Paper Chasers by Mark Anthony Read Free Book Online Page A

investment, was the more money you played with, the more you stood to make. Or the higher your risks, the greater potential of your returns. Like if all went well with our plans, we stood the chance of making close to a 200 percent return on a ten thousand dollar investment. Just imagine if we made that kind of return on a one hundred thousand dollar investment. And see, that was our plan. But we’d first have to start small. In this biz you could be large overnight. If we played our cards right, before we knew it, we could have one hundred grand to play with.
    Erik, who had been quiet all along, came up with the idea of us dealing with “weight out of state.” That meant selling pounds of weed and ounces and kilos of coke—very large volumes of drugs. His plan was that we could be wholesale suppliers to drug dealers in states like Virginia. Selling weight out of state was quickly becoming a growing trend. What it did was cut out the retail portion of the drug business. We would deal strictly on a wholesale scale with drug kingpins from other regions.
    Like I mentioned earlier, dealing with large quantities definitely meant larger profits. And for that reason, selling weight out of state was becoming commonplace amongst New York drug criminals. Many dealers paid females like five or six hundred dollars to get on a bus, ride to DC or wherever on the East Coast with drugs in their suitcase. They would have them make a drop, get the cash, and head back north to New York on I-95 with a pocket full of cash and no hassles from state troopers.
    I-95 was a drug dealer’s and gun runner’s highway to riches simply because state troopers didn’t pull over buses and check each and every suitcase and every carry-on piece of baggage. Some drug dealers were bold enough to drive out of state with drugs in their car. But I personally wouldn’t have done that because it would have been like pressing your luck. With a commercial bus, the only real risk was not getting paid or getting robbed when you got to your destination and attempted to make the drop. I guess it was that fear of getting jerked around that led drug dealers to drive armed in a regular car to close deals themselves.
    Erik’s idea was a good idea considering Reggie already knew some heads down in Norfolk, Hampton, and Virginia Beach that were in the drug game. Even the crew, although we didn’t live in Virginia like Reggie, knew people who had relocated from Queens to Virginia for the sole purpose of selling dope.
    Latiefe agreed that dealing with weight was a good idea. But our main focus, he said, would be to come up with the ten thousand in order to get things rolling in New York. He predicted that after we started, and if things went well, it would be about a month or two before we would be ready to sell weight out of state.
    So that was it. Fourth Crew was going to be one big conglomerate of dope pushers, or better yet, one big drug kingpin. We had to set the operation off fast, but at the same time slow enough so as not to make any mistakes. We, as a crew, had to keep everything on the low and amongst ourselves. Whoever worked for us would have to be kept in strict check. If necessary we would have to literally control their lives. We couldn’t, for the sake of what we were trying to achieve as a conglomerate, have workers coming up short with our money. And we couldn’t have them opening their mouths and singing about our cutthroat way of doing business.
    We kept this vital business meeting going. We moved on to what I call the cash flow segment of the meeting where basically we discussed how we planned to stay in the black. The plan was, after paying our workers, we would throw all of the profits back into a pot. That way our business could flourish and grow. If we were to consistently do that, and if things went according to plan, we would be able to purchase kilos with ease.
    Latiefe was sure to remind us that although we