The brothers knew they were getting cut short, though, and from time to time someone would want to stick Big Roy. The black guys didn’t mind paying two bucks for a chicken breast and a wing, or a thigh and a leg, but Big Roy could get double that from the whites. He was really in cool with the white boys and the Jews when it came to that business, but he didn’t like dealing with the brothers because they’d always try to strong-arm him for cheaper prices. Whatever Big Roy didn’t eat himself or hand down to his crew or trade, he sold.
The chicken meals could fetch $10 a pop, and the kosher cooks always made a killing on what the rabbis brought in for the holidays.
Their packaged kosher TV dinners were easy to smuggle back to the units, and those kosher Sabbath dinners were always a hot item. The kosher dudes got kicked down next, because they had what no other kitchen had access to. Once the food was cooked, Big Roy made sure to cut a share of the hot food for the white boys running the bakery in exchange for his share of the rolls and sweets. This passage is about the economics of a prison kitchen:īig Roy ran the meat crew, seasoning and preparing the beef, chicken, fish, and stews. That meant I’d make $12,000 on every key I bought, and I could easily move five and ten kilos on the first and fifteenth of each month (which were the welfare paydays). Selling crack at $1,500 an ounce, those extra four ounces would give me a profit of $6,000 per half bird. My eight ounces of cocaine yielded a return of twelve ounces of crack. Once I removed the small crack plate from the pot, I blotted it with a dry towel and placed it on the triple beam scale.
I hurried the glass pot to a sink full of crushed ice. As it began to gel, I felt a little relief. I waited nervously for the ingredients to gel. I wasn’t sure whether the water was supposed to be boiling or simmering before I added the dope and baking soda, so I lowered the water to a simmer and added the mix. I brought my bottled water to a boil, just like I saw the Twins do. First, I weighed out eight ounces powder and four ounces baking soda and premixed them in a salad bowl. I experimented by cooking in small batches at first, just in case I fucked it up. I bought one bird of powder from for $17,500, bought my cooking supplies at Kmart and rented a room at the Spring Valley Motel 6.
The first one portrays Jeff as a budding crack dealer, figuring out both the financial and culinary ends of the trade: On the flight home, I planned to just flip through his book but I became thoroughly engrossed and ended up reading the whole thing. That’s the story he tells in his book, Cooked, which Will Smith’s production company has purchased in the hopes of filming his story.Īs luck would have it, I ran into Chef Jeff a few days later when we were both giving lectures at a conference. Now, after several years in prison and many, many restaurant jobs, he is the executive chef at the Cafe Bellagio in Vegas. and San Diego, became a big-time crack dealer, and was sentenced to a long term in prison, where he learned to cook and became passionate about food. (We have the same publisher.) Jeff grew up in L.A. That’s when our publicist mentioned him and his new book. Have you ever heard of Chef Jeff Henderson?