Wager Mage
Wager Mage
Photo: Asaad Haj Taleb
Swangas/elbows refer to two styles of rims that Cragar Wire Wheel Company produced for Cadillac models in the early Eighties: the '83s' and the '84s'. The original swangas were a 30-spoke chrome rim that Cragar produced for Cadillac Eldorados from 1979–1983.
Gambling winnings are fully taxable and you must report the income on your tax return. Gambling income includes but isn't limited to winnings from...
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Tosh – “Nonsense” The word tosh is used to dismiss something as a bunch of nonsense. It's used in the way that many speakers would use “baloney” or...
Read More »“Meet at MacGregor Park and ask for a man called Les. Les spelt with a dollar sign $$$” The text message that pinged into my pocket when I was walking out of George Bush Intercontinental Airport sounded simple. But rolling into MacGregor Park on the southside of Houston 30 minutes later, photographer Mark Riccioni and I quickly realised that finding Les spelt with a dollar sign might be a challenge. Partly because we had driven into what looked and felt like a riot, but mainly because the potent and blinding combination of tyre, marijuana and barbeque smoke filling the air hindered our vision. Spilling out of the park to frame the adjacent six-lane highway were hundreds of people; all cheering, jeering and live-streaming the health and safety nightmare we were witnessing. People sipped sizzurp (see slang guide at the bottom of this page) and smoked joints the size of carrots while motorbikes adopted beyond vertical numberplate-kissing wheelies, old boys dripped out in gold straddled trikes and did burnouts at the traffic lights while ‘bally boys’ on quads conducted dusty donuts. But the various-wheeled bikes were just the filler for the main attraction: the cars. Skip 20 photos in the image carousel and continue reading Turn on Javascript to see all the available pictures. 1 / 20 Not giving two hoots to the Highway Code were cars like we’d never seen before – big, lazy luxury American sleds (lots of Buicks, a handful of Mercuries, Lincolns, Oldsmobiles but most notably Cadillacs) with retina-burning candy paint, chopped springs, mismatched grilles and cartoonish protruding chrome wheels. These scythed chariots would weave across the six-lane highway like a fresher stumbling back from the pub, race on the wrong side of the road and block each other in like they were hunting prey – all while ‘popping trunk’ (again, see the slang list – you’ll be doing that a lot) to reveal neon-lit epitaphs and free the dirty bass reverberating from their oversized sound systems. Sandwiching the stretch of road were the police. “Is this legal?” I asked. Knowingly outnumbered and outgunned, their response came in the form of a shrug, having been forced to turn a blind eye. Welcome to Slab Sunday and the start of our most intriguing couple of days crawling into the underbelly of Houston’s most outrageous, interesting and misunderstood car culture: slabs. To fully understand whatever the hell we have implanted ourselves into, we need a guide. We need Les spelt with a dollar sign to decipher what the hell was going on. “Slabs are Houston,” Le$, a rapper and entrepreneur associated with Boss Hogg Outlawz, says in his slow, soft voice that furiously contradicted his loud full body tattoos. “Where the west coast has lowriders, east has donks, we out here with slabs. These are the story of our streets.” But what about those outrageous wheels? Luckily, Josh ‘KandySlabs’ (a mild-mannered Hispanic and slab encyclopaedia) helps explain. “They called ‘swangas’ or ‘elbows’,” he says in a syrupy weed daze. “They’re the most important part of a slab – the rims are where it all started.” Swangas/elbows refer to two styles of rims that Cragar Wire Wheel Company produced for Cadillac models in the early Eighties: the ‘83s’ and the ‘84s’. The original swangas were a 30-spoke chrome rim that Cragar produced for Cadillac Eldorados from 1979–1983. However, the intricate wired rim was modified in 1984, reducing the lips so there was more space between the outer 10 spokes making them poke out much further; several inches beyond the front profile of the car, giving a Boudicca-style pronged aesthetic. Put simply, they looked cool as hell and became the envy of the streets. But due to a production flaw their structural integrity was compromised so they’d easily break and start ‘clackin’. Being dangerous, Cragar discontinued them after a single year making the 84s (or simply ‘4s’) extremely rare but wildly desirable. They became the thing to have on your car, and people would go to extreme lengths to get hold of them. “They were known as ‘Dead Man Wheels,’” Josh tells us. “Everyone wanted them – so they’d kill for them.” In the early Noughties Texan Wire Wheels began manufacturing reissues of the popular 84s, which made them accessible and popular within the streets again. That’s when they started growing in both popularity and size. The central poker would be extended out further and further, with the current king of the wheels being a ‘G24’ – a 24-inch (61cm) poker on each wheel. The longer the poker, the more expensive they are – so the more respect you get out on the streets. But also the easier it is to take out the side of a car or blender an unsuspecting pedestrian/dog on the sidewalk. That evening Le$ and a few friends take us to Turkey Leg Hut for some proper southern hospitality and a colon-bursting meal. Famed for its toddler-sized Alfredo shrimp stuffed and Hennessy glazed (rapper’s favourite cognac, not to be confused with the man who makes really fast cars) turkey legs, TLH has become an iconic location in the scene and the South. Its car obsessed co-owner Lynn Price may also be the most well-connected man in the city; and not just because the walls of the VIP room he is hosting us in are covered with pictures of him with the glitterati from the various worlds of basketball, rap and pop culture. Within minutes Lynn puts us on the phone to rappers Rick Ross, Lil Keke and OG slab riders Jonathan ‘JC’ Coleman and Corey Blount. When the phone wasn’t red-hot FaceTiming, he filled us in on the history of slabs. “The term ‘slab’ nowadays is thought to mean ‘Slow, loud and bangin’. But that’s not the truth. The term ‘slab’ refers to the slabs of concrete that make up the street. We’d hit the slab.” Skip 15 photos in the image carousel and continue reading Turn on Javascript to see all the available pictures. 1 / 15
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