The drug game was booming, and I ran into this person named Dino, and Dino had a whole lotta money. He said he wanted me to do a party for him. It was all kind of fish tanks and leather couches and gold chandeliers, bitches running around the house all crazy, everybody smoking weed. About a week after I did that party he asked if I wanted to work for him. I began cleaning his house, feeding the fish and walking the dogs. He would give me $250 a week. Then he was like, ‘I’ve got some other things I want you to do for me.’ He took me downstairs and he had about 300 pounds of weed. He was like, ‘I want you to take the weed, bag it up until everything’s one pound each. Take my car, take these ten pounds and go deliver to this person.’ After a month or two they hired my friend Terik to be the driver. We ran around doing the weed thing for a while and we made a whole lotta money out of that.

[Dino] bought me two cars and I was his right-hand man. He would send me to get on the airplane, go to various locations which were outta state, like in Phoenix, with an undisclosed amount of money on me. Pick up what I had to pick up and fly back on US Air or East/West Airlines to an undisclosed location in Philly, bag it up, go to the hotel with it, sleep overnight in the hotel with the weed, and the next day deliver it to everybody who he had in the little black book for his customers. Out of 300 pounds of weed, I would give 250 pounds out on credit, and for the rest of the month I would have to chase them around to get that money back. I was the collections dude with the strength behind me—he had a team of murderers that he would pay them a couple of dollars and they would be on some hitman shit.

I was still doing music, producing beats and scratching, but I had a full-time job, and that was drug dealer. Nobody ever fucked with me, because they knew that Dino had my back. I used to ride around with between $10,000 and $165,000 in my car at any given time during the week, and nobody ever stuck me up. He never let me have any time to myself, I was pretty much a hostage. I was very well paid and well dressed—I was a highly respected hostage.

I was his right-hand man, but he used to treat me like shit. He used to be kinda jealous, because people would still recognize me as Too Tuff. He would be sitting in the front of an Escalade and I would sit in the passenger seat and his customers and people he was dealing with would see me on the other side and be like, ‘Yo, Too Tuff! What’s up dog!’ and come and talk to me. He got mad at that and he eventually said, ‘You know what? I’m gonna buy a property and make you a studio.’ That sounded good to me, that way I could ease out of this drug shit and have a full-time studio to work at.

So he buys a property on Kensington Avenue. Philadelphia Police Department had ‘Operation Sunrise’ at the time, and they used to have a strike force that would just take over a fuckin’ corner and just shut it down, so he called the studio Sunrise Studios to mock the police. He invested so much money in equipment that within four or five days he had a whole professional studio. We did work there with Black Thought and M.A.R.S. Co-Op and a variety of people from the neighborhood. He hired an engineer to work downstairs and we actually put out an album, Sunrise Studio Presents. He gave me a studio that was on the second floor, but I never got to use it because I was always running around trying to collect money for him. I took eighteen crates of my records to that studio, because I was going to live there so I could do the weed shit and when I was done just stay there and make beats. He had told one of the interns to take all my records out my crates and put them all in alphabetical order. There was twelve years worth of records, I had doubles of everything, and the records just mysteriously disappeared!

All of this was basically to show me that I wasn’t shit. This was for him to one-up Too Tuff and show me that all it took was money to make himself a rapper. He had a mural of himself painted on the wall of the studio, he had a custom rug that had red and white letters that said ‘Sunrise Studios’ that cost $10,000. It was fuckin’ crazy. There was a group called the Wise Wale’s, and they came in and stuck the studio up while we wasn’t around and stole half of the drum machines out of there at gun-point. After that, we unloaded all of the equipment and took it back to 8th Street Music and sold all of it! It was $80,000 worth of recording equipment and he got back maybe $15,000 for it.

Six months after I started working for Dino, we’re bagging up at his house and there’s a knock on the door. I look out the peephole and say, ‘There’s fuckin’ three gas men out there in full uniform.’ I didn’t want to be the one to open the door and then get fuckin’ pistol whipped later on that night because they turned the gas off. So my buddy Terik opens the door and the fuckin’ gas men run in with Uzi’s and Mac 11’s—they were stick-up boys! Me and Dino and Terik ran out the front door! They had his wife hostage in there. We go and call the cops and there’s a hostage situation in the house, so there’s a million fuckin’ cops out there, a SWAT team and all types of other shit. The stick-up boys went out the back and climb over the fence. There was a big parking lot behind there and the cops were right here waiting for them.

They had twelve pounds of weed on them, so now the cops are like, ‘Who owns this house?’ Dino’s like, ‘I own it. We’re the ones that called you!’ So they’re like, ‘Put your hands behind your back! You’re being arrested for possession of marijuana!’ I go and bail him out and he says, ‘I’m going to go stay at The Comfort Inn, I want you to live at the house. I’ve already been contacted by the people that stuck us up. They want me to not press charges.’ One of the dudes had 25 years parole or something, so he would have gone to jail for the rest of his life for his third strike. Now I’m living at the house, and every morning there would different payment in the mailbox. Sometimes it was $1,000, sometimes it was $5,000, sometimes it was an ounce of coke, sometimes it was a roll of ecstasy tablets.

He was a real violent person. The people that he was closest with were the people he was the most abusive to, and I was the closest one to him other than his wife—and she used to get her fuckin’ ass whipped, and so did I! Mine wouldn’t be so severe, I would just get smacked in the face with a gun and then he would drive me to the hospital to get stitches. I put up with that shit because he wouldn’t allow me to fuckin’ quit. I started saving up money to have him killed. I used to listen to that Smif ‘N Wessun album and plot on murdering him. I actually had $10,000 saved up. I didn’t actually want him murdered, I just wanted him to leave me alone.