Rob’s withdrawal from and return to drug dealing

Rob’s withdrawal from and return to drug dealing marks one of the clearest reversals in his adult life. Dealing begins as an extension of his competence and his obligations to family and friends, becomes an increasingly intimate encounter with fear and exploitation, briefly gives way to teaching and legitimate ambition, and then returns under financial pressure. The movement is not presented as a simple moral conversion followed by a simple relapse. It is a cycle in which money, loyalty, pride, danger, and the demand to remain “the Man” repeatedly compete with the institutions and futures that might have carried him elsewhere.

Early dealing and the performance of control

Rob’s first connection to marijuana dealing developed while he was a student at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School. When classmates approached him in the hallway to ask whether they could buy weed, he refused to sell directly and sent them to Tavarus, who could obtain larger quantities through his older brother. Tavarus nevertheless gave Rob a twenty-dollar referral payment, which Rob changed at a store and split with Jackie Peace as he routinely did. The exchange established an important pattern: even when Rob did not regard himself as a dealer in the narrowest sense, drug money could be converted into family support.

The business later depended on unstable networks. Rob’s original supplier, introduced by Julius “Flowy” Starkes, disappeared, probably to avoid conflict with a rival, police, or both. A subsequent supply route came through Carl, who received small kickbacks and insisted on accompanying Rob to every purchase. Rob drove Carl from Bloomfield to a supplier in Ivy Hill, inspected the marijuana, negotiated the price down to $1,800 per pound, and maintained a deliberate posture of calm toughness while pretending to be ready to walk away. After each transaction, he drove Carl home and left him $200. The work required him to be relaxed without seeming weak, forceful without becoming openly threatening, and generous without destroying the margin between cost and profit.

At Yale, dealing had seemed comparatively safe and easy because classmates came to Rob and paid the prices he demanded. Newark imposed a harsher economy. He drove through dangerous streets at night to negotiate over five- and ten-dollar amounts with desperate buyers and suppliers, while maintaining a reputation that depended on what the book calls fronting: the management of appearance, credibility, and threat. His drug activity therefore belonged to the same world as his anger at disrespect. When crew-team students at Yale left dirty trays behind for him to clear, Rob’s reaction exceeded the immediate insult. He imagined “curbing” them, struck a wall in the dish room, and carried the humiliation back into his room. The episode shows how quickly an apparently minor slight could become, for Rob, a question of dignity and accountability.

The 2003 crisis and withdrawal

The decisive break came in August 2003, when one of Rob’s bulk suppliers pulled a gun after Rob threatened to abandon a failed negotiation. Rob did not know whether the revolver was loaded and later claimed that the supplier had not intended to fire, but the threat reduced his world to the weapon’s muzzle. The narrative connects that moment to the many guns already embedded in Rob’s memory: weapons turned on people from his schools and neighborhood, and the gun used in the murders of Charlene Moore and Estella Moore. Education, scientific knowledge, and personal achievement became useless in the instant of physical vulnerability.

Rob paid the additional couple of hundred dollars demanded by the supplier. The payment was not a triumph; it was the price of leaving alive. The confrontation, together with the loss of his savings, enclosed the summer of 2003. Dealing had returned less money than anxiety, and the labor exposed him to dealers, suppliers, and users whose lives were organized around the drug economy. Rob understood his own marijuana dependence as frequent enough to meet the ordinary definition of addiction, yet controlled enough for him to call himself “high functioning.” His pity for people who relied on the drug more completely often appeared as contempt. He called them lazy, but friends believed that beneath the scorn lay sensitivity and perhaps guilt: without his particular intelligence and Jackie Peace’s particular care, he might not have been different from them.

After the gun incident, Rob began teaching at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School and got out of the business. Friends were surprised by the decision because it represented more than fear, morality, or a single close call. It was a movement back toward the disciplined life that had helped him reach Yale. The school’s method had always been to occupy boys’ time, build loyalty, and prevent fights, theft, drug use, abuse, and dropping out through repetition, shared identity, and close supervision. Teaching there allowed Rob to reenter that institutional world, though the book makes clear that the old street economy had not disappeared from his identity.

The withdrawal also altered his relationship with Carl. Rob avoided him for months, telling Jackie Peace to keep Carl away from the house without explaining why. Then, seemingly without warning, the rage vanished. When Rob found Carl sitting in the parlor, he greeted him with a casual “What’s up?” The gesture suggests neither a full reconciliation nor a detailed resolution, but a deliberate lowering of the emotional temperature after the business had already cost him so much.

Return under financial pressure

Rob stayed out of dealing for about a year and a half. His return was quiet at first and then increasingly visible. By the time Big Steve Raymond confronted him, Rob was in the second-floor unit of the Greenwood Avenue house, cutting a half pound of marijuana into dime bags, answering calls, drinking coffee, and preparing for a night of deliveries. The house was still sparsely furnished and unfinished. Financial pressure associated with home ownership and renovations had pushed him toward the “too-easy equalizer” of his old profession.

Big Steve asked what he was doing and told him that he did not need to deal. Rob laughed gently and answered that he was not doing it for amusement. Big Steve was six years older, had lost his parents, left college during his freshman year, and worked mainly as a night security guard in Browns Mills, New Jersey. He and Victor Raymond lived together, while Victor worked at Home Depot and worried that the Federal Aviation Administration rarely hired older air-traffic-controller applicants. Their caution came from lives spent trying not to drown. Watching Rob, a Yale graduate who had once escaped through education, become a weary low-level dealer again made the reversal especially painful.

Rob offered Big Steve no program for change, only vague declarations about doing what he had to do. That phrase captured the logic of the return. He did not describe the business as pleasure or as a commitment to criminal identity. He framed it as an obligation to keep the Greenwood Avenue property functioning, to contribute to Jackie Peace, and to remain available to relatives and friends. Nathan later asked him at the Gaslight Brewery in South Orange what he was doing with his life. Rob answered that he had gone to Yale and knew what he was doing, but Nathan pointed out that Yale had been ten years earlier. The exchange exposes the gap between an achieved credential and a present direction.

Dealing as provision and networked obligation

Rob’s friendships helped explain why he could not simply leave Newark behind. His peers included people from Oakdale Elementary School, Mt. Carmel Elementary School, football games, St. Benedict’s, East Orange stoops, and successive dealing networks. He gave money for rent and children’s clothing, drove friends whose cars had broken down, and showed up when someone wanted company. When Flowy’s own car was needed after Rob’s tire blew out on the Merritt Parkway at one in the morning, Flowy drove an hour each way with a spare and a jack. When tenants failed to pay rent at Greenwood Avenue, Drew Jemison came to intimidate payment from them. Rob’s participation in the illegal economy was therefore interwoven with mutual aid, status, and belonging rather than isolated from his social world.

After the return, Rob recruited four young couriers between eighteen and twenty-two. He paid each $400 a week, gas money, and commissions. One recruit fell to his knees and cried because the work would keep him from homelessness. Rob treated the young men like a big brother, avoided giving orders in a resentful or humiliating manner, and insisted aggressively only that their cars be registered, their taillights work, and traffic laws be obeyed. He presented himself as a mentor who could show them a route upward if they remained disciplined. Yet the apparent mentorship concealed the enterprise’s structure: the couriers knew nothing about the basement on Smith Street or the specifics of the operation, conducting business instead in parks, parking lots, and side streets.

For three weeks, the arrangement worked. The couriers moved nearly a pound a day, though overhead reached approximately $8,000 a month and reduced the profits. Rob first directed earnings toward Curtis Gamble, Tavarus Hester, Drew Jemison, and Flowy to repay their original investments. His own share went toward back mortgage payments on Greenwood Avenue, contributions to Jackie Peace, radiator repairs at the Chapman Street house, and Frances Peace’s medical costs. Frances was then in her worst condition, undergoing dialysis for kidney disease in addition to suffering from emphysema. Rob also paid family credit-card debts accumulated for that care and resumed helping friends with rent, car repairs, and marijuana. The operation was projected to clear its stock by midsummer, leaving him time to prepare for an application to Johnson & Johnson.

The unresolved contradiction

Rob’s stated ambition was success, but he could not separate business success from the people and obligations that made the illegal business attractive. In 2006, while driving toward Boston with about five pounds of marijuana in the trunk, he told Oswaldo Gutierrez that he wanted to succeed. Oswaldo answered that Rob wanted to succeed in a “new jack, fucked-up way,” simultaneously as a businessman and a dealer, and that he had to choose one. Oswaldo’s judgment was that Rob cared too much about people to become a truly successful drug kingpin: he knew their stories, families, and needs, but lacked the coldness and lethal authority that such a role required.

That assessment clarifies why withdrawal was possible and why return was unstable. Rob could use drug dealing to pay mortgages, medical bills, and debts, to repay investors, and to keep younger men from immediate homelessness. But the same empathy that made him a provider also made the trade morally and psychologically corrosive. He saw the suffering produced by marijuana dependence while continuing to profit from it; he sought to protect friends while exposing them to the same network of risk; and he pursued legitimate real-estate plans while relying on illegal cash to sustain them.

The return also followed the larger collapse of the alternatives he had tried to build. After more than two years of home ownership, Rob had renovated Greenwood Avenue and was earning roughly $1,000 a month by living with Jackie Peace on Chapman Street and renting all three Greenwood units, though repairs made the figure fluctuate. Real estate appealed to him because it promised a clean sequence—buy, renovate, place the right homeowner, and profit—and because a house meant shelter, heat, security, and family. Yet the property’s expenses, his family’s needs, and the pressure to support his network repeatedly made immediate drug income more accessible than the slower legal future he imagined.

Rob’s withdrawal and return therefore function as a structural portrait of constrained choice. St. Benedict’s could occupy his time and give him a disciplined identity; Yale could supply extraordinary knowledge and status; teaching and real estate could offer legitimate forms of service and income. None erased the obligations, humiliations, loyalties, and economic pressures attached to Newark. The action’s significance lies in that unresolved tension: Rob knows precisely what the drug trade costs, survives a gunpoint confrontation, leaves it, and still comes back because the people he loves and the life he is trying to maintain make escape incomplete.