When Jason King was 11 years old, he got involved with drug dealing in Brooklyn. “At first I did it because I was hungry. Then I kept doing it because I was making a lot of money,” he said. As a 26 year old man today, King has a different state of mind compared to a decade ago. Now making an honest living far from Brooklyn in upstate New York, he has changed his ways and lives to enjoy the trouble-free things in life.
King grew up in Fort Green and was the youngest boy in a group that worked together. “It was a neighborhood thing,” he said. At 11, he was a lookout kid and made deliveries. At such a young age, King was making roughly $400 dollars a week. One man who knew King during these years and only goes by “Sean,” remembers him as being shy. “But once we started hustlin’ he got less shy,” said Sean. “I would walk around with four packages in one pocket, and a Gameboy in the other,” King said. By supplying people with drugs for their habits, King was able to make money to support his passion for video games. His father bought him a Sega Genesis which was later stolen by his own mother. “My mother stole it to buy crack,” he said, “I sold drugs to buy it back.”
As the money kept coming in, King continued to sell and began to make more. “I’d spend the money on clothes, video games, trips down south, and gambling,” he said. When he was 16 and left his home, he would stay with friends and pay rent to their mothers. These mothers were among the drug addicts and would gladly accept the money.
King and his friends have had run-ins with the police, but the most comical one involved King and his nonchalant attitude. “One time we were blazing trees in Prospect Park and [Jason] ain’t even throw the blunt away, he just put it in his pocket,” said Sean. “We started walking and the cops said ‘what are you guys doing?’ [Jason] said, ‘nothing, just minding our business’ and kept it movin’. It was mad funny.”
The typical morning began at 9 a.m with King sitting on a bench, waiting to be paged. “I got a pager so people could beep me. I would go up to the building and give people what they asked me for,” he said. When he grouped up with his friends, they would sell to people on the street and answer their pages. But it ended in the summer of 1997 when King and others were caught by surprise by the police.
King and his friends were in the lobby of a building when the cops sprung upon them. “It’s not like in the movies,” he said, “there’s no warning.” The police caught King with seven crack vials on him. He wanted to get out of the situation so he lied and told them that he was smoking it and not selling it. They did not believe him. In 1997, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 213,200 juveniles were arrested for drug abuse violations.
One month before his 17th birthday, King was sent to Spofford Juvenile Center, a juvenile detention facility. He remembers it as being fun and like a camp for bad kids. They would play card games, chess, shoot dice and fight. It wasn’t all fun as they also had to take classes and a practice G.E.D exam. Out of a group of 40 boys, King and two others passed the exam with him getting the highest score. Later on, he took the real G.E.D exam and passed. After spending six months at Spofford, King was sent to Rikers Island where he was sentenced to stay for another six months.
Rikers Island is New York City’s largest jail and its 10 facilities house the majority of inmates incarcerated by the Department of Correction. King remembers it being “dirty, disgusting, stinky and the shower smelled like mildew.” The date of his arraignment kept getting delayed and this worried him. While awaiting arraignment, King often thought about what would happen to him if he ended up in the general population of Rikers, also known as genpop. “Sometimes I had thoughts of dying there,” he said. When King was finally able to approach a judge, he was given a choice. He could either spend two years at Rikers or two years in the military. King chose the military.
After leaving Rikers, he stayed at home until the following January when he was shipped off to Fort Jackson in South Carolina. King got into a little trouble during these two years by being caught drunk while on duty and smoking marijuana. But these troubles are nothing compared to what he might have gone through if he had been sentenced to stay in Rikers. “If I had done two years in Rikers, I might have linked up with someone and got into more trouble, and had to stay longer in Rikers,” he said. “I feel being shipped off to the military saved my life.”
King’s life was also saved by a small bundle of joy delivered to him in September of 2002. His daughter was born and this forced him to realize that he needed to make a change. “I just woke up one day. I didn’t have anything and my daughter was about four months old. I just thought to myself, ‘I got to take care of this girl,’” he said. After a long relationship with his child’s mother, King decided to end it and go his own way. In 2003, King began pursuing a degree in engineering. Today he does works as an engineer for IBM.
When he sits, he slouches forward and gradually sips his beer as he speaks about his life. As he talks about what he feels is important to him, he looks at you with such seriousness in his eyes that the subject almost becomes important to you too. All the hardships King has been through can be seen through his eyes when he frowns. He has two dragon tattoos, one on each arm. Above one of the tattoos is a faint letter “J” that was burned into him during his stay at Rikers.
To see King smile, simply ask him about his daughter. All he wants is to protect her and give her the childhood he feels ended for him at such an early age. “I’ll steer her away from people that are how I used to be. I want her to have a normal childhood, and a chance to do things that I couldn’t do,” he said. Leaving his old life behind, King intends to raise his daughter in a safe and pleasant environment, far from violence and drug related activities. They live together upstate in Plattekill, a quiet town where there’s no trouble and the people are friendly. He focuses on the simples pleasures in life that make him happy today: video games, music, and movies. King proudly proclaims, “I own in Killer Instinct, among other games. Give me three months and I’ll be a killer in Gears of War.”
As far as the drug business he was involved in, “I’m done with it,” he said, “I’m a grown man. That’s for kids. It’s whack.” King takes great pride in buying things with the honest money that he now makes. There’s comfort in knowing that a police officer, lawyer or judge cannot take away what he rightfully owns and has worked hard for. After all he has been through, King can look back and say that “Crime pays, but not for a long time. You always reach a downfall.”
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