(New York Post) Seattle now has on its payroll a convicted pimp who once vowed to “go to war” with the city — a $150,000 “street czar” whose mission is to come up with “alternatives to policing,” reports said.
Andre Taylor — who appeared in the documentary “American Pimp” about his life as “Gorgeous Dre” — is getting $12,500 per month for a year, along with an office in Seattle’s Municipal Tower, according to the contract published by PubliCola.
It comes just a year after his organization, Not This Time, was paid $100,000 to sponsor a speaker series that was called “Conversations with the Streets.”
He was later accused of trying to get millions from the city for militants who set up the controversial police-free Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) zone, the Seattle Times said.
“Don’t just leave. Leave with something,” he told activists in a meeting caught in a recording, telling them to demand $2 million to exit the site of much of the city’s worst violence this year, the report said. They ignored his advice, the paper said, with one saying the money grab felt “off.”
The new street czar justified the contract to KOMO News as payment for his “particular genius in a particular area” — saying he can talk to “gang members, pimps and prostitutes” who “won’t sit down with anybody else.”
“Black people as a whole have not been in a place to be compensated for their genius or their work for a very, very long time,” he said.
Some of the girls he pimped for were underage, according to court reports in the Las Vegas Sun.
