more news most popular most commented Home Alone—With Medicaid Fraudsters by Tom Robbins Keeping Jazz Makers Alive by Nat Hentoff The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker City Still Hassles '04 RNC Protesters Runnin' Scared by Graham Rayman The NYPD Releases Detailed Data on Dogs They've Shot, But Not on The People Runnin' Scared by Sean Gardiner Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (4) Maria Luisa Tucker Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard Pucker Up: Girls Love Gay Male Porn (3) Pucker Up: Tristan Taormino

We should start with the time John "Bloodclot" Joseph dressed up as a retarded, wheelchair-bound Santa Claus and scammed horrified Staten Island shopping-mall patrons on behalf of the Hare Krishnas. In his memoir, The Evolution of a Cro-Magnon, Joseph claims to have made $3,000 in just one week this way, mortified mothers flinging $10 bills at him if he'd just go away, while distraught, teary-eyed children demanded to know what was wrong with Santa.

Lots of things were wrong with Santa. This colossal, at least mildly appalling act of deception (Joseph is not disabled physically or mentally, and Evolution makes clear that, at least onstage with his beloved New York hardcore band, the Cro-Mags, he was thoroughly intolerant of jolliness) is probably not the moral low point of his life. His riveting autobiography is a profoundly seedy affair: boyhood abuse while in foster care, a drug- and violence-addled adolescence on the streets of apocalyptic '70s New York, 15 years or so AWOL from the Navy, myriad Hare Krishna–related improprieties, a brief but vivid stint fronting quite possibly the most physically terrifying band in New York City history, and, just for the hell of it, on page 377, crack addiction. Joseph has survived all this, and is understandably proud. Regarding the retarded-Santa ploy, he is understandably regretful, but not for the reasons you'd expect.

"I think it's fuckin'—it's ingenious!" he crows jovially, holding court in a vegetarian restaurant on the Lower East Side, a blunt, 45-year-old, generously tattooed human bulldozer currently training for a triathlon. "I put a disclaimer in the Hare Krishna chapter: 'Some of you might be offended by what you're about to read, and some of you will see the sheer genius in it.' " Evolution walks us through Joseph's thought process: "Even better, what if this particular Santa was not only crippled, but retarded as well? This would be FUCKIN' HUUUUGE!!!" And it was. But for three years or so, Joseph now laments that he was in thrall to what he condemns as the cultish underbelly of the Hare Krishna movement, rogue con men who perverted the benevolent religion exemplified in the West by Indian guru Srila Prabhupada, whom John still reveres and follows. John says every dime of retard-Santa's $3,000 bounty was turned over to his superiors, who insisted that they'd use it help people, win converts, feed the poor, etc. Evidently they didn't. And amid widespread rumors of financial malfeasance and sexual assault, Joseph eventually broke with the group, but not before surrendering a great deal of his own time and a great deal of other people's money.

This, more than 20 years later, is what Joseph regrets.

"I regret I got the wool pulled over my eyes," he says. "It's like I said in the book—I forgot the first rule of punk rock: Question authority. I believed everything these dudes were tellin' me. And I didn't question a lot of the stuff I saw goin' on—this, that, people bein' accused of molestation, you just block it out. They always had an excuse, you know? They're fuckin' master manipulators, dude. You know?"

As Evolution attests, Joseph's had a tough and occasionally outright brutal life—terrible things have been done to him, and he's done a few untoward things himself just to scrape by. He was a hustler, but he insists he was a hustler by necessity. Edmund Burke provides Evolution's epigraph: "He who wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper." In his life, Joseph's found plenty of antagonists: foster parents, fellow street thugs, amoral Krishna leaders, his Cro-Mags bandmates, and, eventually, me. Because nothing makes a hustler angrier than the feeling that he's been hustled.