Some people want you to believe that:
'Once a robber always a robber.'
We gotta get boxed in,
if you did something,
that's what you are till you die.
Your life will never change.
A person like him shouldn’t
have even made it through there,
how he get through the, the cracks?
When do we choose to forgive?
Everything that you’ve done in the past
will stay with you till today, till tomorrow.
You’re never going to get a second chance.
This is me, Corey Pegues.
I’m the kid, in the inner city,
that everybody deemed to be dead or in jail.
My family called me Booby,
in school they called me Corey,
in the streets they called me Life.
I clearly remember the day my father left.
Back then in the 70s
everybody had a CB radio.
Where you could hear the police,
you could hear the truckers.
So he had one on a dresser,
it was like his favourite thing
and he would listen all the time.
I remember coming home
and that CB radio was gone.
We had to move into this apartment
over this number’s joint in Queens New York.
We had roaches crawling around the house,
we had mice.
I was embarrassed that I was on welfare.
We used to hang in this park called O'Connell park
on 196 and Murdock Avenue in Queens.
We was just there all day,
24 hours a day.
We had this little team
and we was real close all of us.
We was very close.
It was just me, Due, June, and Ren.
When you say June
you gotta say Cool June not just June ...
Cool June coz everybody
knew him as Cool June.
My name is Lorenzo.
Everybody in the hood
knows me as Sean,
my name is Sean Due
and everybody calls me Due.
Kids that grew up together,
playing ball, playing sports, laughing and joking ...
And in the early 80s
we started selling this wonder drug.
It’s an all out city war
but especially concentrated in these areas:
Washington Heights, Harlem,
east Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn,
Jamaica Queens 
and South Ozone Park Queens.
This has reached epidemic proportions.
It is a crack epidemic
which police say is causing an increase
in murder and other violent crime.
It was just pretty much
a way of life at that time,
it was just what we was doing,
it was almost like playing basketball.
We would go play ball
and we would come back and go sell drugs.
I was about 13 years old,
yeah I was about 13 years old.
We were oblivious to the danger,
thinking back now, it was very dangerous,
it was very dangerous.
I guess we thought we were bigger than the
law at that time
and we were bigger than life itself 
at the time
because it was, it was coming so easy.
I remember the very first time I made a thousand
dollars,
in just a couple of hours
and I told them I was so happy I said,
'Yo I just made a thousand dollars'
and I’m sitting and I’m counting out till
I’m in the store
and I’m like 'look I just made a thousand
dollars'
I can remember I brought my first medallion
and a big rope chain 
and it had like 27 diamonds in it
and it weighed like 85 penny weights
it was big, I felt good,
I came in the house I had it on
and my mother looked at me,
I’ll never forget,
and she started crying
and she said, 'My son is gonna die.'
One day I was out in O'Connell park
playing basketball
and these guys jumped me.
I had like fire in my eyes,
I was like 'Yo I gotta get these dudes.'
So I went to pick up Pop,
my brother-in-law.
We go back to the park,
he was like 10 feet behind
and all of a sudden out of nowhere
Pop pulled this knife out.
He just stabs this guy 
in the back of the head,
dude I was fighting, he stabbed him 
a couple of times,
and he stabbed a third guy.
I didn’t even know he had a knife on him.
He just started stabbing everyone
and the guys all of them dropped on the ground
people screaming and crying, everybody running ...
So I said, 
'Yo, lets get out of here'
When you are out there in the streets
you’re not that same person,
you become a little more hardened 
just by the moment, you have to be.
At that time we was getting a little money
and we was filling ourselves ...
Basically, we thought we was the shit,
can’t nobody tell us nothing.
I just was in character as like this drug dealer.
We had the world at our feet.
We had the world at our feet at the time.
I’m like 17 and I stared working
for the Supreme Team.
That's the south side of Queens,
major drug operation.
They had all the fly cars,
the money was rolling, they had all the girls,
they was ghetto kings.
It was like yo, you with the Supreme Team,
you got them behind you, you’re untouchable,
nobody's gonna bother you.
When he went to the other side,
that's all she wrote,
it was it was, he was the don then.
Coz you went from making 
10 thousand dollars a day
to making 100 thousand dollars 
a day on that side coz
that's what you call,
what we call organised crime.
He was crazy like that, you know ...
He had, he had that desire,
I don’t even think it was about the money
I think it was about the, it was the high.
You know with the Supreme Team
it was about the money,
by any means necessary,
and anybody says something or did something
to the organisation was gonna pay the price.
When I started seeing people
getting beat up,
people was disappearing,
I didn’t know what was what, who was who,
I was treading lightly ...
They had so much power 
but I was in it.
And you know the time came,
they grabbed me, and it was like,
'Get in the car.'
They passed me a 9mm and they say,
'We gonna take you somewhere, we gonna point
somebody out to you and you gotta kill em.'
And all the way there 
I’m praying to God like,
'God please, please, don’t let this person
be in there.'
There’s no way I’m getting ready to murder
somebody.
I’m 17, I’ve got two kids, mother's dead,
I’m in the streets
and I’m working for like this very violent
drug organisation and it’s like,
'I gotta get out of here, I’m just gonna
disappear, nobody’s gonna see me.'
When you're going to the military
they shave everybody down.
I was standing on that line
and I was saying to myself like,
'Man, when they cut this, this is it,
everything that I did, it was gone,
it was all gone right there.'
I could just be me, now I could actually turn
into Corey Pegues.
I wanted more for myself,
and I wanted to be there 
for my kids to make sure
that they know who their daddy is.
So in January 13, 1992,
I went to Brooklyn College
and swore in to become 
a New York City police officer.
They didn’t ask, nobody asked me,
'Have you ever shot a gun?'
Nobody asked me 
'Have you ever robbed anybody?'
So to the naysayers out there who say that
I hid something, I didn’t hide anything.
I answered the questions as truthfully as
possible to the best of my abilities
the ones that was posed to me.
Corey was a, he looked like he needed a haircut,
he was black,
he was the only guy in the squad
that was African American.
A rumour spread that he had a tattoo on
his neck that said 'Thug life.'
Normally we had the military haircut, we had
a certain behaviour
and a way we displayed 
ourselves in public.
Corey would B-Bop in the precinct,
looked like he came out of the projects,
or off Rikers Island.
Got his hair cornrowed, braids in his hair,
He was too representative of his his minority
community.
He’s black and shows it and they didn’t
like it.
Nobody thought he was gonna make it
and I always said you know Corey’s gonna
make, you know,
chief one day.
'He’s too stupid, he’s a dummy,
He’s a ni**er.'
I saw the tension was getting
so I naturally pulled him aside and said
'Listen man, you might want to tone some
of that stuff down'
and he was like, you know, 
'I’m gonna be who I am.'
I was like trying to just go to work, do my
job.
I never really hung out with police that much.
And I just been most comfortable
with my friends that I grew up with.
When I heard Booby 
became a cop, I said,
'Yo get out of here! Yo you lying no Booby!
Get the fuck out!'
We would chuckle about it but
you you you know behind the chuckle
you proud of him.
You proud of him because you know, coz out
there on that street
there’s only two things that can happen:
either going to jail or you gonna die.
He was the same Booby the only thing is he
going in the positive direction ...
With us you probably wouldn’t even thing
he was ...
We probably wouldn’t even thing
he was a cop if somebody would have told us.
If I would have seen Booby after all these
years without somebody telling me
he was a cop and I rolled up.
The same attitude, the same Booby, the same
shit ain’t nothing changed.
The community loved him, it wasn’t just
his rank it was his personality,
they could  relate to him.
He was real and he was sincere.
You would knock on your door, 
you'll knock on his door,
he did not hide himself in the office.
It seemed like he came from
the same place I came from.
Should I come closer?
Three down, two more to go.
In June I bust the captain’s exam.
Sergeant in 1998,
Lieutenant when I lost the cornrows.
Captain in 2005.
So this young man has never failed an exam.
Very very difficult thing to do,
never fail an exam.
People who didn’t know him would be like,
'Man, who’s this clown 
they let got promoted?'
But the back of my mind I was like,
'No, he’s playing you all.'
It’s not everything’s just black and white,
lets just go get them,
lock lock lock.
You can’t lock your way out
of policing, you can’t shoot your way out.
He just did so many different things, that
had never happened before.
To be honest I didn’t even know who our
former commanders were.
They never came out in the community to really
introduce themselves.
He loved his job.
You know how some people like their career,
he loved his career, he really did.
I retired in 2013.
For 21 years all of this stuff 
I had to hold in
and I knew I had a story to tell that could touch
some kids lives and I took a step out there
and I told my story.
Internet welcome to the Combat Jack Show,
Mr Corey Pegues aka Life.
What’s up Life?
Whats going on Life, Pegues?
He did tell me he was doing a radio interview,
that's what I knew, that was it.
He said he had an interview to do that evening
but I didn’t know any details.
Is selling drugs easy or
do you still have to be very good at it?
No you gotta be very good, 
you gotta be very good.
And what made you good at it?
Wow, you know, it was a wow.
He’s got a set of steel ones.
I was stunned.
Initially you felt like, you felt the same
way that everyone felt like, that you know,
Life jumped out of the window.
Like you know what are you doing here?
True story and this is in the book,
you know I can’t give everything away but
this is good.
I've put on my red jacket, I got my nickel-plated
25 in my pocket, I go down right to the block
198 Murdock,
pull the pistol out in his chest and I pull
the trigger right in his chest and pow.
Don’t go off.
I knew there was going to be a lot of backlash
and he was going to be in for it.
So that was where the shock was.
The whole family felt it, yeah, like
'Oh boy, yeah, here it comes!'
And it was shocking that this cop, an inspector,
was involved in selling drugs as a youth.
Police union president Patric Lynch wrote
a letter to the New York Post.
He’s hoping the NYPD will do an extensive and thorough
investigation into Pegues’s past.
If he would associate with drug dealers then,
what was he doing
when he was wearing a uniform in between and
what will he do now that he’s retired?
My phone was going crazy and I’m sleeping,
I worked all night and there’s like,
'What is your ni**er partner doing?'
On Monday police commissioner Bratner
said he was only just learning about Pegues
and would review his time in the department.
He’s evidently attempting to promote a book
and movie deal.
Black, white and indifferent wanted to send
him off on an island to himself.
They wanted to disassociate themselves immediately.
NYPD cops are most enraged about
Pegues’s admission
that he was friends as a teen 
with the guy
later convicted of pumping five shots
into the head of rookie 
police officer Edward Burn,
On February 26, 1988, as Burn guarded the home
of a drug witness in crack-riddled south Jamaica.
Nassau County police took several guns away
from Pegues,
but he’s still got the city pension.
Can you talk to me, Inspector?
Inspector can you talk to me 
for one minute?
It was horrible, I mean I cried, 
I really cried.
I was so mad, and hurt
and fearful like they was gonna set him up.
I didn’t know what was happening next.
He was angry, very angry,
They sent 17 cops to my house to take my guns,
paper said they would take my pension,
my wife was crying,
she thought we was gonna lose the house,
we were getting ready to lose everything.
It was just too much, too much.
Nobody even called me to say,
'Hey, why did you even tell your story or
is it even true?
And all the stuff that I did,
the people I spoke out for,
they wasn’t defending me. Nobody.
It was like me against the world.
I think it's atrocious, to 
take someone’s career,
throw it in the garbage
because they’re talking about
their past and their transformation.
That sends a bad message 
to the kids out there!
Let all the kids know, 
'Your life will never change.'
We live, Boo Life release party, 
Dj Hollywood, Smooth,
Mac Brown ... my man Rizo ... DJ Daddy, Cool June, we here livebaby, you don’t even know what it is, man.
Once a Cop, Boo life, Once a Cop!
I’m very proud of him,
coz he could have went the wrong way.
I could be right now going to see him
behind bars, or going to visit a grave site.
He was like one of the ones that was with
us from the beginning,
that was able to get out of that struggle
and do positive things!
When I went to the book signing, I was like
'Wow!'
I seen the people, I seen all the crowd, people that
he worked with in the precinct, so it's like
you got your precinct crew
and you got your crew, so it's like both stories
and I was like 'Wow.'
I went to the book signing 
at Barnes and Noble's down on Court Street,
bought the book, read the book, and I said
'Wow, this is why he was the way he is'
because he knew, you know,
he knew what it is to be a black man,
a black young man,
he knew what it is, you trying to make it
and people keep you down
and he knew about trying to grow up and be somebody
that the resources are not there.
My name is Corey Pegues, born
and raised in Queens New York, right around here.
I lived it like I was all in, to the point
that I was getting ready to murder somebody
and I don’t even know what he did.
That's the reason why I gravitated 
towards the street ...
It wasn't the greatest idea 
but was the only option that I had.
But today you got a whole lot of
options!
I know that all of you young men 
are good men
but I want to share my story with you anyway
so you never stray off.
Yo, I just did this speech up in Brownsville
high school.
What up y’all? What up? 
What up? What up?
The choke hold in Staten Island,
that man didn’t have to die!
We're just locking people up,
locking the up and giving them violations.
When I talk about policing, 
I'm talking about bad cops...
Police are actually going to have to
do their job.
Guess who runs the police department? 
70% to probably about 78% male white.
What does a cop have to do 
in NYC to get fired...
Not to get fired,
how about suspended without pay?
Some people are saying
you should never have been a police officer.
And you know what I say to those people?
I should never have had 
a second chance in life?
Should I have been stuck in the street, where
most people want you to be
where you're on the lower end of the totem pole
and not given a second chance?
God gave me a second chance at redemption
of my life and I took it and ran with it!
