Queens Reigns Supreme: Book Review
Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip-Hop Hustler
by Ethan Brown
I read books every once in a while, because I've got it like that, so I'm going to try to review them here more often. I don't read too many books about rap music though, so don't get your hopes up or anything.
Queens Reigns Supreme by New York journalist Ethan Brown chronicles the confluence of hip-hop and the drug culture of Southside Queens, NY in the 1980s. The basic gist of it is that the drug gangs in 1980s Queens were gully as shit and that the generation of rappers that came up after them were a bunch of pussies who found out the hard way that crime doesn't pay, at least if you're black.
The first half of the book has to do with the various drug gangs that ran Queens in the 1980s.
The ringleader of that whole scene was a fellow named Lorenzo "Fat Cat" Nichols, an eccentric fellow who sometimes dressed as a pirate. Arggh! He moved shiteloads of cocaine and heroin out of a grocery store called Big Mac's Deli, but ended up getting locked up fairly early on where he still managed to run a multimillion dollar crime enterprise via an obscure technology known as the "telephone."
Law enforcement wasn't nearly as sophisticated in those days as it is now, which is why Thomas "Tony Montana" Mickens was able to purchase a plethora of ridonkulous luxury bullshit, including a fleet of luxury automobiles and a condo out near Disney World, not to mention entire blocks of real estate in Queens, using an hilariously simple shell game right out of an Elmore Leonard novel.
Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff, on the other hand, the infamous secret owner of Murder Inc comes off as much more of a tard. He was locked up early on, too, at which point his [word for named after himself] Supreme Team came under the control of his mental nephew Gerald "Prince" Miller and commenced to kill some of anybody and everybody, usually in a fairly grisly fashion.
Which would've been fine, except some genius (Howard "Pappy" Mason) got the bright idea to off a rookie cop named Edward Byrne, who was asleep in his car outside the house of an informant, er, snitch he was protecting. Next thing you know, the biggest gang of them all, the NYPD, came down hard and that was the end of that era.
The second half of the book is more of a pointless clusterfuck in which it's shown how several rappers have gotten tangled up with these '80s drug lords, usually to their own detriment.
For example, 2Pac, who was in New York in 1994 shooting the awful Above the Rim, fell in with a crowd including Teh Ghey's manager Jimmy "Henchmen" Rosemond, a hustler from Queens named Freddie "Nickels" Moore and, famously, Jaques "Hatian Jack" Agnant. The mystery of the infamous Quad Studios shootings is sorta kinda revealed, which is that a) Pac was most likely set up by Rosemond, but b) Pac shot himself and the other fellow by mistake trying to reach for one of the guys' guns.
Irv Gotti is portrayed as a pansy from the "nice part" of Queens, who happened to bump into the fabled Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff on the set of a video in Queens for the group Cash Money Click. At one point, I think 'Preme helps one of Ja Rule's weed carriers get his chain back, but that was really about the extent of any impropriety between McGriff and the label that was revealed here. Hence, Irv Gotti may have in fact been hassled by the Feds just for having business dealings with an ex-con.
A decent amount of the second half is devoted to the Jam Master Jay assassination, but it's not made clear who was actually responsible and why. It's suggested that Jay and his partner in his music company, Randy, may have had some sort of arrangement in which if Jay died Randy could access Jay's bank account and have Jay's $70,000, which he did anyway. But then Jay was involved with a lot of different shady types in the area where he kept his studio and may have occasionally dealt drugs to help pay down his massive debt to the IRS.
And that's basically it in a nutshell. The book reads well enough, but it does have this issue where it feels like it's been pieced together from a buncha other newspaper and magazine articles. The parts that had to do with Russell Simmons and Def Jam were obviously cribbed wholesale from Rush's awful autobiography Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money and God, or whatever it's called.
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