“Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler”
by Ethan Brown
Anchor Books, 288 pages

The worlds of pop culture and crime intersect more often than you’d think. Sure, you’ve got your former child-stars robbing convenience stores and dealing drugs, or your celebrity dalliances with hookers. But there are deeper, bloodier connections, ones that are shadowed by boastful stars and secretive crooks. Ethan Brown deftly explores this cross-section of the pop underworld in “Queens Reigns Supreme,” a well-constructed account of how the big-time drug dealers in Queens in the 1980s helped give rise to hip hop in the 1990s.

Brown weaves a compelling narrative, first tracing the rise and fall of Queens’ top hustlers, Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols and Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff, and then using these events to chronicle the underground beginnings and, later, the commercial ascension of hip hop.

Using police records, wire-tapped conversations and first-person accounts, Brown reconstructs the chaotic heyday of the crack trade in Queens, during which Fat Cat and Supreme ruled the streets with bloodthirsty abandon and raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars each day. Driven by greed and often high on their own product, the hustlers of Queens were rightfully enamored of their own power—it took the assassination of a rookie cop in the middle of the street before local and federal law enforcement took the borough’s problems seriously.

Brown effectively sets these criminal escapades against the nascent hip hop scene that was springing to life just as most of the big-timers were facing long stretches in prison, tracing the connections and associations that made hip hop and hustling nearly indistinguishable. One of Brown’s few faults is that he goes a little too in depth, bringing in so many names and events that you may need a flowchart to keep track of all the players, despite the inclusion of a handy “cast of characters” list in the book.

“Queens” really takes off in the later half, when all the names that made hip hop the billion dollar business it is today—Tupac, Ja Rule, Irv Gotti, Russell Simmons—start cropping up. Brown casts a wide net, tackling everything from the murder of Tupac to the business partnership between Irv Gotti and Supreme. If there’s anything missing from the first half of the book, it’s similarly fleshed out portraits of the likes of Fat Cat and Supreme (known as ’Preme to his crew). While we get clear pictures of the lives and mannerisms of players like Gotti, we only get second-hand accounts of what ’Preme and Fat Cat were like.

By the book’s end, 50 Cent takes center stage as the final melding of the hip hop and hustling lifestyles, a pop star whose bullet scars and time behind bars culminate in the ultimate street cred. Meanwhile, ’Preme makes a return appearance and trades his criminal past for a hip hop future, only to slip back into the violent activities of his past. This kind of solid narrative structure makes “Queens” read less like a history than an epic tale of amoral titans, a la “The Godfather.”

While other writers would be content to revel in the social implications of how hustling transformed hip hop (and vice versa), Brown plays it relatively straight and objective. He doesn’t editorialize much, instead letting the stories of the drug dealers and music moguls speak for themselves. Crime and the music business—and pop culture, in general—are just different types of hustling, each one relying on some kind of excessive display to capture attention and demand respect. Old hustlers never die, it seems. They just change the name of the game.