He did a lot of hard time, some of it in Fort Dix, New Jersey. It used to be a big military installation that a lot of people from around here did their training at. They turned it into this huge federal prison. They are just building warehouses to put people in.

There was a guy in Dundalk that inherited a house and the bikers came buy and give him all the drugs he wanted. And one day they came over and said he had to pay up for all the drugs. The coke head said, “What, I thought they were on the house.”

Well they were on the house. The bikers said, “Who gives away something for nothing? Sign the house over to us or we’re gonna fuckin’ kill you.”

So, the guy lost the house he inherited.

We were doing an office fit-out and they had a guy running a job there who knows the superintendent of the general contracting company. Derrick started rapping with him and found out he liked to smoke and Derrick said give me $50 and you can grab as big a handful as you can out of this duffel bag. This big contracting bag was as big as a trash can and he had it in the cab of his truck. The boss grabs a big old handful and we had it made after that. You can’t be an effective boss after you do something like that. When he put his hand in that bag he sold his soul.

Nobody fucked with Derrick. You could tell he could throw down and he wouldn’t think twice about putting a bullet in your head. He had that attitude that he knew nobody was fuckin’ with him. We had a good crew of guys. After all he had been through, prison and all that, he was a good family man, took care of his wife and kids, a good provider—just made sure they didn’t ask him where the money came from.

He was good at his job, well behaved on the site, did his job. When you’re workin’—and a lot of these guys [drug dealers] don’t work—you can tell a jury that you do side jobs, a lot of cover for any extra money. Yeah, side jobs aren’t right, but it is expected. The drugs become a side hustle, so you get less addicted to the money coming from the drugs, at least as far as I can tell. If you ain’t desperate to make it, it comes when it comes and you aren’t making desperate decisions to make it.

Derrick could pull back and just make his way with his trade. He was good-natured and pretty serious with the same hand.

We did one job at a hospital and we ran down to King’s liquor store for lunch and we ended up sitting their drinking on the side of the hospital. Luckily the big boss didn’t come out and check, just brought the checks out and left and we’re sitting there drinking all night.