The Queens Kingpin Who Started A War With 50 Cent – HT
On May 24th, 2000, at noon, on a quiet residential block in South Jamaica, Queens, a grandmother was planting flowers in her front yard when a man walked up behind her grandson’s car and fired nine shots into him. The grandson was 24 years old. He had an infant son inside the house. He’d walked back to the car to grab a piece of jewelry, and in the time it took him to open the door, a second vehicle had pulled up behind him.
A man stepped out of the passenger side, circled to the back of the car, and opened fire with a 9mm, hit him in the hand, the arm, the hip, both legs, the chest, the left cheek, a bullet that tore through his gums, shattered a wisdom tooth, and left a fragment large in his tongue. 13 days in the hospital.
Both legs are broken where a permanent slur in his voice that would become the most recognizable sound in hip hop. The grandson’s name was Curtis Jackson. The world would know him as 50 Cent, but the man who allegedly sent the shooter wasn’t a rival rapper. He wasn’t a competing label executive. He was a former crack kingpin who once generated $200,000 a day from a single housing project.
The same housing project where Curtis Jackson learned to sell drugs at 12 years old. His name was Kenneth Supreme McGriff, co-founder of the Supreme Team, a drug operation so sophisticated it used the 5enter Supreme Alphabet as an encrypted language that baffled the FBI for years. 110 employees at peak. Branded product lines with color-coded vial caps.
Rooftop lookouts with walkie-talkies spanning eight-story buildings in the Basley Park houses. He survived a 12-year federal sentence. Came home, bought the film rights to five Donald Goins novels, bankrolled murder in Records, the label behind Ja Rule, Ashanti, and 30 million album sales. put Snoop Dogg, Ice Tea, and Jaw Rule in a movie he produced from the streets of Queens.
He had rebuilt himself from nothing into something that straddled three industries at once: drugs, film, and music. But what brought all of that crashing down? What turned a $200,000 a day empire and $100 million record label into a federal death penalty case? started with a single song recorded by a rapper who grew up idolizing the very man who wanted him dead.
The story most people know about Kenneth Supreme Mcgriff is the 50 Cent version, the old head kingpin who tried to kill a rapper and lost or the murder incas version, the drug dealer who brought Irv Gotti’s empire down. But I’ve spent a long time with this story, and neither of those versions captures what actually happened here. The real story is about what happens when a man with the organizational intelligence to run a Fortune 500 company gets pointed at crack cocaine at 11 years old inside a system that offered him absolutely nothing else to be brilliant at. And
it’s about a code, a code of silence that held for 20 years until a kid from the same blocks put the whole thing on a rap record. What that code built and what breaking it cost is something nobody in either version of this story wants to talk about. The Kenneth McGriff parents both worked for the New York City Transit Authority.
Steady jobs, city benefits. They didn’t live inside the Basley Park houses. They lived across the street from them in a private home, middle class by any measure that mattered in South Jamaica, Queens in the late 1960s. Their son attended PS 140, then Count Basy Junior High School 72 in Rodale Village. He was, by every external indicator, a kid with options.
He was 11 years old when the 5% nation recruited him. The five placenters, the nation of gods and earths, gave him something the school system wasn’t offering, a framework, a philosophy that told him he was divine, that knowledge was power, that language itself could be restructured into something only the initiated understood.
They gave him the supreme alphabet and the supreme mathematics, a system where every letter and every number corresponded to a concept. A became Allah. B became be or born. Seven was God. 12 was knowledge wisdom. It was an entire worldview encoded in language. And it was this system that Mcgriff would later weaponize into an operational cipher that federal agents couldn’t crack for years.
They also gave him his name, Supreme. the organizational ability he displayed over the next two decades. Dividing a crack empire into four color-coded crews, each with its own lieutenant and territory, deploying rooftop surveillance across an entire housing complex, managing 110 people with military discipline while generating $200,000 a day in street level receipts.
That wasn’t instinct and it wasn’t violence and that was operational intelligence. The kind of mind that designs supply chains, manages logistics, anticipates enforcement patterns, and delegates authority without losing control. The same mind that ran Basley Park Houses could have run a distribution company. The same strategic thinking that kept him dominant through the entire crack era could have built something legitimate and lasting.
But in 1971 in South Jamaica, Queens, nobody was recruiting 11-year-old black kids for business school. The 5enters were the only organization that saw what he was and gave it a structure. And the structure they gave it had no legal application. South Jamaica was already breaking by the time McGriff hit his teens.
the the city’s human resources administration had declared it the largest officially designated poverty area in Queens by 1972. A year later, a police officer shot 10-year-old Clifford Glover in the back while he ran from a plane closed car. The officer was acquitted, the neighborhood burned. The fracture between community and police that would define the crack era was already set.
Fat Cat Nicholls came out of the same soil, same neighborhood, same 5enter connections, same era. He ran a $100,000 a week heroin operation with 300 workers. But where Fat Cat went all the way into the streets with nothing held back, Mcgriff always kept something else going. After his first release from prison, he opened a barber shop near his parents’ house.
He organized the annual Supreme’s Night International Fast Break Festival, a basketball tournament at Basisley Palm Park with $50,000 in prize money, concerts with LL Cool J and Run DMC booked through Russell Simmons, a drug kingpin, running a community sports league with legitimate headliners. Both things were true at the same time, and neither one was an act.
The code McGriff carried from the 5enters wasn’t just operational. It was existential. Silence was sacred. The code was everything. Anyone who broke it deserved whatever came next. That belief held for 20 years. It held through prison, through the crack wars, through the murders, through the federal investigations.
Then a kid from his own blocks put the entire code on a rap record and played it for the world. Ah, before the music and the films and the war with 50 Cent, there was the Empire. Mcgriff co-founded the Supreme Team in the early 1980s with his nephew Gerald Prince Miller. Though nephew is misleading, Mcgriff was only two years older than Prince.
They grew up more like brothers. The operation started small, burglaries and bank robberies with a 5enter crew called the Peace Gods. Early members included David Bing Robinson, Troy Baby Wise Jones, and Ernesto Puerto Rican Righteous Pineella. Mcgriff’s entry into drugs came through a job as a stash house guard for heroin dealer Ronald Ronnie Bumps Basset in Hollis.
He was introduced to fat cat nickels through a 5enter cousin. By 1983, the crew was selling heroin and cocaine at Sutfine Boulevard and 150th Street. And McGriff named the organization after himself and set up headquarters at the Basley Park Houses on Guy R. Brewer Boulevard. Then crack arrived and the supreme team became a machine. Mcgriff divided the operation into four crews, each led by a lieutenant, each distinguished by differently colored crack vial caps.
Bimie Antne ran the blue tops. Baby Wise Jones ran the red tops. Prince Miller ran the yellow tops. Colbert Black Justice Johnson ran the orange tops. The product was branded Thriller and Ghostbuster, names that carried weight on the street the way Nike carries weight in a mall. Security was paramilitary.
Rooftop lookouts positioned across the eight-story buildings of Basley Park, armed with walkie-talkies, scanning for police and rivals. Armor-plated vehicles, police scanner monitoring around the clock. on the arsenal included AR15S, MAC10S, and TEC9S workers at the street level had one rule burned into them. No singles, no shorts.
Every transaction ran at full price. And then there was the language. The Supreme Alphabet, the fiveenter system McGriff had learned at 11 became the crew’s encrypted communication protocol. Every letter had its own word. Every number had its own meaning. Federal agents intercepted walkie-talkie transmissions and couldn’t decode them.
The same philosophy that had recruited a middle class kid from across the street became the operational cipher that kept his empire invisible to law enforcement for years. One structural advantage separated the Supreme Team from nearly every other crew in the city. racial integration.
In an era when black drug organizations bought from intermediaries who bought from Colombian suppliers, the Supreme Teams significant Latino membership, Ernesto Pinella, Wilfredo C. Justice, Aoyo, Julio Hernandez, Shannon Himenez gave them direct access to Colombian cocaine sources, cutting out the middlemen and their markups entirely.
$200,000 a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year from one housing project in Queens, 110 employees on the payroll, 25,000 cracked vials moving every week. That scale didn’t happen by accident. And the system that allowed it to happen didn’t happen by accident either. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 created the crack sentencing disparity that would shape federal prosecution for the next quarter century.
And 5 g of crack, the weight of two sugar packets, triggered the same mandatory minimum sentence as 500 g of powdered cocaine. 80% of crack convictions were black defendants. The law was engineered to punish the street level dealers, the workers Mcgriff employed, while the powder cocaine suppliers who fed the pipeline walked with lighter sentences or weren’t prosecuted at all.
That’s not a fact that speaks for itself. That’s a mechanism. It functioned exactly as designed. It incarcerated the most visible layer of the drug trade while leaving the infrastructure above it intact. Prince Miller during his time running the operation while Mcgriff was locked up distributed $3,000 in single dollar bills to neighborhood children every week handed them out personally.
The same man who ordered at least eight murders in 1987 alone. The same man who supervised the killing of Colombian suppliers and cooperating witnesses. The neighborhood saw both versions and understood that the truth was both at once and that the system that made Prince Miller necessary hadn’t offered those same children anything comparable.
When Nas put South Jamaica on wax in 1994, some fiends scream about Supreme Team, a Jamaica Queens thing. It was the first time most of America heard the name one bar on Ilmatic and the Supreme Team became hip hop cannon. Nas would return to the story nearly three decades later, directing the Showtime documentary that put McGriff’s voice on camera from inside a federal prison.
But the crack empire was only the first act. What McGriff built after prison was more audacious, more complex, and ultimately more destructive. He came home from his 12-year federal sentence in the mid 1990s with a plan that no one saw coming. He established Picture Perfect Entertainment and flew to Hollywood to purchase the film rights to five Donald Goins novels.
Black Gangster, Crime Partners, Black Girl Lost, Death List, and Kinyatta’s Revenge. He envisioned a franchise. A Black Gangster soundtrack album moved over 150,000 copies. His completed film, Crime Partners 2000, was a straight to DVD production starring Tyron Turner, Clifton Powell, Snoop Dogg, Ice Tea, and Jaw Rule.
It was not a good movie, but the fact that a man fresh out of federal prison assembled that cast, secured distribution, and delivered a finished product from the streets of Queens. That’s a different conversation. His relationship with Irv Gotti started around 1995. They were neighborhood acquaintances from Queens, connected after McGriff’s release at a video shoot in South Jamaica.
Murder Inc. Records co-founded by Irv and Chris Gotti became a juggernaut. Jaw Rule Ashanti Liil Mo. The label generated over hund00 million annually and moved more than 30 million albums. Federal prosecutors would later allege Mcgriff laundered over a million dollar in drug proceeds through the label. checks totaling approximately $281,000 from Irv Gotti’s personal and business accounts, a $500,000 soundtrack advance from Universal that was secretly backed by McGriff’s drug money and 350,000 of it seized from an HSBC bank account. And
while all of that was happening, the films, the label, the checks, Mcgriff was simultaneously running a wholesale heroin and cocaine operation spanning New York, Baltimore, and North Carolina. More than 30 kg of heroin, more than 150 kg of cocaine, a multi-state drug enterprise generating millions, while the entertainment business generated millions more.
Three industries, three revenue streams, all running at the same time, managed by one man who never finished high school. The same mind that colorcoded crack vials in Basley Park houses was now coordinating drug shipments to Baltimore film productions in Hollywood and music royalties through Universal. That isn’t a drug dealer dabbling in entertainment.
Yeah, that’s a conglomerate. And the man running it learned everything he knew from a housing project and a 12-ear sentence. For three years, it all worked. And then a 24 year old from the same neighborhood recorded a song that put every name, every crew, every piece of the code on wax for the entire world to hear.
I keep coming back to one detail in this story. It isn’t the murders. It isn’t the drug money or the film deals or the federal raids. is the fact that everything, all of it, collapsed because a kid from the same block Supreme used to control sat in a studio and decided to tell the truth about where he came from.
Curtis Jackson thought he was paying tribute. Kenneth McGriff heard a death sentence. Curtis James Jackson III was born July 6th, 1975 and raised in South Jamaica, the same streets the Supreme Team controlled. His mother, Sabrina, was a drug dealer who died in a fire when he was eight. His grandmother, Buler, raised him.
By 12, he was selling crack on the same strips the Supreme Team had pioneered. He grew up idolizing these men. To him, they were legends. In 1996, he befriended Jamm Jay, who taught him song structure, bar counting, and hooks. Jay produced his first unreleased album. By 1999, Trackmaster signed him to Columbia Records.
The debut album was called Power of the Dollar, and on it was a track called Ghetto Kuran. The song is named Supreme McGriff, named Prince Miller, named Fat Cat Nichols, named Papy Mason, named a dozen other active or recently released figures by street name. Pime was the businessman and Prince was the killer. Every ball was a violation of the code that had governed South Jamaica for 20 years.
Federal investigators would later cite the lyrics as a road map to the gang’s hierarchy. 50 Cent defended the song in interviews, pointing out that Naz had referenced real people without backlash. The difference was simple. Naz dropped a single bar on an album in 1994. 50 Cent wrote an entire song naming active players, and the man at the top of that list had just come home from a 12-year federal sentence and was trying to go legitimate.
The song leaked before the album dropped. And what happened on May 24th, 2000 changed everything. 50 Cent had gotten into a friend’s car outside his grandmother’s former home at 140-52 161st Street. Uh, someone called him back to the house to grab jewelry. His infant son was inside. His grandmother was in the front yard. When he returned to the car, another vehicle pulled up.
The alleged shooter was Daryl Homo Balm, a Brooklyn native, childhood friend, and personal bodyguard of Mike Tyson. Bomb exited the passenger side, circled behind the car and opened fire. Nine shots, 13 days in the hospital, a bullet fragment permanently embedded in his tongue. Three weeks later, Balm was shot in the back of the head in Brooklyn, killed by Damian, World Hardy’s crew in a separate war that had nothing to do with Curtis Jackson.
Mike Tyson dedicated a 38 second knockout to Bomb’s memory and offered $50,000 for information. Columbia Records shoved power the dollar and dropped 50 Cent. Then the ghetto Kuran controversy made him untouchable. No label would sign the rapper with a hit on him. He traveled to Canada to record, flooded the mixtape circuit and caught the ear of Paul Rosenberg, Eminem’s manager.
He flew to Los Angeles wearing a bulletproof vest, unsure if the meeting was real. Eminem signed him on June 17th, 2002. A joint deal with Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment. Get Rich or Die Trying dropped February 6th, 2003. 872,000 copies in the first week. In Day Club went number one for 9 weeks. The album became the bestselling of 2003, eventually certified nine times platinum with over 12 million copies worldwide.
The nine bullet survival story became his mythology. The album title was his post shooting philosophy. The slurred voice from the bullet fragment in his tongue became the most recognizable sound in hip hop. The man who tried to silence him had created a superstar. But the retaliation that preceded all of that had already sealed McGriff’s fate.
Colber, black Justice Johnson, McGriff’s lieutenant, the man who ran the orange top crew, was killed on December 11th, 1999. The circumstances are disputed, but the result was not McGriff wanted blood. He hired a team of hitmen from Harlem for $50,000 to handle two targets. Eric E. Moneybags Smith was the first.
On July 16th, 2001, at approximately 9:45 in the evening, Smith was sitting in his Lincoln Navigator on 111th Road in Queens Village attending a neighborhood barbecue. A black Mercedes carrying four men in white gloves pulled up. Over 40 rounds fired. Smith was hit 11 times at point blank range. Key evidence would later surface.
A surveillance video tape filmed July 13th through the 16th by codefendant Dennis Divine Crosby and his girlfriend Nicole Brown from Brown’s home on the same block. They’ve been tracking Smith’s movements for three days. After the killing, Mcgriff sent a text message. Five words. You missed the party. Troy big nose.
Singleton was the second. October 21st, 2001. Multiple shots, one to the head, then seven more as he lay on the ground. At McGriff’s trial, Singleton’s son, 14 years old, took the witness stand and described what it was like to grow up without his father. $50,000, two bodies, uh $25,000 per life. The FBI and NYPD raided Murder Inc.
Manhattan offices on January 3rd, 2003. Computers, hard drives, financial records seized. A gun found in McGriff’s BMW during a 2001 Harlem arrest was traced to a relative of Irv Gotti. And that was the threat that unraveled everything. The superseding indictment came down January 25th, 2005. Racketeering, murder for hire, two counts, narcotics trafficking, illegal financial transactions with drug money.
The government sought the death penalty. The murder incarnated trial ended first. Irv and Chris Gotti stood trial before Judge Edward Corman in December 2005. Defense attorney Gerald Shargle argued that even if Supreme McGriff was the biggest drug dealer in the world, there was nothing illegal about backing a movie.
Jay-Z, Fat Joe, Russell Simmons, and Ashani showed up in support. The jury acquitted both brothers on all money laundering charges. Some jurors asked to meet them afterward to offer congratulations. Irv Gordy spent upwards of $10 million in legal fees and walked out free. Mcgriff, the man behind all of it, did not. His trial began January 9th, 2007 before Judge Frederick Block in the Eastern District of New York.
The government wanted him on a gurnie with a needle in his arm. Prosecutor Carolyn Pornney called him one of the most dangerous, feared, ruthless gangsters in all of Queens. His defense attorney, David Rookie, was courtappointed. Every asset McGriff owned had been seized. on February 1st and the jury convicted him on all counts after five days of deliberation.
The capital sentencing phase followed. On February 9th, the jury split 9 to3 in favor of life without parole. If you watch my video on Frank Matthews, you know what real silence looks like. Barbara Hinton went 53 years without saying his name to a federal agent. That same code is the reason Jam Master Jay’s killers walked free for nearly two decades.
And it’s the reason Kenneth McGriff believed a single song could get a man killed. Jason Miselle, Jam Master J, was shot in the head at 7:30 in the evening on October 30th, 2002 inside his recording studio on Merrick Boulevard in Jamaica, Queens. He appeared to know the men who entered. He greeted one with a handshake. Then they shot him.
The entire thing lasted 10 to 15 seconds. The case went cold for 18 years because witnesses were terrified to talk. When indictments finally came in 2020, prosecutors charged Ronald Tina Washington and Carl Jordan Jr. Jay’s childhood friend and Jay’s godson. The motive, according to the government, wasn’t the war between McGriff and 50 Cent. It was a drug deal gone wrong.
Jay had acquired approximately 10 kilograms of cocaine and cut Washington out of the distribution. Washington and Jordan killed him out of vengeance and greed. In February 2024, both were convicted. Then in December 2025, Jordan’s conviction was overturned. The judge ruled prosecutors hadn’t proven the required drugrelated motive.
Washington’s conviction stood. A third defendant, Jay Bryant, awaits trial. The night before Jay was murdered, he’d been celebrating 50 Cents New Deal with Eminem and Dr. Dre. The code killed the man who was trying to make peace between two sides of the same neighborhood. At his sentencing on March 9th, 2007, after the jury had spared his life, Kenneth Supreme Mri stood up.
He waved to three rows of friends and family. He gently tapped his chest above his heart. He hugged his attorney. And then he gave a quiet nod toward the prosecutors, the same people who had tried to put him on death row. No outbursts, no threats, no performance. His brother David stood up next and apologized to the families of the men Kenneth had ordered killed.
Runky told reporters afterward, “We got to death’s door and it didn’t open. His family remains invisible to this day. No wife, no girlfriend, no child’s full name appears in any court document, any piece of journalism, any federal filing found in the public record. A man who controlled city blocks, bankrolled the record label, and produced a Hollywood film, and his personal life is a blank page.
That’s the code still working even in a sale. Kenneth Supreme McGriff sits today in USP Bowmont, a highsecurity federal penitentiary in Jefferson County, Texas. Life without parole. He’s 65 years old. A First Step Act motion for sentence reduction is pending, but no reduction has been granted. He spoke from prison for the Showtime documentary Supreme Team in 2022.
His voice is calm on camera, measured, the voice of a man who has accepted the mathematics of his situation. Gerald Prince Miller, the nephew, the co-founder, um, the killer, was released on September 20th, 2024 after serving more than 32 years. He runs a nonprofit called The Redeem Team and hosts a YouTube show. He is free. His uncle is not.
Irv [ __ ] died on February 5th, 2025 at 54 years old. Strokes and diabetes. The man Mcgriff bankrolled. The man who was acquitted while Mcgriff got life didn’t outlive the fallout. He spent his last years doing reality television and interviews trying to reclaim the relevance that the federal investigation stripped away.
Curtis Jackson 50 Cent has an estimated net worth north of $60 million. The Power franchise, Sire Spirits, a number one Netflix documentary, The Man Who Almost Died on 161st Street, now produces shows about other people’s downfalls. Uh Jay Rule tours with Nelly and Eve. The beef that defined his career is a punchline now. Fat Cat Nicholls was released from federal custody in 2023.
Papy Mason sits in FMC Devons, Massachusetts, serving life, reportedly suffering from severe mental health deterioration. The Jamm J case 24 years later still isn’t resolved. What happened to South Jamaica after all of this? The same thing that always happens. The blocks are still there.
Basisley Park houses still stand on Guy R. Brewer Boulevard. The 113th precinct still serves the same community. The cracked sentencing disparity that put McGriff’s workers away for decades while the powder suppliers walked. It took until 2010 for Congress to reduce the ratio from 100 to1 down to 18 to1. or it took until 2018 for the First Step Act to apply it retroactively.
91% of the people who received sentence reductions under that act were black. The community absorbed the violence, the addiction, the incarceration, the broken families, and the mechanism that created the conditions for the Supreme Team is still running. Different names, same architecture. The system didn’t break.
It performed exactly as designed. On May 24th, 2000, a grandmother was planting flowers in her front yard when nine shots shattered her block. 26 years later, the man who allegedly sent the shooter sits in a federal cell in Texas. And the kid who survived those nine shots is worth $60 million. Kenneth Supreme Mcgriff built everything on the code of silence.
The code he learned at 11. The code he enforced for 30 years. The code he was willing to kill over. Curtis Jackson broke that code on a rap record. And it’s the only reason anyone remembers either of their names.