Introduction to crime

Ice T: When I got to high school, I started seeing people with things that were beyond their means. I saw guys in the 12th grade that got cars and you're looking at everybody asking yourself what was really going on. Then my boys started to sell weed. They would buy pounds of home-grown weed, then sell joints for a dollar. Then my other friend, his sister used to steal the lunch ticket roll from the school and sell the tickets. She was making a lot of money. She put us to work. She said, "You guys sell them and I'll give you half the money." I was like, "This little broad is running an organised crime ring."

When you get into that you start to hang around with people who take pride in beating the system. That's the scary part. Everyone around you says, "If you ain't a hustler then you're not cool." You believe stolen money is good, and working money is not.

My friends were doing little corny things like grabbing car stereos, selling fake jewellery. We'd go downtown to the jewellery mart and get the fake shit, and they'd put the "14K. Gold" sticker on it and we'd hustle that. Then we learned how to run cons with fake diamond rings at the bus station. You walk up on a guy and tell them you just bought this for your mother and now you're stuck out of town and can't get home. We'd tell them the ring was worth $800 and the guy would end up giving you $100 for a ring that was worth $10. The only people that get conned are greedy people. You never get conned if you're honest.

I was on a petty game and then I got my girlfriend pregnant coming out of 12th grade and I started to feel a little hint of responsibility. That's when I went into the military. When I came out my friends had elevated their game. Jewellery stores were the targets.

Playing a jewellery store is all about lifting jewellery without anyone knowing it. There used to be what we called a pop lock on jewellery cases. We inserted a modified nailfile called a trim that functioned as a lock pick. You'd turn 'em and the locks would pop out, opening the case. With teams of people and confusion we were able to throw the jewellery store off long enough for somebody to reach over and do the bust. It's not like a one-minute lick, you had to plan it. At the end of this game they're not even supposed to know their shit is gone. That was a victory for us. That was finesse. There was what was called "bashing", which is really just walking in with sledgehammers during the day and taking the jewellery store down. Another basic one is the snatch and grab. For that they have to put the jewellery in your hands. They bring it out, and you say, "Can I see this watch? Can I compare this one against that one?" Some fools will bring all that shit out.

I never been to prison. I never been caught. The getaway is more important than the crime. You have to figure out what you're going to do with the jewellery before you steal it. If you're getting something that's very expensive, pre-sell it. Drug dealers want it. Drug dealers' girls are the best - they want every fucking thing. They want minks, they want this, they want that. The guys selling the drugs, they've got illegal money, they can't really spend it in stores. A lot of casing goes on. I could be in Salt Lake City and find what we call "a lick" - a little store with an old lady that happens to have a lot of shit and no one around.

I saw a lick recently in Vegas. I looked right at it and I told my wife, "Yo, this could get got, really, really easily." I don't care what you've done, if crime was ever a part of your life, that part never leaves.

What happened with me was, everybody that I was rolling with started to go to jail. One of my friends was in the middle of a bank robbery and his friend got killed by the police. What happens is that eventually those small crimes aren't going to sustain the lifestyle you live. When you're young you sell a little weed here and there, you try to get some rims OK. Now, you move up to Benzs and Ferraris. You can't sell joints, you gotta sell pounds. The more the crime escalates the more violence escalates.

I was in as deep as I could get and my friends started to go under. I'll never forget, I went on this one lick in the Pacific Palisades with all these cats that I normally wouldn't fuck with. It was the most slapstick disastrous shit I ever been on. We got away, but I was like, "Yo, no. This is why I never fuck with these guys." It gets crazy. From an artistic perspective, those rappers and artists that got out of the life, have great experiences to share. I think people can be entertained with other people's pain. It's exciting and fun to listen to, but to live it is something totally different. Watching the mafia is an exciting thing, but to be in it and to live every day with the potential of somebody blowing your brains out is not as sexy as it sounds.

Nelson George: I remember getting caught shoplifting a comic book, trying to stuff it down my pants. I was so embarrassed, I really wasn't cut out for crime. I grew up in the projects of Brooklyn during the era when heroin first came in. I remember when we had junkies on the corner and how that changed the tenor of the neighbourhood. They would break the elevators and knock the lights out in the stairways. My mother used to go to night school; I couldn't sleep until she got home. She'd have to walk past the junkies by the subway station. She'd have to negotiate the elevator or the staircase and it was a nightmare.

We had a lot of gangs, the 70s gangs like the Jolly Stompers and the Savage Skulls. Once there was a gang kid on a little mini-bike and he fell down in front of my building. A bunch of the dudes hanging out in front laughed at him. He went home, came back and shot one of those kids. That was like a light bulb that told me the world was changing. My little crew of friends were all sports guys. We flipped baseball cards, collected comic books and played sports all the time. Then this stuff started happening. We used to have conversations about whether or not the gang would try and recruit us and what you would do if they did.

My most frightening adult memory of crime involves the police. It happened in DC where I was seeing this woman and we were walking out of her house at about 5 or 6pm. Six police cars pull up, cops with 9mms jump out, I'm grabbed, frisked and thrown in the back of a car. The girl's freaking out, I'm freaking out, and I'm handcuffed. There had been a robbery in the neighbourhood maybe a half-hour earlier. The guy had a black leather jacket on, I had a brown leather jacket on. The police grabbed me, drove me and another guy they'd snatched up to a line-up on the sidewalk. Three people were in the store. One of them looks at me and nods that I'm the guy. Now I'm fucking freaking out. But the two other people came out and said I wasn't the guy. Then they apologised and let me go. I was like: "Wow. Just one more bad ID and I'm in jail for the weekend."

It made me realise how easy it would be to get arrested. It just ruins your whole self-image: "Well, I'm a respectable dude, I'm an adult, I'm this, I'm that..." - no. In the old days, black kids got snatched up like that all the time. They still do in South Central and places like that. People think they are so disconnected from criminal activity and the criminal justice system. But you can always be just one or two bad IDs away from jail.

If you live in a neighbourhood that has a lot of crime, you may never actually be a victim of crime but the fear of it prevails. Seeing all these random bits of crime around you can drive you crazy. The same way we talk about what's going on in Afghanistan and Iraq with traumatic stress syndrome - a lot of these gang-bangers have the same thing. I was intimidated at a point earlier this year, because of my involvement in the American Gangster TV show. I wasn't threatened physically, but there was a guy who came looking for me with a bunch of others. For about a week it was really bad. I realised how physically I was affected by that fear. I had to meet with this dude, and I actually had to bring a dude with me and all that drama. I didn't sleep the night before, I didn't want to make love to my girlfriend. It worked out in the end, but the fear factor was high. What if this is your existence for months and years at a time? What does that do to you?

The mental health aspect of that fear is something that isn't explored enough. A TV show like The Wire taps into it in a really good way, the kind of fear that happens daily with every interaction. Some of Deadwood gets it. I dated this white woman from California and when she used to visit me in the city she was blissfully unaware of everything. I grew up in New York. I'm walking down the street at night, my head's on a swivel looking to see who's behind me. Things that were vaguely threatening would happen and she would never even know they occurred. It amazed me. When 9/11 happened, part of me said, "Well, now the rest of America knows how most black people have lived." The fear that something really bad could fucking happen to you at any time. Not to minimise the violence, but to say that fear and paranoia are a daily thing in most housing projects in America and have been for ever. There, it's also the fear of white authority. It's not like, "Oh, I'm scared today." It's like, "I can't keep my food down," or "I have a burning in my stomach," or "I can't make love to my husband or wife." That's all crime.

Hip-hop and violence

Ice-T: Thank God this music called hip-hop came along, and then rap. We were pimping, we were in the game, we had girls making money. Then rap came along and at that time I idolised Iceberg Slim, the style and flair of his conversation. I took my name from him. At some point I realised, "This dude is a writer. So, if I'm really idolising him I not only gotta live the game, I have to document it." That's when I started to rap. I didn't really feel I could be a writer, so this was a place where I could talk about "the life".

What makes my music different from pretty much anybody else's is that I always try to show both sides of the game. I tell you about the fun at the beginning but there's pain in the end. Anybody who tells you about crime and doesn't tell you that there's pain, they're full of shit and they've never been there. Half of my crew is locked up. They tell me what's going on, and I listen. Sometimes you learn from your mistakes, sometimes through the mistakes of others. I felt like I was running down this road, this hustling road, where I thought it was going to be roses and money and all that good shit at the end. I got to the end of the road and I seen there's a cliff, over the edge of the cliff fires are burning. Now I'm running back up yelling at people not to go down that road.

Nelson George: There is a really weird dynamic with hip-hop culture. On one hand there's a feeling that music is so powerful that these guys can create violence. They're engaged in a dialogue about it, obviously, but they don't create it by any means. On the other hand these guys are all great actors. Hip-hop music is about a creation of persona. When you talk about the whole violence thing, the truth is that no matter how criminal-minded you are, or whatever your life was before you started making records, that's maybe two albums' worth of stuff. If you were that big a criminal, and had done all the things that are on the records, you would never get signed because you'd be in jail.

If you have any success on your first album then your lifestyle changes so radically. Take 50 Cent, for example - it's kind of weird to hear him talk about shooting people or beating people up because he lives in a mansion in Connecticut. He's got horses and a stable. He just made $60m-$70m, he's a big businessman. So how credible is he as an MC talking about the streets? By this point it's all memory, or it's all other people's stories. It's a very complicated relationship, yet the world believes that rappers are what they say they are.

Al Pacino played two of the greatest gangster figures of the postwar period in Scarface and The Godfather: Tony Montana and Michael Corleone. Fuck all these rap records, nobody's more influential in the gangster mentality of this country than Tony Montana and Michael Corleone.

The basic perception of a lot of black people is that white people buy hip-hop to enjoy the violent tales of black people killing each other. It's really that simple. When you hear that 70% of all rap records are purchased by white kids in the suburbs, that makes people insanely mad. White people are enjoying this, especially young white people, and we're allowing them to say things like "nigger". They hear it on the record so they feel like they can use it as well. And then there's the question: what is this doing to black people? When you look at the numbers of people incarcerated, you look at the unemployment numbers, the dropout rate, you can see this downward spiral that has been happening since the 70s. Rap records have been a phenomenon of this period, so people want to blame it all on the music.

Take LA. The black population that rioted in Watts in 1965 worked at jobs. There were factories out in South Central, construction work, manual labour. A lot of people moved to California after the war because of all these jobs. That sustained places like South Central, Watts and Compton for years. As white people moved out, black people moved in. Since the 70s, the jobs went away, overseas and to Mexico. So the kinds of jobs that their grandfathers and fathers had just disappeared. The crime industry and gangs filled that vacuum. The gang problem in LA - and eventually around the country - was exacerbated by crack. Gangs got more guns, more weapons; the amount of money they could make increased. The stakes got higher and the violence grew.

Gangsta rap, as we know it, comes out of that context. If you go back to Criminal Minded by BDP - which was really the first crack album - the crack economy, and the mentality fostered by it, was articulated and taken to the next level on record. You can make a good argument that the first few NWA albums are "ghetto reporting". Rappers say the 1992 riots validated them, and I agree. It validated everything they said about the conditions, and the fear and interplay between the LAPD and the black community.

There are tangible economic conditions that created the world we live in today. The three strikes thing made incarceration easier. It put a lot of people in jail quickly, but when they got out it created a deeper criminal class. Housing juveniles in jail with adults happened frequently. The music is all about these things. For people to act like the music exists in a vacuum is bullshit.

Hip-hop continued to evolve up until the 90s. There were always counter-movements - the political stuff, the bohemian De La Soul thing - and all those threads are still around. But the gangster thing became the easily marketable formula. Especially after Tupac and Biggie died. There are nuances in what Jay-Z does and what 50 Cent does that are different from Tupac and Biggie, but it's a formula these guys profit from that is easily understandable by the corporations that now run the music. Somebody told me the other day that 70% of the rap market is controlled by one entity, Universal Records.

There's a group thing that happens in any corporation that's selling culture. Hollywood does the same movies over and over again. Hip-hop is the same. The videos really reflect that. There are very few countervailing images in the videos in terms of what sexuality is, what success is, what gender roles are, and what materialism is. So what once could legitimately be called ghetto reporting - Chuck D called it the black CNN - is pale and tired 15 years after the 1992 riots. That's why sales are down. A lot of these same white kids that everyone was so upset about are moving away from hip-hop in big numbers. They're not buying those records because they're not raw; it's almost like NWA and PE were rock'n'roll figures, rebel figures. Jay-Z and 50 Cent present themselves as businessmen and always have.

It's become corporate hip-hop in the way that we used to make fun of corporate rock in the 80s. One of the reasons hip-hop rose was because it was very masculine in the era of Michael Jackson, Prince, Luther Vandross, Freddie Jackson. The LL Cool Js of the world provided the answer to a craving for masculinity. Now these guys are so slick and cleaned up and smoothed out; they claim to still be street but they're not. It was interesting when Jay-Z's new album came out last year, the audience was like: "You're old and you're rich." The audience that buys those records wasn't interested in a middle-aged guy being rich in hip-hop. Puffy's album didn't do that well and he's wearing a suit on his album cover. The self-satisfaction and glorification of materialism has reached a point that there's a great exhaustion. As always with any cultural movement, the success often predicates the decline.

Video games

Ice-T: I love them. The best one is Grand Theft Auto, which is just fucking mayhem. I'm in the Scarface game, which teaches you how to sell drugs, and I was in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I played a cracked-out rap star who had his lyrics stolen and the person that stole them became a star. So I went on crack and by the end of the game I get my reputation and my mansion back. You start off as a kid in South Central LA, you build up your rep and then you get a gang. It's definitely some crazy shit.

The Vice City games are the worst shit ever - in a good way. It's so intentionally wrong that you've got to get into it. You go, "Oh my God, if I'm out of money I just rob a liquor store." Inside this world, all the things that you think about, you can do. Does that make you want to do it in real life? No. To me it diffuses it. People say video games make kids violent. I don't think so. It can be an outlet for that aggression. It's a masculine thing. Human beings have some weird blood lust, it roots back to us being animals. It's ill, though.

Nelson George: Video games are more important than hip-hop. There's no doubt about it. The violence and nihilism that everyone thinks is in hip-hop is pumped up about 18 times in video games. That's really what's driving young male culture, that's really the new rock'n'roll. The funny thing about this debate is so many hip-hop critics are fixated on rap and not talking enough about video games, which aren't a racially determinant form. Obviously those Grand Theft Auto guys were very canny because they tied in to Scarface, they tied in to hip-hop. I mean, Def Jam has a line of video games. Hip-hop became subsumed into the games.

But the games are different - they're not folk statements. Hip-hop was a folk music up until the late 80s; I mean, it was music made by people for people. Even Run-DMC, you know, three million records was big for rap but it wasn't big on an international level at the time. There were little labels pushing it. In the 90s bigger companies started getting in there and it began to change. I would say Interscope and what they did with Snoop, Tupac and Dr Dre really took it to a new level. With video games the relationship to the culture is different, they're much more like movies. They're a really interesting hybrid. The Grand Theft Auto dudes were all about figuring out how to tap into urban culture. Video games, like movies, take in so many disciplines. At the same time, it's not a folk expression - at least, the way I understand it - of an individual.

· This is an edited extract from Crime, by Alix Lambert, published by Fuel later this month, priced £22.95.