long but fascinating read
http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/09/09/220682752/federal-drug-case-ensnares-the-home-of-hyphy?sc=tumblr&cc=tumb_musicThis year, nearly two dozen people are scheduled to enter a federal courtroom to face charges related to the sale of Ecstasy and other drugs, including heroin, across Northern California and the country.
On its face, the case appears like any other federal drug sting. It was built over four years and began when a man named Michael Lott pulled a silver Mercedes-Benz into the parking lot of the Hiddenbrooke Golf Club in Vallejo, a about 30 miles from San Francisco, and allegedly tried to sell heroin to an undercover agent.
At the time of his arrest, Lott was the self-proclaimed CEO of Thizz Entertainment, the rap label started by Andre Hicks, the late rapper and mogul widely known as Mac Dre.
The label once promised to put the Bay Area hip-hop scene on the map, bringing with it a tight-knit group of rappers from the Crest, a working-class neighborhood in Vallejo notorious for drugs and gang violence. Hicks' crew helped popularize the Bay Area brand of party-centric hip-hop music called hyphy, launching rappers to major record stores and MTV.
But Hicks was killed, his violent death left unsolved. And now a decade of law enforcement scrutiny has cemented the fate of the independent label and the Bay Area rappers who once aspired to mainstream success.
For police, the record label's dramatic decline was predicted by listening to the music. Over two decades, Hicks and his rapping associates virtually taunted law enforcement.
Amid the rising popularity of gangster rap, prosecutors increasingly mined its lyrics for evidence in criminal matters. In 1990, prosecutors tried three members of 2 Live Crew on obscenity charges after a lurid performance at a Florida nightclub. Prosecutors used Snoop Dogg's "" during the rapper's 1996 murder trial. The rappers were acquitted in both cases.
In 1992, some of Hicks' songs, released through his own Romper Room Records label, implicated him in a series of robberies associated with the Crest's Romper Room Gang. Although Hicks' friends claimed the rapper was never an active participant in the crimes, he and two others were arrested and sent to federal prison. Hicks served five years.
Upon his release, Hicks quit rapping about robbery and moved on to partying. He dubbed his new entertainment company Thizz, a slang word for Ecstasy.
The new in-your-face branding caught on quickly and gave police a reason to keep following Hicks' career. It was only a matter of time, they surmised, before they'd catch the Thizz crew with the real thing.
"They were all rap artists first — they had some pretty big names on that label," said Sacramento County sheriff's Detective Brad Rose, who helped crack the case. "But those drugs are highly profitable."
Federal authorities would highlight the Thizz Entertainment connections when they announced their big takedown in April 2012.
But in the end, hundreds of pages of court records reveal that most of the people arrested in the operation had no connection to the label. A few were Thizz rappers and friends from the Crest. Michael Lott was not, in fact, CEO of the company, Hicks' mother said. And as a businessman and a drug dealer, he was pretty much a failure.
