The Queens Man Who Dominated South Jamaica’s Crack Trade and Used Bodies as Stairs
He built an organization that moved more than 200,000 dollars a day through South Jamaica, Queens, sponsored the same neighborhoods basketball tournaments, and mentored a boxer who would later survive nine gunshot wounds and become one of the biggest rappers alive. Federal prosecutors say the same mentors crew ended up on the wrong side of that shooting and that McGriff answered a friend’s murder by ordering two men killed himself.
This is the story of Kenneth Supreme McGriff >> >> and an empire that eventually turned every relationship in it into evidence. Two men in Queens open fire on a Lincoln Navigator idling outside a stash spot. The driver, Eric Smith, a small-time rapper known on the street as E-Money Bags, is on the phone when the first rounds hit.
Prosecutors say the gunmen fired roughly 40 shots total and Smith dies behind the wheel. It is July 16th, 2001 and the man federal prosecutors say ordered the hit and paid $50,000 for it is a South Jamaica native who once ran one of the most disciplined narcotics operations New York City had ever produced.
But the story starts 20 years earlier in the same 15 or so blocks of Southeast Queens. By the late 1970s, South Jamaica was a neighborhood shaped by decades of migration and disinvestment. Black families had arrived from the South during the Great Migration and settled into developments like the Baisley Park Houses, but redlining and job discrimination left many of those families locked into substandard housing with few paths to steady income.
Unemployment was high, the local schools were struggling, and a heroin trade had already taken root well before crack arrived. Before any single organization took control of the area’s narcotics trade, >> >> dealers there operated as independent free agents, a patchwork of small-time hustlers competing block by block with no larger structure holding any of it together.
Kenneth McGriff was born in South Jamaica on September 19, 1960, the middle child of two city transit employees. He was not raised in chaos. Both of his parents worked steady municipal jobs, and by most accounts, McGriff was a sharp, well-liked kid who did well enough in school that people around him assumed he had options.
What reshaped his path was junior high school, where he encountered members of the Five-Percent Nation, an offshoot of the Nation of Islam that taught its followers that only a small fraction of the population held true knowledge of the world, while the rest lived either as oppressors or as the unaware.
Five-Percenters traded their birth names for new ones, and the one McGriff chose for himself was Supreme, the name that would follow him for the rest of his life. Federal prosecutors would later note that many of the teenagers who eventually built his crew came out of that same Five-Percent circle, >> >> drawn together as much by shared belief as by shared ambition, a network of teenagers who already trusted each other before a single brick of crack changed hands.
As cocaine reached New York in powder form, and then in its cheaper, smokable version, McGriff moved from being one dealer among many to something closer to a consolidator. A former Queens narcotics detective later told New York magazine that McGriff pulled together those scattered, disparate dealers >> >> into an organized operation, eventually running nine to 10 separate sale locations across Southeast Queens, centered on the Baisley Park Houses and Sutphin Boulevard.
The same detective described a neighborhood where turf had once been contested and disorganized. After McGriff’s rise, it split cleanly along lines of control with rival dealer Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols holding down 150th Street while McGriff held the Baisley Park projects. Nichols supplied narcotics to several smaller operations in the area, McGriff’s included, and the two men moved through the neighborhood as parallel powers rather than direct enemies, at least in the beginning. McGriff called
his crew the Supreme Team. A 2005 federal press release describes it as a group founded in the early 1980s out of Baisley Park, made up largely of teenage Five Percenters who organized themselves under McGriff’s leadership. McGriff’s nephew, Gerald Prince Miller, became his second-in-command, and court records would later describe the division of labor between them plainly.
McGriff as the strategist, Miller as the enforcer. One rapper who grew up watching both men operate would later sum it up in a single line. If McGriff was a businessman, Miller was the real killer. The Five Percent teachings that shaped McGriff’s earliest identity were built around a strict hierarchy of knowledge.
5% of the population were the enlightened. 10% were the elites who understood the truth, but exploited it. And the remaining 85% were kept ignorant of both. Founded by a former Nation of Islam member who called himself Clarence 13X, the movement spread through Harlem and Queens >> >> on cassette tape sermons in the 1960s and 1970s.
And by the time McGriff encountered it, its language of chosen knowledge and hidden power had already become part of the everyday vocabulary of young men across South Jamaica. For McGriff, adopting the name Supreme was not simply a street nickname. It was a claim to a specific kind of standing inside a belief system that many of his future crew members already shared before they ever sold a single vial together.
The man McGriff would eventually share the neighborhood’s drug trade with, Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols, >> >> had his own trajectory running in parallel. Nichols supplied narcotics across large parts of Southeast Queens, and like McGriff, became one of the era’s defining local figures. His career ended in a federal courtroom as well.
Nichols was ultimately sentenced to 40 years to life after being convicted of narcotics offenses and of ordering the murder of his own parole officer. A killing that shocked even a neighborhood that had grown numb to violence tied to the drug trade. The presence of two parallel kingpins operating blocks apart, one on 150th Street and one in Baisley Park meant South Jamaica’s drug economy in the 1980s was never a single monopoly so much as a set of rival fiefdoms that occasionally cooperated and occasionally did not.
Around them, the political backdrop of Southeast Queens was hardening fast. The 1988 murder of NYPD officer Edward Byrne, shot while guarding a witness’s home a short distance from the Supreme Team’s territory, was never tied to McGriff’s crew, but it changed how the entire neighborhood was policed. President Reagan cited Byrne’s death while pushing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, a law that dramatically increased both funding and mandatory penalties for narcotics enforcement, and South Jamaica became one of the places
where that new pressure landed hardest. What made the Supreme Team different from the free agents who came before it was structure. Federal appellate judges who later reviewed the case described an operation that ran less like a street gang and more like a company. Workers were assigned to specific spots and stash houses.
Lookouts nicknamed rooftop sentinels watched the surrounding blocks with binoculars and walkie-talkies. Managers issued beepers to employees and money was collected and counted at the end of every shift. The team ran 24-hour operations, used coded language pulled from 5% numerology to communicate over the phone, and by 1987 court records state the operation was pulling in more than $200,000 a day.
A separate federal release put the workforce at more than 200 dealers, while a Queens narcotics detective recalled that on a good stretch, a couple of days worth of receipts alone could bring in $150,000. Drugs were cooked in rented apartments, packaged by hand, and pushed out to street-level workers through a chain of managers and runners who each answered to someone above them, all the way up to McGriff and Miller.
That kind of money did not stay uncontested, and appellate judges later found that the Supreme Team used violence to maintain control over its territory and to discipline anyone who crossed it. In 1987 alone, McGriff and Miller are alleged to have ordered at least eight homicides.
Court records describe the killing of rival dealer James Page after he was suspected of planning to cooperate with police, >> >> and the murder of an informant named Olin Lovett after he supplied information to authorities, along with the killing of at least one Colombian supplier and four Colombian couriers during that same stretch.
Street legend around the crew grew violent and specific, feeding a widely repeated claim that McGriff’s enforcers used the bodies of rivals as literal stairs. Court records never substantiate an act that graphic, which points to the phrase being closer to folklore than documented fact, drawn from a broader New York magazine account of Queens crews competing to be seen as the craziest or the baddest on the street.
The myth outran the record, but the record on its own was violent enough to draw federal attention. McGriff also understood that fear alone would not secure a neighborhood’s loyalty. The Supreme Team >> >> sponsored tournaments and concerts in Baisley Park and offered residents paying jobs inside the operation, blurring the line between predator and provider in a community with few other sources of steady income.
It is a pattern that shows up again and again in this era of Queens. The same men flooding a block with crack were often the ones funding its Thanksgiving turkeys and its summer league trophies. And for a stretch of years, that arrangement bought the Supreme Team real goodwill on the ground. Even as it fueled the addiction crisis >> >> tearing through the same blocks.
Beneath McGriff and Miller sat a layer of lieutenants whose individual stories are harder to fully verify. James Bimmy Antney ran a drug spot for the crew and later moved toward the music industry, eventually helping launch the career of artists managed by his sister Deborah Antney. Interviews in a Showtime docu-series >> >> describe him distancing himself from McGriff’s world after building a friendship with 50 Cent.
Though independent court documentation of his exact rank inside the Supreme Team is thin. Ernesto “Puerto Rican Righteous” >> >> Pinella and Troy “Baby Wise” Jones are remembered in street interviews and rap lyrics as a head of security and a crew boss. But neither man’s role is pinned down in the same level of detail the court supplied to McGriff and Miller, a reminder that much of the Supreme Team’s internal structure survives only through second-hand retelling.
The Supreme Team’s dominance reshaped South Jamaica’s local economy well beyond the individual men running it. Residents saw a visible surge in luxury cars, jewelry, and cash moving through blocks that had little of either a decade earlier, even as the same drugs fueling that money devastated families on those same blocks.
By the late 1980s, South Jamaica had become one of the recognized epicenters of New York’s crack epidemic, drawing sustained police presence, and eventually mass incarceration that hollowed out a generation of young men from the neighborhood. The Supreme Team’s corporate-style structure, meanwhile, became something of a template.
Other crews across the city studied and imitated the hierarchy McGriff had built, whether or not they ever knew his name. In August 1987, that empire hit its first real wall. A joint FBI and NYPD raid targeted the Supreme Team’s operation, >> >> and McGriff was arrested on narcotics trafficking charges. In 1989, he pleaded guilty to operating a continuing criminal enterprise and was sentenced to 12 years in federal prison.
Behind bars, McGriff reportedly kept a hand on the operation through coded messages passed by visitors and phone calls, while day-to-day control fell to Gerald Miller. In one recorded reflection on his own life in the game, McGriff put his stated motivation this way. The whole objective for me being in the game was to exit the game.
With McGriff off the street, Miller ran the Supreme Team with far less of his uncle’s restraint. Court records describe how, after his own brief stint in custody, Miller partnered with new Colombian suppliers and rebuilt a drug pipeline that never again reached the scale of the mid-1980s operation.
Daily earnings falling from roughly $200,000 to closer to 10,000. The violence, however, did not shrink to match. Believing an associate named Gus Rivera might inform on him, >> >> Miller allegedly ordered Rivera shot. Rivera survived a bullet to the head and went into hiding, only to be tracked down and killed roughly a year later.
In 1993, Miller and 18 other Supreme Team members were indicted, and Miller himself was eventually convicted on charges including multiple counts of murder and narcotics distribution, receiving multiple concurrent life sentences plus 20 additional years. McGriff, still incarcerated on his own case, watched the organization he had built essentially collapse from a distance, run by a nephew whose instincts for violence had never matched his own instincts for control.
Much of what is known about this period comes filtered through sources that were not built for courtroom precision. >> >> Mixtape intros, later documentary interviews, and second-hand street retellings that circulated for years before anyone with a badge or subpoena wrote any of it down. Even a Showtime docu-series built around the Supreme Team >> >> relies heavily on first-person recollection from men who have every incentive to soften their own roles, which means the most reliable version of this era remains the one
anchored in indictments, appellate opinions, and sworn testimony, however incomplete that record may be next to the legend that grew up around it. McGriff was paroled around 1994 and for a stretch it looked like he might make good on the exit he had once described. He opened a barber shop and began chasing a different kind of ambition entirely.
One built around Hollywood rather than Baisley Park. He had spent much of his prison time reading the pulp crime novels of Donald Goines, a formerly incarcerated writer whose books were popular reading material across New York’s prison system. And McGriff came out determined to turn one of those novels into a film.
In 1997, following a parole violation and a short return to custody, he was released again and approached a young Queens-raised label executive named Irving “Irv” Gotti Lorenzo about adapting Goines’ novel Crime Partners into a movie. Gotti’s label, Murder Inc., agreed to help finance a straight-to-video adaptation.
Federal investigators would later allege that McGriff funneled more than a million dollars in drug proceeds through the label to launder the money using Murder Inc.’s accounts as cover for a film project he was quietly bankrolling with narcotics cash while also covering his travel expenses so he could pose publicly as a film producer.
The film itself, released under the title Crime Partners 2000, went straight-to-video and became a modest commercial success within that market, giving McGriff a genuine, if small, footprint in the entertainment world he had spent years chasing. To McGriff and the people closest to him, >> >> that success validated years spent trying to build something legal out of a reputation earned illegally.
To federal investigators watching the same money move through the label’s books, it looked like a straightforward laundering operation wearing the costume of a passion project. A Washington Post profile of the label >> >> described how Gotti’s admiration for McGriff long predated the business relationship, framing McGriff as a local legend who had once commanded roughly 200 fellow gang members >> >> selling crack out of a single Queens project.
Defense attorneys would later argue that none of this proved anything criminal on its own, >> >> insisting that investing in a movie alongside an old friend was not by itself illegal, and that the Gotti brothers were operating a legitimate business that simply happened to include McGriff among its circle of associates.
That distinction between friendship and financial conspiracy would end up at the center of a federal trial several years later. Whatever legitimacy McGriff hoped to buy did not last on the street level, either. A Department of Justice release states that after his 1997 release, he resumed large-scale narcotics trafficking.
This time built around heroin and powder cocaine rather than crack, and assembled a new crew that carried forward the old organization’s willingness to use violence. In hip-hop, meanwhile, McGriff’s name kept circulating in a different currency. Artists including Nas and Mobb Deep referenced him and Prince Miller directly in their lyrics.
And the Supreme Team’s mythology folded itself into New York rap almost as thoroughly as it had folded itself into South Jamaica’s own oral history with street legend and documented fact repeated in the same breath so often that separating them became difficult even for people who had lived through the era. It was during this stretch of reinvention that McGriff’s path crossed with a teenager from the same neighborhood who trained at the boxing gym of Supreme Team Lieutenant Kober Black Just Johnson Curtis 50 Cent Jackson.
>> >> Jackson’s mother, a drug dealer, was killed when he was 8 years old and by 12 he was selling crack himself moving through the same South Jamaica ecosystem McGriff had helped build a decade earlier before shifting toward music. By 1999, McGriff was straddling two worlds at once. One built on drug money and one built on the promise of hip-hop legitimacy through Murder Inc.
Both worlds were about to collide with the young rapper he had once watched grow up around Black Just gym. That September 50 Cent recorded Ghetto Quran “Forgive Me”, a song that named South Jamaica’s real hustlers by their real street names: Preme, >> >> Prince, Black Just, Fat Cat and others.
The track spread fast on mixtapes and in a neighborhood where discretion had kept men out of prison for years, it read to many of McGriff’s associates as an act of dry snitching naming names that were supposed to stay unnamed even in a song. Three months later, on December 11, 1999, Kober Black Just Johnson was shot and killed outside a Queens nightclub.
Witnesses later implicated rapper Eric E-Money Bags Smith as the shooter. For McGriff, Black Just was not simply a lieutenant. He was family, and the loss appears to have hardened whatever restraint McGriff had left as he moved deeper into legitimate business. Around the same time, a separate feud was escalating between 50 Cent and Murder Inc.
flagship artist Ja Rule. According to a federal affidavit later filed in the investigation, a friend of 50 Cent robbed Ja Rule of his jewelry, prompting Ja Rule to reach out to Irv Gotti, who in turn contacted McGriff. Using his standing on the street, McGriff was able to recover the stolen chain within roughly 15 to 30 minutes.
It should have ended the dispute. Instead, tension between the two camps kept building, and in March 2000, 50 Cent was punched and stabbed by Murder Inc. associates outside the Hit Factory studio in Manhattan, an incident that ended with the restraining order, and in parts of the hip-hop world, a perception of weakness that trailed him for months afterward.
Then, on May 24th, 2000, 2 months after the Hit Factory incident, 50 Cent was shot nine times while sitting in a car outside his grandmother’s house. He survived the attack, but it cost him his recording deal and reshaped the entire rest of his career. A federal affidavit filed as part of the later Murder Inc.
investigation directly named Kenneth McGriff as a suspect, describing him as involved with the shooting of another rap artist who had written a song exposing McGriff’s criminal activities. Years later, during the 2005 trial connected to Murder Inc, a former McGriff associate named Jon Reagan testified that McGriff and others had celebrated the shooting and that McGriff had allegedly said, referring to 50 Cent, “I got him.
” Defense attorneys worked to undercut Rogan’s credibility on the stand, pointing to his own history of fraud and pimping as reasons to doubt anything he said under oath. No one has ever been convicted for ordering the shooting of 50 Cent and to this day the identity of who paid for it remains formally unresolved.
McGriff, for his part, has consistently denied direct involvement. In his own recorded account of the era, he insisted the case against him was built on informants rather than evidence, stating flatly, “I don’t know Terrence Terrell.” A reference to the government’s key cooperating witness in his later murder trial, whose testimony he has spent years disputing from prison.
McGriff did not wait long to answer Black Just’s death. According to Department of Justice records, on July 16th, 2001, McGriff paid two gunmen $50,000 to murder Eric Smith, the same man widely believed to have killed Johnson. The gunmen ambushed Smith in his SUV and he died at the scene. Three months later, on October 21st, 2001, McGriff ordered the killing of Troy “Big Nose” Singleton, a close associate of Smith’s, >> >> reportedly out of concern that Singleton might retaliate for his friend’s
death. Prosecutors said the same shooters carried out both killings and that McGriff had a portion of the aftermath recorded on videotape, a piece of evidence that would later surface in a Baltimore apartment tied to one of his associates. Federal investigators also examined whether McGriff had any hand in the 2002 murder of Run-DMC’s Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell, a killing that has never been formally tied to him.
Two other men were eventually indicted in that case decades later, and McGriff has denied any involvement, though the rumor that his organization was somehow connected to it has never fully faded from the neighborhood’s collective memory. Another example of a specific unproven allegation folding permanently into the larger Supreme Team legend.
By January 2003, federal agents had built a case connecting McGriff’s finances to Murder Inc. and raided the label’s offices looking for evidence that Irv Gotti and his brother Chris had laundered McGriff’s drug proceeds through the company’s accounts. A 2005 superseding indictment charged McGriff himself with racketeering, narcotics distribution, money laundering, and murder for hire in connection with the deaths of Smith and Singleton.
At the Gotti brothers trial that December, prosecutors leaned heavily on witnesses like Ragin, but the defense picked those witnesses apart on cross-examination, and in December 2005, Irv and Chris Gotti were acquitted of all money laundering charges, a verdict that let the label survive even as its association with McGriff had already done lasting damage to its public standing.
McGriff’s own trial followed a different path, and it happened without him on the witness stand. His court-appointed attorney chose not to put him in front of the jury, a decision McGriff has argued for years afterward was made without his informed consent and in violation of his constitutional right to testify in his own defense.
Prosecutors, working without any rebuttal from McGriff himself, presented testimony that he had paid $50,000 for the murders of Smith and Singleton, along with phone records >> >> and cooperating witnesses who described how the hits were planned and carried out. In February 2007, a federal jury found McGriff guilty of racketeering, drug trafficking, and murder for hire in the killings of Eric Smith and Troy Singleton, while acquitting him on several lesser drug and weapons counts.
During the penalty phase, only three jurors voted in favor of the death penalty, short of what was needed to impose it, and the judge instead >> >> sentenced him to life in federal prison without the possibility of parole. His appeals, which challenged both the evidence admitted at trial and its overall sufficiency, were rejected by the Second Circuit, which affirmed the conviction without finding the alleged denial of his right to testify significant enough to overturn the verdict. He remains
incarcerated today and has continued to argue publicly, including in later interviews, that his conviction should be overturned on the grounds that he was denied the chance to testify, framing the case as one built almost entirely on the word of cooperating witnesses who had every incentive to tell prosecutors whatever kept their own sentences shorter.
What the trial could not fully settle was the mythology that had grown up around McGriff long before any jury heard his case. In rap lyrics, mixtape intros, and street retellings, Supreme became something closer to legend than man. >> >> A figure said to have used rivals’ bodies as stairs and to have controlled half of Queens through fear alone.
Court records tell a narrower, still brutal story. A South Jamaica kid who built one of the most efficient crack distribution networks the city has seen, who tried more than once to trade that world for one built on film and music, and who, according to federal prosecutors, answered the murder of a childhood friend by ordering two more killings while chasing a Hollywood deal.
Several of the biggest questions in his story remain formally open. No one has ever been charged with ordering the shooting of 50 Cent. And both McGriff and 50 Cent himself have publicly maintained, in separate contexts, >> >> that they do not know who pulled the trigger, leaving one of the most consequential shootings >> >> in hip-hop history technically unsolved on paper, even as the street version of the story has long treated it as settled.
No one has ever tied McGriff directly to the death of Jam Master Jay, despite years of rumor connecting the two. The full extent of Murder Inc.’s financial relationship with McGriff is also less settled than either side’s public account suggests. The Gotti brothers walked out of court acquitted, but the trial exposed just how easily the line between funding a friend’s passion project and laundering that friend’s drug money can blur once enough cash changes hands between the two.
And law enforcement records give little indication that the full scale of the Supreme Team’s 1980s profits, hundreds of thousands of dollars a day at its peak, was ever actually recovered. Most of it appears to have simply been spent, hidden, or laundered long before federal agents caught up to the organization behind it.
The shooting that made McGriff most infamous, the one that turned a South Jamaica teenager into a global rap star, is also the one crime that was never formally pinned on him at all. Kenneth McGriff’s name is stitched into the origin story of some of hip-hop’s biggest names and into a stack of federal case files that ultimately outlasted every version of himself he tried to build, from crack kingpin to film producer to finally federal prisoner serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.
>> >> What remains of the Supreme Team today exists mostly in that split record. The indictments and appellate rulings on one side, precise about dates, dollar figures, and body counts. The lyrics, documentaries, and street retellings on the other, looser with fact but far more responsible for how the world remembers the name Supreme.
Both versions point to the same neighborhood, the same handful of blocks around Baisley Park, and the same conclusion that an operation built to look invincible ended like almost every operation like it inside a federal courtroom.