Money Rock

A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South

Pam Kelley

• Publisher: The New Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781620973288
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

"An ambitious look at the cost of urban gentrification."
—Atlanta-Journal Constitution

"Kelley could have written a fine book about Charlotte's drug trade in the '80s and '90s, filled with shoot-outs and flashy jewelry. What she accomplishes with Money Rock, however, is far more laudable."
—Charlotte Magazine

"Pam Kelley knows a good story when she sees one—and Money Rock is a hell of a story. . . like a New South version of The Wire."
—Shelf Awareness

Meet Money Rock—young, charismatic, and Charlotte's flashiest coke dealer—in a riveting social history with echoes of Ghettoside and Random Family

Meet Money Rock. He's young. He's charismatic. He's generous, often to a fault. He's one of Charlotte's most successful cocaine dealers, and that's what first prompted veteran reporter Pam Kelley to craft this riveting social history—by turns action-packed, uplifting, and tragic—of a striving African American family, swept up and transformed by the 1980s cocaine epidemic.

The saga begins in 1963 when a budding civil rights activist named Carrie gives birth to Belton Lamont Platt, eventually known as Money Rock, in a newly integrated North Carolina hospital. Pam Kelley takes readers through a shootout that shocks the city, a botched FBI sting, and a trial with a judge known as "Maximum Bob." When the story concludes more than a half century later, Belton has redeemed himself. But three of his sons have met violent deaths and his oldest, fresh from prison, struggles to make a new life in a world where the odds are stacked against him.

This gripping tale, populated with characters both big-hearted and flawed, shows how social forces and public policies—racism, segregation, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration—help shape individual destinies. Money Rock is a deeply American story, one that will leave readers reflecting on the near impossibility of making lasting change, in our lives and as a society, until we reckon with the sins of our past.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Map of Money Rock’s Charlotte
• 1. Money Rock and Big Lou
• 2. Showdown
• 3. Carrie Platt and the American Dream
• 4. Candy Kingpin
• 5. The Dealer’s Mother
• 6. What Went Wrong with Piedmont Courts?
• 7. State of North Carolina Versus Money Rock
• 8. Convictions
• 9. Heavy in the Weight
• 10. Going Down
• 11. United States Versus Money Rock
• 12. Coming of Age in a World-Class City
• 13. The Christian Inmate
• 14. Sentencing a Generation
• 15. Lost Boys
• 16. The Love of His Life
• 17. Freedom
• 18. Trying to Make a Change
• 19. Susan and Mashandia
• 20. Homecoming
• 21. Life on the Outside
• 22. Uprising
• 23. Southside Homes
• Epilogue
• Where They Are Now
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author