Queens Reigns Supreme (2005) by Ethan Brown

[ninoslim]

Anyone read this book which sheds some light on the Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff and his Supreme team crew of the 80's along with his association with Irv Gotti and Murder Inc, 50 cent and other notable Queens ghetto superstars?

[Cold Bear]

Here's a link:

http://www.randomhouse.com/anchor/featu ... index.html

Here's an excerpt::::


From the Prologue | Queens Reigns Supreme

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 realness and authenticity. Hip-hoppers inflated their street CVs (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 the 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."

The meeting of hip-hoppers and hustlers was a combustible one. Survival on the streets requires realistic, unvarnished assessments of hustles (and fellow hustlers), whereas hip-hop thrives on a romantic belief in the outsize urban-legend myths. Irv's naiveté about the legal ramifications of his relationship with 'Preme--which began at a chance meeting on a video shoot in the drug kingpin's former stomping grounds in South Jamaica--ultimately led to his undoing. Though they were both raised in southeast Queens, Irv and 'Preme came from starkly different backgrounds. Irv is, by his own admission, "from a great family with a mother and father, youngest of eight, never been convicted of a crime nor has anyone in my family been convicted of a crime." 'Preme, on the other hand, is an ex-con with numerous drug arrests on his record (including a conviction on a federal continuing criminal enterprise charge) and an extended family deeply immersed in the crack trade. For a while, the pair served each other's needs--Irv burnished his street cred while 'Preme polished his much-faded street rep and made some cash from his new hustle, hip-hop--but before long the feds were bearing down on them.

Even after the risks became clear, Irv never seemed able to separate himself from 'Preme: Just days after our sit-down, Troy Moore (the brother of 'Preme's street associate Tyran "Tah-Tah" Moore) and a low-level southeast Queens stick-up kid named William Clark were shot outside the midtown Manhattan nightclub LQ where The Inc. hosted an album release party for Ja Rule's album R.U.L.E. Both men were shot with bullets from a .40 caliber automatic weapon; Moore survived a bullet wound to his stomach while Clark succumbed to gunshots to his buttocks and chest. Immediately after the shooting, law enforcement speculated that the killer (who still had not been caught as of late 2005) was looking to warn Tyran "Tah-Tah" Moore against testifying in the investigation into The Inc. But Moore had publicly declared his intention never to cooperate with the government even after he was arrested, but never charged, in the shooting of a police officer in August 2003. "It would be stupid to send a message to a man who is not cooperating by hurting a member of his family," Moore's attorney Marvyn Kornberg told the New York Daily News. "Something like that is liable to make him want to get even."

On the streets--and even on hip-hop shock-jock Wendy Williams's popular radio program--a more plausible motive surfaced, one that didn't involve Irv or his record label. Moore and Clark were career criminals in their late thirties who, after ambushing hip-hoppers for their jewelry at numerous parties during the fall of 2004, fatally chose a mark who was willing to put up a fight. This theory was given some credence in July 2005 when anonymous law enforcement sources told The New York Post that just before the LQ party, Clark had robbed the brother of rapper Foxy Brown. Unfortunately for Ja, however, the Post also reported that law enforcement suspected that one of his bodyguards was involved in the shooting and that he, like Irv, could face federal charges, including conspiracy to commit murder.

Justifiably or not, Irv found himself with another 'Preme-related stain, bringing even more unwanted attention to the already beleaguered Inc. camp. Real hustlers are accustomed to such cruel twists of fate, but Irv held on to a comic-book fantasy of Teflon dons who get away in the end, only to be celebrated by their loyal admirers. The story of southeast Queens and of any inner-city neighborhood is that hustlers almost always end up paying for their dominance on the streets with their lives or with lifelong prison sentences.

***

The hustlers of southeast Queens made nearly unprecedented sums of cash during their reign in the eighties and became heroes to hip-hop execs like Irv in the nineties, but their lives were far more complex than the one-dimensional portrayal of them by rappers such as 50 Cent, Ja Rule, or Nas. This is the story of the most iconic southeast Queens hustlers--Fat Cat, Supreme, Pappy, Tony Montana, and Prince--and how they came to influence a generation of hip-hoppers. It's not the myth celebrated, Cristal in hand, in hip-hop rhymes, but a true-to-life history of southeast Queens hustlers as they were before they became the stuff of hip-hop lore: savvy CEOs of drug organizations with a lust for violence, drugs, and money that doomed not just them but the lucrative business model they created on the streets.

It is also the story of how many of the most significant events in hip-hop's recent history--the nonfatal shooting of Tupac Shakur at the Quad Studios in New York in 1994, 50 Cent's shooting in southeast Queens in 2000, the murder of Jam Master Jay in Queens in 2002, and 50's high-profile rivalry with both Ja Rule and Los Angeles rapper The Game--have connections to the streets of southeast Queens. What emerges from this tale of hustling and hip-hop is the borough's enormous contribution to the evolution of hip-hop: Bronx DJs like Afrika Bambaataa and Kool Herc may have birthed the music in the seventies, but it is Queens impresarios and super-groups from Russell Simmons to RUN-DMC who commercialized the art form in the eighties and the neighborhood's hustling-obsessed rappers such as 50 Cent who made street credibility the most important ingredient for hip-hop success in the nineties and beyond.

Now, as Irv and Chris Lorenzo face as many as twenty years in prison on money-laundering charges and as 'Preme could be sentenced to death for charges ranging from drug trafficking to murder, the foundation of the hip-hop and hustling partnership is becoming increasingly shaky. The Lorenzo brothers are far from the first in the hip-hop scene to incur the wrath of law enforcement, but their indictment is a potent symbol of increased interest in the hip-hop business from the federal government: In the summer of 2005, rapper Lil' Kim was sentenced to one year in prison on three counts of perjury and one count of conspiracy for lying to a grand jury about a 2001 shooting outside New York radio station Hot 97; Kim's ex-boyfriend Damion "World" Hardy was indicted by U.S. Attorney Roslyn Mauskopf on drug-trafficking and murder charges, including the killing of Darryl "Hommo" Baum, the Brooklyn stick-up kid allegedly responsible for shooting 50 Cent in 2000; and news reports surfaced that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York had begun an investigation into unsolved murders such as those of Tupac Shakur and Jam Master Jay. As rap has become drenched in the slang and style of the eighties drug business-one of the most popular mixtapes of 2005 was Harlem rapper Juelz Santana's Back Like Cooked Crack 2: More Crack and one of the year's biggest hits was Cassidy's "I'm a Hustla"--the Lorenzos' case will test the marriage of hip-hop and hustling like never before. It's a relationship that has long driven hip-hop's hit makers from Dr. Dre to The Notorious B.I.G. and helped make the music palatable to suburban whites who vicariously experience dangerous neighborhoods like southeast Queens through the music of their favorite stars. (The fall 2005 release of a video game called 50 Cent: Bulletproof, in which players follow the rapper through New York's underworld, truly fulfills the promise of rap as role-playing.) But it's this long-held desire for street cred that is at last drawing the scrutiny of the federal government; and, obviously, it is the hip-hoppers themselves--not their mostly suburban fan base--who will face the consequences.

[Anonymous20]

i heard this was excellent, I will have the book available here in a few days,

[Anonymous20]

If you were looking for this book you can find it here at:

http://www.streetgangs.com/bookclub/queensr.html

[Old Shatterhand]

Is rap the only musical genre where performers/artists consistently succeed by capitilizing their "game" through drug sales and using violence to establish themselves?

Will anyone ever write an accurate social commentary that chronicles the piles of humanity used, trashed, and discarded by the "King Rats" of the "game" on their way to narcissitic stardom, fame, and "success" for once truly and critically examining the justifications they give for their actions?