Part 1: Hip-Hop Icon, Neighborhood Hero, Drug Dealer, Murder Victim
The life and death of Jam Master Jay
Credit: Globe Photos
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.
Part 2: How Jam Master Jay became a drug dealer