  "A lot of people in the city nowadays have no fuckin' idea,
but it looked like a bomb hit down here," Joseph says of the
LES. "The city was givin' these buildings away for a dollar, you
just had to show them the receipts that you were fixing it up.
We all joked, 'Who the fuck wants to live down here?' The guys
who were smart enough to do that and bought five, six, seven
buildings are all multi-millionaires now. It wasn't my thing. I
traveled the world, I'm an artist, I don't wanna be no real
estate person, I don't need those headaches."  "But back then
the shit was insane. In. Fuckin'. Sane," he says. On the walking
tours, he still runs into some of the characters from the old
days. "The very first time I ever did it, this dude down there,
I was like, 'Yo, that guy used to be an enforcer for this guy
Junior, from 7th Street, that got locked up under RICO. He's a
bad dude.' We seen him comin' toward us, the guy's fuckin' six-
four, prison build, this monster black dude, and he's all, 'Yo,
what you doin' What'