The Long Yellow Line
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Unique life scrapbook
This book is amazing. When I was coming up in the game, if you were into cars, flyness, and taking it to the next level and you did not know Will Castro, you were going to hear about him soon; his work speaks very loudly. It inspires me. He’s part of hip-hop culture. Just start with all the whips he did with Busta Rhymes. I remember once seeing an eighteen-wheeler filled with Busta’s amazing cars, and they were all Will Castro builds. Eventually, Will and I connected through Fat Joe. All the cars that Will built for Joe thrilled me. Will started by putting rims on my Escalade. Then, from there, we upgraded to foreign cars—we started getting into the Rolls-Royce world, the Bentley world, the Phantom world. And I found as we were doing all this together that his customer service was unbelievable. He’ll get on an airplane and fly to you just to have a conversation. Will Castro was born to pop up. Whether I have a car to work on or not, he’s there with something to represent his brand. Will is hip-hop. And his customers are always satisfied. I don’t even want to call them customers. They’re more like his family friends. And I know for a fact that if I need Will, he’ll come through for me and for his friends. Every time.
Hip-hop people express their success in different ways. For me, I like to project happiness and how blessed I feel to have made it in the game. And sometimes we like to treat ourselves with a beautiful car. And what is more beautiful than a Rolls-Royce touched by Will Castro? What I love in my cars and what Will always gives me is a clean interior. Everything gotta be fly: the paint, the rims, the stereo. Sitting in a clean interior with a white T-shirt and jeans is like putting on a pair of brand-new sneakers straight out of the box. And that’s the thing, Will knows our life, and so he knows the presentation we need inside these cars. Sometimes, he gives us too much presentation, and then we have to do a million shows to keep up with what Will is bringing. But he’s bringing it. There’s nothing we can do to stop him.
DJ Khaled
Miami, Florida
Writing this book wasn’t all that easy for me. It brought up a lot of memories I would rather have forgotten. But I decided early on that if I was going to write down my life’s story, I had to do it openly and honestly. I had to be willing to look at what I’d done wrong in my life and own it. And it hasn’t all been terrible. In fact, so much of it has been so great, I had to write a book! Going through my life has brought back to mind phenomenal moments that I’d not thought about in decades, especially of my childhood spent on the streets and in the projects of New York. I hope that if you get anything out of my life’s journey so far, it’s something about persistence in the face of tough odds. It’s about never, ever giving up, even when you’re down on the mat and the ref is two slaps into his three count. If you get up and keep fighting, you never know what’s around the corner. And just having a chance to get around the corner is a blessing from God. Keep going. You won’t get anywhere if you don’t keep steering down that road. Just make sure you have some nice rims as you roll!
Will Castro
It was a Sunday afternoon, just like any other, when the doorbell rang at my house in 2008. I got up to answer it, walking away from the football game on TV. The second that I opened that door, my life changed forever, and I would experience the darkest times I ever knew. And I had no idea yet. Before that doorbell went off, I was on top of the world. I was living the American dream. I had a house, a wife, and a fabulous daughter named Paige. We were living large. At home, I had a personal chef cooking for us every night. I had a hit TV show on Speed called Unique Whips and a new one on Spike TV. I had a star-studded, celebrity client list that wanted me to customize car after car for them. My clients were guys like Busta Rhymes, Erick Sermon, P. Diddy, LeBron James, and Jeff Gordon. I even hung out with Donald Trump at Trump Tower long before he won the presidency. (Trump in my day was a New York businessman a lot of people admired.) I was at the top of my game. I was successful and smart. And now I had to answer the door. When I did, I’d figure out fast how not successful and not smart I really was.
“The second that I opened that door, my life changed forever.”
Two federal officers were on the other side, one man and one woman, dressed in dark suits. They had gold badges and guns. Seeing them was like getting hit by a Maybach on a reckless Sunday joyride. I immediately thought to myself, I got a problem.
“Do you mind if we talk in the house, Mr. Castro?”
I showed them into my spacious and comfortable home, past the huge saltwater fish tank, past the large-screen TV, through the kitchen, and out to the landscaped backyard with the patio furniture and high-end gas grill. Looking back, I probably should have just walked out the front door, shut it behind me, and talked to them on the porch. But it was too late for that. They were in my house, and they saw all the material things and creature comforts that we had.
Will’ s Long Island house which was visited by federal agents
They wanted to talk about back taxes and the fact that I had not filed a tax return with the IRS in a few years. I’ve replayed this day in my head a thousand times. They had me there. And why had I not done what every American was supposed to do when they were making the kind of money I was, giving Uncle Sam his fair share? I was naïve, stupid, and dumb. It’s that simple.
You gotta understand, I was a kid from the LaGuardia public projects on the Lower East Side of Manhattan growing up in the 1970s and ’80s. In my neighborhood, you made a buck, you kept a buck. That’s it. Nobody thought about taxes, and everyone used cash. It’s no excuse. I had a mom who worked hard every day of her life in a dental practice. I had a step-dad who had a good job with Con-Ed, the electrical company in New York. But when I struck gold with my business, I was thinking the way I learned to on the streets. My money is my money. Or, more importantly, I was not thinking. I had a big business with lots of employees, and I paid them all in cash at the end of the week. They appreciated that, and nobody ever asked me why I did it that way. I never went to business school, but I was a businessman. Nobody ever told me about social security taxes and withholdings. I was about to learn the hard way. The TV show, Unique Whips, didn’t help me. The producers made me look like some kind of Tony Montana, an OG. I wasn’t. And the show I was doing for Spike TV didn’t help either. And the fact is, I wasn’t dirty. My business was legitimate. I just wasn’t paying all the withholding taxes for my employees on the incoming money, and, instead, I was supporting a lifestyle at home beyond my means.
“I never went to business school, but I was a businessman.”
As federal agents sat in my pool house, asking me questions that I really didn’t know how to answer, it was suddenly crashing down all around me. Before I knew it, I was going to have my lawyers telling me to choose from three different federal correctional facilities: one in New Jersey, one in Alabama, and one in North Carolina. Prison? It looked very much like I was headed
