Part 2: Hip-hop Icon, Neighborhood Hero, Drug Dealer, Murder Victim
The life and death of Jam Master Jay
Credit: Michael Ochs
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 his dumb ass,” 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.”
Part 3: Why it took 18 years to solve Jam Master Jay’s murder