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BN: And then I wanted to go back to after you retired, you're telling us a story about... what was his name? Ronnie.

NN: Ronnie.

BN: So I wonder if you could go back to that, because that's a really interesting story.

NN: Okay.

BN: Ronnie was a member of the first Yellow Brotherhood, he was a gangbanger, part of the Ministers III, and Ronnie was always bigger than everybody else. He was always like a wannabe gangster. And I guess Ronnie ended up like, he did like Youth Authority time, but there's a real basic niceness to Ronnie. And I don't know if people... but like a gentleness. But I guess Ronnie, like everybody else growing up, wanted to kind of be a tough guy. Ronnie, back in the mid-'70s, got on a drug run. And he ended up shooting someone at the liquor store that he was holding up. Just like a quick story to talk about, like Ronnie's character, that Ronnie was on this drug binge that one of the founding members of the Yellow Brotherhood, with the Yellow Brotherhoods, all this history, like different stages of YB was named Victor Shibata. Anyway, Ronnie hit Victor up for, I think, twenty dollars, and Victor gave it to him. So when Ronnie was locked up at County Jail facing a trial, it was probably going to put him away for maybe life, Victor says one morning that Ronnie's father is at his doorstep, and then Victor greeted him, and Ronnie's dead, says, "You know, my son wanted me to give you this, pay you back." And so he gives Victor the twenty dollars. And we're all going, damn, he's locked up right now, he's thinking about, "I owe Victor twenty dollars." So that's basically part of the neighborhood creed of who we are. So Ronnie gets locked up, I forget what his sentence is, but it's long. We hear back maybe some years later that we know he's in Folsom where he's acquitted, yeah, he's acquitted. We hear that, you know what, Ronnie died of a stroke. And I think this might have been in the late '70s or early '80s. So that's it.

Fast forward to maybe twelve or ten years ago, at Nisei Week, that the Yellow Brotherhood and the Asian American Hardcore, the Asian American drug abuse program, were both being honored by the Nisei Week committee for whatever, that they have this dinner, and Victor and myself are there on behalf of the YB. Mike Watanabe, who's the director of the Asian American Drug Abuse Program, he's sitting across from me at the table, and he's asking me, "Hey, Nick, do you know a Ronnie Nakashima?" "Yeah." And he says, "He wrote a letter." "I thought he was dead." He says, "No, he wrote us a letter and I wanted to give it to you." So he gives me the letter, and Ronnie wrote a letter to AADAP saying that, "He's up for parole, and he's up for parole, and he's been denied parole something like twelve times," and it's because he can't show any place of residence when he gets released. So he wanted to know if, like AADAP could provide him with some residency if released. And I'm looking it as, "Damn," right? So Victor thinks Ronnie's dead, too, and then he mentioned in his letter Art Ishii, who was a member of the YB's. And I remember Art Ishii and Danny Wong, he drops their names. And I guess Art's part of the Nisei Week Committee now. So we all look at this thing, and we're going, "Let's go check him out." And Ronnie is at, I guess it's the same place where they put Manson, it's one of these, not a psychiatric, but maybe it's a... see, Ronnie's in a wheelchair now because of the stroke. So he didn't die, but he got in a stroke, so he's wheelchair-bound.

So we went up to the institution up there, and it's the Tracy or something up north, so we take a day trip, and we don't know what to expect. But Ronnie comes out and, I mean, he's in a wheelchair, and we didn't know if we're going to see this hard-assed convict, don't know what to expect. But I guess through the stroke he's pretty soft-spoken right now, and he got his head shaved. He just has basically use of his right side, but he came up, but he was so happy to see us. And then when we just started to spend time and talk, that if you've been around long enough, around the block, you could tell if someone's bullshitting or trying to game you, that there was absolutely nothing like that. And then he had really good color, he had no wrinkles, and we're saying, "Man, you look better than us, what's the secret, man?" And then he kind of plays chess in the daytime, and then he was real happy to see us because he has not had a visitor since the '80s. So this is the first time he got to use the vending machines. So you know, he was eating Skittles and everything, he was real happy then. So we were asking him about his legal situation, and he was telling us about, well, he's been denied like twelve times, but he has this thing coming up. And on the way home, we just start talking, we said, man, "You know what? Let's try to support him." And then we got together with the AADAP thing, because AADAP was then on board to give him shelter, housing when he got out. And so we formed a committee to help him, to support him. And so he reconnected him to the community, some people were writing him letters and sending him care --

[Interruption]

NN: Started to do some research on the parole hearings and whatnot, and we got him an attorney, Scott Hadleman, who was based in San Francisco, his really good brother. That he took the case, that he went up and met Ronnie, we were telling Ronnie things that, how he should present himself. But he should also maybe take these classes and stuff, Ronnie's still kind of a knucklehead, too. And he says, "You know what, I don't like school." He could help a kid out, he said, "Man, I ain't done no drugs since I had my stroke. And I know right from wrong now." That may not be good enough because they're going to want to hear, "I'm sorry," and all this kind of stuff. But Ronnie just basically wouldn't kiss their ass or whatever. "Gee, I've been thirty-something years, man." So came down to it, on that parole hearing, prior to that, we had a fundraiser at AADAP, big turnout, a lot of support letters. I think Yuri Kochiyama came out from the Bay Area, she's very active in political prisoners. We submitted to the parole board, Rodney submitted on the parole board about a hundred letters from people from the community. So we did everything on this end. End of the day, that he was denied, and then our committee that we met probably weekly, like we were all dejected, because the next hearing is like three years down the line. So said, "We're going to keep doing this for three years?" and we continued to meet for like three years. Went up and periodically, people would go up there to see Ronnie. Scott the attorney says, "You know what? I don't think I could handle the next one, so did the research and found this other attorney. And Ronnie still was taking classes, that was driving us crazy, right? But through this whole time, people really got to know Ronnie, just through the correspondence and everything else, visits and all that stuff. But the second time he got out. He got out, and that was about six years ago, and AADAP, to their credit, they're still putting 'em up in one of their homes that they have. Ronnie is well-versed in public transportation, he has one of them cards that he can get on and off the bus, that he's kind of out and about, really a success story. So periodically, you know what, we have lunch with him together.

BN: What other things have you been involved with in your retirement phase of life?

NN: I got grandkids. So they're good medicine, so I spend a lot of time with the grandkids, grow stuff in the backyard. I try to stay somewhat on top of and try to contribute whatever that I can, and certain issues like the gentrification of people of color communities, mainly like Crenshaw, support organizations like West Adams Community Council. I support reparations for Blacks, but I'm not involved in the congressional aspect of that, because that's way beyond my pay grade.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.