More Updates About The Secret Relationship Between Jam Master Jay and the Black Mafia Family
New Details About the Drug Beef in Baltimore That Led to Jam Master Jay’s Murder
Photo of Scott Burnstein
I hate it when journalists steal my reporting and try to pass it off as their own. It happens a lot. Last May, for instance, two writers from the New York Daily News stole my exclusive story about a jailhouse snitch who was set to testify at the upcoming Jam Master Jay murder trial that one of Jay’s alleged murderers, Ronald “Tinard” Washington, bragged about killing the Run-DMC deejay while in prison. Only after I complained on Twitter did the newspaper add the line: “The story was first reported by investigative reporter Frank Owen.” I even had to sue a famous author for copyright infringement for plagiarizing huge chunks of my first book Clubland: The Fabulous Rise and Murderous Fall of Club Culture. (The suit was settled out of court)
Recently, however, Scott Burnstein from Detroit’s The Gangster Report did something different. While giving me full credit, he took my reporting about the Jam Master case and combined it with his own reporting to create the most complete account yet of the Washington/Baltimore drug deal involving Black Mafia Family co-founder Terry Flenory that led to Jam Master Jay’s demise. As he writes: “The following recollection of events centering on the conspiracy to murder Jam Master Jay was composed by combining the epic reporting by British investigative journalist Frank Owen (in Playboy Magazine and on his own Substack blog), a review of federal court documents and law enforcement files and exclusive Gangster Report (first and second-hand) sources with direct knowledge of Jam Master Jay, his links to the Black Mafia Family and the circumstances that coalesced to create the foundation of his murder plot.”
Among the new revelations:
Writing for Playboy in 2003, I revealed the ill-fated trip that Jay and his childhood friend Ronald Washington took to Washington, D.C. in 2002 to meet a mysterious character known as “Uncle.” They met in a hotel where Uncle fronted Jay ten kilos of cocaine on consignment, which Jay and Washington took to Baltimore to sell. I was never able to identify the location of the hotel but Scott claims his sources say it was Hotel Washington, just steps from the White House.
It took me over a decade to find out Uncle’s real identity, but last year, I exclusively revealed that Uncle was Terry Flenory, the co-founder of the Black Mafia Family, which in its heyday was the biggest African-American drug trafficking organization in America. But I was unsure how Jay first met Flenory. According to Scott, Jay was introduced to Flenory at a Los Angeles nightclub in 1996: “Flenory was a fan of Run-DMC and …had access to an endless supply of powder cocaine. Soon, [Flenory] began feeding Jam Master Jay bricks of cocaine on consignment and the groundbreaking Run-DMC DJ was now a major dope boy headed back to Queens with the plug of all plugs.”
As I’d previously reported, Ronald Washington sold Jay on the idea of setting up a cocaine operation in Baltimore. Washington had extensive experience selling drugs in the city. Jay also recruited another childhood friend, Yakim, to be part of the crew. But Yakim objected to Washington’s involvement because six years before, Washington had burglarized Yakim’s Baltimore home. Scott adds further details to this scenario: “Tinard and Yakim got into a heated verbal altercation [in Baltimore] and Jam Master Jay had to separate them from physically attacking each other.”
Scott claims Flenory was also wary of Washington’s involvement in the Baltimore drug operation because he had been friends with Tupac Shakur and had heard the rumor that Washington had allegedly murdered one time Thug Life member Randy “Stretch” Walker in 1995 . “Neither [Flenory] nor Yakim wanted Tinard involved in anything either one of them was doing in the drug game,” writes Scott. The government claims that after Jay excluded Washington from the drug deal, Washington began plotting to murder the DJ.
Last year, a source who helped Jay run his drug operation told me about the frequent trips the source made to a Black Mafia Family stash house in St. Louis where he picked up as much as thirty kilos of cocaine at a time. The source didn’t know the name of the BLM associate who ran the stash house, but Scott identifies him as Chad “J-Bo” Brown. (I showed a photo of Brown to my source and he recognized him as the BLM member he did business with.) According to Scott, J-Bo (short for Junior Boss) was second-in-command behind Flenory and his brother Demetrius. He handled cocaine distribution for the entire country and had his own crew known as the Dawg Pound.
Scott also claims that in addition to J-Bo, Jay also worked with Fleming “Ill” Daniels, the number three man in the BMF organization. Daniels was in charge of BMF’s New York operation. “It was inside the Daniels crew that Jam Master Jay operated in Queens, [brokering] drug transactions for his partners in the dope game and keeping a sizeable chunk of each deal he brokered.” Daniels is currently serving time after pleading guilty in 2010 to the killing of a man in the parking lot of an Atlanta nightclub.
The only quibble I have with the story is Scott’s characterization of the proposed Baltimore operation as a “BMF franchise.” According to my sources, Flenory had agreed to supply the cocaine, but Jay was not a member of BMF, nor were his friends who he recruited to run the show.
Anyway, you can read the story here:
Breaking Down The Beef That Got Jam Master Jay Killed
The trial of Jam Master Jay’s alleged killers begins in February.