Queens Reigns Supreme_Fat Cat 50 Cent and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler Read online

  This book is dedicated to

  the Snake Charmer,

  southeast Queens’

  preeminent street historian

  CONTENTS

  The Players

  Prologue

  Part I: HUSTLING

  1: The Crews Coalesce

  2: The Cops Move In

  3: The Game Changes

  4: Downfall

  Part II: HIP-HOP

  5: The Rap Game

  6: Straight Outta Hollis

  7: The Rise of Murder Inc.

  8: 50’s Insurgency

  9: Hard Times

  10: Takedown

  11: The New Insurgency

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Insert

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE PLAYERS

  Randy Allen: Former executive with RUN-DMC DJ Jam Master Jay’s record label JMJ Records and member of hip-hop duo Rusty Waters.

  Darryl “Homicide” or “Hommo” Baum: Stick-up kid murdered in June 2000 allegedly by the notoriously violent Brooklyn drug gang called Cash Money Brothers.

  Charles Fisher: Former president of Rushland, a fan club that represented Rush Management artists RUN-DMC and LL Cool J. In the wake of Jam Master Jay’s killing in the fall of 2002, Fisher started a tipline to solicit anonymous tips about the crime.

  Donald Francois: Former employee of JMJ Records and Rush Management.

  Jeff Fludd: High-profile Hollis resident who started a crew called Two-Fifth Down with Jam Master Jay and also road managed RUN-DMC.

  Irving Lorenzo aka Irv Gotti: Music business entrepreneur born and bred in Hollis who rose from the ranks at record labels such as TVT and Def Jam to become the CEO of his own Def Jam-distributed imprint, Murder Inc. (Currently known as “The Inc.”)

  Christopher Lorenzo aka Chris Gotti: Irving Lorenzo’s brother and vice president of The Inc.

  Damion “World” Hardy: Ex-boyfriend of rapper Lil’ Kim and allegedly the leader of a Brooklyn gang called Cash Money Brothers.

  Douglas “Butta Love” Hayes: Highly respected Hollis resident who befriended RUN-DMC’s Darryl “DMC” McDaniels and shielded him from neighborhood hustlers.

  Curtis Jackson aka 50 Cent: Small-time crack dealer turned superstar rapper. Sabrina, 50’s mother, was a crack dealer and crack addict who worked in the shadows of a drug organization run by Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols on 150th Street and Sutphin Boulevard in the South Jamaica section of southeast Queens.

  Rodney Jones aka Boe Skagz: Nephew of Jam Master Jay and member of the hip-hop duo Rusty Waters.

  Karl “Big D” Jordan: Road manager for RUN-DMC and former vice president at Rush Management. Jordan was also a onetime suspect in the murder of Jam Master Jay.

  Karl “Little D” Jordan Jr: Son of “Big D” who was arrested in the May 2003 shooting of Jam Master Jay’s nephew Boe Skagz.

  Harold “Lovey” Lawson: Childhood friend of Jam Master Jay’s who lived on Jay’s 203rd Street block.

  Randolph and Lamont Lucas: A pair of brothers from southeast Queens who killed a parole officer named Brian Rooney in 1985 at the behest of Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols. Randolph also served as an informant in the federal criminal conspiracy case against Jimmy “Henchmen” Rosemond.

  Howard “Pappy” Mason: Lieutenant in the drug organization run by Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols who ordered the slaying of rookie cop Edward Byrne. Mason also ran his own drug gang called The Bebos.

  Darryl “DMC” McDaniels: Hollis-born RUN-DMC MC and lyricist.

  Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff aka ’Preme: The CEO of the crack-dealing crew called the Supreme Team. After his release from prison in 1995, he became a hip-hop entrepreneur who went into business with The Inc.’s Irving Lorenzo on a straight-to-DVD movie calledCrime Partners.

  Thomas “Tony Montana” Mickens: A Scarface-obsessed cocaine kingpin from the Springfield/Laurelton section of southeast Queens who amassed an empire of yachts, condos, and luxury cars.

  Gerald “Prince” Miller: Nephew of Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff who ran the Supreme Team while McGriff was imprisoned.

  Jason Mizell aka Jam Master Jay: RUN-DMC DJ from Hollis who was slain in his southeast Queens recording studio on October 30, 2002.

  Freddie “Nickels” Moore: Hollis-bred former hustler and onetime manager of Tupac Shakur.

  Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols: The most feared and powerful hustler in southeast Queens. The Nichols organization not only netted millions from the sale of crack, cocaine, and heroin but also supplied competing crews such as the Supreme Team with drugs.

  Ernesto “Puerto Rican Righteous” Piniella: Supreme Team strongman bred in South Jamaica.

  Joseph “Bobo” or “Mike Bone” Rogers: High-ranking lieutenant in the Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols organization.

  Jimmy “Henchmen” Rosemond: Brooklyn-bred former hustler turned hip-hop producer and manager who has worked with everyone from Groove Theory to The Game.

  Curtis Scoon: Former hustler from Hollis turned screenwriter and onetime suspect in the murder of Jam Master Jay.

  Joseph “Run” Simmons: Hollis-born RUN-DMC rapper and lyricist.

  Russell Simmons: Brother of Joseph “Run” Simmons and cofounder of the Def Jam record label and Rush Management.

  Darnell “Nellie D” Smith: Onetime RUN-DMC DJ and crew member.

  Eric “E Money Bags” Smith: Aspiring rapper and sometime hustler from the Lefrak City section of Queens who was murdered near a friend’s home in southeast Queens in 1999. Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff allegedly ordered the killing of Smith in retaliation for the murder of Supreme Team associate Colbert “Black Just” Johnson.

  Eric “Shake” Smith: Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based real estate broker and longtime friend of Jam Master Jay.

  Randy “Stretch” Walker: Hollis-bred rapper and manager who befriended Tupac Shakur in the early 1990s and was killed near his home in southeast Queens during the fall of 1995.

  Ronald “Tinard” Washington: Southeast Queens stick-up kid and onetime suspect in the killings of both Walker and Jam Master Jay.

  Richard “White Boy Rick” Wershe Jr.: Caucasian cocaine kingpin (hence the “white boy” nickname) from Detroit who allegedly ran a multimillion-dollar auto theft ring with Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols from a Florida prison. Longtime friend of rap-rock superstar Kid Rock.

  Chaz “Slim” Williams: Hip-hop entrepreneur born in Harlem but raised in South Jamaica section of southeast Queens who mentored 50 Cent and worked with Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff on the Black Gangster soundtrack released in 1999.

  Derek “Talib” Yancey: Friend and longtime associate of Curtis Scoon questioned by the feds during their investigation into Irving Lorenzo aka Irv Gotti and Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff.

  PROLOGUE:

  A Sit-Down with Gotti

  Irv “Gotti” Lorenzo is ranting about the government with a ferocity and paranoia that are equal parts Oliver Stone and tinfoil-hat amateur conspiracy theorist. The plump, chipmunk-cheeked CEO of The Inc., the record label that counts Ashanti and Ja Rule among its R&B and hip-hop stars and has sold more than 14 million records, is sitting on an oversize brown leather desk chair in the company’s cluttered offices at 440 9th Avenue near 34th Street on Manhattans West Side. He is in the middle of a long, discursive tirade about the nearly four-year federal investigation into his music business empire.

  The allegations against The Inc. (formerly Murder Inc.) include money laundering and drug tr
afficking, but when we met for a sit-down in late December 2004, an indictment had yet to be filed. Its only a matter of time; the prosecutor, Roslynn R. Mauskopf, is a tenacious U.S. attorney who has brought indictments in high-profile cases against defendants such as the pilot who crashed the Staten Island ferry and killed eleven passengers as well as Bonanno family capos. Despite his persistent protestations of innocence, Lorenzo seems to understand this.

  “Let me ask you a question,” Irv says, looking up from a desk covered with two-way pagers and cell phones. “This is the government, right? This isn’t the NYPD. They killed JFK, the government killed JFK, that’s pretty much common knowledge, right? I’m not saying anything crazy by saying that, right?” Before I can correct him, Irv continues: “I’m saying that to give you a parallel that the government can pretty much do anything they want to do. Its pretty safe to say that, right? They can start a war with Iraq or Iran, talk about weapons of mass destruction, take all of their oil, give fuckin’ Colin Powell billions of dollars to do reconstruction. Everything I’m saying right now isn’t a lie, right? This is factual shit, right?”

  Irv pauses to answer a cell phone that rings, incongruously, with the tune of Soft Cell’s eighties pop hit “Tainted Love.” “I’m doing an interview,” Irv barks into the phone and then slams it down. “They”—the government again—“can do whatever they want. They can rig elections. When fucking Gore beat them by the votes they say, ‘No, fuck you! Electorally Bush won.’ In the last election, it was Florida, but this time it’s Ohio. We’re thinking Orlando is the place but they’re like”—Irv pantomimes a Republican operative conspira-torially picking up a phone—“ ‘Go to Cleveland!’ ” Irv lets out a loud, hiccupy cackle.

  Even in the boastful world of hip-hop, Irv Lorenzo is known for having a monumental ego. After remixing a track for Jennifer Lopez (in which he convinced the Latina movie star and singer to use the word nigga, thus causing a huge controversy in the African-American community), Irv taunted Puff Daddy by telling him, “Puff, come listen to the new record I did with your old bitch.” Irv’s Mafia-inspired nickname—given to him by Jay-Z when the two were touring together in the early nineties—comes not from a reputation for street toughness but from his brassy, ballsy, bossy personality. Today, Irv is even more animated than usual. It’s easy to understand why: Just a few weeks before our meeting, The Inc.’s bookkeeper Cynthia Brent and Ja Rule’s manager Ron “Gutta” Robinson were indicted on money-laundering charges, the clearest sign yet that law enforcement’s noose is tightening around Irv and his brother.

  The producer and The Inc. impresario hasn’t given any interviews about his legal troubles save a short, guarded Q&A with The Los Angeles Times in June of 2003, so to him our conversation may seem a rare opportunity to vent his frustrations with the seemingly unending federal investigation into his hip-hop empire. “I’m trying to paint a picture for you that the government can do whatever they want,” Irv continues in a more reserved tone, becoming aware of how unglued his rant is starting to sound. “They’ve been investigating me for four years. They raided my office after two years. This will be going on—what—year number three, this will be the three-year anniversary of them raiding my offices, right? They’ve been on me four years and they just arrested … the bookkeeper!” He lets out a huge guffaw. “And Ja’s manager. Do you think they wanted to arrest the bookkeeper and Ja’s manager or do you think they wanted to arrest me?”

  I want to tell Irv that federal investigations work very slowly and that the indictments of Brent and Robinson could mean that they will testify against him in exchange for reduced sentences. But before I can respond, Irv starts ranting again. “Skip all of the Cynthia Brent shit,” he proclaims, waving his hands dramatically in the air, “the blockbuster shit is me, Irv Gotti walking outta here in handcuffs.” This will be the first of many times in our conversation that Irv refers to himself in the third person. “So what I meant to say, after I painted this glorious picture of how the government has all these resources, they have all of these things at their fingertips, and they’ve been looking at me for four years and I’m still sitting here talking to you, I think that’s so crystal clear that I didn’t do anything. I think anybody with a small brain would say, ‘They didn’t lock this guy up yet—maybe this fucking guy didn’t do anything?’ Because you know what? They have snitches on file that everyone knows about, they have all of this shit and how come they can’t find something to put together? This isn’t a knock on them. I’m not saying this to antagonize them. I’m just saying this to say: ‘Maybe I didn’t do anything.’ ”

  Irv leans in toward me, pushing aside everything scattered on his desk. “In a twisted way, I’m happy because now it will come to a fuckin’ close,” he says. “During this whole time I wanted the government to investigate. Because if this is what they’re saying about me, please investigate. Get all of your snitches, get all of your informants, gather all of the information you can. Because I know sitting here once you got all of your information you gonna be like, ‘Fuck, he didn’t do nothing.’ ” It’s the most conciliatory moment of the interview, but it doesn’t last long once our talk turns to the focus of the investigation into The Inc.: Irv’s ties to one of the most iconic drug kingpins from southeast Queens, Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff. Two of the allegations against Irv, made by a special agent in the IRS’s criminal investigations division, are that ’Preme provided start-up money for The Inc. in the nineties and that the drug kingpin served as muscle for the label, intimidating rival rappers and music business executives. The charges infuriate Irv, though not because he believes them to be wholly without cause. “It’s not preposterous,” Irv admits. “I can see what they’re thinking.” Instead, he seems to be upset that the feds believe a street hustler from the eighties, not Lorenzo himself, is responsible for The Inc.’s string of multiplatinum successes in the nineties and beyond. “Back in the eighties, ’Preme was the legend,” Irv proclaims, thumping his desk with his fist loudly for effect, “but guess what? I’m the fucking legend now.”

  Irv’s bravado is often reminiscent of both Scarface and Sunset Boulevard but there is a great deal of truth to it. During the eighties the crack epidemic brought mountains of cash to drug dealers big and small, thus making hustlers iconic. Though a few eighties-era MCs possessed a street pedigree—rapper Rakim famously rhymed, “I used to be a stick-up kid/So I think of all the devious things I did”— hip-hop and hustling inhabited separate social spheres. Street guys went about their business and ignored the hip-hoppers; they considered rappers soft and not street savvy, while the rap business, which struggled to make money at start-up independent labels such as 4th and Broadway, Tommy Boy, and Def Jam, seemed to them a grind with no real payday in sight. Meanwhile, hip-hoppers, particularly those who were teenagers in the eighties like Irv, looked up admiringly at drug dealers. They had the money, the luxury cars, the jewelry, the girls, the respect of the streets, all of the accoutrements that would come to define hip-hop’s “bling” lifestyle in the late nineties.

  Hip-hop and hustling were worlds apart, but their denizens shared the same neighborhoods and even the same blocks, especially in the place where Irv was raised, southeast Queens. During the eighties, the area was home to hip-hop pioneers such as RUN-DMC and Def Jam founder Russell Simmons, as well as notorious drug kingpins such as ’Preme and his homicidal nephew Gerald “Prince” Miller; Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols and his cop-killing lieutenant Howard “Pappy” Mason; and Thomas “Tony Montana” Mickens. It was one of the most violent epochs in New York history, and the next generation of rappers and hip-hop executives—Irv, his older brother Chris, Curtis Jackson (aka 50 Cent), and Jeffrey Atkins (aka Ja Rule) among them—had a front-row seat to watch the neighborhood’s violence and criminality.

  When the bottom fell out on hustling at the beginning of the nineties thanks to tough, three-strikes sentencing; a rising body count from the crack wars; and law enforcement innovations such as COMPSTAT (a program
that enabled cops to identify neighborhood trouble spots through computer-generated crime statistics and electronic mapping), hustlers looked to start a new life in hip-hop. Rappers, after all, had always been their most sympathetic audience. Hustlers became part of the ever-present hip-hop entourage or took on jobs as assistants, security guards, or managers. Hip-hop might have offered lower pay than hustling, but the risks associated with the streets were no longer worth the gamble.

  It was a mutually beneficial relationship. Hip-hoppers needed hustlers to bolster their street cred, especially with the ascent of gangsta rap in the early nineties, which trumpeted values like real-ness and authenticity. Hip-hoppers inflated their street C.V.s (a stint pitching “nicks,” or five-dollar bags of crack, became nearly as important as skills on the mic); assumed the personas of their favorite hustlers (one of The Inc.’s rappers renamed himself “Ronnie Bumps” after a southeast Queens heroin dealer of the same name); or, more often, wrote songs cataloging the misdeeds of eighties street legends.

  Hustlers from the crack era—particularly those who reigned in southeast Queens—thus became part of a permanent hip-hop narrative

  On 50 Cent’s “Ghetto Qu’ran (Forgive Me)” the South Jamaica-bred MC rhymed about nearly every iconic southeast Queens hustler, including ’Preme, Fat Cat, and Tony Montana, and cited historic moments of their heyday such as the Supreme Team’s brutal, execution-style slaying of Colombian cocaine distributors for a few kilos. On “Memory Lane (Sittin’ in Da Park),” Nas reminisced about how “some fiends scream about Supreme Team, a Jamaica, Queens, thing” while on “The World Is Yours” he rhymed that he was “facin’ time like ‘Pappy’ Mason.” That Nas, who is from Queensbridge, not southeast Queens, would pay lofty tribute to hustlers from far outside of his own neighborhood is telling. “They was legends, myths,” Irv says of southeast Queens hustlers, “like urban-legend myths.”