Exclusive: Hip-Hop Icon, Neighborhood Hero, Drug Dealer, Murder Victim
The secret relationship between Jam Master Jay and the Black Mafia Family
On the morning of September 21, 2002, Jason Mizell, better known as Jam Master Jay, the iconic DJ who operated the turntables for the pioneering rap group Run-DMC, was sitting in the lobby of a Cincinnati hotel, when one of his closest pals walked through the entrance.
The friend helped Mizell run a multi-state cocaine business, later investigated by the FBI. As Mizell toured America with Run-DMC, he acted as a middle-man, brokering drug deals between associates and a supplier called Uncle.
The sidekick had just driven overnight from one of Uncle's stash houses in St. Louis with fifteen kilos of cocaine hidden in the back of his automobile. (The source, who has since quit the drug trade and is cooperating with the government, requested anonymity.) He and Mizell planned to continue transporting the cocaine to the friend’s home six hours’ drive away. But before Mizell left, he sent one of Run-DMC’s roadies upstairs to get his signature black Stetson Godfather hat, because, as he explained to his partner: “You never know when I’m going to have to be Jam Master Jay.”
The road trip proved uneventful until the pair hit downtown Chicago when the police pulled them over. Mizell put on his black homburg before introducing himself to the police officer as Jam Master Jay from Run-DMC. The officer took their licenses and when he returned, he said he would let them go with a warning on one condition: the rap star had to give him his autograph.
As they drove away, a smiling Mizell punched his buddy on the shoulder.
“He was right about bringing the Run-DMC hat,” the friend says today.
Five weeks later, Jam Master Jay was dead, murdered over a botched drug deal allegedly involving Uncle.
Jam Master Jay's murder stands alongside the murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious BIG as one of the most baffling unsolved cases to confound the hip-hop world. But in contrast to Tupac and Biggie, the murder of Jam Master Jay looked at first like an easy case to crack. On the night before Halloween in 2002, an intruder forced his way inside Mizell’s small recording studio and shot him in the head with a .40 caliber handgun in front of four eyewitnesses. The gunman and an accomplice fled the studio, which sat next door to a busy bus station on the same block as a police precinct.
Mizell was a beloved character in Hollis, Queens, the New York neighborhood he never abandoned, even after he became rich and famous. Unlike other celebrities, he didn’t forget the people he grew up with, many of whom led hard lives hustling on the street. He was a local hero who found jobs for the unemployed, paid rents for the poor, and allowed novice rappers to record at his studio for free. He bought so many gifts for people that former Beastie Boys DJ Hurricane called him a “Black Santa Claus.” And he never engaged in public beefs with other hip-hop artists.
“Everybody loved Jay. That’s why it was such a shock when he got killed,” says David Seabrook, who grew up on the same street as Mizell and later worked for mob hitman Sammy “The Bull” Gravano running an Ecstasy ring in Arizona.
In the days following the murder, the names of suspects surfaced in media reports. But despite multiple leads, the investigation stalled. For the next eighteen years, the probe led nowhere.
Then, in a surprise announcement last year, on August 20 the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York charged two suspects with killing Jam Master Jay: Mizell’s childhood friend, Ronald “Tinard” Washington and Mizell’s godson, Karl “Little D” Jordan, both members of the DJ’s inner circle.
The government claimed that three months before the murder, an unnamed person — referred to in the indictment only as “a supplier in the Midwest” — gave Mizell 10 kilos of cocaine on consignment. Mizell recruited Washington and Jordan to sell the cocaine in Maryland. Following a dispute, Mizell excluded Washington from the deal.
“In retaliation, Washington and Jordan conspired to murder, and ultimately executed, Mizell,” read the indictment.
Over several months, I talked to more than a dozen people about Jam Master Jay’s murder who supplied me with never-before revealed information about his drug business and the tangled web of local loyalties that led to his downfall.
While federal prosecutors have given few details, someone who helped run the hip-hop icon’s drug operation tells me that Uncle supplied the cocaine that led to his death. The same source says Mizell axed Washington from the deal after a gangster named Yakim insisted. Mizell knew Yakim from his teenage days before he became famous, when he, Washington, and Yakim burglarized houses together.
“Jay told me he was trying to set up Yakim with Uncle so Uncle would supply drugs to Yakim,” says the source. “Yakim told him there was money to be made dealing drugs in Baltimore. Somehow, Tinard [Washington] had convinced Jay to let Tinard move to Baltimore to be part of the drug operation. But Yakim was like, ‘Nah, I don’t trust him.’ So Jay removed Tinard from the situation altogether.”
Among Mizell’s friends, the question is not who killed Jam Master Jay. Washington and Jordan had long been the prime suspects in his murder. The real question is why did it take nearly two decades to catch his alleged killers.
“The FBI told me that the reason it took eighteen years is that motherfuckers weren’t telling the truth,” says the source. “Everybody was lying.”
Jason Mizell was born in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, in 1965, the youngest child of Jesse Mizell and Connie Mizell, who had two older children, Marvin and Bonita. His mother was a teacher, his father a social worker, strict but loving parents who expected Jason to dress well and do his homework. Encouraged by his father, he started learning to play the drums and guitar by the time he was five.
In the early 1970s, the Mizell family moved to Hollis, Queens, to escape crime-plagued Brooklyn. Jesse Mizell bought a two-story, three-bedroom house with a sun porch on 203rd Street. Hollis was a quiet neighborhood of tree-lined streets and neatly tended gardens. Residents took pride in their modest but well-kept community.
“A lot of middle-class people moved to Hollis from Brooklyn for a better lifestyle,” says one of Mizell’s cousins, Ryan Thompson. “In the 1970s, it was a suburb, the sort of neighborhood where they flew American flags in front of the houses on Sundays.”
But after heroin tore through Hollis, the neighborhood changed for the worse. Drug dealers invaded Hollis Avenue, the main thoroughfare. Gangsters holding wads of cash shot dice in the alleyways. Local restaurants doubled as fronts for narcotics trafficking. Hollis had become what the Mizell family left behind.
“By the early 1980s, Hollis had turned into a ghetto,” says Ryan Thompson, who also goes by the name DJ BASE.
At 14, Mizell enrolled in Andrew Jackson High School, the same place that rappers LL Cool J and 50 Cent would later attend. The school had a wild reputation for drugs and gangs. The New York Times reported police busted a heroin processing laboratory hidden in the basement the year before Mizell arrived.
While at Andrew Jackson High, Mizell joined the Hollis Crew, a neighborhood gang whose members engaged in robberies, burglaries and drug trafficking. He didn’t sell drugs during this period, but he befriended people who did.
The Hollis Crew fought with other local gangs, including the Five Percenters, a quasi-Muslim group that preached Black people were “gods” and white people “devils.” They tried to convert members of the Hollis Crew.
“We made fun of them,” says former Hollis Crew member Darren “Big D” Jordan, who grew up across the street from the Mizell family and whose son, Karl Jordan, prosecutors charge killed the hip-hop icon. “We’d be like ‘Hey, Allah-pork-chop motherfucker.’ Stuff like that creates beef.”
In 1980, the Hollis Crew and the Five Percenters got into an argument in the hallway of Andrew Jackson High, according to onetime Hollis Crew member, Wendell Fite, who later adopted the name DJ Hurricane after Mizell secured him a job hosting the turntables for the Beastie Boys. One of the Five Percenters pulled out a gun and shot Fite in the leg. Mizell saw Fite stumble and, fearing the Five Percenter might shoot him again, he dragged him to safety.
“It was stupid teenage shit,” remembers Fite, who became Mizell’s lifelong friend after the incident.
The following year, Mizell got involved with a group of teenage burglars, according to multiple sources. The team targeted Jamaica Estates, the wealthy neighborhood where Donald Trump spent his early childhood. The burglars waited outside in the bushes until a house was empty and then they would break in, stealing money, jewelry, stereo equipment, even food for a meal afterward.
Members of the team — Ronald Washington, Yakim, and Mizell’s best friend, Randy Allen — would later figure prominently in stories about Mizell’s murder.
At first, Mizell confined his role to storing the proceeds from the robberies in his parents’ basement. But one night, he accompanied the others as they broke into a doctor’s house. As they left, a security guard spotted them and fired several shots, one of which nearly hit Mizell. Police arrested Mizell while fleeing the scene.
When Mizell’s father found out, he was furious, says Ryan Thompson. Mizell’s mother burst into tears. His older brother, Marvin, had to go bail him out.
“Jay’s parents were respectable working people,” says Thompson. “They didn’t raise Jay to be a criminal. They blamed Randy Allen. Randy was a bad influence.”
After he was released from the Spofford Juvenile Detention Center in the Bronx, Mizell left the criminal life behind to focus on his genuine passion: music.
In 1982, he started DJing at rowdy parties in Hollis Playground, a concrete park two blocks from his home. Young people flocked to the events, eager to hear the new sound of hip-hop rocking New York City’s outer boroughs. The parties ended in the early hours of the morning when gunshots sent revellers running for cover.
Mizell’s skills attracted the attention of two local rappers. Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels, better known as Run and DMC, had just released their first single, “It’s Like That,” which would change hip-hop forever.
When critics write about Run-DMC, they often cite “Walk This Way” as the group’s most important song. The 1986 collaboration with Aerosmith crossed over hip-hop to a mainstream audience and paved the way for rap-rock artists such as Korn, Kid Rock and Rage Against the Machine.
But “It’s Like That” was a more abiding achievement because it pioneered the less-is-more minimalist aesthetic that still holds sway in hardcore rap circles.
Before Run-DMC, studio producers added live instruments to the mix to make rap music sound commercial. “It’s Like That” took the opposite approach. It reduced hip-hop to its basic elements — a beat, a rhyme and a booming bass — and created the template for all the hardcore hip-hop records that followed.
After “It’s Like That” became a hit on Black radio in 1983, Run DMC’s manager, Russell Simmons, told Joseph Simmons and Darryl McDaniels they needed to find a DJ to do live shows to promote the record. They also needed a new wardrobe to replace the nerdy plaid jackets they wore.
When Mizell turned up for the group’s first gig wearing a black Stetson homburg, a black Adidas jacket, and white Adidas shell-toe sneakers with the tongues sticking up, Russell Simmons instructed his younger brother Joseph and his rapping partner to copy his style.
Over the next three years, Run-DMC rose to unimagined heights of success for a rap group. Run-DMC became the first rap group to go multi-platinum, the first to make the cover of Rolling Stone, the first to be featured in regular rotation on MTV, and the first nominated for a Grammy. They played cities all over the world, making as much as $150,000 a show. They were the only rap group to perform at Live Aid in 1985.
“We’re the ones who got everybody jobs,” Joseph Simmons told me when I interviewed Run-DMC for Melody Maker in 1987. “We made hip-hop work economically, so it couldn't be dismissed as a fad.”
During this time, Jason Mizell became the backbone of Run-DMC. As well as providing the beats and inventing their image, he acted as the group’s day-to-day manager. He made sure Run and DMC turned up for interviews and promotional appearances on time.
“Jay was the person I dealt with the most because he was the most reliable,” says Cory Robbins, who signed Run-DMC to his independent label Profile Records. “If you had to call someone, you would call Jay because he got stuff done.”
Despite his important role, few people realized he wasn’t an official member of the group.
“When I signed Run-DMC in 1983, Russell presented them to me as a duo. There was no mention of a third person,” says Robbins. “Jay wasn’t our artist. He wasn’t contractually part of Run-DMC.”
Not until Run-DMC’s third and best album, Raising Hell, did Mizell’s photo appear on the cover, and then only on the back of the album.
“Jay didn't sign the contract, but he was treated as an equal partner just the same," says Russell Simmons. “He did equal work and received equal royalties just like Run and DMC.”
1986's Raising Hell sold three million copies and made Run-DMC one of the biggest music acts in the world. But just as meteoric as their rise was the group’s commercial fall.
In August 1987, Russell Simmons sued Profile Records to break Run-DMC’s contract with the label. Simmons accused Profile of hiding royalties from the group. Profile countered that the lawsuit was a transparent attempt by Simmons to steal away their best-selling act for his own label, Def Jam. “Rusell tried to break the contract with this accusation that we weren’t paying the band, which wasn’t true,” says Cory Robbins. The case dragged on for a year, delaying the release of Run-DMC’s follow-up to Raising Hell. Simmons ended up settling the suit and Run-DMC re-signed to Profile with an increased royalty rate.
In 1988, Run-DMC returned with their fourth album, Tougher Than Leather. Despite positive reviews, the album didn’t match the mega-sales of Raising Hell.
As author Dan Charnas wrote in his book on the hip-hop industry, The Big Payback: “Tougher Than Leather became an industry joke: It shipped platinum. It returned double platinum.”
The year before, N.W.A. released its seminal recording, Straight Outta Compton, inaugurating the era of gangsta rap. All of a sudden, Run-DMC’s positive messages about “going to school” and “not messing with drugs or thugs” seemed corny. In less than a decade, Run-DMC had gone from complete unknowns to global superstars to respected has-beens.
“If Tougher Than Leather hadn't been pushed back because of the lawsuit, it might have been more relevant, but I still believe it was a great follow-up to Raising Hell,” says Russell Simmons
Then, in 1989, Mizell was shot and wounded after a confrontation in Manhattan. He had driven into the city with his friend DJ Hurricane to go clubbing. He got into a drunken argument with a group of Brooklyn teenagers who recognized the famous DJ.
“Brooklyn and Queens had beef with each other,” says Hurricane, referring to the inter-borough rivalry that was a common feature of the New York hip-hop scene in the 1980s.
Against Hurricane’s advice, Mizell got out of his car to confront the teenagers. In a flash, bullets started flying and Mizell screamed they had shot him in the leg. Hurricane dragged him behind the car for cover, saving him from being shot again as Mizell had done for Hurricane at Andrew Jackson High.
“We drew our weapons ready to fire back, but they fled,” remembers Hurricane.
With Run-DMC no longer making lots of money, Mizell retreated to Hollis, Queens. In 1989, he started his own record label, JMJ Records, and opened a small recording studio. JMJ scored an early success with Onyx’s 1992 hip-hop anthem “Throw Ya Gunz” and the turntable maestro proved he had an eye for talent when he discovered rapper 50 Cent, whom he mentored by teaching the 20 year-old crack dealer how to turn street rhymes into commercial songs.
Mizell’s new career as a producer and talent-scout appeared to be going well until the Internal Revenue Service hit him with a massive tax bill which he incurred during his Raising Hell days.
According to Tracey Miller, Run-DMC's long-time publicist, Mizell couldn’t keep up with the payments as the interest compounded over time to $500,000 and the IRS put a lien on his bank account. The government allowed him to keep some of his money. But most of his earnings went to pay the taxman. Desperate for cash, he turned to the one thing his friends in Hollis did to make money in a hurry: dealing drugs.
In 1995, Mizell, and two associates, JMJ Records regional manager David Seabrook and Curtis Scoon, an entrepreneur from Hollis, traveled to Los Angeles to meet a drug supplier to buy cocaine, says Seabrook.
“Jay said he knew somebody in L.A., and he was going to be in Cali anyway on business, so we met up there,” he says.
Scoon allegedly put up $30,000 to finance the deal, but when Seabrook and Scoon arrived in Los Angeles, Mizell couldn’t find the drug supplier.
“Jay said he knew a second person in Compton, so Jay went to see him and they robbed him,” Seabrook says.
Scoon blamed Mizell for the rip-off and demanded he repay the debt. In an interview I conducted with Scoon in 2003, he admitted Mizell owed him money, but claimed he paid him back. “I had to get heavy with him, but he paid,” he told me. Despite the disastrous start, Mizell persisted, and by 1996, according to the government, he had established himself as a player in the drug world.
In 1998, Run-DMC’s flagging career received a boost when Arista Records signed the group. Mizell used his share of the money from the recording contract to pay the IRS. And though no longer in debt, he still continued to broker drug deals.
“Jay was scrounging for money even after he paid off the IRS,” says Eric “Shake” James, who was a 15-year-old rapper when he met Mizell at a pickup basketball game in Milwaukee after which they became fast friends. “Jay had a lot of overheads. He took care of his mom who moved to North Carolina, he took care of his cousins going to college, he took care of his wife and his kids, he was paying for his sister and her house. That was Jay’s biggest problem. He couldn’t say no.”
Mizell’s drug operation was a modest affair, more of a profitable side-hustle than a major business, until he met a mysterious character he referred to only as “Uncle.”
Eric James remembers the time he first heard the name Uncle.
“One day, Jay told me ‘Hey, Shake, we ain’t doing music no more, we're going to do movies’,” he says. “And I’m like ‘What?’ So Jay says ‘Yeah, there’s this guy Uncle, he’s a cool guy, and he’s going to invest in the movie’.”
In 2000, Mizell had planned to produce a gangster movie called Forever Frank, but he couldn’t secure financing for the project.
James pressed Mizell to reveal Uncle’s identity, but he would only say he was “a street dude.” James assumed Uncle was a drug dealer, and a significant one if he could afford to invest millions in a movie.
Other members of the DJ’s inner circle remember meeting Uncle. “I met Uncle twice, hung out in the clubs, me, him and Jay,” says Mizell’s nephew Rodney Jones, who goes by the rap name Boe Skagz. “Jay introduced him as ‘my homeboy Unc’.”
Though Mizell never disclosed Uncle’s real name to his associates, one time, he let slip the name of the organization Uncle represented.
“He said Uncle was part of the Black Mafia Family,” a source told me.
The Black Mafia Family was founded in Detroit in 1989. By 2000, it had become one of the largest cocaine trafficking organizations in America. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the group employed 500 people and ran stash houses in a dozen states. The organization was notorious for investing in hip-hop businesses to launder drug money. (The Black Mafia Family is the subject of the new TV show BMF produced by rapper 50 Cent.)
While it’s unclear how Mizell first met Uncle, Uncle supplied him with multi-kilo cocaine loads on consignment, which Mizell gave to his associates to sell.
A source who worked with Mizell selling drugs describes a typical transaction.
“Jay made a call to Uncle and then Jay called me with a phone number,” he says. “I went to meet some dudes at a house in St. Louis. Some guy asked me how much I thought I could move. I said twenty keys. They said ‘How are you going to get it back?’ I said I was going to drive it. They gave me a phone number and said ‘Call this number when you get back so we know you made it.’ I walked out with twenty keys of coke just on Jay’s name. That’s how crazy it was.”
The same source says once he sold the cocaine, he either drove back to St. Louis to pay for the consignment, or Black Mafia Family members came and picked up the money.
“They charged $18,000 a key, but if I brought the money within 30 days, it would be $17,000 a key. If I brought the money in fifties and hundreds, it would be $16,000 a key. They didn’t want no tens or twenties because they said their biggest problem was moving the money from A to B.”
As for Mizell’s end of the deal, “Jay would get $3,000 a key. If I did a deal for 10 keys, that’s $30,000. Jay didn’t have to do shit except make a phone call.”
Asked why Mizell risked his career and serious jail time, the source told me: “You gotta understand, the one thing a street guy wants is a connection to the cartels, a connection to someone who can give him all the cocaine he wants. That’s like a unicorn in the drug world. When you find a unicorn, you’re not going to walk away from it. Uncle was a unicorn.”
In March 2002, Ronald “Tinard” Washington left prison in Maryland after serving six years of a ten-year sentence for drug trafficking. He moved back to Hollis, where Mizell welcomed his old friend, took him shopping for new clothes, and gave him walking-around money. Mizell knew Washington from his childhood days when his mother, Connie, used to cook dinner for both of them. He was so close to Washington, he allowed him to sleep in the studio. Washington began dating Mizell’s sister, Bonita.
A violent career criminal who left home at 12, Washington boasted an extensive rap sheet stretching back years that included an arrest for the attempted murder of a police officer during a jewelry heist
“Tinard was a wild kid from day one, doing robberies when he was 14 and 15, going to Rikers Island when he was 16,” says Washington’s cousin, David Seabrook.
According to Hollis street lore, Washington had at least one body in his past: the unsolved 1995 murder of Tupac's best friend, the rapper Randy “Stretch” Walker, a story later confirmed by the government.
Someone who helped Mizell sell cocaine says the DJ knew Washington had allegedly killed Walker when he employed him as part of his drug operation.
“In the drug trade, you need somebody like that around,” says the source, who compared Washington to Wee-Bay Brice, the Barksdale Organization's enforcer in the television series The Wire.
At the end of July, Mizell and Washington drove to Washington, D.C. to meet Uncle, Washington told me when I interviewed him for Playboy magazine in 2003 in an account later corroborated by federal investigators.
The purpose of the trip was to connect Uncle with Yakim, another former Hollis Crew associate. Yakim had moved to Baltimore and told Mizell about the thriving drug trade in the city. Mizell brought along Washington because he thought he might be useful in setting up a Baltimore franchise, since Washington had extensive experience dealing drugs there.
During a meeting at a D.C. hotel, Uncle gave Mizell a large amount of cocaine on consignment. “Jay didn’t put up any money,” Washington told me. “It was ten keys, worth about £180,000.” Mizell and Washington then drove the cocaine to Baltimore, hidden in a secret compartment under the dashboard of Mizell’s black Lincoln Navigator.
The drug deal fell apart when Yakim objected to Washington’s involvement.
Prosecutors claim that six years before, Washington broke into Yakim’s house and stole items of jewelry, a gun, and a bullet-proof vest. As a result, Mizell told Washington he was nixing him from the deal. The government says this angered Washington, and he began plotting to kill the DJ.
“After it went bad in Baltimore, that’s when the rumors started about the drugs and the money,” says Eric James. “So I asked Jay about it and he said ‘Don’t worry, I’m going to handle it’.”
James says Mizell asked him to go with him to Baltimore, but then changed his mind. “I told Jay he should have let me come with him,” says James. “Motherfuckers will kill you over ten keys of coke.”
In the meantime, Mizell had other problems to handle. He had long believed his business partner, Randy Allen, was stealing money from the record label’s bank account. A former Hollis Crew member, Allen served a long stretch in prison, and after they released him, Mizell employed him as his manager. The bond between them was so strong, Allen was even the best man at Mizell’s wedding.
“Jay told me that Randy was dipping in the money,” says Hurricane. “Jay confronted Randy about it but he denied it.”
Jaye Battle, the label's former office manager, says she first discovered Allen was stealing from Mizell in 1996.
“Randy was using the business account for his personal expenses, and he was doing it repeatedly,” she says. “He diverted a significant amount of money. Jason knew Randy was misappropriating funds, but he didn’t realize the full extent until I showed him.”
But instead of firing Allen, Allen persuaded Mizell to fire Battle and replace her with his sister Lydia High.
“There was an unbreakable bond between Randy and Jason,” says Battle. “Friendship was very important to Jason.”
“For whatever reason, Jay felt indebted to Randy,” says Eric James. When Mizell arranged a lucrative record contract with Virgin Records for Randy Allen’s rap group Rusty Waters, he expressed relief. “He told me he was glad because he could finally get Randy out of his pocket,” says James. (Allen declined through an intermediary to be interviewed for this story unless I paid him, but he previously denied to me he stole money from his best friend).
The tension between Mizell and Allen spilled over into the studio in October 2002 while the DJ was out of town. According to one of Mizell’s cousins, Stephon Watford, Randy Allen’s brother Teddy Allen allegedly pulled a gun and told him: “Fuck Jay. This is my brother’s studio, not Jay’s. Get the fuck out of here.”
On top of everything else, Mizell’s marriage to Terri Mizell was falling apart. A few years before, the couple had renewed their vows, hoping to save their faltering marriage. But the stress of her husband being on tour had taken a toll on their union.
“Jay’s marriage was super fucked-up,” says a source, who knew both of them. “They were fighting all the time.”
“At the end, Jay was waking up,” says Mizell's cousin Ryan Thompson. “He was going to disband the record label, JMJ Records, and move into film production. He was about to cut off Randy. He was also going to divorce his wife, Terri.”
Mizell wanted a break from the turmoil in his life, so he visited his friend Eric James in suburban Milwaukee, where he stayed for most of October 2002. He seemed relieved to have left Hollis. The two spent most of their time playing video games in James’ living room. Mizell loved video games and sometimes played for 24 hours at a stretch.
“Jay was hiding,” says James. “I don’t know if it was because of Terri or he was scared to go back to Hollis, but he kept saying he wanted to move to Milwaukee.”
Mizell had a deadline to finish the music for a National Football League advertisement, but he wasn’t answering his phone. James worried he was neglecting his work, so he tried to convince him to go home, especially after he received a phone call from one of Mizell’s friends: “Where Jay at? He’s fucking up.”
“I felt like our friendship was infringing on Jay’s career,” says James. “He kept saying that he’d rather stay in Milwaukee and chill. But I kept telling him he had to go home and take care of business.”
Eventually, James persuaded him to leave, but two days before his scheduled departure, Mizell received an ominous phone call. James heard someone on the other end of the phone threatening Mizell. Mizell yelled back: “Motherfucker, fuck you, I’m going to blow your motherfucking head off.” Mizell left the couch, walked into the bathroom, and closed the door. But James could still hear him cursing.
“Jay was irate. I’d never seen him so mad,” he says. “I was shocked.”
Today, James wonders if the phone call had something to do with his friend's murder.
On October 29, Mizell departed Milwaukee to fly to New York. As he left to catch his flight, he gave James a high five and did something he’d never done before: he kissed James on the cheek.
“I pushed him back and said ‘What are you doing?’,” says James. “And Jay said ‘You’re my man’ and I said ‘OK, it’s all love.’ That’s the last time I saw him alive. You can’t imagine how bad that makes me feel, knowing I was the one who persuaded him to go back to New York.”
When James spoke to Mizell the next afternoon, he says, Mizell was eating lunch with Randy Allen at a sandwich shop. They were about to go upstairs to the studio to finish Allen’s Rusty Waters album, which was due at Virgin Records.
Around 7.30 that evening, two masked men climbed the narrow stairs to the second-floor studio. Inside the studio, Mizell sat on a tan leather couch playing a video game with hanger-on Uriel “Tony” Rincon. Randy Allen was on the other side of the room listening to a demo tape with aspiring rapper Michael “Mike B” Bonds.
Allen’s sister, Lydia High, was checking Mizell’s itinerary. The next day, the DJ was due to fly to Washington, D.C. to perform with Run-DMC at a Washington Wizards-Celtics basketball game.
Mizell's friends say he rarely carried a firearm, but that evening he had a .38 automatic, according to police reports. Rincon told the Daily News in a 2007 interview that Mizell placed the gun on the arm of the leather couch as if he was expecting trouble.
Rincon heard footsteps outside the studio door. He paid no attention until two gunmen burst through the entrance. The taller man, about six-foot-two, pointed his firearm at Lydia High and ordered her to lie on the floor.
At the same moment, the second gunman approached Mizell, his weapon raised. “Oh shit,” said Mizell, but before he could pick up his own weapon, the gunman fired two shots. One bullet hit Uriel Rincon in the left leg, the other struck Mizell in the head. The gun was so close that powder burns scorched his shirt. Mizell died where he fell, wearing his trademark white Adidas. He was 37 and left behind a wife and three children.
Eric James alleges that after the murder, Randy Allen emptied the record label bank account: "Randy told me the reason he took the money from the bank account is that he didn’t like Jay’s wife and he didn’t want her to have the money.”
Allen declined to be interviewed for this story, but in a previous interview I conducted with him, he denied the accusation.
"I didn’t steal from Jay,” Allen said. “I made money for Jay. Do you think Jay would have kept me as his business manager for a decade if I was stealing?”
In the aftermath of Mizell’s killing, NYPD detectives grilled Mizell’s friends who witnessed the crime. They refused to talk because they feared for their lives. Police hauled them away in handcuffs and threatened to arrest them for obstruction of justice.
“There was a lot of fear on the streets given the people rumored to be involved,” says Trini Washington (no relation to Ronald Washington), who booked solo nightclub dates for Jam Master Jay. “People were scared to talk. Plus, they told the cops a bunch of bullshit that ended up stalling the investigation.”
Police investigated several theories. Was Mizell killed because of a simmering rap feud between local drug lord Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff and 50 Cent? Did McGriff have him killed because of a rumored affair between McGriff and Mizell’s wife? Did former acquaintance Curtis Scoon kill Mizell over an old drug debt? Did Randy Allen kill his business partner to collect on a $500,000 insurance policy which listed Allen as the benefactor if anything happened to Mizell in the studio?
“Randy was the worst friend Jay could have had,” says DJ Hurricane. “Randy knew right away who killed Jay. I don’t believe he had anything to do with Jay’s murder, but he hurt the case because he was more interested in covering up the money he stole than helping the detectives catch his best friend’s killers.”
Another question that puzzled investigators: who tampered with the studio’s security cameras? When detectives went to retrieve the videotape, they discovered someone had replaced it with an old tape.
In August 2003, police arrested Mizell’s godson Karl Jordan for attempted murder. Mizell’s nephew, Rodney Jones, said Jordan shot him in the leg as he was getting into his car on Hollis Avenue. Detectives investigated whether Jordan shot Jones as a warning not to talk to law enforcement about the Jam Master Jay case. Prosecutors dropped the charge after Jones refused further cooperation.
The following October, Lydia High came forward at the urging of her friends in the hip-hop industry. She identified Ronald Washington as the gunman who ordered her to lie on the ground. Washington was already in custody after police arrested him for committing a series of armed robberies of stores in Queens and on Long Island.
Around the same time, I interviewed Washington in prison. He claimed when Mizell was killed, he was on the street buying bullets for Mizell’s gun. To deflect attention from his own suspected role in the killing, he implicated his alleged co-conspirator, Karl Jordan. Washington said he was returning to the studio when he heard gunshots and saw Jordan running down the fire escape.
“I’m positive it was Little D [Karl Jordan]. I looked him right in his face before he ran off,” he told me.
The government convened a secret grand jury in 2005. Lydia High testified. But the jury failed to issue an indictment. In June this year, Washington's lawyers asked prosecutors for a transcript to find out why jurors didn’t believe her testimony.
Federal prosecutors first identified Washington as a suspect in the case during his 2007 armed robbery trial when they alleged Washington “pointed his gun at those present in the studio, ordered them to get on the ground and provided cover for his associate to shoot and kill Jason Mizell.”
During the trial, prosecutors also claimed Washington’s girlfriend, Danyea McDonald, who admitted to taking part in robberies with Washington, told them that her boyfriend confided in her he murdered not only Jam Master Jay but also rapper Randy “Stretch” Walker in 1995 after a frantic car chase through the streets of Hollis.
According to court documents, Washington thought Walker’s brother, Christopher, had murdered Washington’s brother in a dispute between the Hollis Crew and a rival gang, the Young Guns. Washington fired an assault rifle out of the back window of a car he was riding in, hitting Randy Walker and causing his car to overturn. Washington thought he was firing at Young Guns member Christopher Walker.
Yet, even though Lydia High identified Washington as one of the gunmen in the studio and Danyea McDonald revealed Washington had confessed to killing Mizell, prosecutors declined to charge Washington.
This led the judge in the armed robbery trial to wonder why the federal government didn’t prosecute Washington for Mizell’s murder instead of bringing it up in an unrelated robbery case.
“Well, one might think if it was such an overwhelming case someone might have prosecuted this man for it and not left it as murder hanging onto a bunch of robberies,” said Judge Nina Gershon during the trial.
Nonetheless, Gershon sentenced Washington to seventeen years on the robbery charges based on his extensive prior criminal record.
For over a decade, the case of who killed Jam Master Jay appeared to grow cold. The perception was law enforcement had given up on solving the murder. Part of the problem investigators encountered was the DJ’s associates didn’t want to tarnish his image by revealing what they knew about his involvement in the drug trade.
“Everybody wants to keep this wholesome image of Jay, but that’s a big part of the reason this shit took so long to solve,” says Eric James.
While Washington was locked up in prison, Karl Jordan, who was only 18 when he allegedly fired the shot that took Mizell’s life, became a successful drug dealer. Every year on the anniversary of the murder, he posted pictures of Jam Master Jay on his Instagram account, mourning his passing.
Mizell’s music lingered on through Run-DMC, but as each year passed, it appeared as if his murderers would go unpunished. Behind the scenes, however, the probe continued.
Then, in a major development in the case in 2016, one of Mizell’s former business associates, who was cooperating with the FBI, claims he stumbled across Uncle’s true identity.
The partner, who played a significant role in Mizell’s drug operation, never met Uncle in person, but claims he talked to him on the phone a dozen times.
“After Jay passed, he [Uncle] spoke to me about investing in the movie that he wanted to make with Jay,” he says. “After that, I lost contact with him. He just vanished.”
In 2005, the Drug Enforcement Administration arrested sixteen members of the Black Mafia Family, including the organization’s founders, Terry Flenory and his brother, Demetrius Flenory, accusing them of trafficking thousands of kilos of cocaine worth over a quarter of a billion dollars.
One night, the source was watching a documentary on the Black Mafia Family entitled BMF: The Rise and Fall of a Hip-Hop Drug Empire, which featured a wire-tap of Terry Flenory secretly recorded by investigators.
“I nearly fell off the couch,” he says. “I knew that voice. It was Uncle, it was fucking Uncle. So I called the FBI and said ‘This is going to sound crazy, but I believe Uncle is Terry Flenory’.”
(In April 2016, I received a phone call from Michael Cassidy, an investigator working the Jam Master Jay case. He asked me based on my previous reporting if I knew whether Uncle was Terry Flenory. At that point, I’d never heard of Flenory. Cassidy identified Flenory as the co-founder of the Black Mafia Family. He said the government had developed information from a source that Uncle was Flenory.)
The source claims the FBI sent agents to interview Flenory in prison, where he was serving thirty years after a jury convicted him of drug trafficking and money laundering in 2008. But he says investigators hit a dead end when Flenory refused to meet with them.
“The FBI told me they visited Terry in prison to offer him a deal if he cooperated,” he says. “And he told them to ‘suck my dick.’ There was no point in him co-operating because he was getting out, anyway.”
Flenory has since left prison after authorities granted him compassionate release because of health issues. He declined to be interviewed. But a spokesperson for Flenory confirms investigators wanted to talk to him: “I can confirm for you that while Terry was serving his time, a law enforcement official contacted me to see whether Terry would be interested in cooperating in a murder case in New York. Terry said he wasn't interested in talking to them.”
Finally, eighteen years after Jam Master Jay’s murder, last year, federal prosecutors charged Ronald Washington and Karl Jordan with Mizell’s murder.
The indictment states that Washington and Jordan “together with others [emphasis added], with malice aforethought, did unlawfully kill” Mizell, which suggests that the government is leaving open the possibility that Washington and Jordan did not act alone but as part of a wider conspiracy to murder their friend.
“This case has been around for a long time,” said Seth DuCharme, acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, at a press conference announcing the charges. "For the crime of murder, the passage of time offers no escape. Today we begin to answer that question, who killed Jason Mizell and why.”
Darryl “DMC” McDaniels released a statement praising law enforcement for not abandoning the case. “It’s been a difficult 18 years not having Jay around while knowing that his murderers were not yet indicted for this heinous crime. I commend NYPD, NYC Detectives, Federal Agents and all the law enforcement who were involved in this case, for not giving up and working to bring justice for Jay," the statement read. "I realize this is a first step in the judicial process, but I hope Jay can finally Rest in Peace.”
But Washington’s lawyer Susan Kellman questions why prosecutors took so long to bring an indictment. “If Lydia [High] identified my client back in 2003, why did they wait nearly twenty years to indict him,” she tells me. “If the studio was bustling at the time of the shooting, why wait two decades to arrest Ronald? Or, maybe they got nothing on Ronald that night because he played no role in Jam Master Jay's death.”
In the end, Mizell thought his fame insulated him from the consequences of his criminal activity, only to be betrayed by those closest to him. Asked if Mizell believed his status as Jam Master Jay protected him from the dangers of dealing cocaine, one of his friends tells me: “That’s exactly what it was.”
The revelation that the DJ was involved in the drug trade, however, shouldn’t diminish his legacy, his important contributions to hip-hop culture, says Trini Washington, who got his start in the music business as one of Run-DMC's assistants before managing Mizell's studio.
“People focus on drugs and drug dealers, but that’s not the Jam Master Jay I knew,” he says. “The Jam Master Jay I knew was a family man, a husband and a father, who loved his mother and sister and brother. His focus was putting out great music, not selling drugs. He was like a big brother to me. I owe him everything. Run-DMC saved my life. If it wasn’t for them, I would still be running the streets, dead or in jail.”
That was a great read.Solid body of work.Nice
Excellent piece, Frank! Great reporting, skillfully told.