“Everything would shut down,” Leslie says, “and all the attention would be on him.” He sometimes worked on his own songs. When the boys would visit him in prison, he would walk the grounds with his sons, reminding them of two somewhat contradictory lessons: Stay off the streets, and keep your circle of friends close.Īckquille loved reggae, the music of his West Indian father, and rap, which his brother turned him on to, and Michael Jackson, which he danced to everywhere his mother took him, disrupting even a simple trip to the barbershop. The boys’ father, Gervase Johnson, was charged with attempted first-degree murder when Ackquille was 2 months old and is serving a life sentence in Florida. His mother, Leslie Pollard, had worked in customer service at Verizon in the city, raising Ackquille and Javase with help from their grandmother. “I got one brother, but it’s like I got a group of brothers,” Pollard later said, “in the building I grew up in.” His large, blindingly white upper deck of teeth sold his smile from blocks away the others called him Chewy. Pollard was younger than most of the others, something of a mascot until he wormed his way into the action. From down the block came Rashid Derissant, or Rasha, the crew’s jokester Alex Crandon, known as A-Rod, soft-spoken and laid-back and Brian “Meeshie” Harvey, loud and brash, with a deep scar on his right cheek. Another pair of brothers in the building, the local basketball stars Chad and Remy Marshall, were Rowdy and Fetti. Ackquille and his friends would hang out there and practice rhymes. When Pollard was a kid, the courtyard soundtrack, furnished by a boom box, mixed 50 Cent and Lil Wayne and Trick Daddy with West Indian dancehall and R&B. It’s also where a young rapper named Ackquille Pollard grew up, in the shabby prewar apartment complex at 139 East 53rd Street, on the outer reaches of Clarkson Avenue. East Flatbush, Brooklyn, is where the city named a street after Bob Marley where the rappers Busta Rhymes and Shyne and Joey Bada$$ came from where one intersection is called the Front Page for its high-profile murders and another the Back Page because its murders get less press.

Bobby shmurda dancing to big rich town