Fat Joe Encounters the TERMINATOR: What Happens Next Will Shock You!

Fat Joe and Cuban Link were almost Terminated in Connecticut by the Latin Kings, barely escaping with their lives.Fat Joe and his "Terror Squad" have quite a few anecdotes floating around about them actually spreading "Terror" in the hip hop business…from Big Pun kidnapping WhoKid to Fat Joe chasing Jay-Z around his office to Cuban Link getting his face slashed in an internal beef. But there's levels to violence and I've seen first hand several well known "street guy" rappers be intimidated by active street guys. Fat Joe just told an interesting story along those lines and I did some more research about it. Pun died in early 2000, so this would have been 98 or 99, probably. Bridgeport, Connecticut is driving distance from New York and has a large Puerto Rican population, as well as a thriving "street economy". Joey Crack and co.'s brush with death began when Big Pun invited them to perform at the Puerto Rican Day Parade in Bridgeport, although Pun didn't end up going himself. When Terror Squad arrived, they were "treated like kings" by local kingpin Frankie "The Terminator" Estrada and his crew. The "treated like Kings" isn't just the usual saying, Estrada was a leader in the Latin Kings, though his involvement with them is an interesting look into how power works on the streets vs jail. Guys who mill around liquor stores and ask for change in the free world might be big deals inside the joint and when Estrada went to prison circa 1990 he was already making money in the streets and became an extortion target. And though his nicknam "The Terminator" came from getting rid of people no amount of tough can protect a single person from a large well organized gang in a prison setting…so Frankie Estrada became a Latin King. Just like they could give him a problem inside the joint, he could give them problems on the streets of Bridgeport. His money and power was concentrated around the P.T. Barnum public housing project. Estrada eventually made enough money to own one of the largest nightclubs in the state of Connecticut, but he definitely came up the hard way. While steel a teenager he went to cop his first ki of yayo for $17k in Brooklyn. His dad was the middleman…and stole his own sons street money. Ran off with cash. After his release from prison in 1995, Estrada set up shop in Bridgeport's infamous PT Barnum projects, specializing in H, with brand names like "Hawaiian Punch". During this period Frankie's street activities put his own family in peril, for example some stick up guys robbed his sister's apartment, shooting a cousin in the process and throwing Frankie's mother out of a window.