Before he was gunned down inside his recording studio in Queens in 2002, in what prosecutors say was a drug deal gone bad, Jam Master Jay of the New York hip-hop trio Run-DMC faced a predicament.
“The money wasn’t coming in,” an assistant U.S. attorney, Miranda Gonzalez, told jurors in the federal trial in Brooklyn of two men charged with Jam Master Jay’s murder, which began late last month. “But people still depended on him.”
As Run-DMC, which had led hip-hop’s mainstream explosion in the 1980s, receded from record charts and MTV playlists, Jam Master Jay — born Jason Mizell — struggled financially and turned to drug dealing to meet his obligations, prosecutors and witnesses said.
A pioneering D.J. and role model who publicly campaigned against drug use, Mr. Mizell spent his last years leading a double life, according to testimony and trial records: He worked as a drug middleman while managing intertwining public roles — entertainer, record label owner, father of three and financial lifeline to relatives, co-workers and friends.
Mr. Mizell lent money to “everybody that was around him,” Michael Rapley, one of five other people in the Queens studio when Mr. Mizell was shot on Oct. 30, 2002, told jurors. When Mr. Rapley’s mother died, Mr. Mizell paid for her funeral, he testified.
Mr. Mizell, the turntable artist who provided the record scratches and booming beats for Run-DMC’s music, was still able to earn paychecks during the 1990s and 2000s by performing with the group and as a solo act.
But he spent more time in his studio on Merrick Boulevard in Queens — near Hollis, where he grew up and first became famous — producing music by younger hip-hop acts that he recruited to his label, JMJ Records, and trying to help them replicate his own breakthrough.
Mr. Rapley said that Mr. Mizell had been producing his music, and had never charged him for studio time. At “the back end” of his Run-DMC career, as Mr. Rapley put it, Mr. Mizell was a member of hip-hop royalty enjoying a second act as a producer and music executive.
But he was also moving drugs for cash, prosecutors said, quietly acting as a middleman between cocaine suppliers and street sellers for at least six years before his death.
One of the defendants on trial, Ronald Washington, 59, also known as Tinard, was a childhood friend of Mr. Mizell’s who helped him sell the drugs, then plotted to kill him when Mr. Mizell cut him out of a potentially lucrative cocaine deal, prosecutors said.
In the days before Mr. Mizell’s death, Mr. Washington — who had already served jail time for heroin distribution — was sleeping on a couch at the D.J.’s childhood home in Queens, which was then occupied by Mr. Mizell’s older sister, according to testimony.
Mr. Washington’s co-defendant, Karl Jordan Jr., 40, who prosecutors say was the gunman, was Mr. Mizell’s godson. He grew up across the street from Mr. Mizell and still lived at that address at the time of the murder.
Mr. Jordan was 18 when Mr. Mizell was killed and had no adult criminal record when he and Mr. Washington were arrested in 2020, though prosecutors said in a filing that Mr. Jordan had been in the drug trade for several years and the indictment included several additional narcotics distribution counts against him.
A third defendant, Jay Bryant, who was charged in connection with the murder last year, will be tried separately. All three men have pleaded not guilty.
As Mr. Mizell managed the competing demands in his close-knit circle toward the end of his life, he grew “nervous” enough about his personal safety to arm himself, according to a cousin who worked for Mr. Mizell’s record label.
“Only close to his death I saw him carry a gun,” the cousin, Stephon Watford, testified. When a defense lawyer asked why Mr. Mizell felt that he needed a firearm, Mr. Watford replied, “We didn’t discuss it.”
Mr. Mizell still kept elite company in popular music circles later in his career, touring arenas in the summer of 2002 with Run-DMC as the group opened for Aerosmith, its collaborators on the groundbreaking 1986 hip-hop remake of the rock band’s hit “Walk This Way.”
Days before his death, Mr. Mizell reconnected with the Queens-born rapper Curtis Jackson — known as 50 Cent — during a trip to the Midwest, according to testimony. Five years earlier, Mr. Mizell produced a track for Mr. Jackson and released it on JMJ. When they met in Chicago, 50 Cent had recently signed a $1 million recording deal with the rap icons Dr. Dre and Eminem and was working on his debut, which would become the best-selling album in the United States in 2003.
But while riches increasingly flowed to other artists and record labels, Mr. Mizell’s business stumbled. Mr. Watford, who did promotional work for Mr. Mizell and JMJ, testified that his paychecks would sometimes bounce. When they did, he knew he had to wait for Mr. Mizell to return from tour.
“He was going to stick his hand in his pocket and make sure I was OK,” Mr. Watford said.
Mr. Mizell kept his ties to the drug trade largely secret. A convicted drug dealer, Ralph Mullgrav, testified under subpoena that he had sometimes bought cocaine from Mr. Mizell in one- or two-kilogram amounts to resell, according to The Associated Press.
“Jason wasn’t a drug dealer,” Mr. Mullgrav said. “He just used it to make ends meet.”
Fans knew, or remembered, Run-DMC mostly for the group’s upbeat songs about sneakers (“My Adidas”), nursery rhyme characters (“Peter Piper”) and everyday struggles (“It’s Like That”), even as rap took a harder turn in the ’90s and Run-DMC’s successors rhymed explicitly about drug dealing and gang wars.
Jam Master Jay once even recorded a “Say No to Drugs” public service announcement with his Run-DMC bandmates: Joseph Simmons, known as Run, and Darryl McDaniels, who went by DMC.
The wall Mr. Mizell tried to maintain between his different worlds crumbled on that October evening in 2002, when prosecutors say Mr. Jordan and Mr. Washington entered the lounge in Mr. Mizell’s studio where he sat playing a video game and chatting with an assistant, Uriel Rincon. Another employee, Lydia High, was nearby.
A few feet away, behind a closed door, three people were inside the studio’s control room, according to testimony. They included Mr. Rapley; Mr. Mizell’s JMJ business partner, Randy Allen; and an aspiring singer, Yarrah Concepcion, who was auditioning her songs.
In the lounge, a silver pistol owned by Mr. Mizell sat in plain view, Mr. Rincon and Ms. Concepcion testified. It remained there, untouched, Mr. Rincon said, until after Mr. Mizell was shot and Mr. Allen — emerging from the control room — grabbed the weapon and ran out of the studio’s front door after the two assailants.
In his testimony, Mr. Rincon, who was struck in the leg by a bullet, identified Mr. Jordan as the gunman and Mr. Washington as the accomplice, after years of telling investigators that he didn’t recognize the assailants.
Mr. Rincon, who had sought a career as a music executive and called Mr. Mizell a friend and mentor — “He was friends with everybody,” Mr. Rincon testified — said that after the killing he moved away from New York for a time. He was “scared” to cooperate with investigators and was under so much “stress and duress” that he sought professional mental health treatment, he told the defense lawyers who cross-examined him.
Mr. Watford, who went on to write and produce a 2008 documentary about Mr. Mizell, likened him to an older brother.
“He took me on a journey with him,” he testified. “Whatever blessings he had in his life, he allowed me to be a part of it.”
Karen Zraick contributed reporting.
