David Kushner - Jacked - The unauthorized behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto

For Sam’s eighteenth birthday, his dad took him to New York. On arrival, Sam bought a leather jacket and Air Jordan Mach 4 sneakers, as he’d seen on MTV. He roamed the open world downtown, soaking in the sights and the sounds. The yellow taxis. The rising buildings. The surly pedestrians. The hookers in Times Square. “From that point I was chronically in love with the place,” he later recalled.

For lunch one afternoon, Sam’s dad took him out with his friend Heinz Henn, a marketing executive for BMG, the music label for the German company Bertelsmann. BMG, Henn explained, was struggling to cash in on youth culture. As Sam sat there listening, he couldn’t contain himself for long. “Why is everyone in the record business so old?” he asked, “Why don’t you have young people working in this business?”

Henn eyeballed this rich white kid dressed like Run DMC, then spoke to Sam’s dad. Who was this hot-tempered but very self-assured boy? “Your son is an utter lunatic,” Heinz told him, “but he has some good ideas.”

Sam had just scored himself a job.

Chapter 2 The Warriors Contents Title Page Jacked The unauthorized behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto DAVID KUSHNER Dedication Author’s Note Prologue - Players vs. Haters Chapter 1 - The Outlaws Chapter 2 - The Warriors Chapter 3 - Race ‘n’ Chase Chapter 4 - Gouranga! Chapter 5 - Eating the Hamster Chapter 6 - Liberty City Chapter 7 - Gang Warfare Chapter 8 - Steal This Game Chapter 9 - Rockstar Loft Chapter 10 - The Worst Place in America Chapter 11 - State of Emergency Chapter 12 - Crime Pays Chapter 13 - Vice City Chapter 14 - Rampages Chapter 15 - Cashmere Games Chapter 16 - Grand Death Auto Chapter 17 - Boyz in the Hood Chapter 18 - Sex in San Andreas Chapter 19 - Unlock the Darkness Chapter 20 - Hot Coffee Chapter 21 - Adults Only Chapter 22 - Busted! Chapter 23 - Bullies Chapter 24 - Flowers for Jack Chapter 25 - New York City Epilogue - Outlaws to the End Acknowledgments Notes Index Copyright About the Publisher

I’m ’bout to bust some shots off. I’m ’bout to dust some cops off.”

It was July 16, 1992, as the performer rapped onstage in Beverly Hills, but this wasn’t Ice-T, the artist who wrote these lyrics. It was the square-jawed superstar actor Charlton Heston. Though best known for his portrayal of Moses in the Ten Commandments, Heston brought his booming voice to the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a higher cause today: getting this song, “Cop Killer,” banned.

The occasion was the annual shareholders meeting of Time Warner, which owned the label that put out this record. Since the release of the track in March, “Cop Killer” had become a national controversy, decried by police groups and President Bush. Ice-T, who had written it in the wake of the recent Rodney King riots, defended it as an honest wake of the recent Rodney King riots, defended it as an honest portrayal of a character fed up with police brutality.

Yet the shareholders in the crowd today seemed to be believing everything Heston had to say. As he bellowed the refrain—“Die die die pig die!”—one man watched the performance in awe: Jack Thompson. Born-again and Republican, Thompson had the readiness of a schoolboy dressed for a yearbook photo. He wore his suits crisp, his prematurely graying hair neatly combed at the part, his blue eyes twinkling. He could feel the electricity of the moment. Heston had, as Thompson later put it, “lit the fuse on the culture war.”And this young warrior was ready to fight.

Compared to the NRA supporter onstage, however, Thompson hardly seemed like the warring kind. Growing up a scrawny straight-A student from Cleveland with a debilitating stutter, Thompson was so myopic that he’d run across the Little League field chasing balls that didn’t exist. His fellow players hated him. “It was fairly traumatic,” he later recalled. One day he acted out. He went into his garage, poured gasoline on the floor, tossed gunpowder caps around, and started pounding them with a hammer until they exploded in flames.

Thompson survived the prank but enjoyed the heat. An eighteen-year-old Robert Kennedy acolyte and liberal, he got his tires slashed and life threatened after leading a student protest to desegregate housing. He listened to Crosby Stills and Nash, and hosted a radio show at Dennison University.

But Jack had a Ripper growing inside. When a Black Panther student replaced the school’s American flag with a Black Power flag, Thompson confronted him. “What are you doing?” he asked. “We share the American flag!” The guy pulled a machete on him. Thompson recoiled, literally and philosophically. “It was a radical time, and you had to choose sides,” he later recalled. “I became a conservative over the lunacies of political correctness.”

With a William Buckley book tucked under his arm, Thompson entered law school at Vanderbilt University, alongside classmate Al Gore. He preferred playing golf to attending class and, despite graduating Phi Beta Kappa, flunked the bar. After moving to Miami and feeling like a failure, he accompanied a friend to a church service where everyone was dressed in shorts and T-shirts. Thompson felt at home and became born-again. Before retaking the bar, he prayed and, when he passed, took it as a sign from God to go on a crusade.

In 1987, after hearing a local shock jock on the air, Thompson hit the law books. With painstaking research, he discovered a little known fact at the time: the Federal Communications Commission had the power to regulate the airwaves for obscenity, and this station, in many ways, seemed to violate the standards. After Thompson took the unusual measure of filing a complaint with the FCC, the shock jock angrily broadcast his name and phone number. Death threats, unwanted pizza deliveries, and the local press followed, transforming Thompson into an overnight rock star of Miami’s right.

Confident, unflappable, and speedy with a sound bite, Thompson deftly played his part, faxing complaints to corporate sponsors until ads began to get pulled from the air. Despite the radio station’s legal proceedings against him, Thompson won the right in court to continue lobbying advertisers and the FCC under First Amendment protection. His hard work paid off in historic proportions when the FCC fined the shock jock’s station for indecency—the first time ever for such levies. Thompson took it as more divine purpose. “God’s people were going to be warriors with me through prayer,” he later wrote in his memoir.

Yet he already had others warring against him. Acting on the radio station’s assertion that Thompson was obsessed with pornography, the Florida bar convinced the state’s Supreme Court to determine whether Thompson was mentally ill. Faced with losing his license to practice law, Thompson underwent psychiatric testing. The test results concluded that he was “simply a lawyer and a citizen who is rationally animated by his activist Christian faith.” As Thompson later liked to joke, “I’m the only officially certified sane lawyer in the entire state of Florida.”

Empowered, Thompson assumed higher-profile battles. He took on incumbent Dade County state attorney Janet Reno for prosecutor, publicly challenging her to declare her sexuality. He made his name nationally by spearheading an obscenity conviction of rap group 2 Live Crew for their album As Nasty as They Wanna Be. With the controversy fueling demand for the record, however, the group’s leader, Luther Campbell, laughed all the way to the bank.

Thompson was on his way, though—right to Charlton Heston’s side at the shareholders meeting over “Cop Killer.” With the impossible task of following Heston onstage, Thompson warned, amid the boos of protesters, that “Time Warner is knowingly training people, especially young people, to kill. One day this company will pay a wicked price for that.”