384 Months

By Anthony Gonzalez

"I handed my $125K watch, $60K chain and my $7K earrings to the girls to take back to Virginia to a friend. It all didn't mean nothing without my freedom. I couldn't take it with me." How could a man who had the world as his playground while managing a platinum-selling rap group suddenly lose it all? Anthony "Geezy" Gonzalez writes in his own wo

• Language: English
• Publisher: Davon Gonzalez
• Release date: Jul 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986411590

Book preview

Intro - Miami: The Marlin Studio

I remember like it was yesterday. I was in the studio with Malice and Pusha T, known as The Clipse. They were working on their album, ’Til The Casket Drops with Pharrell on the boards. After a long layoff, the album was coming out on a different label that was known to be more versatile. The team was back.

Over the past few years with limited money coming in, I had hopped back in the game and was playing with fire. The hustlers on the street were looking at me like I was crazy when they heard I bought me a Bentley and a high rise with an ocean view in Miami. I showed no signs of slowing down.

I remember Twitter was in full effect at the time, and I was watching Pharrell play with his son before he queued up the track the guys were working on that day. I pulled out my Blackberry and tweeted, Pharrell's son looks just like his brother.  Pharrell looked up and said, Geezy, I know you didn’t just put that on Twitter, just as I had my thumb on the Tweet button. I knew I was wrong because people didn’t know about his kids, but the rumors were out there, and with me tweeting, it would have given some light to the truth. Pharrell was a private person and did not want anyone to know he had a son. I told him to relax and that I did not send it. I was The Clipse’s manager, and people would take what I had to say about Pharrell as the truth.  The entertainment business is all about what is real and what’s imaginary. Entertainers’ real lifestyles are not always as important as painting an imaginary one. Malice, the older brother of The Clipse, gave me this look like That’s show business, and said to me, Let’s take a walk. 

I grabbed my Backwoods out of the Bentley and a loud pack. Malice told me he was not smoking so I should leave it and we walked down Ocean Drive. We always joked and played around with each other, but it seemed like he had something on his mind. When Malice talks, you have to pay attention because he might ask you what he just said to make sure you were listening. I was getting ready to ask him what was wrong, and I saw him look at my $125K watch and he said, Money before rap, just like he would always tell me. Then he asked me if I thought my past would come back to haunt me because he remembered the days when I was knee deep in it in the late ‘90s and early 2000s before the record deal. He didn’t realize I had been landing 50 kilos a month in VA for the last two years. He had an idea, but he wasn’t sure. But now while they work on this next album, they need to be the music stars and that’s it. I was famous in the streets of Virginia Beach and Norfolk because they knew where most of my money came from and it was a long road to travel to get that kind of fame.

So, I looked Malice in the eyes and told him the truth. I know you’re far from crazy, but when you say the past, you know I stopped dealing in 2001 before the record deal. But I started up again when things got slow. So, when you say the past is coming back, it’s not as far back as you think. In the last seven or eight months, I’ve been on ice because the so-called connect, Pipe, has been missing. I explained that I had some people check up on him and they said the Feds got him. But that shouldn’t concern me because the Feds would never catch me dirty--or so I thought. Since hearing Pipe got caught, I planned to jump back on my manager duties for this next album.

I knew there was more on his mind and he was concerned about me, but as soon as I brought up the next album, he let me have it. He asked me if I believed in God. I do, but it’s hard to believe in something you can’t see and when you see bad things happen to people who deeply believe. He looked at me and told me to get my mind and soul right with God because I’m blessed. He said I was blessed and didn’t even know it because I survived this long. I was listening but I was thinking, this guy is bugging out. He doesn’t want to smoke and he’s talking about God. So, I asked him if that’s what he wanted to talk to me about because I wanted to roll this Backwood and focus on the promotion for the new album. He said, That’s one of the reasons I called you to walk, to let you know this might be my last album. Not only that, but when you do our show and tour dates, give me some down time so I can be with my family. I know Pusha doesn't mind doing shows every day. He’s not worried about coming home because he doesn’t have a wife and children. 

He went on. Plus, I just finished writing this book and when it comes out, I’m going to promote that and let my brother do his solo thing after this album. I feel this is what God wants me to do. I thought to myself, if this guy brings up God one more time, he’s definitely going to hell with all the crack rap talk he rhymes. But I gave him a hug like it was going to be my last time hugging him. He was like a big brother I never had who’s so smart in his choices. Even though we’ve had arguments and disagreements, I had a lot of respect for him and his brother. At that moment, I was feeling myself and thought I was on top of the world, but I couldn’t shake the feeling in my stomach that all eyes were on me. Returning to the studio, the brothers had a meeting with their publicist and asked me to leave the room while they talked to him. I didn’t think anything of it, so I bounced. The city of Virginia Beach had just shut down my night club, Encore, right before Christmas of 2008. Money was the only thing on my mind. Money was my God.

The day after the conversation, Malice and Pusha headed back to VA. They were going to come back to Miami later to finish the album. My cousin and I were going to stay in Miami at our high rise for a couple of days before returning to VA. Normally, I would party and spend money, which means I would stay there at least a week or even a month. However, that morning, I woke up to a ringing phone. I assumed it was my wife back in VA, who I had recently told about the condo and Bentley.

When I picked up the phone, it wasn’t my wife, but her brother, telling me they picked up my younger sister, her baby father, and they rammed their car into them to slow them down. Thankfully, my sister wasn’t hurt, but the next question was, Who are they? He said he didn’t know, and he was just informing me. I called Pusha but the voicemail came on, so I called Malice, who answered and said they just landed in VA and were still on the plane. I told him to let his brother know about my sister and her baby father because they were all very close. I told him to go bond them out.

As soon as I hung up, I got a call from my wife telling me she was on her way home from work early because her uncle called her to let her know that the police were at our crib in Chesapeake and they wanted to know if I was home because one of my cars was in the driveway. They contacted her uncle because I bought the house from him. So, I asked if it was just the police or a special kind of police? She told me she didn’t ask but was almost there and would call me back. I hung up and called her uncle, who let me know it was the FBI, DEA, ATF, and the regular Chesapeake police who had the house surrounded. They had my burgundy S550 Benz on a flatbed tow truck and were waiting for my wife to get home so they could take her new Avalon, but they hadn’t been in the house yet. I hung up when he told me my wife was pulling up, so I waited for her to call.

In the meantime, I walked from my bedroom to my living room where my cousin was playing the PS3 and smoking his morning blunt. I was talking out loud, so he heard everything unfolding. He cut his breakfast blunt short and waited with his eyes open wide. As soon as I hung up with my wife’s uncle, all my cousin could say was, Did they say they were looking for me? I told him, Nine times out of ten, if they grab others and are looking for me, then they want you, but let’s hope not. 

My wife called me back and told me she showed them where my safe behind the painting was and told them about the .40 caliber I kept under the bed. It was in my name and I had a concealed permit for it. They never would have found it, but my wife told them so they wouldn’t tear up the crib. She didn’t realize that they were going to ransack the house anyway, even though she was honest. Even if they didn’t ransack the house, my wife and three daughters weren't going to stay there anymore. My wife told me they wanted me to turn myself in and if I didn’t in a timely fashion, they were coming back to pick her up. I told my wife to call my cousin Pooh, who was the lawyer of the family, on three-way to see what my next move was going to be. As the phone rang, all I kept thinking about was, HOW DID I GET TO THIS POINT?

Chapter 1 - Bayside 

I attended Bayside Junior High, which was in Virginia Beach. Bayside was known for basketball and football, but the drug game overpowered the will to become greater than the environment.  Where I’m from, drugs and money were the things to have. Money opens doors. Even if you had a 100-yard game or dropped 50 on the court, once they saw that car or gold chain, it was a wrap. The best part of it was that people saw only what was in front of them, not the bigger picture. So, the car or the chain was all that mattered. It didn’t matter if the person could potentially cash in on their skills in the gym. This is how I got sidetracked from Bayside’s basketball, football, and track teams. Even though I helped take our team to the city championship in basketball as the starting point guard and helped win a city football championship, it was all the stuff outside of school that hooked me. By the time high school came around, I had the ball with that pack.

I used to stay with my grandmother so I could go to Bayside, not that my mother and stepdad didn’t want me. I had more friends and there was more action on Southgate Ave., which was across the street from the Bayside Arms neighborhood. My parents stayed out Twin Canal over by Green Run, where it was also going on. Sometimes, I would find plates of white powder and a straw under the couch. But at my grandmother’s, I would come home from basketball practice and stumble across my aunt’s husband counting more money than I ever saw in my life with five to ten white squares on the floor hanging out of a duffel bag. One time, I acted like I was cleaning up just so I could eavesdrop. He knew what I was doing. He counted out $250K. His name was Renee. He was Panamanian, but I thought he was GOD.

My grandmother used to go to work at 7:30 am and get home at 7:30 pm, unless she went to bingo, then she got home at 10:30 pm. That was the good thing about staying with her. So, Southgate was where I wanted to be and