CHARLIE MURPHY AS GUSTO IN CB4
In March 1993 CB4, a hip hop comedy I co-wrote with Chris Rock, opened at number one at the national box office, despite a huge snow storm that held down grosses on the east coast. The film has become a cult item over the years, largely because the film is based around the idea of “the studio gangsta,” someone who rhymes about street life without having lived it. In the movie Rock plays MC Gusto who bases his rhymes on the career of a real criminal called Gusto and played with great comic flair by Charlie Murphy. He even has a club called Gusto’s. Chris and I conceived the character as exaggeration of the gangsta tropes in hip hop and in movies like New Jack Swing (which Chris had appeared in.)
Well, the inspiration for the character’s name was a man I knew named David Crumpler, whose nickname was Gusto and who owned a Bronx restaurant named Arthur’s Roundtable on 174th Street and Bronx River Avenue. The real Gusto was not a caricature. He was a serious dude with a dream that, unfortunately, didn’t come true.
I first encountered Gusto when he started hanging around the record business in the mid-80s. A stocky five foot nine, he was built like a slightly smaller version of Mike Tyson. Yet what you noticed were his eyes, which were small, penetrating and quite intimidating. “You look up the word ‘street’ in the dictionary and Gusto was the definition,” our mutual friend singer Oran ‘Juice’ Jones. In ’87 I was asked me to try write a black detective flick for Jones, who had a unique swag and humorous delivery, as displayed in his hit “The Rain.” Gusto, a buddy of Jones, was asked to be a story consultant and give some credibility to a project to be called ‘Cold Chillin’ in a Hot Spot.’ At Knicks games, seafood restaurants and nightclubs, Jones and Crumpler would trade stories about the streets uptown New York with Gusto finishing most of them. There’s a scene in the movie New Jack City in which Wesley Snipes’ Nino Brown walks a naked man down a Harlem street at gun point. Well, Gusto had been there when it happened. I never asked how he knew these things. It was just understood that he did.
Apparently Crumpler came by his street knowledge through his father. “Gusto’s father was the kind of man who literally would pull his own teeth with pliers,” someone told me. “When you have a father like that there’s only a certain way you can act to earn respect.” But the younger Crumpler dreamed of a life beyond the streets.
He began managing a four-man vocal group that he named Gusto. He traveled to black music conferences and met with industry executives playing his demos of the group, finally getting a deal for the group with a hip New York label named 4th & Bway. They put out one single, “Materialistic Girl,” a hip hop/R&B hybrid just before Teddy Riley cracked the code with new jack swing. The record went nowhere and 4th & Bway didn’t give the group an album deal.
Four years later I was standing in the back of the Apollo Theater before the second of two Easter Sunday show starring Eric B and Rakim. It was midnight and I was sipping a Coke when a dude I knew from Queens slid over to the bar. “What’s up?” I asked. He replied, “They got Gusto. Came into his spot, said they were police. Handcuffed him. Found him today with three in the head.”
What I knew back in ‘91 was this: Gusto, his brother Reggie and a couple of other people were in an office next to Arthur’s Roundtable at 1:30 AM on March 31. Three men arrived at the back door. Flashing badges, they identified themselves as police officers, hand cuffed David Crumpler and took him away in an unmarked car. His brother Reggie attempted to follow but lost the trail. About nine hours later, on Easter morning, Gusto’s body was found in a park on 166th Street with three bullets in his head. Six days later there was a wake at Bentas Funeral Home in Harlem and two days later he was interred in a North Carolina burial plot he now shares with mother and grandmother.
It wasn’t until many years after CB4 I learned details about Crumpler’s death and the gang behind him. I found this report many year later on the internet — New York Times Sept. 30, 1992:
“Equipped with badges and plastic handcuffs, a gang of kidnappers posing as police officers staged the arrests of five New York City drug traffickers over an 18-month period and held them for hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom, law-enforcement officials said yesterday. In one case, $650,000 in ransom was paid, the officials said. In another, the victim was killed after his family refused to pay. The other three escaped. In several instances, victims were tortured with devices like staple guns. The nine gang members were named yesterday in a Federal indictment charging them with using kidnapping, murder and extortion in a racketeering enterprise, the United States Attorney for the Southern District, Otto G. Obermaier, said at a news conference. Five were arrested; four are fugitives.
Police Capt. Robert Martin, who headed the investigation, said that although the gang did not deal drugs itself, it robbed drug dealers “because that's where the money is. Captain Martin said the kidnap ring had two components. One group, which police dubbed "the Crew," included men from the South Bronx "who knew who was involved in the lucrative drug trade and who did the scouting," Captain Martin said. The other group, called "the Cowboys," were men from New Jersey, Westchester and Rockland Counties "who would move in to make the 'arrests,'" he said.”
“The Crew” were black men from uptown and “the Cowboys” were white, who came together to prey on people in the drug trade under the guise of ‘TNT’ aka Tactical Narcotics Units, that were empowered to target traffickers and uniformly abused their authority. So, when Crumpler was grabbed that night in the Bronx, it wasn’t unusual but was fishy.
In Crumpler’s case, as originally reported, three members of this team detained him at the Roundtable. Afterwards they took him to a nearby gas station and transferred him to the trunk of another car. A few hours later Crumplers wife received a ransom demand for $750,000. Despite torturing him with a blackjack, a stun gun, and staple gun, Crumpler refused to let his family pay the ransom. Frustrated by his resolve, the gang took him back to the Bronx, murdered him, and left his body in that Bronx park.
I’ve known a few people who suffered violent deaths, but none as cold blooded as that of David Crumpler. It makes you think: If “Material Girl” had been a hit, his group made an album and gone on tour, the whole trajectory of Crumpler’s life could have been different.