Jackson, Mississippi. You probably know it for the politics, the poverty, the water crisis that left an entire American city without clean drinking water in 2022. And barely anybody noticed until it made the news for a week, then disappeared again. That Jackson. But this story is not about infrastructure.
This is about one man who had the full attention of that city. The mayor, the police, the streets, and even the rap scene all at the same time. The mayor admitted it himself on the record. Told reporters he was obsessed with him. Police built careers trying to lock him up. And the streets, they knew his name before his music ever took off.
And that name, the one that made grown men in Jackson lower their voice when they said it, he got it playing football in elementary school. His name is Albert Donaldelsson. They called him Batman. This is his story. South Jackson, Mississippi, Wood Street, 1980s. His name is Albert Donaldson. And before the courts, before the mayor, before any of it, he was just a kid playing football, split end and linebacker, Galloway Elementary School.
And he had a tackle, a flying full body, put you on your back tackle that made his teammates go quiet for a second before they started hollering. They gave him a name for it. Batman. Not the streets, not a body count, not a reputation built on anything dark. A school football field. recess, his own team. He didn’t choose the myth.
The myth found him between the hash marks. 1992. Donaldson and his childhood partner Willie Harge, who you’ll know as Frank Niti, are both locked up. And instead of just doing the time, they start planning. They call it the Wood Street players, named after the block started in a sale. They get out in 93. They don’t go back to the corner.
They go to the studio. They build their own label due for self-records. No industry co-sign. No infrastructure. Just two men from Wood Street pressing CDs and selling them out of the trunk like it’s any other hustle. Except this one has a beat behind it. That name do for self is the whole man in three syllables.
Albert Donaldelsson never waited for anybody to hand him anything. Not a deal, not a break, not a pass on Wood Street with a name he got at recess. 1995, the Wood Street players dropped their debut Jacktown Players on Due for Self Records. 17 tracks produced in Jackson features Point Blank out of Houston’s SPC track titles like Red Rum, Black Sunday, Life Before Death.
Two men rapping about exactly where they came from. Exactly what Wood Street looked like from the inside. The album drops. Both members go back to jail. I’m not saying that for shock value. I’m telling you because that is the pattern. And the pattern is the story. 97. They get out, go back to the studio. Second album, turning and burning.
Southern rap archivists consider it their best work. Eerie, funky, dark, the kind of sound that feels like driving through South Jackson at 2 in the morning with the windows down. Produced by Jackson legends Freddy Young and Mike Collins. It is a masterpiece. By the time it is out, they are back in jail. 2000 third album, Rules of the Game.
And by this point, they have built enough of a name that there are conversations happening at the major label level. Sony level attention, a distribution arrangement, the kind of thing that for two independent artists from South Jackson is the closest thing to a different life you can imagine from where they started.
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They shoot a video single called Life Ain’t Easy. And this is not a rap video in the way you’re thinking. There were no rented Lamborghinis. The video had real imagery. Cops breaking into apartments, young people running, real wood street faces. The Jackson Police Department noticed it. Ozone magazine later called it quote both the talk of the town and the Jackson police.
In the video, Donaldson and Harge wrapped, “The only way we know how is to live and die in the South. Blame it on my childhood.” That line. Remember that line? and the cops weren’t watching it for the cinematography. Let’s be clear about that because the year 2000 also brings them back into trouble with the law. The Sony conversation ends.
The music stops. Three albums, every single one recorded and released between incarcerations. The discoraphy is the biography. Every time the music got bigger, the street pulled him back. He was building something real. It just wasn’t enough to outrun where he’d come from. May 10th, 2001, Jackson, Mississippi. Aaron Crockett is sitting in his SUV on Lamp Avenue. He is not alone.
His 13-month-old son is in that vehicle with him. Two men approach wearing ski masks. They open fire. Over 20 shots. Aaron Crockett dies on Lamp Avenue. his 13-month-old son survives. Now, here is why this killing connects to Albert Donaldson. Crockett had been scheduled to testify against Donaldson in an earlier aggravated assault case.
He was a witness. He was set to take the stand. He never made it. Prosecutors argued the killing was an order. Called in through a smuggled cell phone from inside the Hines County Detention Center, where Donaldson was already locked up at the time. The specific allegation, a jail deputy passed a cell phone to inmate Nathaniel Brent, who passed it to Donaldson.
Donaldson, prosecutors claimed, used that phone to call in the hit. Brent later testified that Donaldelsson was explaining to him, quote, how he got to do get rid of Aaron because he was feeling Aaron was going to testify on him. Brent saw the news that Crockett had been killed that evening, went to Donaldelsson’s cell the next day.
According to Brent, Donaldson’s first words were, “Bro, what you think them folks going to do now?” The getaway driver, Roderick Taylor, already serving two life sentences, later testified, “We pulled up along the truck and they proceeded to get out and started firing into the truck numerous amount of times. I know more than 20.
- Frank Melton, now running the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, arrests about 12 people connected to the Wood Street Players. Charges include the Crockett killing and the murders of Harrison Hillyard and Keon Perry. Melton says publicly that Donaldson ordered all three. But here is where the case takes a turn I genuinely cannot get over.
The key witness was Christopher Walker, known on the street as Smiley. Walker had grown up around Wood Street, known Donaldson for years. Melton claimed Walker was the man who answered the phone the night Donaldson allegedly called in the hit. Defense attorneys documented in court filings. Christopher Walker had been living in Frank Melton’s house.
He had a credit card in Melton’s name, a car, cash, an apartment in Ridgeland, Mississippi. He listed Melton’s personal address as his own address with his probation officer. The prosecution’s star witness was on the mayor’s credit card. DA FA Peterson filed a motion to drop the charges. She stated the state had reasonable basis to believe Walker’s testimony was unreliable and potentially tainted.
She ended up proceeding anyway, but without Walker on the stand because the defense had made clear they would expose the entire financial arrangement in open court. April 7th, 2006, the jury went out. Less than two hours later, they came back. Albert Donaldelsson, Terrell Donaldson, James Benton, not guilty on all counts.
Donaldson walked out and told the cameras. I thank the jury they figured out the truth. He got in a Jaguar with Louisiana plates and drove away. Mayor Frank Melton stood in the courthouse and watched him leave. Before we go further, I need to tell you who Frank Melton actually was. Because if you go into this story thinking he’s just a villain, you are going to miss the whole thing.
Frank Irvin Melton, born March 19th, 1949, Houston, Texas. He grew up in what he called Fifth Ward, one of the poorest, most crimeaffected neighborhoods in that city. He told the Jackson Free Press in 2006. I grew up in Fifth War, Houston. I’d have had the same plight that these kids have had. He said he was saved by after school activities, swimming, football.
Now, Batman got his name from a flying tackle on a school football field. Melton said football and swimming were what kept him from the streets. Two men, both from poor neighborhoods, both shaped by the same kind of thing. One became the city’s most powerful man. The other became its most wanted. 1984, Melton arrives in Jackson from Texas at 33 years old to run WLBTV, the NBC affiliate.
He walks in his first day and fires the first black general manager of a network affiliated television station in the United States. It triggers a black boycott. He shrugs it off. By the early 90s, he builds a weekly segment, the bottom line. Every week after the evening news, he calls out drug dealers and city officials by name.
Closes every segment with, “And that, my friends, is the bottom line. Jackson eats it up. He becomes so frustrated with drug dealers operating with what he sees as full impunity that he starts renting billboards and putting their mug shots on them. A colleague tells him, “Frank, don’t put those up. We’re going to get sued.
” Melton replies, “I don’t believe you’re going to get in trouble for doing the right thing.” That quote tells you everything about this man. He believed so completely in his own righteousness that the concept of accountability simply did not apply to him. That belief is what made him powerful. It is also what destroyed him.
2000 He sells his interest in WLBT. He walks away a multi-millionaire. He starts positioning himself for the next move. December 2002, Governor Musgroveve appoints him director of the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics. And here is where the Donaldelsson obsession locks in permanently. The real beginning of this feud wasn’t the Crockett murder. It was a videotape.
During his narcotics work, Melton came across crime scene footage of 16-year-old Regginal Versol found beaten to death behind a house on Wood Street. The state of the crime scene, Melton would later say, was something he could never get out of his head. An informant told Melton that Donaldson had ordered the beating because Regginal Versol had disrespected him at a nightclub.
Melton never forgot that tape. He spent most of his 14 months running MBN focused on Donaldson and the Wood Street players at the expense of broader narcotics work statewide. When Governor Haley Barber took office and dismissed him, the obsession had already cost him the job. He ran for mayor of Jackson in 2005. One issue, crime.
He beat two-term incumbent Harvey Johnson Jr. with 88% of the general election vote. A city of 184,000 people, 71% black, a crime rate nearly twice the national average. They handed the keys to the man who put drug dealer mug shots on billboards. Now he had a badge, bodyguards, a mobile command unit, and a target he had been tracking for over a decade.
April 9th, 2006, 2 days after the acquitt, 9:00 at night, Melton shows up to the home of Donaldson’s elderly mother, Beverly Jackson, on Huron Street. TV cameras in tow. He bangs on the door with a shotgun in his hand. law enforcement behind him with submachine guns drawn, his personal dog on a leash.
Four miners were inside that house. All of them later sought medical and psychological treatment. The Donaldelsson family sued Melton, the Jackson Police Department, and the city of Jackson. Melton on how the family felt about it. I don’t give a damn what they thought. DonaldElsson for his part. I can’t really talk about him because I don’t want him coming back to my mama’s house doing nothing to my mama.
That is restraint. That is a man who understood exactly what he was dealing with and refused to give it more fuel. No warrant, no arrest, a shotgun on a grandmother’s porch at 900 p.m. on a Sunday night. That is what this feud looked like from the outside. You heard his name in that courtroom, but you don’t know his story yet.
That’s the part nobody told you. Christopher Walker Smiley Walker grew up around Wood Street. He’d known Donaldson. He’d also started swimming at the Ferris Street YMCA, the same pool Frank Melton volunteered at every summer. That is how they first connected, a public pool. When Melton was building the Wood Street case, he moved Walker into his house.
October 2003, set him up with a credit card, a car, cash, and an apartment in Ridgeland. Walker gave Melton’s address to his probation officer as his own. The case collapsed. April 2006, a quiddle, less than 2 hours. Six days later, Walker is sitting next to Melton at a city hall press conference where Melton is publicly attacking DA Peterson.
6 days after the verdict, still the loyal soldier. That same week, US Marshals arrest Walker. He had failed nearly a dozen drug tests during the leadup to the trial. Melton had known he’d been housing him anyway. After that arrest, Melton stopped returning Walker’s calls just like that. Years of housing him, feeding him, putting his face next to his at press conferences.
The moment the case was done, the phone went silent. In a later interview with the Jackson Free Press, Walker described himself as a chess piece. He said he feared that people from Wood Street were going to come for him or that he’d be forced to come for them because he’d agreed to testify he had nowhere to go. The man who promised protection was not picking up the phone.
Walker said that man started all this. Three weeks after that interview, November 2007, a Friday, Craig Spiva, a friend of Donaldelsson’s, walks into a store on Maple Street near Wood Street, goes in to get a soda. He comes out. Walker is there. Spiva was shot three times and went down on the pavement. Walker ran.
Spiva survived after surgery. That same afternoon, Melton went on camera for WAPT and said Christopher Walker was not involved in any shooting publicly on television. While Walker was calling the Jackson Free Press from hiding, saying Melton hadn’t answered his phone once, the mayor was on TV defending a man he’d abandoned, while that man was on the run for a shooting that happened on the same corner he’d grown up on.
That is what the feud costs, not the headlines. A young man named Smiley raised on Wood Street, turned into a weapon, then left there with no cover and no exit. Two powerful men pointed at each other across a decade. And the person who got hurt in the end wasn’t either of them. It was the boy from Wood Street who just wanted to swim at the Y.
I need you to hear this part carefully because if I just tell you straight, you’re not going to believe it. All those murder charges, Aaron Crockett, Harrison Hillyard, Keon Perry, not guilty. Every single one. The prosecution Melton spent years building. The obsession that cost him his directorship and eventually his credibility. All of it. Not guilty.
The charge that sent Albert Donaldelsson to Parchman Farm for 20 years. A stranger walked past his house in the dark. Early morning hours, September 2010. A young man named Robert Crosby and his brother had been staying nearby on Huron Street. It’s late. They walk to a pool hall.
On the way back, they round the corner of Palmyra and Huron Street. Donaldson’s purple house. Donaldson is on the porch. Donaldson doesn’t recognize Crosby. Confronts him. What happened next is documented word for word in the Mississippi Court of Appeals decision from August 5th, 2014. Donaldson and two associates, Eric Lindseay and Antonio Marshall, beat Robert Crosby severely, removed his clothing, stuffed him into a red grocery cart, and dumped him in a parking lot around the corner.
Police arrived at 5:15 in the morning, found significant blood evidence, a torn t-shirt, a shoe, followed the trail. It led to Donaldson’s front door. They knocked. He answered. Crosby’s blood was on his legs. A search warrant found Crosby’s bloodied shorts inside Donaldson’s bedroom. The red shopping cart, Crosby’s blood on it, was behind the house.
Crosby was found unconscious in the parking lot nearby. He had suffered serious injuries. He testified that he has no memory of that night or any time during the month following. He told the jury he is still impaired. Before trial, Donaldson’s attorneys filed a motion asking that he not be referred to as Batman in the courtroom.
The judge granted it. A man who spent a decade defined by that name walked into court trying to just be Albert Donaldson. The ruling was accidentally violated once. A witness let it slip. November 16th, 2011. Judge Tommy T. Green, Hines County Circuit Court. Conviction aggravated assault. Sentence 20 years.
Mississippi Department of Corrections. The Court of Appeals affirmed it on August 5th, 2014. He went to Parchman Farm, the oldest prison in Mississippi, the Delta. Not for the murders, not for the feud, for a man walking past his house at the wrong hour. Let me tell you about Frank Melton’s ending because it mirrors Albert Donaldson’s in a way that deserves to be said plainly. August 26th, 2006.
Less than 5 months after the acquitt, Melton loads the city’s mobile command unit with young men, some with criminal records and drives to a duplex on Ridgeway Street that he has decided is a crack house. No warrant. He knocks out windows with a large stick. Orders the young man inside with sledgehammers. They destroy it. Leave. Come back.
Finish it. The tenant is a young man with schizophrenia. He was removed from his home at gunpoint by a police bodyguard while the mayor broke his windows. Federal prosecutors later described Milton as quote drunk on scotch and power. July 9th, 2008. A federal grand jury indictes Milton bodyguard Michael Reio and bodyguard Marcus Wright.
Conspiracy to violate civil rights. deprivation of rights under color of law, use of a firearm, and a crime of violence. Maximum sentence 25 years. He had already been acquitted on state charges for the same incident in April 2007. The first federal trial ends in mistrial. Jury deadlocks twice. Second trial scheduled for May 11th, 2009.
May 5th, 2009, primary election day. Frank Melton, the man who won 88% of the vote four years earlier, receives 18.2%. Third place, out of the runoff. Harvey Johnson, the man he’d crushed in 2005, is coming back. 2 days later, May 7th, 2009, Frank Melton is found unconscious. He dies at a Jackson hospital at 60 years old. His wife is by his side.
He had refused to go on a heart transplant list. He dies 4 days before his second federal trial. He died without a verdict. Still the mayor of Jackson, still publicly insisting he had done nothing wrong. He never saw Albert Donaldson go to parchment. The man who got 88% of the vote, who put mug shots on billboards, who knocked a grandmother’s door down with a shotgun at 900 p.m.
, came in third, collapsed, died, and the man he’ hunted was somewhere in Jackson, still breathing. September 2010. Days before his arrest, Albert Donaldelsson sat down for an interview and said this. I am a convicted felon. I never try to hide that. That’s nothing I hide. I’m not ashamed of whatever I did. I learned from it and know how to go forward. He had no idea what was coming.
He went into parchment. The city moved on. Melton died. New mayors came and went. The music industry held no candlelight vigils for the Wood Street players catalog. But the music survived. Three albums pressed on their own label between incarcerations are still traded today by southern rap collectors. Turning and burning and rules of the game are considered authentic artifacts of ’90s southern underground rap.
The music outlasted everything. Frank Niti confirmed in a published interview while his partner was inside. My homie Albert Batman, the other half of the group, is currently serving a 20-year sentence in Mississippi State Penitentiary on assault charges. No drama, just the facts from the man who was there at the beginning in a sale in 1992 when they decided to be something.
Two men making a decision in a jail cell. One of them is still making music. The other is the reason we’re here. By 2022, Albert Donaldelsson was back in Jackson doing interviews talking about crime in the city, the history of Mississippi hip hop, community work, a YouTube video from April 11th, 2022 documents him older, quieter, still there.
In May 2023, a full documentary described him as a man who was a product of his environment and came out a changed man. He was 33 years old when he walked out of that courthouse in 2006, got into a Jaguar with Louisiana plates, and drove away from a murder charge while the mayor watched. He walked out of Parchment in his late 40s, maybe early 50s. The music is still out there.
Wood Street is still Wood Street. And the man with Batman’s name, the one a school football team gave him at recess, the one that followed him through courtrooms and concert halls and a prison in the Mississippi Delta, is still talking. He never chose the myth. He just outlived it. And in Jackson, Mississippi, that counts for something.
