Born a Crime

go down to the corner of Nineteenth and Roosevelt for breakfast. When you’re trying to stretch your money, food is where you hav ...

music, lift weights, make the CDs. Around ten or eleven, the drivers would start coming back from their morning routes. We’d tak ...

the minibus drivers because we’d hop in with them and use it as an opportunity to talk about what music they needed, but secretl ...

we could afford, like a smiley with some maize meal. A smiley is a goat’s head. They’re boiled and covered with chili pepper. We ...

the garage, relax, sleep off the meal, and make more CDs. In the afternoons we’d see a lot of moms. Moms loved us. They were som ...

need of short-term loans, to pay for this or that for the family. Again, they’d rather deal with us than with some gangster loan ...

got locked up. They went to school, came straight home, and went straight into the house. They weren’t allowed to leave. Boys we ...

make small talk. The daughter would be right there, but the mom couldn’t say, “Don’t talk to those boys!” The loan gave us acces ...

“I don’t have money,” he’d say, “but I have some cases of beer.” “Okay, so tonight we’re going to this party. You give us two ca ...

angles, solving the puzzle, seeing what goes where, who needs what, whom we can connect with who can then get us the money. At t ...

Excel document laid out: everybody’s name, how much they owed, when they paid, when they didn’t pay. After work was when busines ...

shoes. There was this one dude who looked like a black version of Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. He’d always come by at the end of ...

don’t ask. Eventually we pieced it together, though: He worked at the airport. It was all crap he was boosting from people’s lug ...

there’d be a police chase, cop cars flying through after some guy with a stolen car. Then everyone would go home for dinner with ...

something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all. I was out there every day from seven a.m. to seven p.m., and every ...

There were many days we’d end up back at zero, but I always felt like I’d been very productive. Hustling is to work what surfing ...

university would give me a degree for. When I first went into Alex, I was drawn by the electricity and the excitement of it, but ...

The hood is also a low-stress, comfortable life. All your mental energy goes into getting by, so you don’t have to ask yourself ...

suspended animation. The hood has a wonderful sense of community to it as well. Everyone knows everyone, from the crackhead all ...

Then she gives you some money and you go buy milk and bread. As long as you aren’t busy and it doesn’t cost you anything, you do ...