𝐋𝐢𝐟𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐲
Peter Shue is a Bronx native who was born in the spring of 1959, and grew up around Simpson Street. He was biracial, coming from an African-American mother and a Chinese father. Despite his Asian features, people could tell Shue was American once he opened his mouth and spoke with a New York accent. As a growing teenage boy, Peter developed a talent for basketball. He would play regularly on school teams, in between getting kicked out of several different high schools throughout the Bronx. Unruly behavior and inconsistent attendance got him kicked out of places like James Monroe High School, Evander Childs Educational Campus, Adlai E. Stevenson High School (my old school), etc.
Around this time is when Peter began his ventures into hustling. He started off by distributing rolled joints for $1 each, and would make about $700 weekly. Hip-Hop was officially born in 1973, not far from Shue as he went through these different schools and made money between 1974 and 1978. He kept selling joints throughout his college tenure as well.
Peter became a student of Manhattan City College in 1979, the same year that “disco died” as hip-hop continued to bubble. Shue of course played for the school’s basketball team, wearing the number 10.
* Peter (far left) with his college team *
As the 1980s rolled in, a new generation of money chasers were coming up. Along with them was Peter and his crew, who made a habit of taking things by force. But once his father died, Shue turned his attention from stealing through armed robbery to actually generating his own profit. It was necessary in order to step up and be the man of the house for his mother.
Peter was arrested for robbery in 1984 and spent four years incarcerated. Upon his release, his acquaintances were ready to go back to sticking people up, though Shue had other plans. He initially refused to return to an illicit life and secured a legit job at a telephone company. Business was good at work, and Peter got along well with colleagues. However, he had to omit his prior felony from the job application in order to even get to that point. One day while contacting his parole officer at his work desk, a co-worker overheard his phone conversation and proceeded to inform their higher ups. The supervisor fired Peter, despite his manager’s attempts at defending him. To make things worse, Shue’s parole officer relayed this information to his mother before Peter could even make it home. Shue stated that he felt suicidal on the drive back to his house and cried on the road.
When he returned home, Peter let his mother know he’d never be someone else’s employee again. That same night he was fired he was gifted a brick of coke by a friend, as a present for his upcoming birthday. Peter contacted his friend, who instructed him how to cook the cocaine into crack, leading to a business that Shue originally didn’t wish to get involved in. He also made a mistake cooking the kilogram, accidentally dissolving the one drug batch he had. Rather than distributing crack, Peter focused exclusively on heroin and cocaine. This made more sense to him since he already had a reliable list of clientele willing to purchase large quantities of his product.
Peter’s friends organized a huge formal-dress birthday party for him, in a rented out ballroom with a capacity of 2,000. Shue handed out over 15 times as many flyers as the amount of people allowed inside just to ensure a full house. He even promoted the event on the radio.
The success of the event marked the first of many more parties to come. Peter began hosting them on a monthly basis due to the demand. The celebrity appearances at his events became more frequent as well. People like Diddy, Charles Oakley, Mary J. Blige, Mike Tyson, Jodeci and Keith Sweat would come to attend Shue’s big parties. It got to a point that music artists saw the promotional value in spreading their music at these locations, so they began performing free of charge. If anything, artists would pay Peter for the exposure, as did Suge Knight one time in the earlier days of Death Row Records. However Knight held out on paying Shue after promoting his artists at the party, despite their original agreement. Shue simply told Suge straightforward that without getting paid his due promotion fee, Knight would not live long enough to leave New York City. Needless to say Peter got his money.
There was one particular party where Keith Sweat was in attendance and got approached by Alpo Martinez, who was then still a Harlem-based drug dealer. Martinez wanted Keith dead for whatever reason before Peter intervened and warned that nobody would lay a finger on the singer. Shue treated all his guests like V.I.P., according to his own words.
Peter stayed involved in narcotics the entire time. His brother-in-law kept him connected to a plug down in Miami who offered decent prices on kilo shipments. Shue would then flip each cocaine key for up to $16,000 compared to its street value of $19K at the time. He made the majority of his profits from moving heroin. Peter once said “Coke is good money, but dope is unbelievable money.”
Shue traveled throughout the country generating wealth, including Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami and especially Baltimore. There, he knew the area just as well as he did New York and handled up to 8 kilograms of dope a week, which would earn him $80,000 for each key. The self-made entrepreneur’s crew would count $15 million in cash by hand and have to start the count over if any error was suspected.
Peter sponsored community basketball games in Harlem’s Rucker Park and advertised his own team called “Take No Prisoners” by handing out t-shirts to the crowd in full view of his opponents. This helped inspire the 1993 film Above the Rim.
Shue had the power to run people out of New York for good if he wanted, which of course meant he wasn’t everyone’s favorite person. His good friend Domencio, another drug lord who hailed from Brooklyn, once found the dead body of a half-black and half-Chinese man laying in a parking lot. Believing this to be Peter, Domencio contacted Shue’s mother in a panic and swore vengeance on whoever supposedly murdered her son. She was undoubtedly spooked, and started checking local hospitals with her daughter. The two became more upset to discover that Domencio made a mistake and that Peter was actually still alive making money in Baltimore. The fear of losing him prompted Mrs. Shue to beg for her child’s withdrawal from the drug game, to which he sincerely promised to abide, after just one more year of hustling.
The scale and reputation of Peter’s parties in New York grew, as well as the guest appearances from celebrities all around. One regular attendant was Heavy D. According to @_ValTown_ on Twitter (co-founder of the @meccapolis Instagram page) Heavy D once claimed “I’ll never go to a party unless it’s a Peter Shue party.”
In the midst of his rising profile in the New York night life, Peter met Madonna at a nightclub and the two began an affair. On the surface, it seemed like the pair hit it off. They traveled on private planes and would visit Rucker Park together, all while he laundered $10 million on a regular basis through his activities with Madonna. She loved him, but he didn’t reciprocate her feelings. Madonna even suggested having his children (he already had kids) to which he replied: “I like my women black like my coffee”. He eventually left her and she chose to conspire with her 60-year-old friend, a long-running FBI informant who originally snitched on the Mafia, in order to get Peter locked up.
Just before his friction with the law, Peter was offered a business opportunity by Suge Knight, who recognized his gangsta after their last encounter. Shue had the chance to run Death Row East along with Chaz, the former manager of 50 Cent and an ex-armed robber.
During one arranged drug deal in Long Island, Shue found himself surrounded by 30 cars of federal authorities. His subsequent trial resulted in 2 hung juries, and he was convinced by his lawyer to claim he loved Madonna as a bargaining ploy. The plan failed. Instead, the feds offered Peter a plea deal that would reduce his sentence to only 5 years, but Shue denied the chance to snitch on anyone. He served 21 years out of his nearly 25 year sentence and was released in the late 2010s. During his bid, he missed out on his children growing up and his mother passed away not long after his release.
Now outside, Peter authored an autobiography which is currently available titled Life of the Party, and he also auctioned off an old pair of panties gifted to him by Madonna for $25 million. The panties came with a love letter she wrote for him.
