Born a Crime

wage. The cost of labor went up, and suddenly millions of people were out of work. The unemployment rate for young black men pos ...

and chill on the corner the whole day, talking shit. They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one will give them a ...

In the hood, gangsters were your friends and neighbors. You knew them. You talked to them on the corner, saw them at parties. Th ...

the other, and the other could be the one. They’d each studied how to be that gangster. In the hood, even if you’re not a hardco ...

need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programs and summer jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets ...

The garage of Bongani’s house opened up onto Springbok Cresent. Every morning we’d open the doors, run an extension cord out int ...

sell. There was a converted shipping container around the corner where we’d hang out when we got tired of the wall. It had a pay ...

hustling because Bongani saw all the angles and knew how to exploit them. Like Tom, Bongani was a hustler. But where Tom was onl ...

started letting drivers buy on credit, charging them a bit of interest. We started making more money. Never more than a few hund ...

going to loan him a hundred, and he’s going to give us back one- twenty at the end of the week.” I’d say okay. Then the guy woul ...

selling a TV.” That’s just how it works. Let’s say we see two guys haggling on the corner, a crackhead trying to sell a DVD play ...

you willing to pay for it?” “I’ll pay one-twenty,” he says. “Okay, cool.” Then Bongani takes the crackhead aside. “How much do y ...

working guy. “All right. We’ll do one-twenty. Here’s your DVD player. It’s yours.” “But I don’t have the one- twenty.” “It’s coo ...

“How much do you pay for a pair of Nikes with your staff discount?” Bongani would ask. “I can get a pair of Nikes for one-fifty. ...

They’re three hundred in the shops. We’ll sell them to you for two hundred.” We sell him the shoes, and now we’ve gone and turne ...

At first I didn’t know not to ask. I remember one time we bought a car stereo or something like that. “But who did this belong t ...

And that was as far as we ever thought about it: When white people lose stuff they get money, just another nice perk of being wh ...

a supermarket, the poor mom isn’t thinking, I’m aiding and abetting a criminal by buying these Corn Flakes. No. She’s thinking, ...

“What the hell is this?” I said. “Oh, some guy at work had these and was selling them,” she said. “I got a great discount.” “But ...

“Let’s go to the hood,” I thought we were going to sell CDs and DJ parties in the hood. It turned out that we were selling CDs a ...