He K*lled His Parole Officer and Own Baby Mama For Stealing From Him— Queens Most FEARED Kingpin HT

A parole officer named Brian Rooney had a habit that his partner thought was crazy. Every time he brought someone in, a parole who violated a man heading back to a cell, Rooney would take money out of his own pocket [music] and put it into their commissary account. His partner, Alan Ryder, asked him why.

Rooney said, “Everyone deserves dignity, even the ones going back inside.” On October 10, 1985, Brian Rooney was lured to Basley Park [music] in Jamaica, Queens. A car pulled up beside him. The driver raised a gun and fired until Rooney was dead. The man who ordered the hit was one of Rooney’s paroleles.

A man from Alabama with a ninth grade education and a soft voice. A man who ran a $20 million a year operation from the back office of a corner grocery store. a man who prosecutors said could order a killing the way most people order lunch quietly, calmly, without raising his voice. Rooney had arrested him on a parole violation a few months earlier. That’s it. He did his job.

And for that, the man had him killed. But the parole officer wasn’t the last person close to this man who died on his orders. After the parole officer, he ordered the murder of his childhood friend and then his ex-girlfriend, the 20-year-old mother of his son. She was shot multiple times and their child was with her when it happened.

His wife was kidnapped. His mother’s house was firebombed. His halfsister died in the fire. His mother, his stepfather, his wife, and his sister were all arrested. Every single person close to this man was either buried or broken. In 2022, after 34 years in prison, the state of New York set him free.

The neighborhood he controlled was Jamaica, Queens. The same blocks that produced 50 Cent, the Supreme Team, and an entire generation of hiphop hustlers. And all of them grew up in the shadow of one name. They called him Fat Cat. Now, let’s get to his story and how he came to that point. Lorenzo Nicholls was born on Christmas Day, 1958 at University Hospital in Birmingham, Alabama.

His mother, Louise Coleman, was a nurse’s aid. His stepfather, Amos Coleman, was a plumber. working people, honest people, the kind of family that got up before sunrise and came home after dark. When Lorenzo was 10 years old, the family moved north to Jamaica, Queens. This was the late 1960s. Jamaica was changing.

The neighborhood was filling up with black families from the south, all chasing the same promise. Better schools, better jobs, better chances. But Jamaica, Queens in the 1970s, was also filling up with something [music] else. Lorenzo dropped out of school after the 8th grade.

He joined a street gang called the Seven Crowns. By the age of 13, he had his first arrest. By 18, he had two robbery convictions and an 18-year prison sentence. He served 3 years. 3 years out of 18. That is what the system gave him. And when he came out in 1980, he came out with a plan. There was a grocery store on 150th Street in Jamaica, Queens.

It was called Big Max Deli. Nothing special. Shelves of canned food, a counter for sandwiches, a cooler for drinks. Fat Cat’s father-in-law owned it. When Lorenzo married Joanne McClinton in 1980, the deli became part of the family [music] and Fat Cat turned that deli into the headquarters of a $20 million a year operation.

[music] The front of the store sold chicken sandwiches. The back office moved cocaine and product. Fat Cat bought his cocaine from [music] the Italian mafia. The families still controlled wholesale on the East Coast in the early 1980s. He bought his other product from Chinese suppliers.

Then he broke it down and sold it through a network of roughly 300 workers spread across the housing projects of Southeast Queens. He sold kilos at $50,000 each to mid-level dealers who broke them into 10 and $25 packs for the street. The money flowed back to the deli, to the block, to Fatcat. They called 150th Street the block, and everyone in Jamaica knew it belonged to one man.

He wore a rabbit fur coat and gold jewelry. He had a 9th grade education and a mind that prosecutors compared to a CEO. One assistant district attorney named Warren Silverman said, “If you put him in a corduroy jacket with patches on the elbows, he would look like a college professor.” Silverman said he was soft-spoken, but those guys are the most dangerous.

He could say, “Kill him in a real soft voice.” And there was something else about Fat Cat that nobody expected. He was superstitious. Deeply, almost obsessively superstitious. He refused to wear black ever. He would not leave the house on Friday the 13th. If his wife accidentally swept his feet with a broom, he would make her spit on it. He was obsessive about cleanliness.

Every Saturday, he scrubbed the apartment top to bottom, including the windows. His wife said he was very attracted to the mirror and would even use her perfume, not caring if he smelled like a woman. This was the man who ran Jamaica, Queens. a soft-spoken, perfumewearing, broom superstitious killer who ordered bodies from a back office behind a deli counter.

And there were bodies stacked up in Jamaica as a result. Fatcat did not build his empire alone. Howard Papy Mason was his closest associate, a friend from prison who served as both enforcer and independent operator. Papy ran his own crew, the Bibos, but he had started as Fat Cat’s security guard, and still did business with him.

Fat Cat’s own sister, Viola, worked for Papy. She was also his lover. Luke Spoon Steven, was a trusted lieutenant. Joseph Mikebones Rogers was another. Brian Glaze Gibbs was an enforcer. And Fat Cat’s mother, Louise Coleman, helped run the operation from the deli, though she would deny it for the rest of her life, insisting she just sold chicken sandwiches.

This was a family business in the most literal sense. [music] His mother, his stepfather, his wife, his sisters, all of them were eventually swept up in the machine that Fat Cat built from the back of a grocery store. He also supplied product to another crew in the neighborhood, one run by a man named Kenneth Supreme McGriff.

The Supreme team would become legends in their own right. But in the early 1980s, they were buying from Fatcat. So were dozens of other mid-level operations across southeast [music] Queens, the Bronx, and Brooklyn. Fatcat was not just a dealer. He was a wholesaler. He was the source. His operation employed roughly 300 workers at its peak.

Street level dealers, lookouts, enforcers, drivers, money counters, people who ran apartments where product was stored. People who ran apartments where money was counted. It was a corporation structured, disciplined, and ruthless. Jamaica, Queens, in 1984 was Fat Cat’s kingdom, and kingdoms need rules. On July 29th, 1985, about 30 police officers descended on Big Mac’s Delhi with a search warrant.

Most of them went upstairs to the apartments above the store. They found one unarmed suspect and about $150,000 in cash, maybe 3 days worth, stuffed in paper bags. The bags were printed with the slogan, “Just say no.” The two officers who walked into the deli itself found fat cat at his desk in the back office surrounded by file cabinets next to a birthday card that read world’s greatest daddy.

They arrested him, charged him with gun possession and product possession. He posted $70,000 bail and walked out. But then his parole officer stepped in. Brian Rooney did his job. He reported the arrest as a violation. Fat Cat was taken back into custody. And in the world Fat Cat lived in, that was a death sentence, not for Fat Cat, but for Rooney.

According to Rooney’s partner, Alan Ryder, Fat Cat considered the arrest a sign of disrespect. A parole officer, a man Fat Cat saw as beneath him, had dared to put him back in a cage. On October 10th, 1985, Brian Rooney was lured to Basley Park in Queens. A car pulled alongside him. The occupants opened fire. Rooney died in his vehicle.

Brian Rooney left behind an 18-month-old son named Thomas. A boy who would grow up never knowing his father. A father who died because he did his job and because the man he supervised believed that obedience was owed upward, never downward. Fat Cat would later tell the parole board that he only wanted Rooney roughed up, that it was never supposed to be a killing.

Ryder called that a lie. Even from behind bars, Fatcat ran his empire. Orders went out through visitors, through [music] phone calls, through family members who climbed and went from the various facilities where he was held. The money kept flowing. The block kept operating. The deli stayed open. But money creates problems.

And the biggest problem was a 20-year-old woman named Myrtle Mesha Horscham. Horscham was Fat Cat’s ex-girlfriend. She was also the mother of his son, a boy everyone called TC. According to Fat Cat’s own confession, Horscham stole money from his stash and spent it on another man. In Fat Cat’s world, that was two betrayals at once, theft and disloyalty.

In December 1987, members of Fat Cat’s crew found Horscham and shot her multiple times. A friend who was with her survived. Horscham did not. She was 20 years old. Their son TC was with her when it happened. After the shooting, one of Fat Cat’s people picked up the child and dropped him off in the yard of Horscham’s mother.

They left him there like a package. When Fat Cat’s mother, Louise Coleman, learned what her son had done, that he had ordered the murder of the mother of her grandchild, she disowned him, cut him off completely. The woman who had worked in his deli, who had been arrested as part of his operation, who had stood by him through robberies and prison terms, she was done.

That’s the line Fat Cat crossed. Not the parole officer, not the childhood friend, the mother of his child. In 1986, between the parole officer’s murder and the girlfriend’s murder, there was another body. Isaac Balden was a childhood friend of Fat Cats. They had grown up together in Queens.

They knew each other’s families. They had come up on the same streets. Then Balden made a mistake. He robbed Fat Cat’s then girlfriend, Carolyn Tyson. Maybe he needed money. Maybe he thought Fat Cat would not find out. Maybe he thought their friendship meant something. Fat Cat found out and he gave the order.

Balden was shot and killed by members of Fat Cat’s crew. A parole officer who did his job. A girlfriend who took his money. A childhood friend who robbed the wrong person. Three people close to Fat Cat. Three bodies, all ordered from behind bars by a man who never pulled a trigger himself.

The violence did not only flow outward. In May 1987, Fat Cat’s wife Joanne was kidnapped. Fat Cat paid the ransom and she was returned. But the message was clear. His enemies were willing to go after his family. Then someone firebombed his mother’s house. Louise Coleman survived, but Fat Cat’s invalid halfsister did not.

She died in the fire. Jamaica, Queens had become a war zone, and Fat Cat’s family was at the center of it. His wife kidnapped, his mother’s house burned, his halfsister dead, his ex-girlfriend murdered, his childhood friend dead, his parole officer dead, and Fat Cat himself was sitting in a cell giving orders through a telephone, watching everything he built consume everyone he knew.

February 26, 1988, at 2:30 in the morning, a 22-year-old rookie police officer named Edward Burn was sitting in his patrol car on a street corner in South Jamaica, Queens. He had been assigned to guard the home of a local resident, a man who had called the police to complain about drug dealing in the neighborhood.

The dealers had threatened the man, and Burn was there to protect him. Four men walked up to the patrol car. They fired five shots into Edward Burn’s head. He was 22 years old. He had been on the job 7 months. The hit was not ordered by Fat Cat. It was ordered by Papy Mason, Fat Cat’s associate, the man his sister loved, the man who ran the Bibos out of the same ecosystem Fat Cat had built.

Mason ordered Burns killing because another officer had disrespected him. The same logic, the same code. Disrespect equals death. But the burn killing did something no other murder in Jamaica, Queens, had done. It went national. President George HW Bush cited the murder during his presidential campaign. The NYPD created special anti-rack units in response.

The entire weight of federal law enforcement turned its attention to one neighborhood in Queens. [music] And that attention did not just land on Papymason. It landed on everyone connected to him, including Fatcat. August 1988. Federal agents swept through Jamaica, Queens, and arrested Fatcat’s mother, Louise Coleman.

They also arrested his stepfather, Amos Coleman, his wife, Joanne, and his sister. All of them were charged with participating in his operation. Louise Coleman, the nurse’s aid from Birmingham, Alabama, who moved her family north for a better life, pleaded guilty to owning real estate used for drug trafficking.

The woman who raised him, the woman who worked in his deli, the woman who eventually disowned him for killing Myrtle Horscham. She went to prison because of her son. Fat Cat had now destroyed every relationship in his life. His parole officer dead. His childhood friend dead. His ex-girlfriend dead. His halfsister dead in a fire.

His wife kidnapped then arrested. His mother arrested then disowned him. His associates murder of a cop brought down the entire neighborhood. Every person who was close to Lorenzo Nichols paid a price for that closeness. In 1992, Fat Cat pleaded guilty. He admitted ordering the murder of Brian Rooney.

He admitted ordering the murder of Myrtle Horscham. He admitted to drug charges and racketeering. The sentence was 25 years to life for the murders. It was 40 years federal for the narcotics and racketeering. The sentences ran concurrently. The math was clear. Fat Cat was never supposed to see daylight again.

In exchange for his cooperation with authorities, he received a lighter sentence than prosecutors could have pushed for. Fat Cat turned canary. The man who had people killed for disloyalty, cooperated with the government to save himself. From his cell, he wrote a letter to the New York Daily News in 2010. I have nothing but time to ponder my misdeeds.

To the victims of my criminal activities, I offer my deepest regret and sincerest apology. 14 words of apology for the parole officer who put money in inmates commissary accounts. For the 20-year-old mother who was shot while her son watched. for the childhood friend who made one mistake. April 2022, after 34 years in state prison, the New York State parole board voted to release Lorenzo Fatcat Nichols.

The police unions erupted. PBA President Patrick Lynch said, “This murderous drug lord and cop killer must not move even an inch closer to freedom.” Our hero, police officer Edward Byron, sacrificed his life to rid our city of nickels and his gang. Brian Rooney’s former partner, Alan Ryder, now 76 years old, said what he had been saying for three decades.

Alan Ryder said, “There is no reason why any of them should be released. They murdered Brian and it was a contract killing. I have no compassion for him. Maybe God will forgive him, but I certainly cannot. Then Ryder said something quieter. I think about Thomas Rooney, Brian’s son. He was 18 months old when he lost his father.

He is a grown man now. He does not know his father, and my heart breaks for this little boy. A little boy who grew up without a father because a drug lord felt disrespected. Fat Cat was released from Clinton Correctional Facility and immediately transferred to federal custody. In February 2023, a federal judge shaved 3 years off his 40-year sentence, ruling that time served before sentencing should have been counted.

But he still was not free. He had a 10-year sentence waiting in Florida for a car theft and title fraud ring that he ran [music] from prison. Even behind bars, Fat Cat could not stop. As of today, Lorenzo Fat Cat Nichols is still in the system, still fighting for full release, still writing letters about rehabilitation and regret.

And Brian Rooney’s son, Thomas, is still growing up without a father. Jamaica, Queens, looks different now. The block, 150th Street, no longer belongs to Fat Cat. Big Mac’s Deli is gone. The crack era is a memory. The neighborhood that Fat Cat ruled is the same neighborhood that produced Curtis 50 Cent Jackson, who grew up hearing Fat [music] Cat’s name like a ghost story.

The same neighborhood that produced the Supreme Team. The same neighborhood where a [music] book was written connecting all of them. Queens Reigns Supreme, Fat Cat 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler. Fat Cat’s legacy is not power. It is not money. It is not the 20 million a year or the 300 workers or the rabbit fur coat.

His legacy is a list. Brian Rooney, parole officer, father dead. Myrtle Horscham, 20 years old. Mother dead. Isaac Balden, childhood friend, dead. Edward Byron, 22-year-old rookie, dead. Killed by Fat Cat’s associate using Fat Cat’s logic. His halfsister dead in a fire. His mother arrested, disowned. Her own son, his wife, kidnapped, arrested.

His stepfather arrested. His sister arrested. Every person who stood close to Lorenzo Nichols was either buried or broken. And the man who did all of it from the back of a deli, from a prison cell, from behind a phone receiver, is asking the state of New York to let him come home.

Brian Rooney’s partner said it best. He is 76 years old now. He has been thinking about this for almost 40 years. I think about Thomas Rooney, Brian’s son. He was 18 months old. He is a grown man now. He does not know his father. Thomas Rooney grew up without a father because a drug lord from Alabama felt disrespected by a man who put his own money into inmates commissary accounts.

Myrtle Horscham’s son TC grew up without a mother because she took money from the wrong man and spent it on someone else. Isaac Balden’s family buried a young man because he robbed the wrong person’s girlfriend. And Louise Coleman, the nurse’s aid from Birmingham who moved her family north for a better life, spent her final years knowing that her son destroyed everything she built, everything she sacrificed, everything she believed was possible when she packed up and headed to Queens.

Fat Cat wants to come home, but there is nobody left.