Dapper Dan by Daniel R. Day

Author:Daniel R. Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-07-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Aruba

What Shawn said about profiting off other people’s sorrows was still ringing in my ears. At the same time, I had a family to feed. I started selling clothes out of the trunk of my car, but fashion was still only a side hustle, and all the goods was coming from a creep-thief who sold them to me after boosting them from department stores. I wasn’t yet convinced I could make a living from clothes. So I kept swallowing my morals and going down to the drug corners and shooting dice. A lot of the guys I grew up with had become bosses of their own crews. They knew my reputation, but their crews didn’t. They’d often warn their younger members about playing dice with me.

“Y’all don’t want it with him,” they’d say, laughing. “Leave Dap alone, man.”

But the younger guys would let their egos get the best of them, and I’d just be spanking them and spanking them.

That’s exactly what was happening on West 116th Street when a guy who’d just used the last of his cash pulled out an envelope from his coat pocket. He said he’d knocked off a FedEx truck the other day, and he handed me one of the packages from it. Inside the envelope was a bunch of credit cards. They were supposed to go to some executives at a big company downtown.

Credit cards had been around since the 1950s, but they’d never been part of my reality or the everyday lives of most people I knew in Harlem. That was for the middle class and wealthy. But there were some hustlers who specialized in the paper game. That’s what we called everything from kiting checks to credit card fraud—the paper game. Since dice had been my main focus, I’d never really thought about the paper game before, but now that I was looking for distance from gambling, I got curious. I’d heard a rumor about some guys in the Nation of Islam who were masters of it. I had a hunch that I could maybe do something with these stolen cards, even if I wasn’t sure what.

“So?” he said. “Can you use em?”

“Yeah,” I said. “How much you sellin em for?”

“Fifty a piece,” he said.

He had half a dozen cards. I took all of them joints.

The next thing I did was call up my friend Hasan, who was in the Nation of Islam and knew all about the paper game.

“Can we do anything with these cards?” I asked him.

Hasan said, “Yeah, man, we can make a killing with this.”

“Yeah?”

“You know Amir, right?” said Hasan.

Man, Amir and I went way back. We used to be in the same Harlem Academy program, taking the bus to and from prep school out in Newark. I knew Amir’s whole family.

“Yeah, I know Amir.”

“He the one with all the science about the credit cards,” said Hasan. “You need to talk to him.”

So I called up Amir. In the years since our Urban League prep school days,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.