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In 1977, Robinson was convicted on a misdemeanor weapons charge (concealing a gun under the seat of his Cadillac in Berkeley) and paid a $40 fine. Otherwise, he evaded the law and never served time in prison.
Although he claims to have enjoyed all the perks of the job -- Cadillacs, women, tailor-made outfits, jewelry, champagne, and cocaine, Robinson said he was never fully satisfied. He remembered driving along the Grapevine on Interstate 5 in the early '70s, with two hookers and $25,000 in his car.
"I said to myself, 'This is really fucking boring,'" he recalled. "'There's gotta be something else.'"
When he pulled into Bakersfield, Robinson saw "little people on their way to work, going into the little coffeehouses, smoke coming out of the smokestacks."
"I thought, 'Even though I'm gettin' all this shit, I would give it all up just to have a normal life.' I started thinking of ways to escape it," he said. But over a decade passed, and Robinson couldn't stop pimping.
"It's an addiction," he said. "You're gettin' sometimes $2,000 a day. You get so you come to expect it."
Tragedy opened an escape hatch. In 1989, Robinson's brother Ken was in an automobile accident that left him a quadriplegic. Several weeks later, their birth father died from cirrhosis of the liver.
"I never particularly cared for that guy," said Robinson. "But when he died, I cried. That's when I realized I loved him."
Robinson plunged into despair and dissolution. For months he regularly binged on cocaine, sometimes failing to return to the Richmond home he shared with his wife and kids.
"He wasn't even dressin' or nothin'," recalled Rosalind in her raspy voice. She finally put her foot down, telling him to either get into detox or get himself "a good shot of Jesus." Robinson chose the latter, and accompanied Roz to church. He was baptized and momentarily transformed.
"When I came outta the water, I was speaking in tongues," he said. He knew it was time for a career change.
But Robinson, then 41, was in a bind. He had established a middle-class lifestyle for his family based on money earned from pimping. He had a $168,000 mortgage on the Richmond house, and needed a job that paid a decent salary. But he had no college degree and no legal work experience to list on his résumé, other than a short stint as a security guard.
"I don't like to be dirty, so I'm not going to work under the hood of a car," he said. "I'm not going to work at McDonald's neither."
Given his recent epiphany, he first tried the church. After a year at a local Bible college, he earned a certificate in evangelism. But the process left him disillusioned. He saw greed in collection baskets. And after careful reading of the Scripture, he came to view Jesus as just an ordinary guy.
"In Matthew 11:18, it reads, 'The Son of man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous, and a winebibber,'" he read from his well-worn Bible. "Winebibber! The man liked to have his cocktail!"
Next, he tried to become a cop, attending San Mateo College's police training course. But after graduating in 1992, Robinson said, he "just wasn't feelin' it" and didn't apply for a police officer's job.
Finally, like Goldilocks finding the bed that was neither too soft nor too hard on the third try, Robinson found a way to go straight that felt just right. In 1993, he was hired as a Muni bus driver.
Beginning drivers earned less than $14 an hour. But at the time, they could almost double their salaries with overtime shifts.
"In the black community in San Francisco, [working for Muni] is like going to the Super Bowl," said Robinson. He encouraged his stepbrother to apply, too. Burleson had not been as lucky as Robinson, having served time in state prison on robbery and narcotics charges. But he, too, went straight, was hired on at Muni, and bought a house in Atherton.
However, Robinson didn't stop pimping when he started working for Muni. In June 1994, he and Rosalind launched a telephone prostitution service called All Starrs Escourt Service. Robinson is cagey when discussing All Starrs. Asked how long he ran it, he said "days," then changed his mind and said "months." Another time he said "it was hard to say" how long he'd operated the business, but that he "made a shitload of cash" before giving it to one of his former hookers to run.
"[All Starrs] was a transitional business," said Burleson. "He was doing legal things, but, you know -- the lust. It ain't easy to just get up and walk away."
Robinson's political awakening was also caused by a near-death experience -- his own. In April 1995, he was driving through the Bayview District when a gunman fired a shot through the windshield of his bus. Robinson wasn't hit, but he hurt his back and neck falling down. He took six months off and returned to work fearing for his life.
Three years later, a woman bus driver was shot at in the Bayview on Robinson's line and he decided to do something about it. He drafted a petition, demanding that three bus lines near the Bayview housing projects be rerouted after dark. He collected nearly 200 drivers' signatures and submitted them to Mayor Willie Brown. He also scheduled a meeting with the mayor during one of Brown's Open Door Days. Rosalind accompanied him.
The mayor, Robinson remembered, "came in with his tailor-made suit on, suede shoes. For a bus driver to be sittin' there -- me and Roz -- with the mayor, his secretary, and bodyguard -- it don't get no better than that."
