There was no limit to the way Silk played either. He didn’t care who you were supposed to be, he was still going to play with you. He would play with you even if you weren’t trying to and if you got serious, he was cool with that too. A lot of times Wayne would try dudes he didn’t like by playing with them. “One time, me, Wayne and two other dudes were in my Benz on the way to the mall. Wayne knew that one of the dudes with us wasn’t who he thought he was in the streets. The dude was supposed to be a killer but Wayne could see through him. Wayne hated fake niggas. So Wayne starts playing with dude, trying to provoke him. When the dude gets fed up, he told Wayne to stop playing with him. Wayne said, ‘Nigga fuck you, I play when I want to and if I wanted to I could fuck you. You’s a bitch, you should be taking that dick.’ The dude gets heated and tells Wayne can’t no nigga fuck him. Wayne laughed at him and told him, ‘I ain’t no average nigga, I’m Silk and if you keep running your mouth I’m a leave your fake ass in this back seat with a hole in your head.’ I tried to tell the dude to leave the shit alone because I saw where it was going, Wayne was going to end up smokin’ the nigga. The dude wouldn’t let it go, his pride was in it. Wayne ended up telling the dude they could fight if he had something he needed to get off his chest. When we got to the mall Wayne took off his jacket and slapped the shit out of dude, he tried to make the nigga fight him but the dude wouldn’t fight. Wayne looked at us and said, ‘I told y’all this nigga was a bitch.’ Wayne then pulled out his pistol and makes the dude strip ass naked right in the parking lot, then he shot him in the ass and told him to get the fuck away from us. Everybody was laughing. Wayne exposed the nigga and it was all a big joke to Silk.” A dude from back in the day relates.
Wayne was on that extortion time real hard too. “He put me on a nigga one time, he wanted me to lean on the nigga.” Another one of Wayne’s old partners in crime says. “I put the squeeze on the nigga, told him I wanted 50 grand. I worked the move about two or three times and broke down with Silk every time. At the same time Silk was playing things with the nigga, getting close to him, making him think they were cool. Then Silk acted like he found out I was squeezing the nigga and told the nigga that he would get me to leave him alone for 50 G’s. From there he was milking the nigga for 50 G’s anytime he wanted to and he would still hit me off. Silk worked that move so many times on different niggas too, even some niggas that was supposed to be like that. It was like taking candy from a baby for Silk.” And when Silk’s friend came home from jail he used his reputation to put him back on his feet.
“I remember when I first came home from Lorton and was in the halfway house,” Manny says. “Wayne came to get me and told me to get in his CE and took me uptown. He asked me if I had money. I was just coming home, I was broke. I told him, no, so he said he was going to take me to get some money. We pull up in front of a well known spot that’s owned by some dudes that supposed to be major in the city. Wayne looked at me and said, ‘Go in there and tell such and such to send a bag of that money out here and don’t make me come in there and get it either.’ I thought Wayne was playing, he’s a real funny dude, always playing, but he was dead serious. So I went in the spot and told the dude what Wayne said and with no problem the dude gave me a bag full of money. Wayne had niggas scared to death.” He didn’t stop at street figures when it came to his extortion game either. It’s said that he went as far as extorting lawyers and Italians in Georgetown too. Silk was cool and calculating but he also fortified his bourgeoning reputation as the most feared man in D.C. with sporadic outbursts of violence that seemed to come out of nowhere with no rhyme or reason.
“I had a spot over Southwest on Orange Street. I had a few young dudes hustling for me,” another dude from the era relates. “One day Silk came over there to holla at me and me and slim was sitting in the apartment talking shit and joking when my little man came in the spot and told me that a New York dude around the corner told him that he couldn’t hustle until he was finished with his shit. Me and Wayne looked at each other and shook our heads. Wayne told shorty to go back outside and stand on the corner and sell his shit. Shorty acted like he was scared so I told him that if Silk said it was cool, then it was cool. The young dude went back outside and started pumping. As soon as the New York dude bent around the corner to say something to shorty, Wayne stepped out of the cut beside the building and hit his ass in the head with everything he had in the clip and stepped off with the hammer smoking. When the police and ambulance arrived, Wayne popped back up with a different set of clothes, just to see who was talking to the cops.” It seemed Wayne did what he did just because he could. His aura of fear was impregnable.
This is an excerpt from Street Legends. If you want to read the rest order the book right now.