five

If you keep up with the entertainment news at all, you’ve probably heard of a man named Lucius “Luke” Marsellus. He ran maybe the second-biggest gangsta rap label in America. Or, if you were an LAPD cop doing gang suppression in South Central about fifteen years ago, you knew him for different reasons. I could say that people who knew Marsellus when he was a teenager knew him “before he was famous,” but that wasn’t quite accurate. He just had a different kind of notoriety back then. There are different words for it—made guy, OG, veterano—but most gang members reach that status young. When you’re liable to be dead by twenty-one, you have to. Luke Marsellus was ganged-up by the time he was ten and a hood celebrity by fifteen.

At that age, Marsellus had become the right-hand man to a dealer named J. G. Deauville, a man who’d climbed the distribution chain from street-corner dealer to having two dozen guys working for him. And Marsellus was constantly by his side, his protection and enforcer. His shadow: tall, silent, feared. The extent of his crimes in Deauville’s service still isn’t known: The gang unit never made anything stick to him.

His boss wasn’t so fortunate. Deauville taught Marsellus a lot, but perhaps the most important lesson was this: Luck always runs out. He taught his lieutenant that the hard way: After years of luck, in which the DEA and the LAPD failed to touch him, the IRS nailed Deauville, like Al Capone before him, on tax evasion, and he went to prison.

Marsellus was the obvious heir to Deauville’s enterprise, but he didn’t do the expected thing. To the eyes of those who’d long been watching him—the police, the feds, gang rivals—he seemed to drop off the radar. Several smaller, warring gang sets carved up Deauville’s territory, and life went on.

Maybe a year after Deauville’s arrest, Marsellus resurfaced in an entirely new role. Using money he’d apparently saved from his gangland years, and completely unknown talent from the streets, Marsellus founded a rap label. He was twenty-two years old.

But he quickly proved to have a natural business acumen rivaling that of his old boss. Marsellus signed the coldest and angriest of the gangsta rappers; their live-fast-die-young words were echoed by white kids in the leafiest of suburbs. The usual suspects boycotted his music—parents’ groups, law enforcement—but that only sold more CDs.

So Marsellus became a legit businessman, but it’d be going too far to say that he’d entirely left his old ways of doing things behind. He made no apologies for the fact that his private security men were all ganged-up. And while nothing stuck to him, disturbing incidents followed the Marsellus name. A troublesome ex-girlfriend, reportedly about to sign a contract for a tell-all book, was beaten so severely she lost the hearing in one ear. A young white talent agent who’d lured several artists away from the Marsellus fold found a new line of work after a gunman put two rounds through the window of his house. Federal agents subpoenaed boxes and boxes of documents from Marsellus’s downtown L.A. offices, but no charges ever followed. The local cops hadn’t been able to nail Marsellus on anything in his dealing days, and in his newer, bigger life, the feds couldn’t, either.

This was how Marsellus ultimately defied them: He became respectable. When a South Central African Baptist church was burned down in what was assumed to be a hate crime, Marsellus paid to have it rebuilt from the ground up, not as the humble shag-carpeted refuge it had been before, but as a graceful edifice with high clerestory windows and slate floors. He bought a home in Beverly Hills. He was generous with his siblings, and threw storied birthday parties for his nieces and nephews. And when he married, the ceremony was attended by not only his large extended family and his music-industry peers but by a former congressman, and several well-known actors and pro athletes.

And about seven years after their marriage, Luke Marsellus and his wife became parents. They’d been trying in vain for some time to conceive, so when their son was born, it was cause for greater celebration than their marriage. In a ceremony even better attended than the Marsellus wedding, the infant Trey was baptized at the church his father had had rebuilt, wearing a christening gown from Neiman Marcus.

I learned everything I knew about Marsellus in my last days in Los Angeles. Before that, I wouldn’t even have recognized his face. Even CJ didn’t know him, not beyond shaking his hand at a fund-raiser.

I did remember liking some of the music Marsellus’s artists put out. Angry, unapologetic, fatalistic, unafraid—the music had fit with my life-after-West-Point frame of mind. In those days I hadn’t thought any further ahead than sundown. Those had been my omnia gaudia vitae days, and to be honest, I’d been partying a lot, whether it was beer and grass with Serena, or kaffir lime vodka shots in the Westside clubs I went to with CJ.

But on what I consider my last real day in L.A., I was sober. It was important to me that people knew that, or it would have been if I ever told anyone this story, which I didn’t. But I was sober and driving the speed limit that day on Wilshire Boulevard; it’s just that the late-afternoon sun was in my eyes, and when six-year-old Trey Marsellus ran out in front of my car, I hit and killed him.