Paper Chasers by Mark Anthony Read Free Book Online

happily said in unison as we clasped each other’s hands.
    â€œHold up. Hold up,” Latiefe said. “Don’t get too excited yet. We ain’t finish mapping this thing out. Now my man, Gangsta, runs a little something in Far Rockaway. He promised me from an old solid that he would give us a spot out there in the projects. So all we have to do if find some boyz to go out there for us and pump the work.”
    Earl informed us that his cousin had spots uptown and in Brooklyn, spots that he would be willing to give to us for a certain kickback of whatever we made. We all agreed that we would hit Brooklyn, but we weren’t going to mess with uptown because we unanimously felt that the niggas out there were just too ruthless.
    I went on to pessimistically tell everyone that it wasn’t going to be as easy to come out like we were planning on doing. Besides the fact that we would be stepping on toes, risking our own lives, and risking the lives of those who we would recruit to work for us, but we also had to start from square one with absolutely no cash. We needed loot and a lot of it to kick off the operation. Purchasing kilos wasn’t like purchasing Cheerios. Kilos cost big dough and we had no money whatsoever.
    Montana and the rest of the big time hustlers and players all had crazy cash coming in, so they, with one phone call, could go out and buy weight, aka large amounts of drugs, like it was nothing. Our crew didn’t have any money, nor did we have any money coming to us. It would be tough for us to get started.
    Dwight suggested that we only deal with crack and marijuana. The true heart of the crack era had reached its peak probably during the summer of ’87, but there was still a faithful enough remnant of crackheads to make us rich. Marijuana seemed to be making a resurgence. Every time I turned around I heard someone talking about smoking weed or Phillies, or puffing on Ls. The latest term that I’d been hearing to describe the use of marijuana was the saying “smoking trees.” I even saw brothas walking around with pictures of marijuana plants on their T-shirts. We couldn’t have passed up that kind of free promotional marketing. We just had to execute a plan to profit from it.
    Dwight was on point with his suggestion. He went on to say that, on the streets of Queens, marijuana and crack sold the fastest, so that’s what he suggested that we concentrate on. See, if we were dealing in Washington Heights, a section of Manhattan known as Spanish Harlem, the drug of choice would be heroin, aka heron, and we would have to concentrate on pushing that. Just your classic case of what you learn in Economics 101 about supply and demand.
    Dwight added that if we were planning to have a spot in Far Rockaway, a spot in Brooklyn, and heads working for us all over Montana’s territory, which consisted of Laurelton, Rosedale, Cambria Heights, and Hollis, then we would need at least four pounds of weed and twenty eight balls of cocaine. We all figured that we could get the four pounds of marijuana for about seventy-five hundred dollars and the twenty eight balls of cocaine for about twenty-five hundred. In all, we estimated that ten thousand dollars would be a good amount of money to get us started.
    See, one pound of weed went for about two grand. But we’d get back three grand in return, or a 50 percent return on our investment. One eight ball of coke could be cooked up into crack rocks and sold on the street, netting us somewhere in the neighborhood of five hundred dollars on a two hundred dollar investment—a 150 percent return on our money. It didn’t take a Wall Street genius to figure out that if you could make those kinds of flips with cash within a week’s time and pay no taxes, that it wouldn’t be long before you’d have a house on the white sand beaches of St. Thomas if you wanted it.
    The thing with the drug trade, just like with any