The epic saga of a city within a city, and the man who came to define its most volatile era.
Harlem in the 1960s was in the headwinds of a revolution – both political and criminal – that would inevitably intertwine. The war in Vietnam was dividing a nation, Black power was finding its voice, and a new generation of gangsters were ready to step into the spotlight.
Coming off the era of classic gangsters like Bumpy Johnson, men like Nicky Barnes, Frank Lucas, Frank Matthews, and Guy Fisher, seized on the heroin habit of soldiers returning from the jungles of Southeast Asia to create a new syndicate and build a Black empire never before seen in the United States.
Lou Simms was born into this Harlem tumult, the youngest of ten siblings. To put food on the table, his older siblings went into the streets, partnered with the pros, became legends in the neighborhood, and brought their work home with them, meaning Lou was given a crash-course in crime as soon as he could walk.
By the age of twelve, he had his first crew. A few years later, he was helping his older brothers run the hottest corner drug spots in Harlem.
In 1982, at the age of seventeen, he caught his first state bid.
When Lou was released in 1988, history had turned the page and the relatively organized heroin era was over. The Wild West had descended over Harlem. Crack was king; lawlessness ruled the street; entire neighborhoods resembled the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse; teenagers like Rich Porter, Alpo Martinez, and Azie Fasion became overnight millionaires with targets on their backs; and veteran gangsters like Clarence “Preacher” Heatley employed unimaginable brutality to ensure they got their piece of pie and didn’t get left behind.
And to accompany a new wave of criminal, a new type of sound was necessary, one offered by homegrown super entrepreneurs like Sean Combs and Damon Dash, who seized on the energy and took hip-hop from the streets to the covertly gangster-corporate boardroom, which proved just as dangerous.
All in all, the Crack years were a volatile mix of lightning-fast cash and stratospheric fame that rewrote the complex heroin-era rulebook and distilled it down to one point:
Might makes right.
Lou thrived in the new Harlem, reigned supreme with his partner Charles “Fat Leon” Brown. They combined forces to reign over a crack operation that would expand past 142nd Street to include Louisiana, Alabama, and Delaware to name a few. But when that kind of money is being made by regular citizens, it’s only a limited time before the politicians get involved. And they want their cut, or they want it all.
A lesson Lou Simms would learn the hard way, first taken advantage of by local politicians and community leaders looking to gentrify Harlem, and ultimately by the top attorney in the land – Janet Reno – and her boss President Bill Clinton, who gave the approval to sentence Lou to death in the state of New York to serve their own interests.
This is the story of how he survived…
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Nicholas Mennuti is the writer of the espionage thriller Weaponized (Mulholland Books/Little Brown), which had film rights purchased by Universal Pictures and Scott Stuber and Scrap (NeoText). Nicholas's short stories have appeared in AGNI and Conjunctions, and he has written about the intersection of technology and entertainment for the Huffington Post. He is also a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts Dramatic Writing program.
Louis Griffin (aka Lou Simms) was born in 1965, the youngest of ten brothers and sisters. To put food on table, his older siblings went into the Harlem streets, and became stars. By the age of twelve, Lou had followed in their footsteps, developing a reputation for fearlessness and loyalty.
But it was in the late 1980s, an era of speed and violence, when Crack was king, that Lou tasted fame, made his own name, and stood out from his siblings. He thrived in the new Wild West with his partner Charles “Leon” Brown, and together they ruled over a multi-million-dollar, multi-state drug operation that would expand past 142nd Street to include Louisiana, Alabama, and Maryland, just to name a few.
The FBI would call their crew “The Lynch Mob”; Harlem would call them some of the greatest hustlers of all time; the DOJ and federal courts would call Lou Simms a clear and present danger and sentence him to the death penalty in 1995, an unjust verdict he would overcome by acting as his own attorney.
Today, Lou Simms is a devoted father and grandfather, a devout Muslim, and a living example of a street legend who held it down while doing twenty-five years of hard time.
