The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Visiting The Most Dangerous Hoods Of NYC With A Crack Kingpin | #25

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

Johnny meets up with an OG Harlem crack Kingpin  @uniquemeccaaudionyc  to discuss the history of hustling in New York City, as well as Unique's rise from Jamaican immigrant to street hustler in Brooklyn and the South Bronx, where he worked a trap house that made millions of dollars a year when he was still a teenager. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Let him die before you open it. Because if you open it, you're going to die too. So we understood that because we wasn't scared of death. You understand what I'm saying? So these are chances that you take. Because this is a whole other world out here on the street. 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 your... Don't ever leave the cell block without this. Here's the reason I made it out of that place alive.

What's up, everybody? Welcome back to The Connect. I am your host, Johnny Mitchell. Before we get started, make sure to like and subscribe. Follow us on all social media. Turn on alerts so you get notified whenever we drop new content. And the Patreon. Patreon.com slash The Connect Show.

All right, let's get into it. All right, we have an incredible episode for you today, guys. We went to New York and filmed with one of the most legendary New York City crack lords. I'm talking about King of Kings from the 1980s. He goes by the name of unique mecca audio. At his height, he was selling 200 kilos of pure Colombian cocaine in New York City every single week. He was, by all accounts, probably the only black drug kingpin of that era to go higher than the Dominicans, who at the time, were the ones supplying all of these street-level dealers with powder.

He got above them and was dealing directly with the Kali cartel who was shipping their bricks to New York City. He was the first one to receive them. In 1993, he was arrested and charged with the Kingpin Act, running a continual criminal enterprise, the same thing that they got Choppo with, and he was sentenced to mandatory life in prison. He spent time in some of the biggest, most violent federal penitentiaries in the state. country. He ran a pretty large-scale heroin operation while he was locked up for the first half of his stretch, but he taught himself how to read and write. He studied the law. In 2020, he finally caught a break. He was granted a compassionate release by the judge who sentenced him. And 26 years later,

finally, he stepped foot again in New York City as a free man. We spent a week filming with him in in New York, where he showed us the streets that made him rich. But to understand what makes a a gangster like Unique Mecca. You have to go all the way back to the beginning. Unique was born Wainsworth Hall on the west side of Kingston, Jamaica in 1964. He grew up close to the infamous neighborhood called Tivoli Gardens, which is the slum that gave birth to Jamaican gangs like the Shower Posse. The Shower Posse is the largest Jamaican gang in the history of the island. They were the armed wing of the Jamaican Labor Party, and if you know anything about the JLP, they were funded and trained by the CIA.

And the shower posse, besides being drug dealers and large-scale drug exporters, they got votes for the Jamaican Labor Party. So on voting day, they made sure that everybody from the west side of Kingston voted for the JLP. And if you voted wrong, according to Unique, you would be killed faster than a rival drug dealer. That's how politics work in Jamaica. The two political parties protect the street gangs and allow them to sell drugs in exchange for those gangs. returning them votes. So in the early 70s, the shower posse starts exporting some of their soldiers to America, specifically New York City, to start moving the Jamaican weed and cocaine that they're exporting. And this was the culture that Unique was raised in. He was part of this wave of rude boy

immigrant Jamaica's to the United States and specifically to the New York City area. Okay, so it's 1972, unique is eight years old when he and his family immigrate to America, to New Jersey, right across the river from Harlem. May 8th, 1972, and we landed at Kennedy Airport. My family lived over in Hackensack, New Jersey. We lived in a house in Jersey and all that. But you know, we was raised from my father. You know, that's the one that's directly descended of Marcus Garvey.

That's Marcus Garvey's first cousin. So the first thing he taught us is, when you go to America, you make sure you take care your mother. And nobody can't understand the relationship I have with my mother. But my mother and father was up here in America, you know, working. My father was a Metro D. My father was a nurse's aide, you know, living with, you know, white people taking care of their families, things like that. And to give you an idea of how poor he was, he did not own a pair of shoes until he got on that flight to take his family from Jamaica to the United States.

Picture that, being a first grader and having never worn a pair of shoes. Now suddenly he's thrown into the concrete jungle, and it doesn't take him long before he gets his feet wet. We asked Unique to take us to the exact spot on Schenectady where he used to hustle out. Last time I was here, I left here like 82, 83 is when I left over here on this block. By the time he's 12 years old, Unique is already sneaking off to Schenectady Avenue in Brooklyn, Crown Heights, one of the most dangerous neighborhoods at the time to hang out with the rude boys and other gangsters that he grew up with back in Jamaica. My family in Jersey, my mother and father didn't know what was going on over here.

All they knew was I was coming to visit family members that I knew from, you know, Jamaica that I grew up with, you know what I mean? So I'm out here with the older guys that was like maybe 19, 20. They're fresh coming up from Jamaica. They see how the running's going. That's what we call the hustle. You see how the running's going up here? That was like the gully posse.

You know what I mean? That's who had this area right here. You know what I mean? From Kingston 16. So that's where I grow up at, you know, on Wellington Street, you know? So we all came up and they was older than me, but we know their parents from Jamaica. So when I told my mother I was going to go visit such and such, you know what I mean? Over in Brooklyn, she knows who they are.

But she don't know what their kids are doing on the street. But this is a whole other world out here on the street. This is where he first got his start in the drug game. So they out here, they're selling the Heron right in there in the $10 glassine bag. So I come visit them. and they'd be like, y'all, I'm getting ready to work. You know what I mean? So, you know, I come out with them.

I ain't got no gun on me. I ain't got no intents on selling no drugs. But when I come, I see the customers coming in and the little $10 passing back and forth. That's a bulk dance was right there, you know. And then right here, that's the pool hall on the left where the real estate sign there. And on the right where the Phillips sign,

that was the pool, that was the social room. You go in, we had like a bar in the back. And, you know, everything was in. in the front, we had a little counter in there. And, you know, all the locals used to come and buy the Heron from us. We had $10 glassine bags, or we had, you know, aluminum four. You rip the Ludum of 4. You put a little one, two in it.

And, you know, all the Americans and everybody was into Heron back then. We talked about like, you know, 78, 79, you know, all that, like I mentioned, with the studio 54 days. And at this time, there's two different camps of Jamaican immigrants. There's the Rastas, the Rastafarians, who we've, seen in popular culture, Bob Marley dreadlocked rosters. If a dude walked around with dreads in his hair back then and he wasn't Jamaican, the roster would stop him and cut that shit out of his head right on the street.

You know what I mean? That's how vicious it was. Like when the five percenters came out, if they stopped you and asked you today's mathematics and you didn't know today's mathematics and you're saying you're a five percenter, you get what they call a universal beatdown. Well, if you violated the roster community and you wearing dreds in your hair like everybody wearing it now, they'll stop you in. chop off your drain.

You know what I said? Like y'all fish, boom, and cut that shit off. Don't disrespect us like that because the rosters had a good, a good understanding of being upstanding, you know, Jamaica. And they sold Bud exclusively, marijuana. The rosters, they had, you know,

they dealt with roots and culture. Like, rosters back then didn't sell cocaine, didn't sell heroin, they didn't touch none of that. They looked at it as poison. They viewed herb, of course, is a way to make money, but more so as a spiritual healing medicine. And they were very content to make a living strictly selling bud.

And then the other camp of Jamaicans was everybody else. It was guys like unique. This was, no disrespect, the grimy part of Jamaica. You know, the dudes that hungry dudes that come up. But we was the renegades. You understand what I'm saying? That we just came to get it. They were told in the old country by the elders who had come to America,

money grows on trees in the United States. and it was just in their culture to get it however it came. It was like, this is what we do. You know what I mean? This is how we eat. Like in Jamaica, they tell you that when you go to America, you could pick money, you could pick money off trees. Like how they got leaves on trees, they tell you it was dollar bills on trees like that.

And when we came up, that was the tree. The tree was selling the drugs to get the money because everybody, and I hate using that word because I'm an older, wise man now. But I'm gonna say majority of the people, you know, from this very neighborhood in all these apartments, all of them got high. Get money by any means necessary to take care of your mom and your family. This is the only guiding principle that unique and his peers grew up with. So he's a 12 or 13 year old kid and he's on to connect to the avenue and he starts working for one of these Jamaican heroin spots. I made my first drug sale right here.

matter of fact you know what I mean we're selling 10 we're selling what you could call it a line right in a in a gram you got 10 lines 10 lines add up to a gram so um one line is worth 10 dollars and the whole gram is a hundred dollars a gram over here for uh new york you get an ounce is 28 grams so they tell you take a 10 that means you could put 10 ounces you know what I mean like 28 grams time 10 times on that. So now you take one ounce this big and make it 10 ounces. And then you bagged it up and they called that scramble. You know what I mean? Because it's already cut up. You took it to the table and whipped it through the strainer and crushed it and you had to go through that a number of times to make sure that the cut blended in right with it. So that every bit that they sniff

or they put in the cook or the shoe, you know what I mean? It's going to get them high. I was a little nigger. So that was like crumbs they was giving me compared to what they was making. You know what I mean? Like, you know, I sit out here with them all night. And at the night, they might give me a G2 G's just to be here. If they give me my own pack to sell, you know what I mean? I might bring in five, 10 grand, but we talk about this 1980, you know what I mean? Imagine that. Being a kid who never wore a pair of shoes until he was eight years old, he's now bringing home five, eight, sometimes $10,000 a week in cash. You can't fathom what to even do with that money. You're so young. And that's what Unique was telling us. It was so fast and easy.

It was like fake to him. I remember the first time I went home with a brown bag full of money, you know, back over the Jersey. Me and my brother walked over there to, um, on the other side of the railroad tracks to Benjamin Franklin High School. They had some woods over there, Windsor Road woods. And, you know, we Jamaica, so we used to like to walk in the woods. They had ducks and raccoons and possums and, you know, all that type of stuff. So rabbits. So, you know what I mean? I'm just running while in the woods out in Jersey. So I have my little bag of money and I go back and I'm showing my brother the money.

We count the money. You know, rest of peace to my brother. And I'm telling her that, yeah, I was over there. He wasn't with me. But I'm like, yeah, I was over there, man. You know, I made this, but, you know, I don't know how are we going to give Mommy something. You know what I mean? Because Mommy was messed up.

She ain't had no, you know, she's working as a nurse's aide at the time. So my brother came up with the idea, he's genius. Rest in peace to Peter. Peter was like, yo. We just go to the woods and we come back and we say we found it. So maybe somebody threw it off the train. It's crazy as it sound. But we went back and told moms, I said,

Mommy, look what we found. Look what we found. Somebody must have threw it up. He found it by the railroad track and it was $8,000. So my mother looked at the money. You know, she need that. You know what I mean? So that sounds good enough.

So she went with that and never questioned anymore. You know what I mean? What could you possibly buy at 12 or 13 years old? And me and my brother, I'd never forget. Out of $8,000, all we took was $150. and went to a little corner store called Digby's. It was a department store. And I was happy with that just so you could understand

that eight grand to me, you know, wasn't chic. I didn't know what I could buy with eight grand. You know, what do you want at 13 for eight grand? And at this same time, Unique is getting introduced to the violence that the rude boys have brought over from Jamaica to New York. Delro Ouzing, when he came up, you know what I mean?

We used to be hustling over here and he'll drive by with his little rankers in the car, you know, those the American, you know, Jamaicans. You know what I mean? So, like, they used to call him Jifakin. When he called me, he ran with his bunch of little Jafakens, but they wasn't faking about busting that gun. You know what I mean? Meaning they'll pull up

in like a little LTD, and when they come, they drive through real slow with the tinted windows, and we out there hustling the front of the building talking to the customers, talking to the girls, and we're doing our thing, got our jewels on and, you know, our latent sweaters, you know what I mean? With our brand new clocks from over,

you know, in Manhattan. And when he come through, you knew what time it was, you know what I mean? I mean, could you imagine a car pulling up and everybody just duck and pull out their gun? You understand what I'm saying? Because this dude was that vicious. You know, the guy got in a shootout before he ever sold his first gram of drugs. I mean, just imagine that. We're sitting in front of the building.

I'm a kid. I ain't got no gun. I ain't thinking about no gun. I'm not selling no drugs. I might think about. I don't even know what drugs is damn there at the time. But I'm standing out here with my older, you know, family members and my friends from Jamaica and you know this car pulls up everybody

duck and then they start shooting boom boom you know what I mean the car so now my people start shooting back you know I mean I'm a kid and my first time over here so when my people start shooting back you know I'm ducking to get away from the bullets too so after he leave now I hear them talking man man the boy just keep coming wrong here with the fuck we out blood clot somebody off to kill him and blah blah and you know and everything going on and like I'm like, but hold up. Nah, next time they come out, I need my own gun. They can give me a gun.

I'm not going to hide behind, y'all. You know what I'm saying? Here, take mine. And they got an extra gun. They give me the gun. And, you know what I mean? A couple of hours later, he'd come back again. Because what he's doing, he's trying to catch us what we call slipping.

You understand what I'm saying? So now when he come back, now I got my gun. So when he come back and he start bucking, you know, we all start bucking. So while this is all going on around 1979, he starts his own side hustle. At that time, I went out to do what I was. out in Jersey also, I picked up another hustle. I started robbing houses out there. You know what I mean? So when I start robbing the houses out there and we get the, and we get the, we get like the Beta Max and the color TV because, you know, this is when

color TVs just started becoming prevalent, like computers started becoming prevalent in every home. We take that to Washington Heights and we sold it for cocaine. So we got like half cocaine, half cash. All I wanted was the cash back then. I didn't want the cocaine. You know what I mean? I just wanted to cash. With my people I was with, they was smoking freebase at the time. I gave them the Coke, you know, that we get, and I take the $100. So all I'm getting is $100, and they're getting $600 worth of, you know, but we wasn't selling it then. They was using it. So it was selling these stolen goods that kind of awakened the young business mind of unique. So then I started taking minds from what I learned over here now. And I took it back to Jersey and, you know,

went to like Inglewood, William Street, Atkinsack Railroad Avenue, rest of peace of my man, Tom McKay. And, you know, there were people over there that I would sell, too, to get my little money from the little seven and a half, you know, three and a half grams, whatever I got. That's been unique since the beginning. He's always seized on the opportunity like any good businessman. Now, unfortunately at this point, like many drug dealers,

especially back then, he started using Coke as well, and it quickly got away from him, and he got hooked. I started eventually smoking it because everybody else that was with me. They were smoking their half of the Coke when all I wanted was the money because I wasn't into it. But when all my friends was doing it and like he got six grams, I only got $100 and we hanging out for the night. And I'm just smoking weed. Nicky say, here, taste this. You know what I mean?

Take a hit. Man ain't going to hurt nothing. Take a hit. And then you take a hit and boom before you know it, you're chasing it until you wind up in prison. So to feed his habit, he moved up from just breaking into people's houses, stealing VCRs to committing armed robbery. He became a wolf, a stick-up kid, a jack boy. And he would go uptown to Harlem and rob drug dealers. He would just clean them out. And in fact, he gained such a fearsome reputation as a wolf that years later, after he was already clean and out of jail, he went back

to Harlem to buy drugs to resell. And he couldn't find anybody to sell to him at first because they all knew his reputation. They assumed that he had come up there to rob him. So finally, in the early 80s, all of these drug-fueled stickups get him arrested and he goes upstate to do his first bid. He's not even 20 years old at the time. All right, so it's 1980, 81, Unique gets out of prison for the first time and he goes up to the South Bronx where his older brother has just opened a weed spot. He took us up to the building where they used to have this weed spot. Memorial 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. At that time, it just had like two people working in there and someone had to stay in there all the time

because it's an apartment. My older brother owned this. That's the fourth floor. That's my apartment. The window open. That's the herb gate's right there. That's the fourth floor. And we very quickly learned that we were not supposed to call it a weed spot.

So it was like me and another person my age, you know, the two of us, that would be our job that run the spot. This is a weed spot. But we called it a herb gate. You get smack to the face for calling it a weed spot back there. Because that meant like bush, commercial weed they call it. But this is an herb gates because we sell an herb. Unique was very adamant that this was an herb gates.

This is what the Rastas used to refer to what we would call a weed trap house. The Rastas believed that, you know, the weed was like herbs, like the weed of wisdom. They branded themselves as an herb. So they were moving high-grade Sinsamea Mexican bud at this time and did not want to be associated with weed. So that's where that distinction came from. But for our purposes, it was a fucking weed house, okay? The South Bronx in the late 70s and early 80s

was one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in America. I'm sure a lot of you have seen footage of the Bronx at that time. It's burnt out buildings, stripped down cars. It's starving dogs running through the street. Dead bodies would pop up. Dudes get shot out here. And at night, and the police don't call me. and pick the bodies up until it's daylight.

They're not coming middle of night. You can't call the police and say, hey, you know, there was a shooting over on Garden Street between Prospect and Cotonin. You know what I mean? Because they're not coming in that neighborhood. In the morning, they come pick it up. So that body there all day, they're still coping

with the body laying right there. You know what I mean? And, you know, police ain't stupid, man. You know what I mean? Because back then, it was crazy, you know? It was chaos. It was lawless. And at this time, Unique and his older brother

are the only Jamaicans in an entire neighborhood filled with blacks and Puerto Ricans. So they're outnumbered. Jamaicans, we came and we knew everybody was against us. So we barricaded ourselves from them and secured ourselves in. Take this out. A dude came up the fire escape right here, you know, jumped up, grabbed the client up and came up to the fourth floor and tried to come in and kill me in my sleep while I was up there.

So to protect themselves from this danger, instead of standing on a corner selling drugs like most of the other crews in the neighborhood, They opened up an herb gates, a weed spot inside of a building. Yeah, so this is what it is. This is how we used to come in through the back way. You know what I mean? This is a little alleyway right here. This is where the super was at.

This is the super apartment. So you're coming back here. You know, everything caged off, man. This is what owning a drug spot actually means. So a guy like Unique's older brother, he would go to the superintendent of a building and make a deal with him. He would say, hey, I want to push drugs out of a certain apartment in this building, And of course, they would kick him a percentage every month.

So Unique's older brother owned this spot. He invested in the wholesale pounds. He hired the workers. He did all of the marketing and advertising, just like any other store or business. And as you'll see, they were meticulous about the setup, the ways they protected themselves from wolves, the jack boys. First thing to teach you is, if I come to the door, there's anybody behind me, don't open it. If they tell you to open the door, they're going to kill me. don't open it. Under no circumstances it is through an open till I tell you to open it.

So you would just, somebody would have to die. If somebody had a gun to your head and you had the work on you and they were trying to force you to open the door, the dude in there would just have to let you get smoked. That's the rules, my lady. That's what I'm saying. There's rules to this shit. Why would I bring them in there for me? Because then everybody's in danger. You understand what I'm saying? So if you slip and you came in the building and let somebody come up behind you that you're for, not the man behind the door. We'll go and we'll go get a solid plate of steel. You know what I mean?

Like a half inch thick. And he'd be like, open the door, I'm shooting. And they got the gun pointed to thing. You know what I mean? Man, get away from a blood clod door. And they're like, boom, boom, boom. And they shoot the door. Now you see a bunch of bullet holes,

but nothing went in because of that steel plate. So I might be just leaning up waiting on the customers to get served. My man would see me there. And then he'll wait until everybody leave. then they'll ask me, yo, is it clear? You know what I mean? But now when you're trying to go in,

you can get somebody to see you there and try and grab you and tell them to open it. But on the inside, no, let them die before you open it. Because if you open it, you're going to die too. So we understood that because we wasn't scared of death. You understand what I'm saying?

So these are chances that you take. And from the cops. This right here is the cylinder. You know what I mean? We'll put cut a hole in here and this would be the cylinder, right? I see your arms up, Ma. This would be the cylinder.

And when we got the steel down there, we got another thick plank of board like this. You know what I mean? That goes over here. And then that board that's there, when you put the cylinder out and you let it down and you pull it up, you wrap it on a rubber band around here

to make sure it's secure so if the police come, they can't look at the door from the hallway and see that it's a weed spot, herb gates. You understand what I'm saying? So when the customer ring the bell, ding-dong, you know,

you let the rubber band off, you drop it down, then it's a little round hole from the cylinder, and you push your, you know, nickel and tray bags through the door, your ounce go through the weed. But now the board that was there, we also had one on the ground, excuse me, John, like right here. And with that, we'll take another piece of board and you'll wedge it like this,

where it'll be right up under here. So that if the police come with the barricade and they go to hit it, the board that's over here on the floor, I'm talking about a big, like, four by eight, you know, like this thick, you know? If they come and hit it, they couldn't get in. So they give you a funny story when they used to come. They couldn't get in the door and they always tried to hit by the locks.

But then later on, they found out that it was best to hit by the hinges. One of Unique's jobs, besides actually working in the spot, was as a runner. So his brother would send him to the re-up, the connect, with a backpack on, and he would come back with it full of pounds of weed with the re-up. And when I pull up, you know, and I get out the cab here, they might be about five, ten dudes out here. I'm Jamaican. I don't know none of them.

You know what I mean? So now I got the little bag on me. They see me going in. They know I'm Jamaican. They know I'm going to the spot. So that means it's their chance to get you. So of course, I'll come out my nine millimeter my hand next to my waist so that they see it. And I just walk in with it.

They see me with the gun. They're staying far. They're making a pass like Moses, because they're not stupid. But now if I came in with nothing in my hand, I'm just walking with a back. on, you better believe somebody's going to try you. And at this time, the best weed is coming from Mexico. This is in the early 80s when Miguel Anghel Felix Gallardo and Rafa Caro Quintero, who formed the Guadalajara cartel,

had the entire United States on lock. They were billionaire weed traffickers. And this is what unique and his older brother were pushing at their herb gate spot. It was Mexican bud. We was getting the weed from like the Mexicans, the Jamaican weed, the Mexican weed was big back then. You know, Arizona was slowly coming in, you know, to play.

But it's really like the Mexicans had it because they're the ones bringing in the, you know, the cocaine and they were bringing in weed at the same time. You get a quarter pound for a hundred. It's like $400 for a pound. You know what I mean? For some good weed that was selling in a spot like this. But like 400 a pound, you're talking about, you know,

the Thai stick and the Buddha and the Ganges and all that. That was being sold like, that was like seven, eight hundred a pound, you know? They had a couple methods of marketing the spot to clientele. And once they got the customers in there, because they had good Mexican bud, that's how they kept them coming back. First of the do is you get, you get some cards and you, you know, and you get a card, and you might put a weed plant on it or whatever you put on it.

You might even put a lock on it or make it look like a record store. But when you meet people, you know, like her walking down the street, you'll say, hey, you know, I mean, we got to, um, Irv Gates over there on 730 Garden Street. They're going to say they're going to worry about what else is on the card. All they're worrying about is the address and we're telling them that it's a weed spot. So once they come up and get it, they go back to their neighborhood and they're going to tell their friends, oh, they got that killer weed over there at 730 and it spreads word of mouth because we don't have social media. And as it turned out, this method worked.

They would literally be a line from the first floor to the fourth floor of people waiting to go to the cops all day. You know what I mean? And on the weekends, it was bananas, you didn't get a chance to sleep. I know we was making about $20,000 a night. You know what I mean? That's just selling, you know, nickel and tray bags of weed and half ounce and ounces. So to put some of what he's saying in perspective, like, Unique, you know, he doesn't, he plays down how much weight he used to move. You know, $20,000 a week is what I would do moving packs across the country, right?

Wholesale, risk in fed time. He was doing that in nickel and dimes every night out of this spot. And this is one weed store out of who the fuck knows how many. That's the kind of drug traffic that was moving through the Bronx back in the day. Wild. A tenant actually led us into her apartment so Unique could show us how the spot worked and how they would escape on the rare occasions that the cops did come. We look out the window right there and where we're going is upstairs.

But, you know, when the police come, this where you run. You know what I mean? So I was on the fourth floor, so we might have to jump out the fourth floor, so we already got a rope up there and ready and everything. So you're scaling out of the motherfucking building with the rope. Yeah, you're like here at Indiana Jones. With the knapsack on our back with the weed and the drugs and the pistol and we hit the back alley. Once we hit the back alley, the police are not coming back here. You know what I mean? Look at this shit, man. They're probably all kind of rats under here as we're talking time. Not to come out. So it'll be surprised if something jump out. You know what I mean?

And grab you. The sheer volume of people, foot traffic that was going in and out of that building to buy drugs was incredible. When I say $20,000, I mean, like, that's on the weekend, you get $20,000. During the week, you might make $7,000, you know what I mean? But Friday and Saturday, you'll make $20,000 easy. Okay, so let's just do some conservative math. $20,000 on a Friday and a Saturday night. The other five nights during the week, they're doing about $5,000 a night.

That's $65,000 a week. So in a year's time, that one spot is grossing $3.3 million. And every morning, after the spot closed down, it was Unique's job to escort the money out. When he come and get it, I'll walk him out to make sure he got to the car right with the pistol. And you're coming, you'll look, you know, to your left. You look to your right, never cross your feet. Because if somebody's out there and they push the door to come in, I'm going to fall over now.

I'm already slipped. And then I open the door, and when I look out, I make so everything cool. You know what I mean? And then I put my gun back in my pocket, and I just come out. The South Bronx is so fascinating because it's one of the last neighborhoods in New York City that is relatively unchanged from decades ago. You know, the reason that these very young kingpins are able to come up and become millionaires overnight, whether it's unique Mecca or Peter's shoe or Boy George, any of these

80s era kingpins. It's very simple because the South Bronx is a drug-infested neighborhood. It is to this day. And you just have an unbelievable number of people that are buying drugs. And as a result, the neighborhood is built like a prison yard. They turned it into a fortress because they used to walk right from over here, right across the courtyard, into 730 Garden Street and come up. But now they got it where they only got one way in. Uniques walking us through the projects, and we see that they've all been fenced off. Why do you think they put all of the fencing around it? Of all the shootouts and people running in the projects getting away from.

If somebody shoots over there, they can just run right through the projects. You never find them. Yeah, exactly. But now if somebody shoot over there, they've got to run up this long walkway, and the police got time to catch them. Even the food that gets delivered has to be brought in through a security checkpoint. It felt like I was back on the yard in prison. but this is where Unique got his first taste of big money.

But as you'll see, $3 million a year was barely the tip of the iceberg. It was chicken feed compared to what was coming for. Okay, you guys, that's been today's episode. Make sure to check out Part 2 next week and go buy Unique's book, Aurora in Harlem, where you get to hear stories like this, plus so much more. The link is in the description, as well as his YouTube channel, go check him out. We will see you guys next week.