STORY TIME PT.2 : COKE WAVY

[Gas One]

PLEASE SNORT ME - PART 1

An Oral History of Brooklyn's Most Notorious Bar


Why hello there, sonny. You too, little miss. So you’re the young whippersnappers that’re living in good old Williamsburg, Brooklyn, now, huh? Well let me tell you kids, I may not look like much more than an old fogey now, but I was here in the WB back when the likes of you were sucking on your mammy’s teat. Why, I was there at the first Fischerspooner show. I have a copy of Andrew WK’s home-recorded demos—he gave them to me himself. We used to sit around and spin yarns at the Stinger Club on Grand Street all night long, and then Peaches and Larry Tee would come in trailing Adult. records, Nike Dunks in black and yellow, and steaming fresh copies of index magazine. After that we’d go over to P.S.1 on Saturdays and listen to Chicks on Speed play a show while we all tried to recover from the night before at Kokie’s…

Wait, “What’s Kokie’s,” you said? These old ears ain’t what they used to be but I could swear you just asked me that. You did! Well sit down here on this stack of back issues of Purple, and let me tell you about a time long past… a hazy era known as 1999…

Just before the turn of the millennium, on the soon-to-be gentrified corner of Berry and North 3rd in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, there was a bar called Kokie’s Place. It was the stuff of legend. Or, to put it more bluntly, it was a dingy Puerto Rican coke bar. But really, it was so much more! 1999-2001 was a pivotal era in Williamsburg history—it’s when the neighborhood finally went from kind of depressing because it wasn’t Manhattan to really depressing because it’s full of assholes fresh out of art school—and Kokie’s was at the center of that transformation.

So this is a tale of gentrification. It’s a tale of people from different cultures coming together in really weird ways. And of course, it’s a tale of wrecking your life and wasting your 20s doing tons of the worst cocaine that a Spanish-speaking New York drug dealer has ever stepped on.

We’ve compiled a history of Kokie’s, straight from the mouths of the locals, the regulars, and the people whose lives were touched and/or destroyed by this very special place… a coke bar called Kokie’s.


ANCIENT HISTORY

JEFF JENSEN: I first noticed the Kokie’s sign in 1991. It wasn’t open to the public at the time but we knew there were people doing coke inside. You have no idea how blown-out and desolate the neighborhood was back then. The token booth dude at the Bedford stop of the L train was narcoleptic and you could just push the crappy old wooden turnstiles open. No one cared. I tried to wake him up once to pay for my ride and people laughed at me.

TOM C: In the early 90s, the cops called South 2nd Street between Berry and Bedford, right around the corner from Kokie’s, “The Drugs and Death Corridor.” You could buy drugs right out on the street. It was all Puerto Rican and they loved to beat-up white guys. I got jumped at least three times.

GARY J: The Southside was no joke. And those Kokie’s guys were not the kind of people you’d want as friends or enemies. They were all criminals, in and out of prison.

JEFF JENSEN: So it took real balls for me to finally knock on the door in 1995. I convinced the doorman to let me in. I said, “I want to become a member of this club.” He wouldn’t let me in at first but I know how to hustle. Plus I had a pretty serious cocaine habit at the time. At first I would just buy coke from them and leave, but then I started hanging out with the Overlords guys. There was a biker bar called Road Sores on South 6th street. This gang called the Overlords would always hang out there or at Kokie’s. I became really good friends with one of them, a Puerto Rican biker who changed his name to Muskrat after his wife died in a chain fight. They had both really loved the song “Muskrat Love.” I used to do immense quantities of cocaine off the end of Muskrat’s knife. He would just dip it into a Folgers can full of coke right there in Kokie’s.

GARY J: If you want a little bit of history, the landlord told me that the bar started off in the early 1900s as an Italian social club. Then in the 50s it got taken over by a Puerto Rican gentleman and he turned it into a Spanish social club—they had cockfighting and gambling there. That went on for about 20 years and then he passed it on to his godson or someone like that. The bar wasn’t making any money because its clientele was all old-timers paying something like a dollar for a beer. So the godson had the bright idea to turn it into a coke den.

BRIAN F: Word spread fast. Everyone heard about Kokie’s the same way: “Hey, have you been to Kokie’s? It’s a COKE bar called KOKIE’S!”

GARY J: Oh, by the way, the name of the bar comes from a little green tree frog from Puerto Rico called a Coqui (pronounced “Kokie&#8221. It’s called that because when it chirps it makes a sound like, “Ko-kee! Ko-kee!” That’s where the name comes from, not from cocaine.

http://www.viceland.com/int/v14n12/htdocs/contributors.php
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[Gas One]

PLEASE SNORT ME - PART 2

An Oral History of Brooklyn's Most Notorious Bar


THE SNOWY HEYDAY

JERRY P: Kokie’s went through a series of changes after I started going there in ’99. You could tell how long somebody had been a regular based on whether or not they were familiar with certain milestones. When I first started going, they had a live salsa band in the corner on certain nights.

BRIAN F: Wednesday night, I think, was salsa night. Man, it was decked out. They had a huge band in there—vibes, percussion, everything. It filled up the entire back room. An old man in brown pants would be dancing with some hot mama with a flower in her hair. It felt like being in Cuba in the 50s or something. I felt like Henry Miller.

JUDY W: They had karaoke nights there too, but they started at 6 PM and ended by 10 so we never got there in time to do it. The karaoke setup looked like an AV unit that was stolen from a high school or something.

JERRY P: Eventually they fazed out the band and got a jukebox. But it was still pretty decrepit. Just dark, dingy, walls and little yellow lightbulbs. It was all empty and weird on weeknights. I loved the shittiness of it.

SHARKEY FAVORITE: One night in 1999 I was at Kokie’s and I was wearing this scarf that my girlfriend had spent two months knitting and had just given to me that day. Well, of course, within a couple of hours of running around Kokie’s like an idiot, the scarf was gone. I spent the whole night looking for it and complaining about how she was gonna kill me for losing the thing. When it finally came time to face the music, sure enough, she was pissed. I followed her around the apartment, apologizing over and over again. She looked at me and said, “You just don’t get it,” and left. I glanced at the clock. It was 2 PM. I had no idea I’d just spent 13 hours at Kokie’s. It was a time vacuum and it made me a bad boyfriend.

MEG SNEED: The windows were blacked out in the front and there were no windows at all in the back—you had no sense of time or reality.

LORI A: Nothing good ever happened to me at Kokie’s. I’d only go there when I was already too drunk and it was 3:30 AM and someone would inevitably shout, “I know! Let’s go to Kokie’s!” The next thing I knew I’d be back in that curtained booth doing the worst coke in the world until well past dawn.

JERRY P: The coke was stepped on like crazy. I think it was cut with meth, because it lasted so fucking long. I personally didn’t mind it.

BRIAN F: It was convenient living nearby because the coke was so awful. As soon as I did a bump I would run home, shit my brains out, and then come back refreshed and ready for more.

MEG SNEED: The coke there was pretty bad, true, but it was such a pleasant place to be. A real positive atmosphere and community feeling. I even thought about hanging out there without drugs once or twice. Of course I never did.

LUCY P: I don’t know if I ever talked to anybody there who I didn’t know, but I felt as though I could’ve. And it wasn’t just the drugs. There was a sense that everybody was there to enjoy some sort of desperate eked-out freedom. As though a line had been crossed into comity. You know, the purity of purpose people shared.

STEVE L: The first time I walked in there, I could see that all the action was in the disco room, where a crowd of mostly middle-aged Puerto Rican mamis were dancing around to what sounded like electro-Merengue. One of them, in a hot-peach tube top, bleached cut-offs, and espadrilles dragged me out on the floor to get down with her. I must have pranced with every orange-haired lady in the place.

STUART McCLENNAN: Kokie’s usually came alive around 3AM. It always looked so dead from the outside but then inside it was packed with people partying like extras in an 80s party movie. The crowd was about 75 percent Puerto Ricans dancing the mamba or whatever with perfect precision and 25 percent college kids grinding their jaws and doing a jittery hip-hop version of the mamba in a futile attempt to blend in.

VALENTINA A: I’d never heard of Kokie’s until early 2000. I was walking with my boyfriend who had just moved to Williamsburg. It was late, maybe 2 AM, and as we walked by Kokie’s I heard a psychedelic 70s Colombian salsa song that I love— not the kind of song that you normally hear coming from some dive bar in Brooklyn. I had no idea what kind of place Kokie’s was. The door was locked, so we waited for a minute and when this hipster girl went in, we scooted in with her. I was hoping to find a crazy dance party, but instead there were a bunch of very white kids sitting at tables and not doing much of anything. We ordered beers and I soon realized that everyone serving at the bar was Colombian. I started talking to them about Colombia, one thing led to another, and this bartender named Nora ended up giving me a bunch of coke for free!

STUART McCLENNAN: You bought coke from this guy who stood in a fucking closet in the back room. It was $20 a bag, right? If you had a mustache he would say, “I have no idea what you’re talking about” at which point you’d have to give your $20 to a girl and have her do it.

JERRY P: I remember they wouldn’t serve [singer of a then-popular band] because he had this big, goofy mustache and he looked like a policeman. He asked me if I would cop for him, and I said no. I didn’t want them to see me getting drugs for the guy they didn’t want to serve. I was like, “Sorry dude, serves you right for looking like that.”

MEG SNEED: In the early Kokie’s stages, you couldn’t just walk in and buy the coke right away. You had to sit in the bar area in the front and buy a drink. The drinks were tiny. They had these mini Budweisers that looked like baby bottles. One time I ordered a vodka with orange juice and they gave it to me in a Dixie cup.

LESLIE R: It wasn’t so hard to figure out how to buy the coke. I just went up to some college kid who seemed high and asked, “How is it done here?” He pointed to a booth in the corner. It was like a little closet. I walked over there with a $20 and stuck out my hand. The guy took the $20 and handed me a bag. Boom. Finished.

STUART McCLENNAN: The first time I went there I had no idea how to go about scoring the coke. I notices a curtained off booth in the corner. That was where people go to do their bumps after buying it. But I didn’t know that and after watching about a dozen people go into the closet and come out sniffing, I was sure that was where to go buy the coke. I ducked in behind the curtain and there was nobody there. Doye. There was, however, a big hole in the wall that had pipes running through it. I figured the dealer was behind that hole so I stuck my hand in with $20 and waved it around. “Just a twenty-bag, thanks,” I said. Nothing. Maybe he was taking a break or something. So I wedged my head in the hole and said, “Psst. Hey … you there?” How Mr. Bean Goes to Kokie’s is that?

STEVE L: I’d heard about the infamous tooting area and headed over expecting to see a dimly-lit gauntlet of art hipsters (this was just before the swarms hit Williamsburg), gang-bangers, and mamis all giggling and snorting together. Instead, I threw back the curtain and saw an orange-haired older lady, bent over like Betty Boop, enthusiastically blowing a British painter of my remote acquaintance. I said howdy, did three bumps, and went back to join the dance party.

 

[Gas One]

PLEASE SNORT ME - PART 3

An Oral History of Brooklyn's Most Notorious Bar


THE COMEDOWN

JERRY P: Eventually they refurbished the coke closet. When we first started going it was the size of a phone booth, but then they put up some drywall to double the size. And they had a bouncer stand outside the booth to regulate how many people were in there at a time. There would be a line around the side of the room waiting to go into the coke closet, and if they caught you doing coke outside of the coke closet they’d kick you out immediately.

ANN G: One night I was in the booth and this Dominican guy was giving me bumps off his key. People were usually pretty nice about sharing. We were chatting and he said that he was the brother-in-law of the owner. I tend to be a real lighter klepto, like I’m always pocketing people’s lighters and whatnot just absent-mindedly, and I guess I pocketed his key ring. I got home that night (or morning, technically) and when I dumped out my pockets there was this huge ring with like 20 keys and a million dangling key-chain doodads. I was scared. That guy was scary! I shame-spiraled into a total coke depression. Those keys symbolized everything that was wrong in my life and I wanted to keep them as a reminder. I never returned the keys and I never went back to Kokie’s again.

MARIA S: My friend and I met this group of greasy leather-and-chains-clad biker dudes one night at Kokie’s and they invited us back to their clubhouse someplace in bumblefuck Brooklyn. Their place was a garage in the front and a rec room with a bar in the back. It was decked out in pink balloons and streamers for a baby shower that was happening the next day. One of the dudes kept going around with a paper plate and a switchblade, giving us bumps off the tip. The sun was starting to come up and we were about to call a car and the guy asked if we wanted one for the road. Sure! Why not? So he cuts up a new batch and comes around with the knife, bump bump. I began to sweat. I mean, profusely, like I needed a towel. As I headed toward the door to get some fresh air I saw one of my friends hunched over the toilet barfing. I could barely walk. I found a stoop in the sun and plopped down. I remember this incredible, warm, peaceful wave go through me as if all was right in the world and I didn’t care about anything. We cabbed home during morning rush hour. Traffic was backed up on the Williamsburg Bridge and every time the cab stopped we would open the car door to puke. We spent the rest of the day tag-team vomiting into my friend’s toilet. We were so out of our heads that it took us hours before we realized that the biker dudes had slipped us heroin.

LUCY P: One time we were all kicked out in the morning and it was very bright and no one wanted to go home. Some people said there was a party at their apartment. So everybody (20 or so people at least, mostly total strangers) tromped over to an industrial building through this maze-like series of corridors to find the apartment with the party. Well, a party it sure as hell wasn’t. No booze. Just some lame band practicing. Not playing. Not a show. Band practice. And a whole bunch of really disappointed, hopped-up goofballs watching them. No one knew how to get out but it was clear within minutes that it had to be done. I found a door down some corridor and went back and led the people out. The thing here was the total abuse of goodwill. Man, you just don’t abuse that trust. If there’s no party at your apartment, that’s fine, but don’t tell people your idiot roommate and his idiot bandmates are a goddamned party.

JERRY P: My roommate and I started talking to these two people one night: Tony, a 35-year-old Latino man, and Adrian, a 38-year-old black woman. Adrian was a dental technician and Tony was a marine who was on leave. It got late and I invited them back to my house. And it was far, all the way out in Greenpoint. We got to our tiny, railroad apartment and my roommate immediately freaked out and went to bed, but of course he couldn’t sleep because he was all coked up. He told me that he sat on his bed listening to us all night. Tony and I argued about who the best rapper of all time was for about an hour. He thought it was KRS-One and I thought it was Biggie. Adrian didn’t really say much. Toward the end of it, when I started to get really weirded out, Tony was telling me that he could see my aura. He was like, “Man, it’s all about auras, man”, so I finally kicked them out around dawn. We were standing on the front steps, squinting in the sun, like, “Yeah, great meeting you guys, bye!” Stuff like that happened all the time. I shiver just thinking about it.


THE BUBBLE BURSTS

BRIAN F: In 2001 Kokie’s became the official hipster cocaine vending machine. They started to pander to the crowd. The place closed down for a week and reopened up with, like, mod Ikea gear and neon lightning bolts everywhere.

JERRY P: Yeah, the final milestone before it died was that they painted these lame tropical murals on the walls. You’d walk in and be like, “What the fuck?” It was so weird, they wanted to jack it up and make it nice, but it was so out of touch with their new clientele.

JUDY W: Sometime toward the end of the era, a guy who worked there invited me to a party at a new place that the Kokie’s owners were opening up. I think it was on Broadway and it had Trinidadian dance vibes. He gave us cards for it. They were glossy and had color photo of chicks in bikinis on them.

GARY J: Around this time, someone went on the internet and wrote, “Oh man, it’s like Amsterdam in Williamsburg! It’s awesome!” And that was the beginning of the end.

RICK P: The final nail in the coffin came when the local precinct got a new police captain who had come straight from doing narcotics and vice work. She wasn’t having a coke bar in her precinct. They busted the place a few times and that’s pretty much the end of the story. They went out of business. They couldn’t conduct his trade anymore.

GARY J: I worked at the Antique Lounge, which is what Kokie’s became after it went out of business. The owner told me that he found bullets in the walls when he gutted it out.

SUSAN S: I own The Levee, the bar that opened after the Antique Lounge closed. I think business was pretty bad for the Antique Lounge. People thought it was still the same owners as Kokie’s so they had a hard time drawing a new crowd. People still come in to this day and talk about how they miss Kokie’s. There are so many different stories about Kokie’s that at this point it’s kind of a local legend. A few of the door guys who had worked there come in and play pool sometimes. They’re really sweet. One of them brought his dad in to show him where he used to work. We’ve really had to work hard to shake off the coke stigma.

JEFF JENSEN: Kokie’s has a huge place in Brooklyn’s history. I would also like to submit that the genre of electroclash was officially started at Kokie’s. I can prove it because I was there. In the early days, there was a janitor who worked at Kokie’s who was from Saskatoon and claimed that he had seen Bigfoot. Me and Casey Spooner used to laugh like crazy over his Bigfoot stories. That’s what gave Casey the idea to start Sasquatch, his Bigfoot-themed band that eventually became Fischerspooner.

MEG SNEED: Kokie’s and electroclash. That’s all I remember about 2001.

 

[G RAIDER]

ill read when i get back home later cause that other one you posted was interesting.

 

[Dhadnot]

I've been by kokie's too many gay ass hipsters they ruin everything that's good.

 

[Kon1]

Damn that was a hella good read SON!!!

 

[Gas One]

^ kinda tryna bring good threads back not all this weak bullshit...thanks

 

[Nuttkase]

Another good read. Thanks man.

 

[brixton bomber]

good read Gas...

 

[Ne Obliviscaris]

Gas, you gonna post everything from the past 5 years in Vice worth reading? Start putting up some don'ts.

 

[Gas One]

Gas, you gonna post everything from the past 5 years in Vice worth reading? Start putting up some don'ts.

who knows. i might

theres another one im gonna post before i get on to other websites and all

no one here reads that shit anyway

speaking of a kid from my college was in a dont in vice magazine, shit was comedy..they clowned his sweatpants with the stripe down it

 

[Mah_Piece]

coke wavey season

 

[Ne Obliviscaris]

who knows. i might

theres another one im gonna post before i get on to other websites and all

no one here reads that shit anyway

speaking of a kid from my college was in a dont in vice magazine, shit was comedy..they clowned his sweatpants with the stripe down it

the don'ts kill me sometimes, wish i saw someone i knew in there they would catch some seeious clowning. personally i think half the dos are even funnier, but thats just because im not a canadian hipster living in NY.

 

[Cante-up]

nice reading thnx

 

[Gas One]

the don'ts kill me sometimes, wish i saw someone i knew in there they would catch some seeious clowning. personally i think half the dos are even funnier, but thats just because im not a canadian hipster living in NY.

yeah both of the dos and donts are funny. they clowned the shit out of dudde that lived in my dorm..theyre on some wild ass new york hipster shit, youll never see people dressed like that down here..haha

 

[jr916]

good read gasolina

 

[Gas One]

^ hold on buddy, were coke waving
theres multiple coke waves

part two coke wave owww

part two make it hot make it hot

Photo by Marco Tulio Valencia​

Julián is a coke dealer. He’s 44. He’s been working Mexico City for two decades. He agreed to take us on a ride-along as he worked. The phone never stopped ringing, not for a minute.

Vice: You couldn’t see us yesterday because you had a really important poker game. How was it?

Julián: Great, man. I won. We split the pot. I got 1,000 pesos. It was relaxed. There was a tournament today, but I won’t be going.

Do you have contacts with the police or politicians?

Of course, with the AFI [Mexican FBI]. Everyone is well connected, and everyone is so full of bullshit—epecially over there in the organized crime and anti-kidnapping units. I take care of the heavyweights from the AFI. They send their bodyguards to me in armored cars and shit.

At this point, Julián pulls up to a drugstore.

You buying medicine?

No, just candy for my diabetes. Oh, yeah, I’m diabetic. If you do not complicate your existence, fuck, life is worth shit. I won’t be long, hang in there.

Ten minutes later we are driving south of Mexico City.

Julián: Look at that guy [pointing at a trannie]. Shit. It’s a shame he’s got an antenna.

Have you ever gotten a blow job from one of them when you were really coked up and horny?

With hookers, of course. At my age, I can’t be judged if I do a guy or I don’t.

Do you work all over the city?

Yeah, but I don’t get near downtown. More cops. More probabilities. It’s basically that, not that I’m afraid. If a guy calls me from down there and asks me for only one bag and tells me he’s paying by check, I say, “Buddy, go fuck yourself.”

Have you ever been in a gunfight?

Sure, years ago when I was powerful and moved a lot of kilos. But I’ve never been to jail. The thing is, you get caught and you get kidnapped, fucking kidnapped. They don’t get you like in the US, where you get arrested and go to jail. Here, they grab you with the intention of getting your money. They just take you in a car and do all sort of things to you so that you shit your pants.

Anyway, I used to carry weapons, but not anymore. They only get you in trouble. That was in the 90s when I made 10, 15k daily. But so much dough goes to your head. The cops fucked me up three times in two years.

They had you on a short leash?

No. Remember, all great empires fall on account of women. Women fucked me up. But the first rat was an asshole who worked with me. He ratted me out.

So you don’t want to be the next Tony Montana?

Not anymore. There’s an old saying: “It’s better to be the president’s brother than the president.” I don’t want anyone looking at me.

Do you sell to anyone?

Not to rapists and kidnappers, not me. Not to that kind of asshole.

How about 13-year-old kids?

No, not at all. It would look like pedophilia. You don’t sell to a kid. No kids or pregnant women. But the thing is, generations change. You have to adapt to your times. Sometimes, someone kind of young calls me, and they get the vibe, so they never call me again. It’s better that way. And where do they get the money? They steal it from their parents. I mean, you make your money, you buy your drugs, it’s your own problem. But if you’re stealing from your parents, that’s when problems come. I have a lot of clients my own age, and I don’t give a shit about them. It’s like, when I tell them, “Take care,” it’s like, yeah, take care because you’re the source of my income.

Do you have new clients every day?

No, not anymore. I have my client base. I’ve got some really strong ones who spend between 5,000 and 8,000 pesos a week. Even I have to tell them, “Man, what do you do with so much shit? You should invite me sometime, you fucking asshole, you’re going to have a heart attack.” I don’t like selling to crack users. I hate it. They’re a pain in the ass. They’re on my case all night, and it’s business, sure, but I also need to get my rest.

You don’t take care of crackheads at all?

Not anymore. It’s not the same as before. I used to have a lot of fucking energy, health, and balls. I still got the balls and the energy, but I lost my health. I need to get my rest. I don’t sleep, but I need to lie down, be at home, watch a movie. I don’t usually drive around waiting for calls.

What kind of movies do you like?

Extreme violence. Cops and robbers.

Do you have vacations?

That’s the problem. Everyone tells me to go to Acapulco, “Let’s go there, let’s go to this place” and shit. I could go to Cuba or the States or wherever the fuck I want to go but the only thing in my mind right now is my kid, Fatty. He has autism. He was deaf, but now the little fucker can hear thanks to a cochlear implant. I’m sending the little asshole to China for some really expensive therapy and then I’m buying a house with a pool, because the fucker loves water. My motivation, my goal, and my project is my kid. That’s it.

 

[Gas One]

upgraded to level 3 coke tsunami

We’ve all got dealers we like to call “our guys,” but aside from their numbers, general delivery hours, and where they usually are at 1:30 AM Saturday morning, how much do we really know about them? I was introduced to my current guy through a mutual friend. I’ve been calling him for over a year and he’s always been reliable as well as super friendly, so I figured maybe he would actually let me sit down with him and get acquainted. It probably helped that I told him I’d double my usual purchase.

Vice: How’s it going?

Coke Guy: It’s going all right, taking it easy.

What did you want to be when you were a kid?

I wanted to be an astronaut or a pilot. I just like the sky. I was always into space movies and sci-fi.

So do you like what you do now?

Yeah. I enjoy it, you know? I know guys who got into it and don’t like it. They just need the money, and they’re always stressed out thinking about the consequences. But me, I really like doing it.

What’s the secret to dealing drugs but not becoming a paranoid lunatic?

Just keep a tight, tight group. I don’t associate myself with a lot of people. You only ever see people get into trouble because of someone else opening their mouth. Cops never know what’s going on until somebody talks.

Do you ever have deliveries where you’re like, I have a bad feeling about this?

Yeah, I get that feeling once in a while. And sometimes you can start to feel like you’re invincible. It’s easy to forget that you’re doing something illegal. It becomes as normal as getting up and drinking a glass of water.

Are your parents around? Do they know?

My dad was never around. My mother had suspicions when I was living with her. I think she has an idea, but she doesn’t ask. I just make sure to not make it obvious that I make a certain amount of money. I take off my jewelry when I’m at home and if someone needs a ride I tell them I don’t have a car.

So what do you tell her is going on?

Oh, well, I work. I went to school and have had a real job for about ten years.

So you were legitimately working before you started dealing?

Yeah, it’s good to have something else going on. The person that brought me into this grew up in the middle of it, all the way uptown where it was drug infested. But I didn’t grow up around it. I was going to school and into TV and movies, but then I started hanging out with him more and the rest is history.

Have you ever had a customer you had to cut off because he was spinning out of control?

Yeah, there was one guy who got to the point where he would try to give me stuff from his apartment. He’d offer his TV, anything he could to get some. And look, we’re here to make money, not to fuck up people’s lives. I didn’t want this dude to be out on the street. He must have also been getting stuff from other people too ’cause it got to the point where you would go to his apartment and it was just a futon on the floor and nothing else. I stopped dealing with him. I heard from someone that he eventually went to rehab and moved in with his parents.

What about weirdo customers, have you got a lot of those?

There’s one who stands out. He’s this gay guy I deal to and he has this thing with suits and tuxes. I come over one night at three in the morning and he’s fully dressed up, and he has a suit laid out for me to wear. And, like, to fuck in. He’s usually a cool dude, but I think he’d probably been drinking and taken a lot of stuff before he called. I was like, “It’s cool, dude, but that’s just not my thing.” It was way too weird. He still calls me.

Do you go back?

Yeah, yeah. He’s cool, but once he gets in those moods he turns into suit man.

OK, one last question: Just to quash the myth once and for all, are there baby laxatives cut into our coke?

Look, they put a bunch of shit in there depending on where you get it from, but I never heard about fucking baby laxatives.

 

[Gas One]

lemme throw the heroin wave in and calm the waters

By the time Suleyman Ergun was 21 years old, he was the world’s most prolific and powerful seller of smack. Known throughout the junkie and police communities as the North London Turk, Ergun and his gang flooded Britain and Europe with heroin for five years.

For his pains, the former factory worker got mansions filled with cash and unlimited underworld cachet. At the height of his powers he was a multimillionaire and his favorite tipple was a bottle of champagne with eight grams of cocaine dumped into it. Today, he is almost penniless and lives with his mum. He’s 39. What happened?

Vice: Tell me a fond memory of your drug-dealing days.

Suleyman Ergun: There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you’ve got 100 kilos of heroin in the trunk of your car. Just to be near it, to smell it. Driving along at 120 mph in France somewhere and thinking: “I know what I’ve got in the car.” Police stopping beside you. A gun under my seat. Wouldn’t think twice about shooting them. Taking the risk. At the end of the day that’s why I became a drug dealer. Not the money or the power, but the buzz.

Did you serve an underworld apprenticeship?

At 15 I was an errand boy working in the Turkish rag trade in North London. I was earning £70 a week. At 17, I started selling coke, E, and pot, and I was earning £1,000 a week. Then I muled a couple of kilos of coke direct from Colombia and sold it in the clubs, along with tablets. Someone tried to rob me in the toilets of the Camden Palace once—I shot him in the leg.

How does one go from selling coke in a bathroom in Camden to being the king of all heroin in Europe?

Me, my former brother-in-law Yilmaz Kaya, and an Istanbul babas [godfather] named the Vulcan founded the Turkish Connection—that’s a network that smuggles heroin from Afghanistan across Turkey into Europe. Up until the early 90s, Turks had been bringing it in piecemeal. An immigrant would bring in ten keys, sell it, buy a shop in Green Lane and pack it in. We were the first to start bringing it in 100-kilo loads. Stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap….

It’s that simple, eh?

No, that’s only the supply. On the demand side, we bypassed all the usual gangsters and crime families in London. We fucked the Adams family off when they asked us to serve up to them. Instead, we sent it all to one distributor in Liverpool who sold the lot.

What was your role?

I was hands-on. The gear was driven from Istanbul to Paris in, say, a coach load of Turkish folk dancers. I coordinated the handover to the Scousers in France.

Then I’d drive up to Liverpool a few days later and come back with black bin bags full of cash—£140,000 one week, £100,000 the next, £68,000 the next, £150,000 the next, and so on. Then I’d count it, stack it, and box it in cereal packets and send it back to Turkey using a former Turkish Army colonel disguised as a bone-china collector as a courier.

After a while, we rolled out the same system across Europe—Spain, Italy, Holland, and Germany. We dealt with the Mafia, all of that. At one point we could afford to buy our own oil tanker.

Where did it all go wrong?

One of our workers was having an affair with a woman who was a police informant. He got nicked. Customs put us under surveillance for a year, and then bingo. The whole thing got walloped in July ’93.

What was the upshot?

Fourteen years, nine months. The gang got 123 years between them.

Did that teach you a lesson?

Did it fuck. I started dealing in prison within two days, trading heroin and coke for phone cards, food, tobacco. In September 1995 I used heroin for the first time, out of boredom and curiosity. It felt lovely and warm, like somebody putting an electric blanket over you. But the best thing about it, and this is why the jails are full of heroin, is that it makes time go by very quick. Twenty hours on heroin is like two hours normal. I got out ten years later and I didn’t know I done the bird [prison time].

How did you get your heroin in jail?

Before I got nicked, I had five kilos of pure heroin straight from Turkey buried along with two Berettas, an Uzi, and four shotguns at St. Pancras graveyard in North London. Every week I’d phone a girl up and use the word “brandy,” which was code for brown—heroin—and she would go and get it. She dug up the stash and shaved off some, and then it was given to a second girl who had a boyfriend in my prison. It was wrapped in a condom and nylon sheeting, shaped up proper like a dildo. She stuck it up her cunt. On the visit, they’d snuggle up close, and her boyfriend would put his hand slyly down her knickers, get it, and then stick it up his arse. Back in my cell, he’d get 60 grams and I’d get 60 grams.

Didn’t the prison wardens ever find out?

I had the DST—Dedicated Search Team—permanently on my case. They even used to take apart my batteries in the radio. But they never found gear in my cell because I used to hide it in my vegetable plot. I hollowed out an onion and put the gear inside and buried it. When the stalk wilted, I just taped a fresh one on. Take three grams out a day. Sell half a gram for my phone cards and that, and smoke the rest. Sometimes I would put it up my arse wrapped in tape so if the screws made me squat during a search, it wouldn’t fall out.

Couldn’t anyone smell you smoking it?

As long as you’re not causing trouble, cutting people over deals, and fighting, then the screws turn a blind eye. They know you’re on it because your pupils are like tiny pinholes and you start scratching and go red and raw. But the authorities let it go because if you stop the heroin it causes murders and they can’t handle that. Withdrawal symptoms. Kicking doors. Drugs will never be stamped out in jail.

How many bent screws did you know?

About six all over. They approached me because I was rich. I never ate prison food. They brought me in Marks and Spencer salads. In one prison the screw brought me in four ounces of weed, half a carrier bag full of phone cards, half a bag of tobacco, a TV, a phone, and two bottles of brandy, every week, for £500 a week, plus the bill for the food. He’d wink and say: “Your box is under your bed.” Then I’d pay another inmate to look after it. If you don’t have money, you have nothing.

I suppose when you got out of prison in 2003 you gave up drugs?

No, it got much worse. I discovered crack cocaine. The world had changed so much. I couldn’t cross the road—it was too fast. I used to see people talking to themselves on their hands-free and think they were off their heads.

What’s crack like?

It’s great. It blew my fucking head off. Over the next four years I blew half a million pounds on it. Sold my flat. My jewelry. Spent the few hundred grand I had stashed away.

What was the lowest point?

My mate robbed a rock off my table. I dragged him into the kitchen and chopped his little finger off with a knife on a chopping board. Then I flushed it down the toilet.

Some people would say that it was natural justice—that you were being punished for selling heroin by becoming a drug addict.

An eye for an eye. I’d created thousands and thousands of addicts. My past had caught up with me. I got depressed and then I took more crack and heroin to stop thinking.

How did you finally get off drugs?

I went for treatment in Turkey twice. A detox where they put you to sleep through withdrawal. It cost £20,000. My family paid. But when I got back onto the streets here in London, I kept slipping. Finally, I fell in love. It’s as simple as that. I haven’t touched a stone since.

Would you ever go back to being a heroin baron?

Not in a million fucking years. I’ve been offered a million pounds in cash to start up again. I could fly to Turkey now and get 100 keys and be away. £100,000 in cash by tomorrow. Mine. I get approached every week by someone or other, some of the country’s biggest gangsters, to go into business. But I can’t do it.

Why? Are you scared?

Fuck off. D’you want a smack?

 

[Kon1]

Wayyyyyvvvy!!!!!!! Lmao @ suit man haha WTF was that about!!!