📖 Chapter 1 — Who Is Ariel Hanasi?
I was born in Bogotá, Colombia, on April 23, 1982, as Thayron Manuel Suárez Ruiz. Throughout my life, I would go by many names.
On the streets, names were everything: masks, shields, identities that shifted with the chaos. I was known as T-Bone, Hueso, Ty-Nitty, Spanish Ty, Touchy Ty. It all depended on what era you got to know me. Today, I am Ariel Hanasi.
Family Roots
My grandmother, Lilia Tiliaguy, and my grandfather, Avraham Suárez, built a life in Bogotá. He was a barber with barbershops; she ran hair salons and hustled whatever came her way. Together, they raised a big family, including my father, José Manuel “Manolo” Suárez—or so I was told.
As I write this, I have lost many family members, and I am starting to question everything I thought I knew about my family. I told my grandmother this book might help her enter the world to come, and I believed it could inspire people to do good deeds and repent for their sins. At one point she said she was willing. But when I called and sat with her to ask for details, she changed her mind.
I want this book to be as real and true as I can make it. As a convert to Judaism—or Bnei Anusim, as I have described myself—you come to realize that you really are a new person. In my case, with no family and no past to go back to, it became all about the future and the world to come.
Here we go, putting the pieces together.
Avraham, my grandfather, was shot in the head and killed, leaving Lilia to raise eight children on her own. That loss appears to have hardened her, pushed her into survival mode, and ultimately into bigger hustles. Grandma—who we later called “G-Unit,” after 50 Cent and gangster rap—had a lot of properties in Colombia: a couple of houses, a couple of salons, apartments. When I look back at all of that, I wonder whether a simple salon business would have been enough to maintain it. Or would it?
My Father: Manolo
Enter Jose Manolo Suárez, aka PAPI... mi PAPI lindo. He tried... he really did... but the streets always called him back.
The truth about my father’s life came to me in fragments—stories whispered by family, pieces gathered over years. My father, José Manuel “Manolo” Suárez, was a triple OG: a hippie and a ladies’ man, a smooth talker, and as slick as they come. There are stories of him selling my grandmother—his own mother’s—house, signing off on the papers as if it were his to sell. Crazy, right?
He was eventually drafted into the Colombian military and wiggled his way out of it. As the story has been told to me, he never served a day in his life. Discipline wasn’t in his blood; hustle was.
Instead of fighting wars for the government, he became a hustler selling “tarjetas militares,” fake discharge cards and military exemptions to anyone willing to pay. He became friends with corrupt officers and quickly became one of them. It was a quick hustle that caught the attention of the higher-ups. They saw his charm, his wit, his street instincts—and soon he was working for the dirty side of the military.
From there, it escalated: guns, ammo, military-grade weapons—whatever moved fast and made money. My father began dealing with parts of Colombia’s criminal underworld, the early mob structures that would later fuel the cocaine and heroin trade. He was a hustler, a charmer, a manipulator, and a survivor.
It’s a world I’m still trying to piece together. My grandmother refuses to talk about it. Every time I’ve asked, she shuts down. Maybe it’s shame; maybe it’s fear. Maybe she just wants to take those stories to her grave. But I can feel it—she knows more than she lets on. The more I look back and read this book, the more clearly I see things. I understand why I turned out the way I did.
And here’s what I’ve learned about secrets: they don’t die. They sleep until Hashem decides it’s time for them to wake up.
He was the black sheep of the family, a smooth operator. He loved the dance floor, the ladies, and the thrill of the streets. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him. He had the whole barrio moving, making money.
But he lived too fast. Motorcycles, women, danger. He burned everything he touched. Even my mother.
My Mother: “La Mona” & The Queens Years
My mother was a free-spirited hippie they called “La Mona.” Feminist, risk-taker, wild at heart.
She lasted only three or four years with my father before the chaos swallowed their relationship. His motorcycle crashes, his reckless hunger for the streets, his accidents nearly killed him—and wore down her spirit.
And here’s where life started to rhyme: like father, like son. I didn’t know it yet, but later in life I, too, would become a dance monster in the clubs, addicted to rhythm and in love with motorcycles. I, too, would suffer my own near-fatal crash.
While my grandmother was running the New York operation, and while my father was sinking deeper into Colombia’s criminal underworld, I was living with my mother in Queens. This chapter of my life wasn’t about guns or military hustles. This was about survival.
When my mother arrived in the United States, she expected some kind of reunion with my father. A spark. A family. Hope. Instead, she walked into a new reality: my father had already moved on. He had met María Martínez, a beautiful Colombian woman with a son named Douglas. This set off a chain of pain, hate, jealousy, and tough love. There was constant competition between kids who didn’t ask to be in the same war. Douglas bullied us constantly, and my father was blind to it—he had sucker love for this new woman, and for the moment, we were forgotten.
My mom worked nights at The Tunnel, one of New York’s wildest clubs, where the craziest parties happened in the late ’80s. She told me she worked as a bartender there. But now, putting two and two together, with all that juice and work flowing through the family, I wonder what was really going on.
We always stayed fly: Sergio Tacchini tracksuits, fly clothes, all original gear. But while the clothes were fresh, the hunger at home was real. There were days no one came home. Me and David ate lettuce sandwiches, or just bread and ketchup. Two little beasts, fighting, surviving, learning life the hard way.
The fights got violent. Back-to-back brawls where I would overpower my little brother physically, only for him to turn around and grab a weapon. Once, David grabbed a knife and almost stabbed me. I ran to the bathroom in fear. There was no mother to scream to, no one home to help. I remember locking myself in that bathroom all night, shaking, a kid too afraid to sleep. By morning, sleep would wipe away his anger and revenge, and he’d go right back to being my sparring partner as if nothing had happened.
And where was my father? Running guns, running women, running from responsibility. A ghost shaping my destiny without ever being in the room. We were ping-pong balls—bounced from my mother’s house to my father’s chaos to my grandmother’s “business,” and back again. No stability. No protection. No innocence.
There are things about my mother I will never write out of respect. Things too twisted, too painful, too confusing — moments when trauma blurs memory, when survival hides truth. But I will say this much: Living with my mother in those early years affected me for the rest of my life. A lot of the monster I became was rooted in my philosophy of the 3Ds: Decisions Determine Destiny. I was a scumbag due to the way I was raised. I used to get angry at my grandmother for her silence, realizing she was partly to blame. But obviously, it was all Hashem’s hand.
I used to sob at things out of my control, but now I realize how important it is as a parent to give your children a solid ground to succeed, to avoid the madness I grew up in. So if I end up offending people in these pages — sucks for them. This is raw, uncut, and the absolute truth, so help me G-d.
The Move to America
By then, my grandmother was turning into a legend. She was the OG — the one who made power moves when things got too hot in Colombia. After countless interviews and questions, she never gave me the full story. But my memories fill the blanks.
It was the early 1980s: Bee Gees, afros, disco balls. My grandmother moved the family to Jackson Heights, Queens, New York.
I was four years old when we landed in the so-called land of opportunity. But what I saw was a different kind of kingdom. Me and my brother David — two Colombian kids tossed into a world of chaos, color, and cocaine.
My earliest memories take us back to Jackson Heights, Flushing, Halsey schools, and Jamaica Queens. My grandmother’s table on Continental Boulevard was covered in triple-beam scales. Hundreds of little baggies laid out like candy.
“What are those?” I asked.
“Elephant eggs,” she told me.
Me and my little brother David, just kids, believed her. But the truth was they were latex-covered cocaine and heroin — swallowed and shitted trafficked drugs.
That was our introduction to New York life. Behind the cover of hair salons and immigrant hustle, my grandmother had mules running product from Colombia to Queens. She got involved with a man named César, another smooth operator. He dripped in gold chains, open shirts, baller energy. For a time, he was like a grandfather figure to me — my nickname back then was Tato.
César would take me out, treat me like his own. But like my real grandfather in Bogotá, his fate was written. Shot in the head in Queens. That was the curse hanging over us: both grandfathers murdered the same way.
And so began my life in America — born in Bogotá, raised in Queens, baptized in cocaine scales and bloodshed.
At six years old I was already rocking Sergio Tacchini tracksuits in Colombia, going back and forth, living what I thought was paradise — a gangsta paradise before I even knew the meaning of the word.
🟨 Divine Providence File At four years old, I thought “elephant eggs” were real. Looking back, Hashem covered my eyes so I wouldn’t fully understand the darkness around me. He let me remain a child, even in the middle of sin. Later, I would understand what those bags really meant — pure poison wrapped in latex.
Hashem hides the truth from us until we’re ready to handle it. My father’s world was dark — guns, death, corruption — but each fragment I’ve uncovered has come at the right time, not before. Divine timing means some truths are buried for mercy, not for mystery.
🟦 Torah Blueprint “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil; who put darkness for light and light for darkness.”
— Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 5:20 In Queens, I thought cocaine was elephant eggs. In Torah, truth is truth and lies are lies. When the world flips darkness for light, innocence is stolen. Hashem protected me then, but the lie would catch me later.
“He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what is in the darkness, and light dwells with Him.”
— Daniel 2:22 There’s no hiding from Heaven. Even the stories buried in silence are known to Hashem. The secrets my grandmother carries aren’t lost — they’re preserved for judgment or redemption.