| = |
|
|
( KROOK - THE BROOKLYN KINGS ) STARTED : 1978 AREA : Sunset park Brooklyn ALIAS : KROOKLYN, MAD KROOK, KRK, SC.3 Writing Groups : TBK, DOG, TKC, TNS, WOW, 7DS, TFV. LINES HIT : B's, D's, Q's, RR's, E's, F's, N's, M's, J's, LL's |
_______________________________________
* * Conducted by Gil with help from SPAR @ 149th Street * *
I grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn in the early part of the 1970's. In 1974, I became aware of writing, through my older brother, who started writing STAR.
|
|
One day my brother came home from school, he had a TMT marker in his hand and caught a tag on a piece of paper. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. What he was doing looked so cool. From that point on, I became amazed with Graffiti, as well as hooked! I remember asking him what he was doing and he said it was Graffiti and that there was this really big writer (whose name was TERO) in his class, and that he was giving him style. At the time, TERO was killing the B train line. As a kid I was very fortunate, because I lived next to the B line, and under the B line was the famous old Calver line (a train line, which is no longer in existence). When I was a kid I used to take trips into the old abandoned tunnels of the old Calver line. What I saw looked like an incredible museum, where writers used to do pieces on the walls. I remember this one particular giant top-to-bottom by DANGER 59, an old MICKEY piece, and a JESTER piece that looked really nice for the time. TERO, YES 7 |
and KRAZY SNAKE a.k.a. KS3, also had pieces down there. The pieces had me so amazed as a kid, that it kept me more interested as I got older.
THE EARLY YEAR'S.
As a kid at 12 years old, I was lucky enough to see some of
the biggest writers on the BMT's, as well as some, who came from my
neighborhood. Writers like TERO, 3YB, DANGER 59 a.k.a. D 59, SM a.k.a
SPARKMASTER 17, KS 3, a.k.a. KRAZYSNAKE and his partner YES 7 (the two had a
crew called GSA (GRAFFITI STRIKES AGAIN). DICE, TROUBLE 59 a.k.a. T 59 and AS
2. MR. MINT 56, MUGS 1 a.k.a. MS, MAD RITZ and KED 1 also came from Sunset
Park. There were others who were also killing the trains, like TEE 3YB,
LSD 3, TRACY 168, MICKEY 729 a.k.a TO, HURST a.k.a. 0I, DEAN BYB, IZ THE WIZ,
NUGGET 1, IN, IF, MADFLED a.k.a. MF. MADFLED, AND MR. RITZ all had a writing
group called BAB, which stood for BUSTIN ASS BOYS or BATH
AVENUE BOYS. JESTER, PINTO a.k.a. DP 2, CISCO, CC 3, MR NEED 1,
ES, BUFF 1, AFX 2, CHINO 13, ED 1, MORO 1, CLOUD, STOKES, VE, DS 3 a.k.a. SPEAR,
GASP 69, and HUGHIE. These were all guys you would see on the subways from
1974 to 1976. I was such a young kid and my parents would not let us stay out
late at night, nor could I sneak out of the house to go hitting. In the mid
1970?s it seemed like everyone fell in love with writing, even my older sister
would tag up her name on train stations. There were also guys that had nothing
to do with Graffiti, who I saw put their names up on walls. It used to bug me
out! It was growing before my eyes.
The neighborhood started getting more and more bombed by writers like TERO 3YB, DANGER 59 aka RM and KRAZY SNAKE aka KS 3. KRAZY SNAKE was my favorite writer of them all. I saw how things progressed as a writer in the neighborhood. There were a lot of guys that were getting up around the neighborhood. I remember seeing LEMPIE and his brother SOOT, tagging up right in front of me. Just seeing this kept me more and more interested in writing. The Gangs were all over this part of Brooklyn where you would see the names of some of the groups on the walls, like the TURBAN SAINTS, THE ASSASINATORS and THE DIRTY ONE'S. SUNSET PARK BROOKLYN
With the 70's coming to an end, I was getting a little older and a little more independent. My first tag was DEVIL, which I felt was a very toy name. I just did very
|
small stuff on paper, the school walls or writing on my desks in school. Then I came up with the name SC 3, which stood for SAL IS CRAZY or SUBWAY CRIMINAL. Later I picked KROOK as a name since nobody wrote that at the time. At times, I threw up MAD KROOK, because I was inspired by an early Sunset Park writer MAD FLED. In Sunset Park the main line was the B line, which ran from Manhattan to Coney Island, Brooklyn. On that line were writers from Bensonhurst, Brooklyn that were hitting the insides pretty hard (writers such as CF, which was short for CHRIS FOSDALE, MF short for MAD FLED, and MARTY FOSDALE. By 1979, I met this kid who wrote KED 1, who was a member of the groups FMD's (FLOOR MASTER DANCERS), NCB, and COG (which stood for CRIMINALS OF GRAFITTI ). KED 1 was a writer groomed by ROTO-NCB, who got a lot of fame from appearing in the movie, THE WARRIORS. In the film KED 1 had a top-to-bottom that shows up in the film. However, his writing career was cut short due to him being incarcerated. In 1979, I moved from Sunset Park to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that's when it all began! I met a guy who was writing |
|
TAX 3 (May he Rest in Peace). He introduced me to BT a.k.a. BADTAXI, SES a.k.a. SUBWAY SLASHER, JOE NUTS, AC, RAC, SOR, SO 3, DG, ROACH and other writers from the area.
*** THE BROOKLYN KING'S *****
My first experience hitting the trains was in 1979. I was motion tagging, which is what almost everyone did back then. Then I hit the lay-ups once with
|
|
KED 1, and by 1980 I did a hard bomb of the insides with BT. That was when SES started joining us. I started becoming very good friends with DELK, and we started hitting a great deal together. We started getting up real hard on the RR's, B's, and Q's; we mainly bombed BMT's. Back then we were catching our trains at the 18th Avenue and 20th Avenue lay-ups. We were both bombing hard for about two years (from the beginning of 1980 up until the end of 1981). DELK then started slowing down. Our favorite lay-ups that me, DELK and the TBK CREW loved to hit was BAY PARKWAY, 53rd Street, 18th Avenue and 20th Avenue lay-ups. We also went to places outside from those |
spots like the M yard on Fresh Pond Road in
Queens and Astoria lay-ups in Queens, the E and F lay-ups and the Corona yard
(for E, F, GG
and N's).
Sheepshead Bay lay-up was a great place to catch trains and NET lived not too far from there. We would both tear that place apart. It got so good we started bringing guys like DJ BONES. I also took trips to the 7 yard in Queens to hit insides and outsides with SES and BT. I would love to find someone who has photos of the stuff we did. JOE NUTS is a very over looked writer. Not only was he all over the BMT?s, but at 14/15 years old he was a recruiter for TKC (THE KILL CREW) and 7 DS (SEVEN DEADLY SINS), which was a crew from Park Slope Brooklyn. He was just a young kid at the time who was recruiting a lot of writers into established groups.
B.M.T INSIDE KING'S, OF THE 1980's
The history of the TKC, started with this guy SMOKE a.k.a. YE who put it together in the mid 1970's, and passed it down to EKO and SIR. but JOENUTS was made recruiter before SMOKE passed it on. The guy was very close to LILSTAR, KILO and the rest of the 7 DS family. Since I was always lucky for a
|
white guy, I was able to hit places like the Coney Island yard with the WOW CREW, who owned the yard at the time. For some reason the whole crew liked me, so I never had to worry about getting robbed or jumped. wow recognized my getting up ability when they made me a member. The TBK CREW was down with the MOD CREW, so we were able to hit places like the 43rd and 53rd Street lay-ups. During that time many of the gangs had died out. The crew focused more on taking over the insides. We would head over to City Hall to kill the outsides, however, back in 1980 until 1982, the years of the heavy BUFF, the city was cleaning the trains frequently. The TBK CREW became one of the all time great writing groups as far as the insides were concerned. AC was one of the writers who kept the crew on top throughout the city. In my opinion, he was one of the all time Kings of the insides. He never stopped pushing TBK throughout those years.You could not help to see one of the members on a RR train, B train or any other BMT train that pulled into a train station. There were so many others pushing our groups like, REN, NET, |
|
DJ BONES, SNIPER a.k.a. NR, BOM 5 from the Bronx, and a few others I can't think of at this time. BOM 5 had a cousin who lived next to JOE NUTS, so when BOM 5 would visit his cousin, the members of TBK CREW were all over the trains and neighborhood. That impressed BOM 5. Eventually, he met JOE NUTS and through JOE, I met BOM5. He would come out from the Bronx, to bomb some of the trains in Brooklyn with us.
My peak years as a writer were 1980 to 1981 with DELK. One day we stood on a train station and saw all our names on the insides of every train that pulled into the station. The next peak year for me was between 1981 and 1982, with BT and SES. The last of my peak years was in 1984 with NET. I remember in 1982 or 1983, this guy KEN 007 was throwing a JAM out in the Bronx. As I met a few people out there, I was surprised that all of those Bronx writers heard of me. I didn?t realize that the B and Q trains switched over into D trains, and continued to ride out to the Bronx. One day I got together with SES, RAC, and SOR who were going to the Fort Hamilton lay-ups and invited me along with them. That was before I ever went to that place, since I was from Sunset Park and mainly hit the B line. However, these guys were already hitting the F train before me. At the time, I mainly concentrated on my local line. That night, when we got together, we all tore that place apart.
We all use to carry six to seven tubes of supermarket ink to kill the insides. What we did was go into the grocery stores and rack up on Aspirins then sell them to the bodegas, and with that money we would go buy ink. But one day we had gotten lucky; we found this place on Pacific Street in Brooklyn called Samuel Underberg's which sold supermarket ink for a really cheap price. It was cheaper than Flow Master ink and we found it was very hard to clean, off the trains. I started to realize you couldn't use them in a pilot because the ink would clog the marker. So we would make TMT markers and fill them up with this purple supermarket ink and bomb the insides. We kept picking up as much ink as we possibly could, until we ran out of trains to bomb. Another thing we would do, was take the erasers from school, cut them up and add them on to our TMT markers. So when we hit the inside panels of the trains, we would make sure they dripped as much as they could, which we thought looked really cool. SES used a sock, filled it up with homemade ink and made one of the biggest TMT markers any of us ever saw. By 1984, I started to slow down. I started to go hitting less and less with NET until I quit that same year. Others like SES, BT, SOR, RAC and a few others also stopped writing.
In 1986, I made a comeback hitting streets and took a trip to the Brooklyn Bridge. I went on a part of the expressway, which had a sign that read Welcome to Brooklyn, I jumped on to a small walkway with a can of white paint, and I changed the B into a K. The K on the sign lasted a long time and eventually SPIKE LEE saw it and got the idea for the name of the movie Krooklyn.
I would like to give a shout out to
Logo1, Soe-tns MR-R mod crew, Swan, Komak, Chip, Lil Krook from the dirty ones, Buff 1, Mato, Kaves lob, Fec 1 tfv, Bet 1 tfv, Easy twins, Glenda, Try 1, Don1, Chewy louie, Assanators ,Stingray, Apache, Slim, Turban Saints, Rodan, Snatch, Ink76, Sonic 002, Joe61, The Techno Kings, Dj Bones, Ven, Teras heather Heart ,James top, Duro1, Rico tcp, Jr fmd, Jim, John, Sammy, 69Troopers, Ciro1 Base god, The whole Byi crew, Spar1, Eric @149thstreet , Gil & Bom 5, Ceo3, Strider, Fuzzone, Venom fym, Rush, Acid ,Cc, Ftw, Ens, Knew, Site, Mask, Lil Luck, Lil Star, Dawn, Carmen, Teresa Pimpses, Barbie Tbk. Rebelob, Big H uptown mob, Sert, Joey, Lil G, Tj, Steve, Blaze, John, Matosbx, Wegie, Bx, Jay Jay bk.....Rest in piece, Mom, Tax3, Joenuts tbk, Buck tbk, Roa tbk, Joey the white boy. Vm bobo, boss69troopers, Chino13, Red alert, Oreckinto, Pg3 aka Pgism, Dondi, Siko tb and Phyn , thank you.
*********************************************************************************************************
Photo
credits go to : KROOK , TRIKE, JUICE NSA, EASY 1, BOM 5, FARGO 1, DANGER 59,
SAR,TMB and LOGO 1. I would like to thank SPAR 1 for making this interview
possible as well as thank the whole team @149th street for all their support over the
years. Check out SPAR's art work @
SPARONE.NET
Should any one have any photos of KROOK's work please contact Message@subwayoutlaws.com
