# NYC GOONS 6 - COMPLETED SCRIPT

These streets don't play, son. These mean streets, you feel me? Step out for one decade, you might as well be enslaved. When'd you first get put on to the hustle, the crack cocaine game? Man, I can't even pinpoint the exact age, but it was early, real early. But yo, it turned into a full-blown business operation. You ain't never touch the product yourself? Nah, hell no. Crack? Never that. So you was a drug dealer? Fourteen years deep in the crack game, my g. Wait, what? Fourteen years pushing work? Yeah, fourteen year vet in the drug game, you heard? Fourteen years and he still counting. Who deserves freedom? That's my accountant right there. If you could run it back, would you still be a drug dealer? You think you'd still push work? No doubt. Was it worth it though? Yeah, for sure. It's a rush, you know what I'm saying? It's shocking to anybody, anybody who's really been deep in the trenches of the game. It's like a drug rush that gets you hooked. That's why it's such a dangerous field to be in, you understand? Dangerous occupation, but yo, that rush you get, like, 'cause it's do or die. You sitting up in the plug's crib and the whole spot gets raided and they might not get locked, they might not get hit, they just might start blasting. The whole thing was just a rush, straight up. What was your favorite part about it? You like counting that bread, you like cutting that work up? What was it, you like serving fiends? See, it's the rush, like it's the lifestyle, the whole package. It's the whole experience of just being in the game. It's almost like being a rapper, you know what I'm saying, 'cause you're a star with whatever talent you want to call it 'cause you're the big man in town.

Sean Carter, better known as Jigga, J. Hova, or just Jay-Z nowadays. The name echoes through the streets as one of the coldest rappers to ever touch a mic, the calculated businessman, and the husband of the baddest chick in the game. But before all the fame, the fortune, and the accolades, Jay-Z was just another kid from Brooklyn's Marcy Projects. Like mad kids from the projects, his story kicks off the same way—good student, doing his thing in school until his pops dipped out on the family. Left with this void inside him, young Jay-Z turned to the streets and his journey into the hustle began.

Your father, who you look like more? Your moms or your pops? My father, I really look just like him, that's why it broke my heart, you know what I'm saying? 'Cause as a kid, you look at your father like he's a superhero, you feel me? No one can beat your pops, right? So to have that person that I looked up to most in the world just remove himself from your life, that's some traumatic experience type shit. So you got all your male role models like the drug dealers around you, right? That's what happened. So after that, you start, but you know, navigating the streets and there's nobody else to guide you through the maze that is life inside those projects except for the drug dealers. So naturally you looking up to them, and that's how I got into the street life, you heard?

Now as a pre-teen with no father figure in the crib, drugs flooding all around the projects, it made it mad easy for Jay-Z to slide into the drug game. But how'd you actually get into the business though? Yo, it was fairly easy, you know what I'm saying? Growing up during that era, we gotta put the timeframe in perspective, we gotta remember what time we talking about. We talking about Reagan era diamonds, you feel me? We talking about when crack cocaine was everywhere, it just swallowed up everything. You could smell it in the hallways. You'd see them little empty vials scattered on the curb, floating by in the gutter water. It was just everywhere, so it wasn't difficult to get in. It was one conversation. It was my man who was my age. He introduced me to someone else who was maybe two years older than us. We had a conversation, and it was almost like a job interview, you know what I'm saying? Tell me about that. And he's like, yo, you gotta be serious about this. You can't be playing around with this. This is serious business. You gotta not get high on your own supply. That man he mentioned who put him on was DeHaven Irby.

Then DeHaven introduced me to the game, Spanish Jose introduced me to the connect. I'm a hustler now, I'm a Jay here, I'm posted on 59. I ain't no joke. He lived in my building at the time. It's a couple floors above me, but I'm on the block. I ain't no lie, man. The gangs used to have mad Marcy cats lined up. I'm going to the park, there's Jay standing in that line. Seeing Jay in the building, I'm like, yo, you go to the 168 school? He was like yeah. I'm like, yo, I see this cat on the fence all the time lined up, right? I told him, come on, screw it, walk with me. Hang with me, ain't nobody gonna fuck with you. Marcy said, yo, come on, screw it, walk with me, I'm saying, ain't nobody gonna fuck with you. This was third, fourth grade up in this neighborhood. This was it, this was the starting point, you know, right here I really met Jay.

Jay and his best friend were more like brothers than anything else. They was inseparable, doing everything together, even running a paper route. But soon that paper route shifted gears and became a drug route as they grew older and the hustle evolved. Jay's love for music never took a backseat though. One pivotal moment came during a talent show out in Queens where he performed in front of none other than LL Cool J, one of the judges that night. Went to a talent show and Jay did a battle up there and LL was there. LL was like, yo, you nice, right? Like he gave Jay his props right then and there, you feel me? This is before anything popped off, you know what I'm saying? Real talk, Jay won that joint, but they just gave it to a Queens dude anyway.

At that concert I met some girls and shit back then, and one of the girls, I don't know if her pops was like a big-time dealer or whatever, she came around and I found a whole bunch of drugs. And I said, yo Jay, we gonna move this shit. So that's when he came in, like when he came in the game, I showed him the same thing. We was just spending money, shopping every day, not thinking when we spend this money, we gonna get more. I ain't having none of those concerns, you know what I'm saying? I'm just like, yo, I found this shit, Jay, let's get rid of this shit. And eventually I ran out of drugs. I'm like, yo, I don't know what to do next and shit. And I was going to the store and shit. One of the guys from the neighborhood that raised me and shit, one of the Spanish guys named Spanish Jose, he pulled me to the side and was like, look, you know what I'm saying? I hear you making a name for yourself, you making noise out here, and I'd like to work with you. Met Spanish Jose, man, I never looked back.

Life in the streets brought violence and crime and Jay-Z wasn't no stranger to either. In one intense moment, he accused his older brother Eric of stealing from him, which led to a heated confrontation where Jay shot him in the shoulder. The burner he used belonged to his mentor and the one who first showed him the ropes in the rap game, Jaz-O, the originator. The day he shot his older brother in the shoulder for stealing his jewelry, he was twelve years old. And here are some bars he wrote about your brother. He said, saw that devil in your eyes, high off more than weed. When I was scared, I just closed my young eyes and squeezed. What a sound, opened my eyes just in time to see him stumbling to the ground. Yeah, I ain't gonna talk about that on TV, that's not cool. It was my gun. It's so bad. It was your gun? Yeah, let me clear that up. Go ahead. He didn't have the burner so he could go and shoot his brother, you know what I'm saying? It was just a thing back then. You got some arms, you got guns, or you got connections.

But yo, that incident haunted Jay for years. That guilt, that weight he carried from pulling that trigger on his own blood—that's real trauma right there. You understand? That's the kind of pain that don't just disappear with time and money. The streets took his childhood, his innocence, his peace of mind. But what the streets couldn't take was his hunger, his vision, his undeniable talent. While his friends was still moving weight in the projects, Jay-Z was laying down rhymes, perfecting his craft, building his brand. He started his own label, Roc-A-Fella Records, in 1996 with partners Damon Dash and Kareem Burke. That was the move that changed everything. From pushing product on the corners of Marcy to pushing platinum records on the charts worldwide.

By the late '90s and early 2000s, Jay-Z had transcended the streets completely. Albums like "Reasonable Doubt," "In My Lifetime," and "The Blueprint" established him as not just a rapper, but a hip-hop legend. He went from looking over his shoulder for the feds to looking down from the penthouse suite. From living that gangsta life to living that billionaire lifestyle. He built an empire—music, fashion, sports, entertainment. Jay-Z became the blueprint for how to get out, how to legitimize, how to scale your operation from the underground to the mainstream and beyond.

The legacy of NYC Goons like Jay-Z represents something deeper than just the glorification of street life. It's a cautionary tale wrapped in a success story, a reminder that the same intelligence, ambition, and hustle that gets you deep in the drug game can get you to the top of the legitimate world if you're willing to pivot and evolve. Jay-Z rose from the rubble of the crack epidemic, the fatherlessness, the violence, and the desperation of Marcy Projects to become one of the most influential figures in entertainment and business. He survived the streets, he survived himself, and he built something that'll outlast empires. That's the real goon mentality—knowing when to switch your game up and dominate at the highest level. That's the legacy that echoes through these mean streets forever.