Original Gangster: A True Story about the Man Who Founded the Bloods (The Stacks Reader Series)

By Paul Solotaroff

T. Rodgers created the infamous L.A. street gang the Bloods and helped introduce crack to America. Later, chastened, Rodgers set out to end the madness.

Including an interview with the author by imprint editor Alex Belth.

The Stacks Reader Series highlights classic literary non-fiction and short fiction by great journalists that would otherwise be lost to history—a living archive of memorable storytelling by notable authors. Curated by Alex Belth and brought to you by The Sager Group, with support from NeoText (www.NeoTextCorp.com).

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Sager Group
• Release date: Feb 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781950154807

Paul Solotaroff

Paul Solotaroff has been a senior writer at Rolling Stone for thirty years (and at Men’s Journal for almost twenty). He broke the NFL concussion scandal, the Aaron Hernandez story, the horror-show conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital and has written a series of stories that helped free innocent men who were doing life without parole in state prisons. Winner of the National Press Club Award, two Genesis Awards and a dozen selections to the Best American Sportswriting anthologies, he is a Pulitzer Prize and National Magazine Award finalist, as well as the best-selling author of four books. More recently, he has been the creator/producer of prestige docu-series: Free Meek (Amazon); How to Fix a Drug Scandal (Netflix); USA vs El Chapo (Facebook Watch), and the Sundance-winning 3 1⁄2 Minutes.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

I’m a wiseass by nature. I can’t help it. That’s the other legacy of being brought up Jewish on the Upper West side in a literary environment. You learn to be funny. My favorite writers use comedy as another way to explore tragedy. It’s the other side of horror. I write about the horror of corruption . . . so humor becomes a way to counter the heaviness, even the self-righteousness at times. You want that balance.

Although he grew up around some of the most celebrated literary fiction writers of the twentieth century, including his father, Paul Solotaroff found his idiom in literary nonfiction and turned it into his own brand of advocacy journalism. He is nothing if not a pugilistic writer; his work is animated by rage and righteousness. The stories themselves, says Solotaroff, are a form of vengeance.

This was true in Dead Boys, his first big story for the Village Voice in 1988, a jarring investigation into the molestation and prostitution of young crack-addicted boys who hung around the waterfront on the far west end of Manhattan. And it remained true throughout a career that took Solotaroff to GQ in the early nineties and then to Rolling Stone for the next thirty years, with plenty of appearances in Wenner media’s sister publication, the slick and writerly Men’s Journal. We feel his undiminished outrage through the years in his stories about the sickening world of puppy mills; the fentanyl epidemic; the interpreters left behind in Afghanistan; the history of violence within the Chicago Police Department; the sordid case of former NFL star Aaron Hernandez; and Black men wrongfully imprisoned, such as rap star Meek Mill and Tony Wright, who served twenty-five years before he was exonerated of a crime he did not commit.

Solotaroff’s tough, unflinching stories are written in a stripped-down, muscular prose that wastes no time with subtleties. But Solotaroff doesn’t just run on adrenaline; his stories are laced with humor—and he’s done less traumatic stories, too, including traditional magazine profiles of athletes, Dez Bryant, James Harrison, and Hector Camacho. He’s also capable of hitting tender, melancholy notes, such as in the devastating Men’s Journal portrait of Dave Duerson, a former star with the Chicago Bears who killed himself. Nowhere has the mix of outrage and compassion come together with greater success than in Solotaroff’s various stories about the challenges of raising his autistic son, Luke, now a young man in his twenties.

Solotaroff is forever telling stories about people who are marginalized or ignored, forever at the ready for the fight. He’s all heart.

—Alex Belth

Alex Belth: As the eldest son of a writer and editor in the New York literary world, were you destined to be a writer? Was it the family business?

Paul Solotaroff: If by family business you mean being in lifelong therapy and a having deepening sense of alienation, not just from the profession I was bred into, but also from my nuclear family members, then, yes, I was born into the family business. My father was in the New York literary mix, as an editor. Philip Roth was at the dinner table, Norman Mailer was at the dinner table, Bernard Malamud, Ralph Ellison, Bobbie Ann Mason, Sue Miller. My mother translated Tolstoy to make a living, which is to say she did not make a living, although my brother Ivan and I continue to get