Coolio Da’Unda’Dogg Why did you decide it was important to tell your story to the public? At first, we were all skeptical because some of those people were still going through cases. But we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t gonna harm us. My brother is an officer and I asked him, “Is this stuff incriminating?” And he was like, “Naw, you can talk about anything you’ve been convicted for or anything they charged you for.” Plus we wanted to get the story out about Mac Dre not being involved in robbing banks. What was going through your mind the first time you robbed a bank? The first time I actually robbed a bank I didn’t go in; I was the driver. One of my friends got in my car with a wad of brand new money and said he robbed a bank and wanted to hit another one. I’m lookin’ like, that’s some Jesse James type stuff! We picked up another friend and went to the bank. I’m in the car waiting and I hear these sirens coming. I’m automatically thinking we’re caught, but they made it to the car with the money. I saw the police coming towards me and they ducked down. I headed towards the freeway. I was nervous as hell but once we made it back to his house, we counted the money and it was like $17,000. When did you get up the nerve to go into the bank yourself? A few weeks later. It was probably the biggest adrenaline rush I ever had. I felt comfortable knowing we could get away with it. I was more nervous the first time than I was actually going into the bank. I went in and grabbed all the money out the drawer. My friend was pretty much just barking all the orders so I didn’t have to say much. We got the money and ran out. That time we had about $47,000.
Did the money overshadow the guilt of robbing people or the idea of getting caught? Yeah. Once you make it home and count the money, you don’t think about the people ‘cause you haven’t physically hurt anyone. You don’t think about getting caught if you already got away. The only time I felt remorse over the people in the bank was when I got arrested. I started reading that some of the people were traumatized. I told my homeboy, “I wish I could apologize to these people.” I reflected back on it and was like, wow I really scared the life outta people, pointing a gun in somebody’s face. When you were in prison, were you thinking about ways to change your life? The whole time I was like, I’ma get out and do my music the right way. I got my high school diploma, went to college for a year and studied law. I was getting books sent in about the music industry. I was already working on Cavvy R. Records off and on, but I wasn’t that successful. The crazy part was, before I got arrested, in 1991 I had released a cassette. I pressed up 2,000 copies of it. I hadn’t saw any money of it yet, but when I came home all those units were sold out and I had a check waiting. So the publicity from the Romper Room capers fueled your record sales? When me and Dre got out, we started working on The Rompalation, and to this day that album has sold over 100,000 copies. We hit Billboard as soon as we came home. We sold 10,000 copies in the first week. The rest of this story will be featured in OZONE’s February issue.
OZONE MAG // 21