Street Legends, Vol. 1
"Any gangsta rap fan  knows that the genre largely glamorizes the violent, fast-lane  lifestyles of street hustlers and bange.” -Smooth Magazine“A  few years ago, Alice K. Turner wrote a book entitled The History of  Hell. The book traces the idea of hell throughout history. In like  manner, Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from  Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. His book traces the idea of the  Devil in a period of history. Turner and Burton are highly educated,  erudite, and talented. They write about abstract ideas.There's  another writer, who wrote a book combining the subjects of Turner’s book  and Burton’s book. His name is Seth Ferranti aka Soul Man. He, too, is  erudite and talented only in a different kind of way. Seth has been  incarcerated in the feds, which is the federal prison system since 1993.  If everything goes smoothly, he will be released in 2015.In his  book, Street Legends, Seth writes about the same subjects as Turner and  Burton, hell and the Devil. Only Seth doesn’t write about ideas, he  writes about reality. There is a hell on earth. It's called a supermax  prison. And it’s where they keep the Devil. Only in this case, there’s  more than one Devil there’s six. The names of the Devils are: Kenneth  “Supreme” McGriff, Wayne “Silk” Perry, Anthony Jones, Aaron Jones, Peter  “Pistol Pete” Rollack, and George “Boy George” Rivera. And they make  the Biblical Devil look like a three-year-old toddler at a Sunday school  picnic.Seth Soul Man Ferranti tells the actual story of each  man. The stories twirl around cocaine and heroin, oodles and oodles of  money, plump cars, and bling bling. Unfortunately, in each case, the  merry-go-round of fun turns into a Tilt-a-Whirl of violence and murder  as the street hustlers ride the streets. In the end, each of the six  Devils is imprisoned in hell on earth for life.Ferranti's style  is raw and edgy, full of street slang and prison jargon, which is  fascinating to read. What really keeps the book moving and the reader  engaged is Ferranti's talent for storytelling. As he relates the story,  Ferranti seems to be idolizing the lifestyles and actions of these  street stars. And in a sense, he is, but only because he's showing the  reader how members of certain socio-economic groups look at these men.  To these people, these men are legends. They are street stars, because  they re living the life.Then, though, as each man's life  spirals into a black hole from which there is no return, Ferranti  politely acknowledges the utter folly of such a lifestyle. He shows each  man for the fraud and charlatan he was. Oh, Ferranti respects their  code of omerta (silence), and the fact that they were willing to go to  prison for it. Yet Ferranti implies that only totally immoral  individuals operate on a pseudo-moral system founded on omerta or  silence. Only corrupt people worry about someone snitching on them. And  anyone who knows enough to snitch about such people has, at the very  least, been dabbling in corruption.At the same time, Ferranti  does not pretend that the agents of justice the authorities are  impeccable angelic beings, who always play by the rules. In Street  Legends, carrying a badge does not guarantee a squeaky-clean character.  Ferranti points out that the authorities sometimes stack the deck when  it serves their purposes. In other words, this is not a story about good  guys and bad guys. It’s a story about waste. This does not, however,  dilute the moral of Ferranti's book.The moral of the story is  that living the life, if that life is based on drugs and murder, is  nothing more than a fleeting mirage. When the mirage disappears, all  that's left is a sign that reads Welcome to Hell.Street Legends is the story of the cry of utter desolation coming from those now residing in that hell.” -Alvah's Books