The Time I Nearly Got Shot by the NYPD
‘Get your fuckin’ hands out of your pockets, motherfucker!’
I was sitting in the back of a very beaten-up car – a Nissan or a Toyota, I think. An NYPD detective with a pencil moustache and a mullet was aiming a pistol and a torch at me through the window, and yelling. Obviously, I did as he asked.
In the front of the car were Mike Ladd and Rob Sonic, two hip-hop artists managed by Ozone Entertainment, where I was carrying out a few weeks’ internship in the summer of 2000.
The cop shone the torch into my eyes and over the back seat of the car. On the driver’s side, his partner was leaning into Mike’s face through the open window. ‘I can smell alcohol,’ he said. ‘Have you been drinking?’
For a moment, the three of us – hands raised above our heads and pushing into the torn fabric that hung down from the roof like a sheet, eyes blinking against the torches – were shocked into silence.
It all started like this: Since September 1999, I’d been interning and working part time at the indie label Ninja Tune while going to university in London. Will Ashon, founder of Ninja’s Big Dada imprint – and the man I saw as my mentor – introduced me via email to Amaechi Uzoigwe, who’d set up Ozone with a couple of college friends.
Amaechi managed Company Flow, Saul Williams and Antipop Consortium, as well as Mike and Rob. This was the cream of the leftfield NYC rap scene that emerged in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Company Flow were a particular favourite of mine. Their album Funcrusher Plus blended great rap chops with off the wall lyrics and industrial, darkly beautiful production. It had the atmosphere of Blade Runner or a William Gibson novel, steeped in NYC hip-hop and animated by a love / hate relationship with the oppressive and thrilling city that produced it. The group’s leader, rapper and producer El-P, is currently going stronger than ever as one half of Run the Jewels, alongside Atlanta rapper Killer Mike.
This was the music I loved most, and I couldn’t wait to get started on the internship. For two weeks I stayed in a youth hostel in Chelsea, sharing a bunk bed and keeping my possessions in a battered locker. At Ozone, I discovered an office with echoes of Ninja Tune’s cramped, industrious one in London Bridge. But the buzz was missing at Ozone’s – I realised soon after arriving that something was amiss.
The office was located on Pearl Street in the financial district, a few blocks from Wall Street and the East River. When I first arrived, Amaechi wasn’t there, and the man who opened the door suggested I come back a bit later. NYC was baking in full summer heat, and the heavy, baggy jeans I was wearing made me sweat as I wandered the streets.
Since I was close to the Staten Island ferry port, I decided to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Wu Tang Clan, whose 36 Chambers album I’d obsessed over. On the ferry, between staring over the gleaming water at the diminishing island of Manhattan or the Statue of Liberty, I read a rap magazine – probably The Source. Eminem was on the cover, and he, Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre were interviewed for the piece. Snoop claimed that his and Dre’s careers had been in deep trouble, as though they were stranded on a cliff, and Eminem had come and rescued them like a ‘big white helicopter.’
I couldn’t believe how perfect NYC was. It was both exactly as I’d expected, and somehow more exaggerated; a cliché that outdid itself. As I stared at Manhattan from the water – this shard of land, spiked with skyscrapers and humming with life – it seemed almost computer generated, unreal.
When I got back to Ozone’s office, Amaechi was there. He answered the door and greeted me with a smile. ‘Hot enough for ya?’ he said.
A handsome, mixed-race man with high cheekbones and a shaved head, he’d sensibly worn shorts. He showed me around the place. There was a poster of Peter Tosh over his desk, a small kitchen area, a studio where Company Flow had been recording. I peered reverently into the dim, tight space, momentarily awed.
Over those two weeks I’d run errands around the city, dropping artwork at production houses, or contracts with mid-city legal firms. I heard new Company Flow music, befriended NASA, El-P’s engineer, drank with Antipop Consortium and Rob Sonic. Through another British kid in the youth hostel, I met a beautiful American model. For three, intense nights we had a fling, and she couldn’t seem to get enough of me until she abruptly stopped answering my calls.
I learned that the strange atmosphere in the office was due to the Ozone partnership breaking up. One of Amaechi’s co-founders gave me a colourful leather belt and told me he was getting rid of his stuff before going back to Ohio, or wherever he was from. It was a time of change generally. Company Flow, too, was coming to a close, and El-P would soon become a solo artist. Rawkus Records, the indie hip-hop label who’d released their music, had turned out not to be what it seemed[1]. One of its owners was James Murdoch, son of Rupert, and it had abruptly closed down. There were allegations of financial shenanigans and rumours that Rupert had told James it was time to put away childish things and join the family firm. El-P was about to launch his own record label, Def Jux, which would rapidly become the place I most wanted to work.
When I made a gauche comment about the harsh, mechanical snare drum on one of NASA’s own productions, the man who’d given me the belt said: ‘that’s New York, baby.’
Rob Sonic, whose group Sonic Sum had been compared to a ‘Radiohead of hip-hop,’ was perhaps the friendliest person I met. We spent a lot of time together over those two weeks, eating and drinking, listening to music in his apartment in the North Bronx.
It was sometime in the middle of the trip when he told me Mike Ladd was back in town and asked if I wanted to meet him for a drink.
Mike Ladd had released a sprawling underground masterpiece the previous year, Welcome to the Afterfuture. Like Company Flow’s music, it reminded me of the postmodern novels I was reading – it was dystopian and clever, witty, bleak and occasionally funny. Mike had also released an EP on Big Dada, and I knew Will Ashon loved his music and wanted to release more of it, so I badly wanted to meet him.
As I remember it, we met up in the East Village. My first impressions of Mike were of a mixed-raced man with intense blue eyes, a stubbly beard, gravelly voice and a slouchy demeanour that belied an edgy, livewire charisma. He had the vibe of a punk as much as a rapper. Rob pointed at his polo shirt, which had the word ‘Scores’ printed on it.
‘Why the fuck are you wearing a Scores T-shirt dude?’ he asked.
‘That’s my shit,’ Mike said. It turned out that Scores was a notorious Manhattan strip club.
I would come to realise that this sort of exchange characterised the relationship between Mike and Rob. Mike had something of a star-like quality, and I think back then, in the days when he still had great ambitions, and before he’d stopped drinking, he probably liked being the centre of attention. This wound Rob up, and made him want to prick Mike’s bubble.[2]
The next few hours were some of the most exciting and deranged I’ve ever experienced. Mike kept saying ‘whisky rocks,’ to the barman, in his beautiful gravelly voice. Each time he did so, a large measure of whisky on ice would appear before him. He must have drunk six or seven of them, alongside the beers we all ordered.
‘Hey, you wanna see somethin’?’ he said.
‘Ok,’ I replied.
He took the remains of his cigarette and stubbed it out on his inner forearm. I could see that there were lots of other burns there, in various stages of healing and scarring.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said.
‘I learned that in the army,’ Mike said.
‘Ah, fuck off Ladd,’ Rob said. ‘You weren’t in no army.’
Between the bars, Mike would casually go into a late-night food outlet and buy something greasy, and chicken based, wiping his hands on his shirt or his grubby jeans and talking as he ate. Every now and again, he’d shout ‘viva Connecticut, New York sucks!’ A few people would turn their heads, and some would grin.
There were more bars, more whiskies, more cigarettes and a lot more beers. Then, probably around one o clock in the morning, Mike said: ‘Yo, you wanna ride home?’
Around the corner was a completely beaten looking car. The outside was dented and unwashed, the paint peeling and ruined, and for a moment Mike lolled on the bonnet and finished another smoke. When we eventually got in, there were unpaid parking tickets and cigarette butts all over the floor. Worse, the entire dashboard appeared to have been removed, leaving just the steering wheel and instrument panel, and a CD player sticking out on a stalk. The cloth from the ceiling was torn and hanging down, and I had to hold it away from my face.
When the ignition started, terrible, cheesy house music began playing from the stereo. ‘Are you fucking serious?’ Rob asked.
Things were going reasonably well until we saw the large black SUV. It sat at a red light in front of us. On its bumper were two stickers: a crossed out weed leaf, and one that read HILLARY GO HOME[3]. Mike began grunting and muttering, apparently angry. ‘Fucking fascist assholes,’ he said.
‘Chill the fuck out,’ Rob said from beside him.
But Mike’s annoyance seemed to mount, and he suddenly slammed on the gas, pulled out, gave the SUV’s driver the finger and drove straight through the red light.
Rob and I turned in our seats to look back. With horror, we saw a hand emerge from the SUV’s window, holding a blue light, which it planted on the roof as a siren blared out and the light began flashing.
‘Oh shit,’ Mike said.
‘Oh shit, oh shit…’ Rob said. ‘That’s it. We’re going to jail. You fucked us now Ladd, you fucking asshole!’
In the back, I was too drunk and elated to be truly afraid. Surely this could all be resolved, I thought. If worse came to worst, I could just pull out my passport and explain that I was a British tourist caught up in some sort of misunderstanding. Of course, doing so would reveal that, at twenty years old, I’d been drinking underage. But I assumed that was the least of our problems.
As the two cops exited the SUV and began creeping towards us with hands on their holsters, Rob breathed a deep sigh and put a cigarette in his mouth.
‘Yo, Jamie,’ he said. ‘Let me get your lighter.’
In the ruined, collapsed back seat, where my bum was well below my legs, getting my hand into my pocket was no simple matter. I’d just got it in and was fishing for the lighter when the yelling at the window began.
‘GET YOUR HANDS OUT OF YOUR POCKETS MOTHERFUCKER!’
So, there we were, hands above our heads. The pencil-moustache cop with the mullet haircut had decided I offered no further threat, and was dealing with Rob on the passenger side, barking a series of questions. When he fell silent for a moment, Rob said: ‘Yo dawg, lemme get my CD out from under the seat.’
The cop looked at him, his face stiff with surprise and disgust.
‘What did you say to me?’
‘I said – lemme get my CD out from under the seat.’
‘Do you understand what the fuck is happening here?’ the cop said. ‘Why the fuck do you wanna get a CD out from under the seat?’
‘If I’m going to jail,’ Rob said, ‘then I just wanna hear my shit.’
For a long moment, Rob and the cop stared at each other. And then Rob collapsed into a deep, wheezing giggling fit.
On the far side of the car, the other cop was questioning Mike. This seemed more serious. It appeared to me that there’d be no reason not to breathalyse him, at which point he’d be in extremely deep shit. I estimated he’d had eight or nine large whiskies, and a fair few beers on top.
‘Have you been drinking?’ the cop asked.
‘These guys have,’ Mike slurred. ‘I just had a couple of beers when I came to pick ’em up.’
The cop stared at him. ‘Why did you stick your fuckin’ finger up at us?’
Mike took a deep breath. ‘Yo,’ he said. ‘You wanna know the real reason?’
‘Yes, I wanna know the real reason,’ the cop barked.
There was a long, dramatic pause. ‘I just really like Hillary Clinton,’ Mike said.
The cops looked at each other.
‘Alright,’ the one dealing with Mike said. ‘You three assholes need to go straight home. If I see you on the streets again tonight, you’re all going to jail.’
‘Thank you, officer,’ Mike said, demurely.
With one final scowl, the cops departed. I couldn’t believe it.
‘How come they let us go?’ I asked.
‘They’re detectives,’ Mike said, pulling out. ‘They don’t wanna do the paperwork for drunk fucking idiots like us.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘Jesus Christ…’
‘My God, Ladd,’ said Rob, shaking his head.
‘Hey,’ Mike said, twisting around in his seat and grinning at me, his blue eyes gleaming. ‘You wanna come back to the Bronx and watch poodle snuff movies?’
[1] On his debut solo album, El-P would memorably rap: ‘Signed to Rawkus? I’d rather be mouth-fucked by Nazis, unconscious.’
[2] Perhaps the ultimate example of this took place a couple of years later when I was staying with Mike in the Bronx. At the end of a drunken back and forth over something or other, Rob said ‘you’re just mad because you’re white and your dad’s dead.’ For a moment, I wondered if this staggeringly brutal insult was going to lead to physical violence, but then Mike laughed uproariously, his bright blue eyes seeming to suggest acceptance he’d been skewered.
[3] Hillary Clinton was running for Senator in NYC.
Great story Jamie. Love that you’re doing this!