He spun the turntables for one of the bedrocks of hip hop. But in the months before his murder, Jam Master Jay built up a double life as a middleman for drug dealers as he struggled to pay the bills and support friends and members of his Queens community.
The Run-DMC superstar, born Jason Mizell, grew up in Hollis and shared his success with Hollis. He extended his good fortune to a widening circle of friends, family and hangers-on, witnesses and prosecutors explained during the trial last month of two of his killers.
But those close ties to Hollis proved deadly. He turned to lifelong friends to dabble in the drug trade. And his killers came from the same tight-knit community he loved.
“Jason was an amazing talent. He loved everybody. He could never say no. That’s one of the reasons why some of the people that were around him were undesirables, if you will,” Carlis Thompson, his cousin, told reporters. “He just didn’t push people away. He loved everybody. And he just couldn’t say no, and I think that just contributed to where we are today.”
Mizell was killed by his godson, Karl Jordan — the son of one of his longtime friends — and by Ronald “Tinard” Washington, a childhood friend who was staying at the rapper’s childhood home in the leadup to the 2002 murder. Both were found guilty of murder in Brooklyn Federal Court last Tuesday. The two men face 20 years to life behind bars.
Jordan walked into Mizell’s Queens music studio on Oct. 30, 2002, embraced him, then shot him in the head, while Washington stood by the door, forcing Mizel’s business manager to the ground at gunpoint.
Mizell’s best friend and business partner, Randy Allen, was in a control room along with another close friend, rapper Michael “Mike B” Rapley, joined by a young rhythm & blues singer who had the bad luck of picking that night to audition her music at the studio.
Two more friends were sitting in the studio lounge and witnessed the killing — Uriel “Tony” Rincon, who considered Mizell a mentor, and Lydia High, Allen’s sister and Mizell’s business manager.
The motive, prosecutors said, centered around a drug-dealing operation involving still more of Mizell’s longtime pals.
Sometimes described as the “Beatles of hip hop,” Run-DMC broke out big in 1983 with the track, “It’s Like That,” and their fame skyrocketed from there. The trio, dressed in their trademark Adidas sneakers and Kangol hats, became the first rappers to score a platinum album and to have a music video on MTV with the genre-breaking hit “Rock Box.”
Run-DMC’s third studio album, “Raising Hell” — featuring the mega-hit “Walk This Way,” which they recorded with Aerosmith — went triple-platinum.
Mizell’s younger cousin, Stephon Watford, who produced the 2008 documentary about the slaying, “2 Turntables & A Microphone,” told the jury how the DJ shared his success.
“I would stay at his house. … As he grew, I grew with him,” Watford said. “He took me on the journey with him. Whatever blessings he had in his life he allowed me to be a part of it.”
Watford did production work for Mizell’s music label, JMJ Records, and in 2002 he was staying in Mizell’s sister’s house with other family members. Washington was crashing on the couch.
“He would help everybody around him,” said Rapley. “He paid for my mother’s funeral.”
Rincon, who broke decades of silence about the slaying to point the finger at Jordan, said he was about 17 when he met Mizell through mutual friends in Queens and they stayed close in the years before the killing.
“He kind of served as a mentor when I was in high school,” Rincon said. “He kind of opened my eyes to a lot of things from a business standpoint.”
Mizell was still performing and touring with Run-DMC, and was producing other acts, at the time of his death. But the rap trio’s heyday was in the 1980s and 1990s, and their last studio album was released in 1993.
“The reality of the situation, I knew for a fact that he was in financial trouble,” Thompson, his cousin, said. “And I tried to talk to my cousin early on. What happened was that my cousin, just like a lot of celebrities, you know, make a lot of money and spend more money. And that’s what happened.”
“Early on I tried to get him to get rid of some of the riffraff that was around him, some of the bad influences and stuff like that,” he added. “It went through one ear and came out the other.”
JMJ Records had early success signing the group Onyx, but the label had a reputation for being poorly managed. A portion of Watford’s documentary was dedicated to that dysfunction, with several of Mizell’s friends and fellow performers putting the blame on Allen.
Allen, for his part, saw the verdict last month as a vindication.
“For years, you cast your gaze upon me with blame and contempt, convinced of my guilt in our friend’s demise,” he said in a blistering statement sent out a half-hour after the jury’s decision. “Opinions formed in the streets while the culprits partied and sat with many of Jay’s family and friends while their lies were believed.”
Mizell lent money to friends, let other artists use his Merrick Blvd. music studio for free and even let people sleep there sometimes, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Miranda Gonzalez.
Watford testified that a few of his paychecks from JMJ Records bounced — “My money would be funny” — so Mizell paid him cash.
“If the checks bounced from the record label, all I had to do was wait for Jay to get back,” he explained. “He’s gonna stick his hand in his pocket and make sure that I was OK. He was like that.”
During the trial, prosecutors also made reference to a tax lien and a home foreclosure in the early 1990s.
“As the spotlight on Run-DMC began to fade, the money wasn’t coming in for Jason Mizell the way it once was. … Jason turned to another way to make money, the way some of his peers from Hollis did,” Gonzalez told the jury. “The drug trade.”
Hip-hop historian Bill Adler, a longtime friend of Mizell’s, told the Daily News he had no idea about the drug-dealing activity, nor did several of Mizell’s friends who took the stand.
“He definitely kept it on the DL,” Adler said.
The people Mizell turned to included Ralph Mullgrav, a childhood friend who headed up a cocaine dealing operation in Baltimore.
Mullgrav had bad blood with another of Mizell’s childhood friends, Washington, and that bad blood got Washington and Jordan cut out of a 10-kilo $200,000 cocaine deal, prosecutors said.
Eric James, a former drug dealer living in the Midwest and longtime Mizell pal, testified that he knew the hip-hop star dabbled in the street life because the two occasionally talked about prices. “That’s really not what he did, it was more what I did,” James said. “He wasn’t really a drug dealer like that.”
Mullgrav painted a similar picture. “Jason wasn’t a drug dealer,” he said on the stand. “He just used it to make ends meet here and there.”
Adler told the News that Mizell likely turned to the drug trade not out of greed but out of a sense of financial obligation.
“He used money to build up a reputation for himself as really a beloved figure in the neighborhood,” Adler said. “I think it was difficult for him when he didn’t have the money to continue to be that guy anymore.”
