In 1986, prize-winning journalist Pam Kelley wrote a front-page newspaper story about a shootout between two drug dealers in a public housing project in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was full of facts about cocaine, big money, and flashy jewelry, but it offered little insight into why this once-tidy development in one of the New South’s most prosperous and progressive cities had suddenly changed from white to black, become ground zero for a rapidly expanding drug economy, and drawn generations of young African-American men into lives of crime, violence, and incarceration. Some three decades later, Kelley explores those questions in depth through the story of a charismatic young drug dealer turned Christian preacher, in MONEY ROCK: A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South (on sale September 25).
At its core, MONEY ROCK is the riveting personal story of the fall and redemption of a magnetic young drug dealer and his striving African American family, three generations swept up and transformed by cocaine. Yet it is also the story of Charlotte, a New South boomtown that is finally beginning to confront the many ways its Jim Crow past lives on. A probing and revelatory social history in the tradition of Ghettoside and Random Family, it makes a vital contribution to the ongoing national discussion about race, drugs, law enforcement, incarceration, equality, and opportunity.
Becoming Money Rock
The first time Kelley met Belton Lamont Platt—known on the street as Money Rock—as a prisoner in his early twenties, he tried to convince her that he was innocent, even persecuted. A quarter century later, still a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, she hadn’t thought about him in years. But prompted by Jay-Z’s account in his memoir about his own years as a crack dealer in Brooklyn, Kelley got to wondering about Money Rock and the other drug dealers he’d been involved with, and whether they’d lived to tell about it.
Monty, as he was called in his youth, had been an energetic and popular student, as well as an avid Boy Scout and a successful playground entrepreneur. But those interests were no match for his adolescent passions—girls and sports—and crack was far more lucrative than candy bars. By the age of twenty-two, when he had the infamous shootout with another dealer known as Big Lou Samuels, Money Rock already had six children, a massive Mercedes, loads of diamonds and gold, and an income that often reached tens of thousands of dollars per week. A walking contradiction, he was known for his good nature, generosity to the community, and fervent abstention from drug use.
Money Rock was sentenced to thirty-five years for his role in the brazen daylight gunfight, which seriously injured innocent bystanders. The crime had shocked and shamed Charlotte, which was obsessed with becoming a “world class” city. In prison, Money Rock began to turn toward religion and became heavily involved in prison ministry, with aspirations of becoming a preacher. Yet he was released after serving only one year when his conviction was overturned on appeal. Realizing that he had been given a remarkable second chance, he tried to go straight, and returned to his former job as a contractor cleaning fast food restaurants at night. But family and financial pressures made him vulnerable to the lure of the street, and within a year he was back in the drug business.
Becoming Belton Platt
Within another year, Money Rock was snared in a botched FBI raid and sentenced to twenty-four years by a judge known as “Maximum Bob.” He would not be free again for two decades. This time, however, Money Rock—who now wanted to put his past behind him and wished to be known as Belton—approached his studies and his religion with utter seriousness and devotion. He became a model prisoner and a powerful preacher, admired by fellow prisoners and staff alike.
On the outside, however, Belton’s family was truck hard by the consequences of poverty, social divestment, and mass incarceration struck them hard. His first wife, Rhonda, divorced him early in his second prison term. By the time he left prison in 2010, two of his sons had been killed in gunfire and one, aggrieved at the loss of his brother, shot himself in the heart. His oldest son, known as Big Lamont, shot and killed a mentally disabled man and spent thirteen years in prison, more than three of them in solitary confinement.
In his second prison term, Belton became extremely close to an older white mentor and fellow inmate, a white man named Jim List, who was also an accomplished preacher. After List suddenly died in 2003, Belton raised eyebrows when he quickly married List’s widow, Susan, who was not only white but fourteen years his senior. After his release in 2010, they built a successful ministry together near Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, several hours away from his old haunts in Charlotte. After Susan died of cancer in 2015, Belton again set tongues wagging when he married a younger black divorced mother, Mashandia, whom he and Susan supported, guided, and opened their home to for several years. Today they continue the ministry that Belton and Susan had started.
The story behind the story
Kelley was inspired to write her gripping narrative by a simple question: What happened to Money Rock? The question grew more complicated the more she researched, as she saw everything she’d missed the first time around. Money Rock’s story began long before cocaine invaded Charlotte, with his birth in 1963 to Carrie Platt, a respected community leader and civil rights activist. Carrie’s marriage to his father, Alphonsus, ended after he stabbed her nearly to death. Later in and out of prison, Alphonsus also sold marijuana and heroin, ultimately introducing Belton to the drug game.
In addition to Carrie’s prominence and inner strength, there were other bright spots in young Monty’s upbringing. His early years were spent in a pleasant and stable public housing project, a product of forward-thinking city and federal policies. In 1974, Charlotte was the nation’s largest integrated school system, which served as a model for northern cities struggling with integration, like Boston. Focused on business development and civic peace, the city’s white leadership included many pro-integration progressives. As a result, young Belton attended a well-resourced, integrated high school. And in 1983, Charlotte elected its first black mayor, Harvey Gantt.
Yet as Kelley details, all these positive factors could not overcome the effects of “redlining” by banks, which choked off investment in black neighborhoods. The practice stifled business development and deprived African Americans of the opportunity to acquire their own homes with low-interest loans, which would have allowed them to build wealth as many of their white fellow citizens did. Meanwhile, the massive national demolition and construction program known as “urban renewal” (or “Negro removal,” as black people called it), destroyed more units of affordable housing than it created. It also helped to drive the black middle class out of city centers and away from their less privileged neighbors. Combined with lesser wages and sub-par benefits, healthcare, and schools for most African Americans, the effect of these policies was to lock in poverty, along with instability and incentives for criminal activity.
Furthermore, as Kelley explains, the arrival of cocaine (especially in its cheap and hugely addictive crack form), the national moral panic of the 1980s that spawned the War on Drugs, and the disparate impact of drug enforcement on poor black communities all helped to produce unprecedented levels of arrests, criminal convictions, and imprisonment among African American men. Kelley dramatizes this baleful trend through the experiences not only of Money Rock and his family, but also of Shirley Fulton, an African American woman who rose from poverty to become a state prosecutor and later a distinguished judge. Yet even Fulton, a staunch defender of the law, ultimately grew disillusioned with the War on Drug’s effects on poor African Americans, and retired to offer more direct forms of support to the black community.
About the Author:
A former reporter for the Charlotte Observer, Pam Kelley has won honors from the National Press Club and the Society for Features Journalism. She contributed to a subprime mortgage exposé that was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. She lives in North Carolina.
Praise for MONEY ROCK from reviewers:
“A diligent exposé. . . . A fascinating and hard-hitting story about drugs, crime, faith, and retribution.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Extends the work of such classics as Code of the Street and The Corner with curiosity, economy, thoroughness, and a deep feel for the nuances of human life. . . . Kelley places the remarkable story of her remarkable protagonist, Belton ‘Money Rock’ Platt, in a larger narrative that is too often elided, illuminating, in the process, the difference between justice and mere judgment.”
—Garth Risk Hallberg, author of City on Fire
“A powerful and unforgettable story of ambition, the failed War on Drugs, and those places where policies have failed to keep up with the human experience.”
—Wes Moore, author of The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates
“Eye-opening and moving. . . . An honest and absorbing chronicle of the social and emotional devastation of ‘law and order’ and essential reading for anyone who cares about racial justice and the health of American cities.”
—Matthew Horace, author of The Black and the Blue: A Cop Reveals the Crimes, Racism, and Injustice in America’s Law Enforcement
