Raw Returns

At age 11, Raw moved with his mother to Miami, settling near 20th Street and Biscayne Boulevard, an area polluted with violence, prostitution, and drugs. "Man, the only high-rise back then was the FPL Building. There was nothing downtown. Biscayne was a shithole back then."

He and his mom moved around quite a bit. "We were like modern-day gypsies," he says. They eventually settled in Wynwood in 1984. During his teens, he tried vocational school for auto mechanics but soon discovered he could earn more money selling weed to classmates. Raw recalls banking $100 a week — not bad for a 16-year-old. He soon dropped out of school and began hustling full-time.

But, Raw declares, his real passion was hip-hop. "When I moved down here, people was like, 'What's hip-hop?' Back then it was all bass," he says, referring to the style of music popularized by 2 Live Crew. "That music was fun, you know, girls shaking their asses, but me being a b-boy, I just couldn't get down with that sound. There was none of that New York hip-hop until guys like us ... brought it."

Peter Price couldn't agree more. Also known as NME (pronounced enemy), his graffiti handle, Price is a longtime friend of Raw's and business director of Hoodstock. Price was 11 years old when his family moved to South Florida in 1983. "Coming from Queens to Miami, kids would make fun of me, how I dressed, spoke. I would break dance and they all looked at me crazy."

Now 35 years old, the soft-spoken Haitian with a penchant for storytelling considers Raw a father figure. He met Raw at the funeral of a 15-year-old named Dustin, who was shot dead after an altercation over a girl. Several years beforehand, Price had started KOP — Knock Out Posse — as an after-school football team. It became an after-school gang, which Raw joined.

As the group's eldest member, Raw persuaded KOP members to try music. "We all loved hip-hop," recalls Price. "Raw saw that some of us had talent, and him, being the entrepreneur, decided to make KOP a hip-hop music group."

Were other band members aware of Raw's side job as a drug dealer? "We all knew that he was selling, but back then, who wasn't?" says Kurage, a tall, lanky Haitian whose real name is Ettienne Thomas.

Kurage is referring to the mid-Eighties, when one word described Miami's illegal narcotics business: simple — simple to get, simple to sell, and simple to make a killer fortune. By the late Eighties, Raw was deep into the trade. No longer was it dime bags of weed. He was selling and trafficking kilos of cocaine by the dozen. "I used to work for an import/export company out of the Port of Miami. The company went bankrupt because I sold so much dope to the president that it folded up," remembers Raw. "One day I went into his office to pick up my check. My check ain't ready, my dope money ain't ready, so I'm like, 'What we gonna do about this?' So he offers me the title to the warehouse and a 24-wheeler. So I come to Wynwood with this big old truck and now we gotta pull off a scam, we gotta fool the cops. We got this big truck ... so I buy everybody [in KOP] green suits and now we're landscapers!" says Raw, laughing. "Now we pushing dope in lawnmowers, you know, serving guys on the corner while pretending to cut grass."

Price remembers his short stint in lawn care. "It was crazy. People be watching us trying to trim hedges, and we not knowing what the hell we're doing."