Lower Road

By James A. Scarborough

On the outskirts of the outwardly-charming Spanish Colonial village of Chimayó, New Mexico, stands the ancient Santuario de Chimayó, a world-renowned shrine conveniently situated a quick drive north of Santa Fe.  Thousands of visitors--among them the faithful and curious as well as legions of tourists--explore the quaint community each week, drawn to it by the chapel’s “healing soil,” nearby shops laden with museum-quality folk art, a converted hacienda offering gracious patio dining, and high-desert scenery straight from an artist’s easel.  Chimayó and the surrounding Española Valley, have also gained a reputation as the “Black Tar Heroin-Death Capital of the World.” The story of these two worlds is told in Lower Road by James A. Scarborough.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 1, 2005
• ISBN: 9781420874310

James A. Scarborough

The author is a well known criminal defense attorney and former New Mexico Supreme Court Justice. Scarborough tells the true story of a Chimayó drug-dealer’s murder and the people in that conflicted community tied to it.  The author defended one of the accused.  Included in the text are riveting, verbatim accounts of principals in the story, taken from interviews with them conducted by the author or taken from court records. Scarborough’s work examines the drug culture in the rural communities neighboring aloof and trendy Santa Fe through the eyes of junkies, traffickers, cops, court personnel, addiction-treatment providers and others. 

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© 2005 James A. Scarborough. All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/14/2020

ISBN: 978-1-4208-7430-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4208-7431-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

T.A.

The Early Years

The High Road To Taos

Competing Claims

Death In Chimayó

Drugs, War & Transition In

Northern New Mexico

Tijerina, Zapata, Cuauhtemoc

Convictions Count

The Eyewitness

The Alibi Defense

The War On Drugs

No Time Wasted

One Alternative

An Important Interview

Courts

A New Direction

An Argument For Change

About Several Addicts

Drug Policy Statements

Others Speak Out

Eli Explains

The Alhambra Murder

Moving On

Delancey Street

The Numbers

Amistad

Smack City

Leland Speaks

The Greg Roybal Trial

Heroin, Chicago & Chimayó

Mama Dora

Probation Officer Romero

Pastor Mike

Connie Vigil

Valerie, White Supremecy & Delancey

Put Up Or Shut Up

Tafoya, Garland, Limbaugh

Felicia

The Wrath Of God

Department Of Health & Phillip Fiuty

Winding Down

Conclusion

Postscript

About The Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank

Barbara Riley and Jake Arnold

for their advise in writing Lower Road.

T.A.

As Eli began to speak, the two of us were alone, sitting across from each other in the guard’s muster room at the back of the Rio Arriba County Detention Center in the remote, unincorporated village of Tierra Amarilla, a rapidly disappearing assemblage of wilted, crumbling, mostly-abandoned, pre-statehood homes and storefronts ringing the county courthouse, the construction of which was completed in 1918.

Tierra Amarilla is boxed in by mountains and mesas. On the north and east are the southernmost peaks of the San Juan Range of the Rocky Mountains.

To reach Tierra Amarilla from Santa Fe, traveling along an old Indian path, now a highway, one first passes through Española and Abiquiú.

The Territorial Legislature designated Tierra Amarilla the Rio Arriba County seat in 1880. The county takes its name from its high elevation in the upper watersheds of the Rio Grande and its principal tributary of the region, the Rio Chama, which rises a half-day’s horse ride from Tierra Amarilla and flows down through Abiquiú to its confluence with the Rio Grande at Española.

Belying its name, the countryside around Tierra Amarilla is anything but yellow. But the Spanish Colonial settlers saw lushness of the environs as a golden opportunity.

Nobody calls the county seat Tierra Amarilla. In the local argot, it is always T.A.

Even after the principal county offices moved to Española after T.A.’s decline, that village remained the official county seat as a lingering reminder of its onetime prominence and its eighteenth century Spanish Colonial/Mexican Era heritage, as did the county courthouse, which formerly accommodated the old jail on its ground floor.

In the new detention center, Eli and I sat barely a foot apart on the west end of an oddly shaped oval wooden table, obviously designed and thoughtfully crafted for service elsewhere and then requisitioned as an afterthought for use in the muster room.

Eli was physically restrained by handcuffs, a belly chain, and ankle bracelets. Not that he was dangerous—he wasn’t. It is detention center policy that inmates be so restrained during the few contact-visits allowed.

T.A., a world of its own, situated eighty-five meandering highway miles north of Santa Fe, is within sight of the Colorado borderland, just beyond and rising above the village of Chama, New Mexico, another fifteen miles to the north. Santa Fe, of a world charmed by galleried streets and tourist-choked walkways, straddled by interchangeable, look-alike vendors hawking ever-more exotic wares, accurately informs even the most casual observer of the disparity between those worlds.

Santa Fe’s affluence, marked by the presence of an international community of worldly wise artists-in-residence and the multitude of tourists that seek them out, contrasts sharply with the entrenched poverty and rural isolation that grips much of Rio Arriba County. Although wealth in the city to the south accentuates poverty in the countryside to the north, the gulf that separates the two communities goes far beyond rich and poor, have and have-not. For many, the real difference between these two attached, but very different worlds has to do more with that uncharted space between hope and despair, living and dying.

The town of Taos, to some a reflection in miniature of Santa Fe, and the world-famous Taos Indian Pueblo nearby are eighty unpopulated miles to the east of T.A. The highway and bridge across the Rio Grande Gorge linking those communities was only completed in 1965.

Prior to that time, as the mountains and gorge blocked the most direct route, motorists traveling from T.A. to Taos had to go up to Colorado, head east over a pass, and then come back down south or else drop down to the Española Valley of the Rio Grande, keeping in sight of the lesser Rio Chama most of the way, and then head upstream again, north along the greater river.

The courthouse, a four-pillared, three-story edifice with white trim and mustard plaster, is a sad reminder of the village’s former glory days as a center of trade and social intercourse on the western fringes of the Old Santa Fe Trail corridor, days when multitudes of people traveled scores of miles to the courthouse on foot, by horseback, or on wagon to observe or participate in celebrated criminal trials—much as their descendants today drive the one hundred and fifty miles to Albuquerque for a popular sporting event.

Today, the courthouse is considered historic by its woefully inadequate period architecture and fading fame as the site of a 1967 uprising by Hispanos in Northern New Mexico, bent on repossessing large tracts of grazing and forest lands lost by their ancestors in the years following the Mexican-American War of 1846-48.

Most of the original business and residential structures that surrounded the courthouse have long since disappeared, some bulldozed into oblivion, while those that remain suffer advanced stages of deterioration.

The recently-constructed Rio Arriba County Detention Center in T.A. stands behind a cluster of starkly modern and decidedly unattractive county government buildings across the street from the old courthouse on the hacienda site.

Sharpened, spiny loops of razor wire bristle atop the ten-foot-high chain-link fence that safeguards the inmate entrance to the facility and sparkles in the high-country sunlight.

One of the few reminders of the town’s fashionable, but long-since vanished, past was a dignified, colonial-style hacienda located across the old town plaza from the courthouse.

Its elegant, shaded verandas enclosed a courtyard, in the center of which was a deep and hand-hewn fresh-water well. The residence was unceremoniously erased from the landscape a decade ago, bulldozed into a heap of rubble and carted off, following the death of a child who died following a fall into the well.

The county houses most of its prisoners in T.A., while others have been in a now-closed municipal facility in Española, the county’s dominant city, a long hour’s journey away by motor vehicle, when the county detention center is full. A few inmates are farmed out to facilities in surrounding counties, principally for reasons of security.

A sizable population of young male addicts is incarcerated in T.A. for an array of drug-related criminal activity and other offenses. It is unlikely that any of the addicts will receive meaningful treatment for their addiction while jailed. According to an August 15, 2003, report by the New Mexico Department of Health (ADAM/CSAT Coordinating Report), seven of one hundred and eight adult male inmates interviewed for the study had previously spent one night in some sort of a mental-health facility. But only two of those had been admitted to a residential drug-treatment program during the preceding year.

Brenda Eyman, a detention center employee, coordinates inmate visitations with family members at scheduled intervals. During approved visitations, inmates are denied physical contact with visiting relatives, but view each other through a thick, security-glass window and speak through an intercom system that records their every word.

A uniformed guard ushered Eli into the muster room, closed the door, and waited in the adjacent corridor as we conversed. As I am an attorney, we were allowed to speak with no physical barrier between us. I also brought along a tape recorder.

The system had shifted Eli back and forth between detention and treatment facilities since his felony conviction for aggravated battery in July, 2000. Eli is five feet, eight inches tall. A shaft of thick, black hair, which he shaves from time to time, dusts his dark, brooding eyes.

Both arms are tattooed and deeply blemished. Eli looks and acts like a seasoned convict, and was back in jail after having been expelled from a drug treatment program. When we visited, he was sober and, by his own account, off drugs.

Eli had become institutionalized. At times, he expressed doubt about his ability to survive on the streets.

Eli experienced a measure of respect behind bars that was denied to him on the outside. The bars behind which Eli spent a great deal of his time served as a great equalizer, and gave him the opportunity to compete for status among a rather select peer group. There was no competition for jobs, clothes, income, or cars. None of that. Inside the detention center, Eli stood tall, a man among men.

Anthony Valdez and Bidal Candelaria ran the county detention center. Both have been on the job for decades. They know all the inmates by name and treat each of them with respect. In short order, Eli gained the trust of his custodians, and, from time to time, they would release him from jail on work details, but it was not long before he was back in lockdown. In the spring of 2004, Eli’s trustee status was revoked when he found himself the target of an internal investigation, suspected of conspiring to bring drugs into the detention center when he returned from work release. There was little evidence to prove the charge, and Eli feared that authorities were trying to set him up.

While T.A. today remains, if only technically, the seat of Rio Arriba County, its heyday as a mile-and-a-half-high hub of commerce and culture on a spur of the Santa Fe Trail came to an end more than a hundred years ago.

Back then, large herds of sheep and a few cattle grazed in hundreds of isolated, pristine, high-country valleys, fringed by snow-capped peaks from which silvery threads of crystal-clear water gushed with each spring thaw.

Today T.A. is a distant and frail counterweight to the populous Española Valley at the other end of the county.

With the growth of the Española to the south, after the now-defunct Chile Line of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad bypassed T.A. in the 1880s and made Spana (as legions of gang members call Española today) the narrow-gauge carrier’s major stop between Colorado and Santa Fe, the county seat was largely shuttered and eliminated as the focal point of the county’s meager economic and political power.

From Española, a lower road takes a northerly route, skirting the Indian Pueblo of San Juan and the unincorporated villages of Alcalde, Los Luceros, and Velarde, serving as a black-topped link between the trendy, upscale tourist Mecca of Santa Fe to the south, and the arty, rustic, day-trip destination of Taos, which draws visitors of that same ilk.

Although it is at a crossroads, few tourists stop in Española on their way to Taos. Fewer still stop in T.A. on their way to Chama, another day-trip destination, after taking the other prong when the highway from Santa Fe forks in Española. Gritty and intentionally ridden—successfully for the most part—of any ambiance suggesting historical or architectural significance in the community, Española straddles an invisible line separating Rio Arriba County on the northwest from Santa Fe County on the southeast.

Adjacent to both those counties on the west is the state’s only metro-government city/county, Los Alamos, carved out of them to create a new unit of local government at the federal government’s request; to provide an insular organ of local administration and isolate the national laboratory of the same name from traditional New Mexico politics at the end of World War II.

Española, its name commemorating Spanish settlers of the late sixteenth century, sprawls for several miles along both banks of the Rio Grande, which plummets precipitously down from the Colorado Rockies through the gorge west of Taos, and then fans out in the Española Valley as it struggles to reach the waters of the Gulf at the estuary marking the eastern end of the international border between the United States and Mexico, a thousand river-miles away.

The operational model for delivery and distribution of Mexican black-tar heroin in the Española Valley has changed very little over time; heroin is transported north across the international border between Mexico and the United States by Mexican drug dealers and their couriers. Once in New Mexico, one of four states along that border, the drug is cut and then distributed locally by an army of small-time pushers, most of them junkies. Competition can be quite fierce at all levels. Drug turf battles are not waged in the courts of the land, but on the streets, where disputed accounts are quickly and violently settled. Where illegal drugs go, prostitution, thievery, and murder follow in short order.

Drug-driven street prostitution in the city of Española and the surrounding valley is hard to ignore, even for the totally disengaged tourists who find themselves ensnared by local traffic congestion on both prongs of the fork connecting it to Taos and T.A. Sickly, emaciated, young women openly troll city streets during the middle of the day and continue to ply their trade in the late afternoon and early evening hours when home-bound Española Valley workers return from Santa Fe and Los Alamos. Most suffer from advanced stages of afflictions wrought by their addictions.

Streetwise hookers flashing hand-painted signs reading, Will Work, can occasionally be spotted on busy street corners and the entrance to Wal-Mart’s parking lot. They sell themselves, completing the transaction in the seats of cars and pickup trucks, turning quick tricks for a twenty dollars or a fix.

Their income barely covers the overhead—makeup and clothes—and rarely takes the edge off the craving that drove them to the streets. Frantically, they move along the curb or through the lanes of traffic, flaunting their shopworn bodies to prospective customers.

Some stand and stare, gap-mouthed, at passersby as they work on the edge of night to acquire their next interlude from the pain visited on them by virtue of their addiction.

THE EARLY YEARS

The early years of Eli’s life appeared on the surface to have been rather ordinary. The details of a court-ordered psychological evaluation, when he was a twenty-year-old convicted felon in 2001, inform us that Eli was raised in a loving, drug-free family. His grandfather had been gainfully employed in Los Alamos, and had retired. Living with his wife on a modest pension, they owned their own residence.

Neither grandparent had a history of alcohol or drug abuse. According to the court evaluation, Eli had been taken away from his mother, Elaine Geraldine Sanchez. His maternal grandparents adopted him when he was twelve. Eli is hesitant to criticize his mother, but he has admitted that she partied a lot, doing all that stuff with her friends.

Elaine provided Eli with two brothers, both younger: Derrick, twenty-three at the time of my interview with Eli, and Aaron, then nineteen.

Derrick is a convicted felon and is presently serving a lengthy sentence in the state penitentiary for drug-related crimes.

Somehow, the youngest of Elaine’s sons, Aaron, managed to escape the ravages of drug addiction. Aaron moves about, living with his mother or friends and working part time at odd jobs.

Eli’s psychological evaluation ended on a discordant note: [Eli] does not think he needs to make any changes in his life.

Eli is just one of the seven thousand injection-drug users in New Mexico (a statistic promulgated by the state Department of Health), about 4.4 percent of the state’s total population of 1.6 million.

A disproportionately large number of those users reside in the Española Valley, which includes Chimayó and other unincorporated communities in Rio Arriba, Santa Fe, and Taos Counties with roughly a twenty-mile radius of the confluence of the Rio Chama and the Rio Grande at the Indian Pueblo of San Juan, just north of downtown Española.

Injecting heroin with a dirty needle causes endocarditis, a long-term, life-threatening condition that damages the heart and makes the addict susceptible to HIV, hepatitis A, and hepatitis C.

Eli Sanchez is an injection-drug user; a skin-popper. Skin-popping is the subcutaneous injection of drugs. Some addicts skin-pop when they can no longer find a willing vein. Their veins have been scarred, collapsed, or destroyed by repeated injections. Others skin-pop so the drug is absorbed more slowly and produces a mellow, longer-lasting effect. And some skin-pop small amounts of heroin to reduce the risk of overdosing.

Being right-handed, Eli pops heroin under the skin of his left forearm. As a consequence of this practice, the surface of Eli’s left forearm is devastated. What remains is a swarm of dry, shriveled, cratered, purple blemishes and eruptions.

Eli speaks:

My name is Eli Sanchez. I am a chronic heroin addict, and have been since I was twelve years old. I was born twenty-four years ago on July 28, 1978. I live in Rio Arriba County, New Mexico, which is known as the black-tar heroin-death capital of the world.

The heroin habit is all I got. The heroin habit is all I’m left with. Today, all I want is to kick my drug habit, but I can’t. My drug habit is a disease that lives here within me. I am an addict because of decisions I made.

I started using heroin on my own, when I was twelve years old. No one forced drugs on me. I live for my drug habit. I got nothing else to live for. I nurse my drug habit. I care for my drug habit.

All I want is my next fix. I love my drug habit. That’s all I think about. There are lots of times I wish I was dead. I wish I was dead right now. Even when I’m stoned, I wish I was dead. I can’t live with my drug habit and I can’t live without it.

At the age of twelve, the judge gave me a choice to live with my mother or my grandparents. Elaine would leave me alone with babysitters or with my grandparents. My grandparents saw that and took me home with them. I already had two little brothers, seven and eight. I told the judge I did not want to live with my mother because I did not like the kind of lifestyle she was living, so I stayed with my grandparents.

Mom drank heavily, but at that time she did not do any drugs that I knew of. She was seventeen when I was born, but my mom and dad never married. They just lived together.

I started doing drugs after I was adopted by my grandparents. I was twelve or thirteen years old at the time and in the seventh grade. I started hanging around with some friends there, my age, who were in the sixth or seventh grade. I started hanging around with my neighbors, the kids there on the street where I grew up. As we got older we started getting further from the house.

My grandparents bought me a three-wheeler. I had two of them, a Yamaha and a Honda. Riding, I got to go a lot further from the house, meeting other kids, riding back there in the hills behind the house, there on the west side of town. I met other people, kids like me, some older ones, too. So I started hanging around with them, too.

I remember one person I met. His name was Max Padilla. I asked him where he lived. He says he lives in Baquita Land. Where’s Baquita Land? I asked.

Right there by the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. I’m your neighbor just down the road, he said.

Let’s go down there. I want to see where you live.

Since we’re going to my house, I got to show you something, he said.

We went over there to his house to show me. He had, like, a green house out back, behind the house. We went in there and I noticed a bunch of plants.

Check this out, he said. I been growing these.

What are they? I asked. There were plants all over the place.

Yeah, these, he said, and he started to giggle. He showed me a plant and I asked him, what’s that?

That’s pot, he tells me. Want to try some? he says.

I had never tried pot before, I said.

You’ll like it, he said.

But I got something better.

Just then there was a knock on the door. It was his mom.

Get out of there, she said. I left real scared.

Then we seen a cousin of his named Freddie. This guy, he was older than me, and, ah, he looked like real messed-up… ah, he had his eyes closed and I could see like I thought this guy is real drunk, or something. That’s when he called me and Max over.

Look, you guys are teenagers. It’s time you guys know something about life, he goes. How to enjoy life and how to feel good, he tells me.

This will take away all your worries and all your problems. Those words I’ll never forget. This will take away all your pain and all your worries and problems.

If only I had known then what I was getting into.

What is it? I asked.

He opened up one hand and showed me some black stuff. In the other hand he had some brown, powdery stuff.

This is black-tar heroin and this powder is some good synthetic stuff, he told me.

This is going to take away all, everything, he told me.

So Max tried it. I seen him. He got a needle and stuck it in his arm.

Oh, no, I don’t want none of that, I said.

Okay, then let’s smoke a joint.

So, okay, I smoked a joint with him.

Does that joint taste funny? he goes.

Yeah, it tastes pretty funny, why?

How do you feel? he goes.

I don’t feel nothing, I said. Just happy, I told him.

Well, that joint that you just smoked is called a ‘lazy,’ he tells me.

You just smoked one. That joint had two papers on it that had heroin on it

I started freaking out. When he told me that, my body went like…I was like in shock. I had heroin in my system and I didn’t know what to do.

Just calm down, he goes. It’s not going to do you nothing.

I was freaking out. I thought what was happening was the weed was getting me paranoid. Then I started feeling real heavy, and he told me come here.

That’s when he mixed up some stuff and burnt it in the spoon, which was the brown powder stuff.

Here, snort this, he said. And I snorted it.

Sure enough, it took away the high of the pot and everything, and I started feeling a tingling feeling, like I was floating.

Freddie was about…I was thirteen years old at the time…he was about twenty-five. He was from the neighborhood. He lived on the next street off Baquita Land. This was the first time I had met him. I had seen him before, but this was the first time that I had met him.

Where do you live?

…On that side, I told him, pointing to the south.

Oh, you live on the good side of the West Side, he said.

Do you think you can come up with some money? I can sell you some parts for that motorcycle of yours.

Yeah, as a matter of fact I need some tires, I told him.

Next day, I went over with forty dollars. I had told my grandfather I needed forty dollars for tires. My grandfather and my grandmother, they trusted me. My grandfather had a good job at Los Alamos, and he always gave me money.

They loved me like… I was their favorite. They put me on top of all their kids. They put me first. Still, to this day, they’ll do anything in the world for me. Especially my grandmother. My grandma will do anything for me. They gave me the money.

I went to Max’s and asked him where Freddie lived. Then I went to Freddie’s. He sold me the tires.

Well, he says, I charged you a little bit too much. Here’s a little piece of heroin so you can snort it.

The day before, when I had done it, I felt real good. It took away the high off the weed, and it made me feel real tingly, like I was floating.

I did it again and told him, wow, this is better than sex.

It is, huh? he said.

I think it is, I said.

…Little by little I started getting money here and there, little jobs that I would do when I was working at fast foods and stuff.

I did drugs cause I wanted to. Nobody made me.

Every time I would get paid… I would go over there and buy a twenty.

Little by little, after a week, I started getting real sick to my stomach.

I called Max and asked him what he was doing.

…what are you doing? I go.

Nothing, I’m just here.

Are you going to school, tomorrow? I asked, him.

Yeah, he said.

I’m not…I’m real sick.

Sick?

I feel like…there are snakes inside my stomach biting at me with their teeth. I’m sweating and I’m cold at the same time.

Ooohhh, he goes. You just went through the Marias, he said.

What the hell are Marias?…

Withdrawals, he goes. You’re sick from the drugs that you just bought from Freddie…

Really? It gets you this sick, I asked. I don’t think so. I feel like I’m dying.

I’ll be there in about five minutes, Max said. And you’ll feel much better………

Sure enough, Max was up to my house in about five minutes. With a needle in his hand, knocking at my door.

Hide that, I said. Real quick. My grandma and grandpa are here.

He put it in his pocket, like that, and then we went to my room.

Lie down, he goes. Close your eyes, give me your arm and close your fist………

So I closed my fist and I lie down and I give him my arm and he shot me up with heroin. That was the first time I shot up with heroin. Wow! It took away all the feelings and everything and I was like, God, this is really good. That was the first time that I had shot up, you know. Ever since then, to this day, I have stayed hooked on heroin.

On July 29, 1999, Mom and I went to a birthday party for my cousin, Curtis Guinn, at the Cities of Gold Casino in Pojoaque. I was twenty-two years old on the twenty-eighth of July that same year.

Mom went off somewhere to talk to someone. Then she came back to our table and sat down with me. We had a few drinks, listened to the band, and danced together for a while. I noticed that my mother kept glancing over to a nearby table and that she made eye contact with some guy sitting there, but I didn’t think nothing of it. I had noticed that he was watching us, too. Pretty soon Mom motioned with her eyes for the man to come over to our table.

Come here, she seemed to say. Two men get up from the table at the same time and move in our direction. Still, it didn’t mean nothing to me. Neither man was known to me. The first one that got to our table asked me.

Do you know who I am? one man asked.

No, I replied.

I’m your uncle Andy, the first man said. Then he sat down with us.

This is Nicky, your father, my mother said as the second man reached our table.

I was caught off-guard by her statement. I had never seen my father before that day.

I was surprised a second time when he greeted me in a friendly manner. I had thought about my father a lot over the years and had made up my mind I never wanted to meet him because of the way he abandoned me and my mom when I was just a little boy. He, too, sat down at our table.

Why don’t you two guys just both leave, I said. I don’t want you guys at my table. Why don’t you leave? This is a private birthday party, I said, and I don’t want you at my table.

No, no, no, no, Nicky tells me. I’m your father, he goes, and I’m very sorry that I never came to you in your younger years and was never part of your life.

I got real angry right away. I was very nervous meeting my father for the first time. I was shaking. The way I felt, I wanted to hit this guy. I wanted to sock him, because my grandparents had done so much for me all through my life, and then this guy shows up, just boom, out of the blue sky, and comes and says, I’m your father, and I want to be a part of your life.

My cousin was there at the table with me. He looks at me and says don’t go do nothing stupid. Don’t fight or nothing. Just kick back and let’s see what happens.

So Nicky stayed there at the table with us. Pretty soon he ordered us a few drinks and we drank them with him. That makes us both relax a little. Then all of a sudden he just began to cry and he couldn’t stop.

He started telling me how sorry he was for not being a part of my life. It hurt me a lot to hear