In 1969, a point guard from Harlem got drafted by the Chicago Bulls. He showed up to preseason camp, looked around, did the math on what a rookie contract paid versus what he was already making on 116th Street, and walked out. He chose drug money over the NBA, and he wasn’t the only one. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, six of the most gifted basketball players this country ever produced turned their backs on professional careers and walked straight into the drug trade, prison, or both.
Some of them were drafted. Some of them were better than the guys who made it. All of them made a choice they couldn’t undo. This is how the streets stole six careers the NBA will never get back. Six names that should be hanging in the rafters somewhere. Instead, they ended up on rap sheets, prison rosters, and headstones.
If you’d asked anyone in Harlem about playground basketball in 1965, they would have told you that the real talent never made it to the league. They would have told you the parks produced more kingpins than point guards. And they would have told you that the line between athlete and hustler was thinner than a crack vial.
They had no idea how right they were. Richard “Pee Wee” Kirkland grew up on 116th Street in Harlem. By the time he was 13, he was selling drugs. By the time he was 18, he was one of the best point guards in New York City. He wasn’t just good at basketball, he was absurd. The kind of fast where defenders would set up correctly and still be two steps behind.
At Kittrell College, a junior college in North Carolina, he reportedly averaged 41 points a game. From there, he transferred to Norfolk State where he teamed up with a kid named Bob Dandridge. Dandridge would go on to become a four-time NBA All-Star, win a championship with the Milwaukee Bucks in 1971, and get inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.
In 1968, Kirkland and Dandridge led Norfolk State to the CIAA title with a 25 and two record. Kirkland was named the tournament MVP. That Norfolk State squad only fell in the second round of the Division Two National Tournament. Sports Illustrated took notice. They called him maybe the fastest man in college basketball.
UCLA’s John Wooden reportedly tried to recruit him to transfer West. Kirkland turned that down, too. Not because he didn’t want to play for Wooden, because Wooden couldn’t match what 116th Street was already paying him. That’s the detail that separates Kirkland from every other could-have-been story in basketball history. He didn’t fail.
He didn’t get hurt. He didn’t get cut. He looked at two paths, one that ended in an NBA jersey, and one that ended in cash, and he picked the cash. By 1969, Richard “Pee Wee” Kirkland was already a millionaire. The Bulls drafted him in the 13th round, 172nd overall. Kirkland showed up to preseason camp, looked at the rookie salary, and did the one thing nobody in the NBA had ever seen a drafted player do.
He left, walked out, drove back to Harlem in a Rolls-Royce he’d bought before he had a driver’s license. Think about that for a second. A man gets drafted by a professional basketball team and decides his side hustle pays better. In 1969, the average NBA salary was around $25,000 a year.
Kirkland was reportedly clearing that in a week on 116th Street. The math wasn’t even close. On 116th Street, they called him the Bank of Harlem. He didn’t just run a corner. He ran an operation. Ron Chep Osuke dedicated an entire chapter to Kirkland in his 2007 book Gangsters of Harlem. According to Kirkland himself, he was pulling in more money than most NBA teams were paying their starting lineups.
The number that gets repeated in interviews is $30 million. That That figure comes directly from Kirkland’s own mouth, his Vlad TV sit-down, ESPN profiles, the Chep Osuke book. No federal indictment or court document confirms that specific number. Take it for what it is. What is confirmed is that in 1971, the feds caught up.
Federal drug conspiracy charges. 15-year sentence at the United States Penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he served roughly 4 years before release. He came home and then in 1981, he went back. Federal tax evasion charges connected to the drug money. This time they sent him to the Federal Correctional Institution at LaTune in Texas.
He didn’t get out until 1988. 11 years behind bars, two separate federal bids, and the NBA career that could have been gone before it ever started. Kirkland is 81 years old today. He runs a Nike affiliated basketball camp in Harlem called the School of Skills. He speaks to schools. He played a character named Phil Reed in the 1994 film Above the Rim.
His redemption arc is real, but so is the fact that he is the only man on this list who openly admits he chose the drug game over the NBA. Everyone else on this list, they’ll tell you they fell. Kirkland will tell you he jumped. This decision seemed small at the time. It wasn’t.
If Pee Wee Kirkland chose the streets over the NBA, Earl “the Goat” Manny Gaultz was consumed by them. At 6’1″, Manny Gaultz had a 52-in vertical leap. He could take a dollar bill off the top of a backboard and leave change. There’s a story repeated so many times it’s become gospel in Harlem that Manny Gaultz once dunked 36 times in a row, reverse dunks, for a $60 bet, and nobody in the crowd even blinked because they’d seen him do it before.
At Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, he set a New York City junior high single-game record of 57 points. 72 colleges came calling. UCLA, Michigan State, West Point. The kid from 99th Street had his pick of the entire country. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar played against Manny Gaultz during the Rucker Park summer tournaments that turned 155th Street and Frederick Douglass Boulevard into the basketball capital of the world.
The court was surrounded by chain-link fences, and on summer nights the crowd would be three deep, players, hustlers, locals, scouts. Manny Gaultz owned that court. Years later, on his retirement night, Kareem called Manny Gaultz the greatest player he had ever played with or against. Think about the weight of that statement.
Not Jordan, not Magic, not Bird, not Wilt. Earl the goat, Manigault. A man who never played a single professional game. And then it all collapsed before Manigault could play in the city championship game against Lew Alcindor, the kid who would become Kareem. He was expelled from Benjamin Franklin High School for smoking marijuana. One joint.
That was the fork in the road. If he plays that game, if he goes head-to-head with Alcindor under the lights in front of every scout in New York, the conversation about his future changes completely. Instead, he was expelled and the conversation ended. He finished his education at Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina, then enrolled at Johnson C.
Smith University, lasted one semester, clashed with coach Bill McCauley over playing time and practice rules, and walked away from college basketball for good. At that point, there was no more structure holding him up. No more coaches, no more teammates, no more curfews, just the streets. What Manigault walked into was heroin. Not as a dealer, as a user.
The streets of East Harlem in the late 1960s were swimming in it. Entire blocks along Pleasant Avenue and 116th Street were open-air heroin markets. And Manigault went under. In 1969, he was arrested for drug possession and served 16 months. While he was locked up, a journalist named Pete Axthelm wrote a book called The City Game that made Manigault famous all over again.
Bill Daniels, the owner of the ABA’s Utah Stars, read the book and offered Manigault a tryout when he got out. Manigault tried. He didn’t make the team. His body was done. He tried to give back. In the mid-1970s, Manigault founded the Goat Tournament at his old Harlem playground, a summer streetball event that ran for years.
The initial money to launch it reportedly came from local drug figures, and that proximity pulled him back under. By 1977, Manigault was so deep in his heroin addiction that he attempted a $6,000 robbery to fund his habit. Two years sentence, Bronx House of Detention, then Sing Sing in Ossining, New York.
He came out clean, stayed clean, and spent the rest of his life running basketball clinics for kids in the neighborhood that broke him. Earl “the Goat” Manigault died on May 15th, 1998 at Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan, congestive heart failure. He was 53. The playground at 99th Street and Amsterdam Avenue was renamed the Earl “the Goat” Manigault Court.
Don Cheadle played him in the 1996 HBO film Rebound. A movie came, but the NBA never did. Every name on this list so far came out of New York. Raymond Lewis came out of Watts. At Verbum Dei High School, a small Jesuit school in South Los Angeles, Lewis was untouchable. He led the team to an 84 and 4 record across three seasons and won three straight CIF Southern Section championships.
He was named CIF Player of the Year as both a junior and a senior, only the second player in CIF history to do it back to back. 250 scholarship offers, UCLA, USC, Long Beach State. Lewis chose Cal State LA, a small Division II school. The rumors that have circulated for decades say he received a red Corvette and $2,000 a month to play there.
As a freshman, he averaged 38.9 points per game. As a sophomore, 32.9, second in the entire country. And on one specific night against UC Santa Barbara, he scored 73 points on 30 of 40 shooting. Against Jerry Tarkanian’s third-ranked Long Beach State squad, he dropped 53. NBA scouts were flying out to Los Angeles just to watch this kid play Division II basketball.
The Philadelphia 76ers took him 18th overall in the 1973 NBA draft. He was 20 years old. At the time, that made him the youngest player ever drafted. And here is where the story turns. Lewis showed up to the 76ers rookie camp, and according to multiple accounts, dropped 60 points in the first half of a scrimmage against Doug Collins, the number one overall pick.
Head coach Gene Shue reportedly called off the second half. The figure of 60 points appears in oral history and Lewis’s own interviews, though no official box score from a closed practice exists. So, how does a kid who just outscored the number one pick in the draft end up dead at 48 with nothing? Lewis negotiated his own deal without an agent.
He was 20 years old sitting across from a front office that had been doing this for decades. He thought he was signing a guaranteed three-year $450,000 contract. The actual structure, broken down by Jack Kiser of the Philadelphia Daily News on October 23rd, 1973, a $25,000 signing bonus, then three years at 50,000, 55,000, and 60,000, only half guaranteed with deferred payments stretching into the late 1980s.
When Lewis sat down with someone who understood contract language and realized what the deal actually said, he went back to the 76ers and asked to renegotiate. They refused. They put him on the suspension list, which meant no other NBA team could sign him, either. Lewis tried to get around it. He reached out to the ABA’s Utah Stars, who were willing to put him on the roster.
The 76ers legal department filed an injunction. Lewis was literally sitting on the bench in a Stars uniform when the lawyers pulled him off. He never played a game. Between 1975 and 1981, Lewis went to tryout after tryout. The 76ers again, San Antonio, San Diego, Phoenix, the Knicks, cut every single time. He played in Los Angeles summer pro leagues through the early 1980s, and the talent was still clearly there.
In one legendary game, he dropped 56 points against the squad that included Michael Cooper and other Lakers players on the roster. Scouts watched. Nobody signed him. Lewis insisted until his death that the NBA blackballed him. The 76ers former GM Don De Jaden disputed that claim, saying he tried to bring Lewis back, but Lewis couldn’t stay focused.
The real answer probably sits somewhere in between. What’s clear is that the system chewed up a kid who didn’t have representation, didn’t understand the business side of basketball, and didn’t have anyone in his corner who did. What isn’t disputed is that Raymond Lewis slid into alcoholism. The same hands that scored 73 points in a college game couldn’t hold a steady job.
His legs went bad from years of neglect. Doctors told him to amputate. He refused. He said he’d rather die than lose his legs. He got his wish. Raymond Lewis died on February 11th, 2001 at LA County USC Medical Center from complications of an untreated leg infection. He was 48 years old. He never played a single NBA game.
The 2022 documentary Raymond Lewis: LA Legend finally put his story on film three decades too late. If you’re learning about these names for the first time, hit subscribe. Street Archives covers the stories they left out of the history books every week. Lloyd “Sweet Pea” Daniels was 6’7″, could handle the ball like a point guard, and pass like Magic Johnson.
The comparisons to Magic were constant. A player that tall who could run an offense, see passing lanes nobody else saw, and score from anywhere on the floor. Howard Garfinkel, who ran the legendary Five-Star Camp and had personally evaluated hundreds of future NBA players, called Daniels the best junior alive, dead, or yet unborn.
That’s not a throwaway compliment. Garfinkel had seen Moses Malone. He’d seen Patrick Ewing. He said Daniels was better. At Andrew Jackson High School in Queens, Daniels averaged 31 points, 12 rebounds, and 10 assists as a junior. He was named most outstanding player at the 1985 Five-Star Camp. He was also functionally illiterate, severely dyslexic.
He attended five different high schools across three states trying to get his grades in order. The system kept passing him along because he could put a ball through a hoop. None of that stopped Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV from offering him a full scholarship for the 1987-88 season. Tarkanian had a reputation for taking risks on players other coaches wouldn’t touch.
This time, the risk blew up before the season even started. Daniels never played a single game at UNLV. On February 9th, 1987, he was arrested inside a North Las Vegas crack house during an undercover operation. He was one of 60 people busted that night caught trying to buy cocaine from an undercover Las Vegas Metro officer.
Tarkanian cut him. The scandal became one more piece of the NCAA investigation that eventually forced Tarkanian’s resignation. Daniels drifted back to Queens, back to the crack that had already cost him everything. On the night of May 11th, 1989 in Hollis, Queens, near his grandmother’s house, Daniels, drunk and looking for a fix, stole a small bag of crack from two teenage dealers.
The amount in question was $8 worth of product. The two kids drove back minutes later and shot him three times at point-blank range, chest, neck. He lost six pints of blood. A bullet punctured his lung. Another lodged in his shoulder. He survived, barely. Court-ordered rehab followed, then the CBA, a stint in New Zealand.
Rehab again in Van Nuys, California, alongside Roy Tarpley, David Thompson, and Pearl Washington. A room full of talent that the streets and the bottle had chewed up. And then, something happened that almost never happens in these stories. Talkin’ Neon, who had left UNLV and taken over the San Antonio Spurs, signed Daniels on July 21st, 1992.
Lloyd Sweet Pea Daniels, the crackhouse kid, the kid who got shot three times over $8, played 200 NBA games across five seasons. Spurs, 76ers, Lakers, Kings, Nets, Raptors. Career averages of 7.1 points per game. He is the only person on this list who made it to the league and stayed for more than a cup of coffee.
Which makes his story the exception that proves the rule. Daniels is 58 years old. He coaches youth basketball on the Jersey Shore. His life was documented in John Viehl and Ron Naclerio’s book, Sweet Pea, and the 2015 documentary, The Legend of Sweet Pea. He got out. The other five didn’t. And the fact that Daniels made it after everything he went through makes the rest of this list hit even harder.
Ed “Booger” Smith grew up in the Tompkins projects in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. 5 ft 9, 155 lb, and he could take apart any point guard in the city. In 1989, Smith beat Kenny Anderson head-to-head to win MVP at the Capital Classic All-American game. Kenny Anderson went on to become the second overall pick in the 1991 NBA draft and played 14 seasons in the league.
Ed Smith went to community college. Smith had committed to Temple University, but couldn’t qualify academically. He spent a half season at Compton Community College in California, averaging 21 points and 12 assists, then transferred to Drake University, where he was named Missouri Valley Conference Player of the Year as a junior.
21 points, five assists, three steals per game. By 1997, Ed Smith was the most famous street ball player in America, and he had gotten there without ever setting foot on an NBA court. The documentary Soul in the Hole, directed by Danielle Gardner, followed Smith and his Brooklyn street ball team, Kenny’s Kings, through the summer tournament circuit.
The team was coached by a local mentor named Kenny Jones, a Bed-Stuy original who kept young players off the corners by running a squad through the park leagues. Jones himself survived a shooting in Brooklyn in 2008. The film premiered theatrically on August 8th, 1997, and Smith appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated that same month, photographed at Tillary Park in downtown Brooklyn, his jersey soaked in sweat, the Manhattan Bridge rising behind him.
He was the last street ball player to ever make the SI cover. That fact still stands today. The Harlem Globetrotters offered him a contract after the film came out. He turned it down, felt like a sideshow, not a basketball career. He had stints overseas, France, Italy, Israel, Finland, short runs through the IBA, the IBL, the USBL, and the CBA’s La Crosse Bobcats, where he played alongside a young Stephen Jackson years before Jackson would win an NBA championship with the Spurs.
Smith was named USBL MVP in the 1997 to ’98 season, proving he could still ball against anyone on the planet. The NBA still never called. In the documentary, Smith said something that would follow him for the rest of his life. Sitting on a bench in the Tompkins Houses courtyard, the camera right in his face, he said, “If I don’t make the NBA, I’ll be a drug dealer.
” He said it matter-of-factly, like he was reading a weather forecast. And nobody watching that movie in 1997 thought he was joking, because everybody who grew up in those projects knew exactly what he meant. He wasn’t joking. In 2004, Smith was arrested on weapons possession and conspiracy charges, 4 years sentence.
He served most of it at Gouverneur Correctional Facility in Upstate New York, about as far from Bed-Stuy as you can get while still being in the same state. At Gouverneur, the prison library stocked a copy of Soul in the Hole. Other inmates recognized him and asked him to sign the 1997 Sports Illustrated cover. They’d seen the documentary on late night cable. They knew the face.
They knew the quote. And they were locked up with the guy who said it. That image is worth sitting with. A man signing his own magazine cover inside a state prison. The cover that was supposed to be the beginning of something and instead became the last photograph anyone took of that version of Ed Smith. Smith was released in 2008.
He works construction in Brooklyn now. Wakes up early, puts on a hard hat, builds things with his hands. He coaches kids on the weekends. He has two daughters and is a grandfather. He still lives in the same borough that made him famous and then watched him fall. He meets a parole officer weekly and gets drug tested.
If Peewee Kirkland is the man who jumped, Ed Smith is the man who told the camera exactly where he was going to land and then landed there. Every story on this list has an ending that hurts. This last one is different. This one is something else entirely. Richie the animal Adams grew up in the Andrew Jackson Houses in the South Bronx. At Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem, he played alongside Walter Berry who would later be named a college basketball’s national player of the year.
That 1979 Benjamin Franklin team was ranked number one in the country. Adams followed the pipeline to Jerry Tarkanian’s UNLV. He became the first player in PCCAA history to win player of the year twice. He set the school record with 623 career rebounds. He scored 1,168 career points. In one game against Utah State, he put up 37 points and 18 rebounds.
The Washington Bullets drafted him in the fourth round of the 1985 NBA draft, 81st overall, and this is where it ends. One day after the draft, Richie Adams was arrested in the Bronx for auto theft. One day, 24 hours earlier, he was shaking hands, taking phone calls, talking about the future. Now he was in handcuffs.
The Bullets released him immediately. They didn’t even wait to see if the charges stuck. Turk Eyed Nee Onn tried to save him. He sent Adams plane tickets to Las Vegas and offered him a staff position at the Palace Station Casino, a fresh start, a way out. Adams cashed the plane tickets for money and never showed up. That was Turk Eyed Nee Onn’s last play, and Adams burned it for pocket change.
He bounced through the CBA, Bay State Bombardiers, Baltimore Lightning, and played briefly in South America. Then he came back to the Andrew Jackson Houses and picked up a cocaine habit funded by armed robberies. In 1988, Adams was arrested twice in the Bronx in the span of a few months. Once for robbing a woman at an ATM at gunpoint, once for purse snatching.
Both crimes were blocks from the apartment complex where he grew up. The people he was robbing were his neighbors. The courts gave him 5 years. He served the sentence at Sing Sing in Ossining, New York, the same prison where Earl Manigault had done time a decade earlier. Adams was paroled in 1994 and went straight back to his mother’s apartment in the Jackson Houses.
The same building, the same floor, the same projects where everyone still remembered him as the kid who was supposed to make it out. What happened next is the reason this story doesn’t belong in the same sentence as the others on this list. On October 15th, 1996, a 15-year-old girl named Norma Rodriguez was found beaten to death in a hallway of the Andrew Jackson Houses.
Norma lived one floor below Adams. She was a student at Morris High School in the Bronx. According to witness statements and trial testimony, she had rejected Adams’ romantic advances for weeks. He was 33 years old. She was a child. The medical examiner’s report described head and neck injuries consistent with repeated stomping.
Her chest was caved in. Police recovered a bloody size 13 and 1/2 Adidas footprint on her shirt and matched it to a pair of sneakers found in Adams’ apartment. The forensic evidence was straightforward. Adams was charged with second-degree murder. After a 4-day jury deliberation, he was convicted of first-degree manslaughter.
On October 26th, 1998, Judge Gerald Sheindlin sentenced him to 25 years. He never came home. Richie Adams died on February 19th, 2026 inside a New York State prison. He was 62 years old. He had served roughly 27 years. His death was first reported by Tony Cordasco on social media and later confirmed by Muggsy Bogues and Meet the Matts. And Meet the Matts.
By a bitter coincidence, Denver Nuggets coach Doug Moe, one of the first people to champion Adams coming out of the draft, died 2 days before him. There is no redemption arc. There is no basketball camp. There is no documentary narrated by the man himself looking back on his mistakes.
Richie Adams went from PCCAA player of the year to a man who stomped a 15-year-old girl to death in a house in project hallway and he died in prison before his sentence was up. Six players, six different decades, neighborhoods, and sets of circumstances. The talent was real. The scouts were real. The draft picks were real.
And in every single case, the streets won. Kirkland chose the money. Manny Gaoult chose the high. Lewis got boxed out by a system that chewed up a 20-year-old kid who didn’t know how to read a contract. Daniels nearly bled out on a Queens sidewalk over $8. And somehow clawed his way into 200 NBA games. The only one on this list who got a second chance and actually used it.
Smith told a camera crew exactly what he would become if the league didn’t call and then became it. And Adams became something no highlight reel, no dunk, no championship ring can ever erase. The NBA has a museum full of jerseys from players who made it. Nobody keeps a museum for the ones who didn’t. The streets don’t hang your number in the rafters.
The streets don’t give you a ring ceremony or a farewell tour. The streets give you a sentence or a headstone. And these six got both. YouTube thinks you’ll want to watch this video next, so click it. And if you made it to the end, subscribe. Street Archives every week.
