‘I wanted the money and the power ... I was going to die trying’

Eugene Thomas wishes he had been more productive in his younger years like his three role models, who all died at age 39.

Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated fighting for civil rights. Malcolm X was gunned down also in the struggle for equality.

And Eugene’s father, a hard-working Columbus fencer, died in a tragic alcohol-related incident.

Thomas spent part of his teen years selling crack on the streets of Columbus, which eventually led him to prison for 21 years for a voluntary manslaughter conviction.

“It says in the Bible and the Koran that a man reaches his spiritual maturity at 40, and he never made it, like Martin and Malcolm never made it,” he said of his father. “Look at what they did. Look at where their minds were before they even hit 40. And I look at myself, and I say, ‘Wow. I’m 43 and I still don’t think I’m the man that those guys were, my father included.”

Thomas, now an ex-felon, came of age in the 1980s, as gangs, drugs and neighborhood violence proliferated on the streets of Columbus. He was released from prison in 2014 after spending a year at the Columbus Transitional Center. These days, he works as a manager at Chester’s Barbecue and he boxes several days a week at the Game Bred Boxing Club in Fort Mitchell. He’s also a new father with a 7-month-old daughter, and he struggles with living up to that responsibility.

This year, for Red Ribbon Week, the Ledger-Enquirer tells Eugene Thomas’ story, from his early years in the Muscogee County school system to his years as a gang member; from his time as a crack dealer to his conviction; from his 21 years in prison to his release nearly three years ago.

‘Dinky’

Eugene Thomas was born in Columbus on Jan. 3, 1973, to Henderson Thomas Sr. and Corlis Regina (Alexander) Thomas. The family nicknamed him “Dinky” because he was born premature at a “rinky-dink” size. Growing up, his family lived mostly on Northstar Drive but spent some time in the Alpine Apartment project on the south side of town.

Thomas said his life was typical for a black youth in the 1980s. His mother came from a family of educators. His father’s side of the family was more blue-collar. His paternal grandparents ran a club called the Red Rooster across from what later became Club Majestic. It had softball teams and was a very popular spot in town.

“They were community leaders when I look back on it. People respected and regarded them,” he said. “... I had an aunt that was constantly correcting me on my English. When I said, ‘I want to lay down, she said, ‘Nah ... it’s lie down.’”

At home, Thomas was raised by his mother, a Vietnam veteran who worked a variety of jobs to support three sons. His father lived outside the home but wasn’t absent from his life.

“I can’t take nothing away from him. He was a good man,” Thomas said. “He and my mother, of course, the relationship didn’t work out. ... No, he wasn’t in the home, but he was there.”

At the same time, his father had a drinking problem and sometimes used other substances. At 16, Thomas saw his father high one day. He believes it was crack.

“He was ashamed, and he couldn’t even look at me,” Thomas said. “He came from that blue-collar background in the downtown area, and it just got the better of him.

“But I have to take my hat off to him,” he said. “... He worked hard and was considered the best fencer in Columbus, Ga. ... It’s just that this society, sometimes it throws things at you, and some people just can’t really handle it.”

When Thomas was 17 years old, his father went to Montgomery for a fresh start. Somehow, he ended up in an altercation. Thomas said his father was drunk at the time, and someone beat him up and then ran over him with a car.

The boy was devastated. “I didn’t know how I was internalizing it then, but it bothered me,” Thomas said. “It was very traumatic.”

Breaking Windows

Northstar Drive is located in an area called School Alley, behind Dawson Elementary School. As a child, Thomas developed a habit of throwing rocks. And some days, he and his friends spent afternoons pelting Dawson Elementary, occasionally breaking windows. Thomas said he was just a good thrower and always tried to out-do his peers.

“I grew up with brothers and uncles who played sports — football, baseball, basketball,” Thomas said. “And I always wanted to be like them. When I was younger, I liked to put my uncle’s cleats on. ... Just the sound of the cleats, clamoring against the floor. I wanted to play baseball. I wanted to play football, put the shoulder pads on.”

One day, as a kindergartener at Dawson Elementary School, Thomas was playing outside with his schoolmates. He found a smooth, flat rock, the kind that curves as it glides through the air. He threw it across the playground, busting another child’s head.

The school principal marched Thomas straight home to his mother, who was walking to the mailbox.

“Miss Alexander. I’m so sorry. But can you do something with Eugene? We have tried,” the principal said. “Can you do something with him?”

“And, of course, my mother tore me up,” Thomas now recalls. “My birthday was coming up, and my daddy came to take me to see “Popeye the Sailor” and she wouldn’t let me go.”

In second grade, Thomas began slacking off in school, and a teacher told him not to return unless he copied a page from the dictionary. Thomas skipped school for two days. When his grandmother found out about it, she marched him to school the next day, and told the teacher, “Don’t you ever tell a child not to come back to school.”

But today he remembers liking school. “I liked learning,” he said. “I could learn. I just started getting distracted.”

Testosterone-Driven

At Rothschild Middle School, Thomas repeated the seventh grade. It was around that time that he started getting involved in gang-related activity.

“I was running with a bunch of tough guys, thought I was tough,” he said. “You know, everybody always tries to out-do the next guy, whether it’s with girls, or with violence, or with drinking. It’s very testosterone-driven. It’s an ego-driven situation when you’re dealing with gangs.”

Thomas, who was always one of the smallest among his peers, would initiate fights by slapping a person or spitting on him, even bigger kids. He said he got suspended from school “too many times to count.” Older guys liked what they saw and designated him the group’s junior leader.

He eventually became part of a gang called the Delta Alpha Assassins. It started out with guys just hanging together and marking neighborhood territory, later escalating into fights against rival groups.

One day, he had three fights in one school day, one in front of the principal’s office.

Thomas was suspended and sent to an alternative school for a short period of time. When he returned to Rothschild Middle School, he pulled a brass-knuckle knife on a student.

At the time, he had a science teacher fresh out of the University of Georgia who had been having difficulty with the class, and she had to write a report about his behavior.

“She was young and we sort of took advantage of that, because she didn’t really know how to handle teenage students,” said Thomas. “She was barely out of her teens herself, about 25.”

In her report, she wrote: “Eugene is a very intelligent student. He could have been on suspension and been gone a week and he’ll come back, jump right in and he’ll know the work. ... But his behavior is bizarre. Eugene would threaten a student right in front of me and then look at me and laugh.”

“That kind of made those people — the psychiatrists and the board of education and the psychoanalysts and whoever else was there — it made them feel like I was a monster, that I was some kind of a diabolical creature,” Thomas said. “I think her statement made them feel like, ‘He has to go because he knows exactly what he’s doing.’”

The school district expelled Thomas, who was still a seventh-grader, from school, and he never returned. Yet his quest for knowledge continued.

He had become interested in black history while attending the alternative school. One of the classrooms had pictures of famous black people on the wall: Martin Luther King Jr., Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Charles Drew.

Malcolm X really caught his attention. Thomas remembers staring at his picture: “Who gave him that kind of name? Is he a super hero or something? What kind of name is that?’”

He started listening to Malcolm X’s autobiography on tape and learned that he was highly intelligent and aspired to be a lawyer as a youth. But he had attended a predominantly white school where the teacher told him that he was more fit for manual labor. That story resonated with Thomas, who felt he had also been misunderstood by teachers.

He learned all he could about the Nation of Islam and other black Muslim leaders. He stopped eating pork and tried becoming self-disciplined. But soon other forces would overcome his life.

The Crack Epidemic

In the summer of 1988, Eugene was a 15-year-old stock and bag boy at Goolsby Foods. In his spare time, he hung out with a guy named Crook, who was a couple of years older. They would smoke marijuana and hang out together. They also sold weed.

But in 1988, they discovered a more potent drug exploding on the neighborhood scene.

“We became aware of crack and how lucrative crack sales and the crack market was,” he said.

Crook was a real hustler, Thomas said. He suggested they use Thomas’ first paycheck to buy crack. So they took the $104.35 and went to a drug dealer.

“The funny thing was that we were both so young that the guy who sold the drugs didn’t want to sell it to us,” he said. “Because even drug dealers, they had morals and standards then. And he knew us and he knew our families.”

The boys said they weren’t going to use crack, just sell it. The dealer said no, and the boys persisted, dropping by his home and flagging him down on the street. Thomas believes the man finally acquiesced because they were drawing too much attention to his illegal activity.

“I guess he said, ‘Let me sell this fool some drugs so he will leave me alone,’” Thomas said. “And he did, and he was surprised at how we turned it over right quick.”

Thomas said selling crack made selling marijuana look like “chump change.” They started with what’s called “a slab,” which looks long and slim like a French fry. They took a razor blade and cut it into $25 pieces, making a $75 profit from the $100. That allowed them to take $150 to purchase “half an eight-ball,” which yielded a $300 profit.

“We got to be recognized by that guy as two of the best young hustlers in this area,” he said.

“... It was a crack boom and cars were just coming through. And this was on Dawson Drive. We used to call it ‘The Drive’ because it was like a drive-through because people would drive through, get drugs and keep going.”

Thomas said a line was drawn between selling drugs and being a gang member.

“You couldn’t do both because if you were a gangbanger, you’re gang fighting, so the police is going to be looking for you for gang activity, then they’re going to stumble upon drugs,” he said. “ ... It wasn’t financially smart to be a gangbanger and a drug dealer, too.”

Before long, he and Crook began smoking marijuana laced with crack, then they rolled the crack into a joint.

“You can’t smoke that stuff and be high like that trying to sell it,” he said. “We would smoke and just chill out, drink beer, trip out, talk and look for some women or whatever.”

Thomas started messing up. Drugs would come up short, and their supplier noticed. He stopped dealing with them, and Crook became upset. So the two separated and began selling crack on their own.

He started hanging out with people much older than him, and smoked more crack.

“And then I got addicted to crack,” he said, “and now I was known as a crack smoker — not a hustler, not a primo smoker (which is marijuana laced with crack), but I’m a crack smoker, I’m a crackhead.

“So Crook being my homeboy and like a brother, it kind of hurt him,” he said. “Everybody in the neighborhood who kind of had respect for me, they were kind of hurt by it too.”

Thomas lost touch with many of his friends. He couldn’t relate to them anymore. When they were going to clubs, he wasn’t interested. As an addict, he didn’t want to be around all the noise and people.

“I’m a crackhead, so I’m in that world,” he said. “I don’t want to be in the world where they hang out at McDonald’s on Friday nights or hang out at Krystal. I don’t want to be around that.”

Landing in Prison

At 17, Thomas was arrested for cocaine possession and spent time at a boot camp in Milledgeville, Ga. He was later transferred to Frank Scott State Prison, where he spent seven months.

When he was released back into the community, he waited about a month before getting into more trouble. One night, he was inebriated outside a store on St. Mary’s Road, when a man left his vehicle running and dashed inside. Thomas hopped in the vehicle and drove away.

Inside was a police scanner, radar detector, walkie-talkie, fishing pole and pistol. Thomas drove to the south side and sold all the items for a little less than an ounce of crack. He drove up Victory Drive and made an improper turn, almost causing an accident. Police arrested and charged him for trafficking drugs and theft by taking auto.

Thomas spent a little more than a year in the Muscogee County Jail and another year in prison. At 19, he was released back into the community.

He said he tried to live a clean life, abstaining from drugs and alcohol. He adopted the Muslim name Jama Malik Shakur and began attending a mosque on Forrest Road.

At first, he stayed with his grandparents, who fed him well and enforced a 9 p.m. curfew. But money was tight and he left his grandparent’s house to live with his brother on the south side. He started staying out later, and things began to change.

“I got a job at Hardee’s and I said I was going to take my money and invest it,” he said. “So, I invested it in some drugs and started back making illegal money.”

“I was in it to make a million,” he said. “And I didn’t just want to be rich. ... I wanted the money and the power, and all the fear, adulation and respect that came along with it. ... I was going to die trying.”

On Feb. 15, 1993, Thomas and a friend had set up shop at a duplex on Winston Road in south Columbus, right off Fort Benning Road, he said. The women who lived there worked as prostitutes, buying crack with the money they made. To keep the hustle going, Thomas and his friend paid for the women’s groceries and other expenses.

Thomas said Kevin Martin was dating one of the women. When he came to the “drug trap,” he went ballistic and told Thomas and his friend they had to leave. Thomas said Martin called him a foul name and he felt disrespected, so he shot him two times in the chest.

Today, Thomas regrets taking another man’s life. But at the time, when Martin pleaded for him to call an ambulance, he just couldn’t sympathize.

“I told him, I didn’t want to hear it because, ‘You did what you did, and that’s what happens. In the street, you can’t do certain things and not expect certain results, certain reactions. They’re going to happen,’” he said. “I didn’t have any mercy in my heart for him at that moment.”

Thomas gathered up all the drugs and money and fled town. He went to Atlanta, then Chattanooga, Tenn. The Columbus Police Department issued an all-points bulletin describing him as armed and dangerous, he said. He remained on the run for two weeks.

He asked one of his brothers to pick up his paychecks from Hardee’s, but his brother didn’t want to get involved. That’s when he began to realize that he couldn’t survive on his own.

“My brother told me how it was affecting my mother and my grandparents,” he said. “So I turned myself in.”

Thomas was charged with voluntary manslaughter and aggravated assault by a convicted felon in possession of a firearm, he said. He accepted a plea deal and went to prison for 20 years.

He was 22 years old.

Coming later this week

Wednesday: Eugene Thomas goes to a maximum security prison, where “I knew it was a violent situation.”

Coming Monday and Tuesday: We take a closer look at the effects of mandatory drug sentencing laws and gang activity on young black males.

This story was originally published October 22, 2016 at 6:05 PM with the headline "‘I wanted the money and the power ... I was going to die trying’."