Dead Man's Wheels: How Two Years of Cadillac Wire Wheels Built Houston's Slab Scene

In 1996, a 10-year-old boy sat in a candy-apple-red 1986 Lincoln Town Car in Houston's Third Ward and watched the plate-glass window of Frenchy's chicken shatter. The car's owner, Pat Lemon, had popped the trunk and let four 18-inch subwoofers go. The boy grew up to be the rapper and label owner D-one Tha Chosen, and he told the story to Hagerty in 2021. "We rode in that car all day," he said, "and that was really the day that I fell in love with all of it."

It is a good place to start the story of the slab, because it holds all of it: the car, the music, the wheels and the danger. To understand why a set of wire wheels could matter that much, you have to go back to a Cadillac dealer option that lasted two model years.

In the beginning was the '83

Hagerty's history, by Jack Baruth and Sajeev Mehta, lays it out. The 1979 downsized Cadillac Eldorado had been a hit, but by its fourth year the appeal was fading. Some Cadillac dealer accessory managers had Cragar supply a version of its Star wire wheel for the 1983 Eldorado. Unlike plastic wire wheel covers, the real wires showed the car's four-wheel disc brakes, and their centers stood about 4 inches proud of the rim and sidewall, visible from every angle on the street.

They sold. For 1984 the Cragars came back with a slightly different design and a little more of that poke. Then they were gone, likely, Hagerty suggests, because servicing tubeless wire wheels from an outside vendor was more trouble than Cadillac dealers wanted. Texas Highways tells a similar story with a different reason: Cragar dropped the 30-spoke design after two years, deciding it was a road hazard. Either way, the supply was fixed. As the Eldorados passed to second and third owners, the wheels became essential on city streets, and the scene started naming them by year: 83s and 84s.

Houston was primed for them. Hagerty describes a city where oil money had kept loaded Cadillacs moving from showroom to suburb to street, many reworked by dealers with Rolls-Royce-style aftermarket grilles reading CLASSIC CADILLAC and nonfunctional continental kits. Then came the oil bust and crack cocaine. Langston Collin Wilkins, who grew up in Houston's Hiram Clarke neighborhood and wrote his Indiana University dissertation on hip-hop and Houston street culture, told Texas Highways that the dealers who made serious money wanted the world to see it. "They wanted their cars to be an outward projection of their personality and their identity," Wilkins said.

The ur-slab, in Hagerty's phrase, was the 1983 or 1984 Eldorado with the Cadillac badge, elbows-out wire wheels and a continental kit. That trinity defined the look for the next decade.

The death car

Back to the red Town Car. D-one explained to Hagerty why it was painted red: its owner was affiliated with the Crips, who in Houston, unlike Los Angeles, rode red. A red car on swangers was a provocation twice over. You could be killed for your affiliation, or carjacked for your wheels.

D-one was the only passenger from that afternoon who survived to talk to Hagerty. Pat Lemon was killed on the street not long after. The Lincoln passed to Houston rapper Fat Pat and appears in his video for "Tops Drop." Fat Pat was shot and killed in February 1998 at 27. The next owner, reportedly another local rapper, was also shot and killed. Then the car sat at Wyoming and South Park until someone burned it. "It was like a death car," D-one said. "Everybody who owned that car got shot."

The wheels were at the center of that violence. One well-known customizer told Hagerty there may have been as few as 50 sets of Eldorado wheels in circulation by the turn of the century. Texas Highways heard the same estimate from builder Kevin "Meyagi" Mitchell, and put the price of a set of four as high as $10,000. B.G. Porter, owner of the Slab Outlawz body shop, gave the wheels the name they carried. "They were called 'dead man's wheels,'" Porter told Texas Highways. "People would kill for them."

The Swanger Crisis

Eddie Kennedy, who runs 3rd Coast Customs out of a steel building on a residential Houston street, lived through what Hagerty called the Swanger Crisis. "By 1998, you could easily get killed just for owning a set," Kennedy told the magazine. "You couldn't be a regular 9-to-5 guy and own these wheels. Had to be an outlaw, a dealer." Even dealers stopped riding alone, he said. They went out in packs and painted their cars the same color so their affiliation was obvious. That is one root of the color-coded slab lines that fill car shows today.

The fix was supply. Hagerty reports that in 2007 a company called Texan Wire Wheels started making all-steel replicas of the Cragar wires. Texas Highways dates the replicas to 2005. Kennedy heard a rumor that somebody was remaking the wheels but had only a P.O. box in California, so he took a bus there and waited at the post office until the owner came for the mail. "We ended up selling the first 10 sets of wheels," he said. "It was almost like a black market."

Once anyone could buy them, the deadly demand for originals faded. Porter told Texas Highways that buyers now include corporate people. "It's anyone and everyone," he said. People without criminal ties started building slabs, choosing neutral or regional colors instead of gang ones, according to Hagerty, and the poke kept growing.

Why the history matters

It is easy to see a slab today, trunk up at a brewery car show with families taking pictures, and think of it as pure celebration. It is. But the culture's most famous part spent years as something people were shot over, and the old builders remember. When an owner today calls a set of wheels 84s, they are naming a model year of a Cadillac option and everything that came after it.

Hagerty ended its story by saying the arrival of a slab in Third Ward in 2021 was as electrifying as Pat Lemon rolling up to Frenchy's in 1996. The difference is who gets to drive one now.