trying to make up for lost time. They're partying.

They're having fun. But they're also using their platforms and their stories for good. They're trying to educate the youth the way they never were when they were locked up. to show them that, hey, it wasn't worth it. There's a better way you don't want to follow in the footsteps of us. I'm going to tell you, to be honest with you, man,

it's nothing positive about what we did. We did it in ignorance. I mean, we had a good time. You know better, you do better. This lost generation is trying to impart the knowledge they wish they had when they were young. Yeah. If we had known at that age,

what we know now oh man you think we got 10 people in all the neighborhood we would have never had to experience being in there being away from family on many of these holidays missing birthdays you know what I'm saying

missing family members who died are in there because we can't go to the funeral that's wouldn't allow you to go to the funeral you know what I'm saying this is a lot of trauma a lot of turmoil a lot of heart

and it's many nights I don't care what anybody's stuff we alone by ourselves and tears come out of our lives. By us saving one life, that might be the one that would kill one of us with a stray bullet, our family member, our children, God forbid, you know what I mean? So we just got to keep trying and just don't give up. All right, you guys, that's been today's episode. Thank you so much for watching.

We will see you next week.