There was a stretch of years in Queens where the most dangerous job in the borough wasn’t selling drugs. It was robbing the people who did because a drug dealer can’t call the police. If you take a kingpin’s money, his jewelry, his package, he can’t file a report. He can’t sit in a precinct and point at a photo.
He has to handle it himself on his own time in his own way. So, a certain kind of man learned to live off that silence. He robbed the men who could never go to the cops. His name was Eric Smith. The streets called him E-Money Bags. And for the better part of a decade, he walked up on the hardest men in New York, took what he wanted, and walked away breathing.
People who knew those blocks will tell you he was untouchable. At least, that’s what everyone thought. On a July night in 2001, four men in white gloves walked up on his truck while he sat at a neighborhood barbecue, and they answered all of it at once. This is the story of the man who robbed Queens’ biggest kingpins for a living, and the one debt that finally came to collect.
But, this story doesn’t start with a barbecue or a Lincoln Navigator. It starts with a question nobody can fully answer, which is where Eric Smith actually came from. Brooklyn, the Sumner Houses, depending on who’s telling it. Some of the people closest to the story say Eric Smith was a Brooklyn kid first, Sumner Projects in Bed-Stuy.
They’ll tell you he went to Westinghouse High School, the same building that produced two other names you might know, a heavy-set kid named Christopher Wallace and a sharp-tongued one named Shawn Carter. Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z, same hallways. Other people swear he was a Queens man through and through.
They put him in Lefrak City, the huge apartment complex out in Corona, >> >> or in Hollis, the neighborhood that gave the world Run-DMC, where men who say they grew up with him will tell you, flat out, “I knew E-Money Bags. He’s from Hollis.” The honest version is this: The records don’t agree, and the people don’t agree, and his exact birth year doesn’t even agree.
Some sources say 1969. The newspapers that covered his death called him 29. Do that math, and it doesn’t line up. So, if you ever see somebody tell you they know the precise day and place Eric Smith was born, be a little careful with them. The truth is, he belonged to a few neighborhoods at once, Brooklyn blood and Queen’s streets, and that’s part of why he could move the way he did.
What everyone does agree on is how he got the name. He was about his money. The way one writer put it, Smith earned the name E-Money Bags for being about his bottom line, and he had a line he liked to use about rapping. He called it stick up without a gun, easy money. To him, picking up a microphone and robbing a man at gunpoint were just two doors into the same room, and he came up in the right rooms for it.
By his early 20s, Eric Smith was running with a Queen’s crew called Live Squad, two brothers out of Hollis who produced music and ran the streets at the same time. Live Squad was tight with Tupac Shakur during his New York years, and if you go looking, there are old photos of E-Money Bags standing right there in that world.
So, before he was ever a name in a federal indictment, he was a face in the background of one of the biggest scenes in hip-hop history. That’s the company he kept. Producers, shooters, and rap stars all on the same block. By the early and mid-1990s, Eric Smith had built a reputation in a lane most people are too scared to even look at.
He was a stick-up artist, not a corner kid, not a runner, a man who robbed other criminals for a living, >> >> and the logic was simple, which is exactly what made it so dangerous. He targeted drug dealers, kingpins, hustlers sitting on real money, men who could not afford to involve the law, because involving the law meant explaining where the money came from.
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So, when E-Money Bags took your chain or your bankroll, your only options were to eat it or to come There was no third option. There was no detective coming to help you. The cleaner way to say it is this. >> >> Every man he robbed went to bed that night doing the same math he was doing. He just usually finished the math first.
And he was good enough at it that he built a whole life on it. The jewelry, the cars, the reputation that walked into a room before he did. In a borough full of men who got rich selling product, Eric Smith got rich taking it from them. He never had to find a connect. He never had to move a package.
He let other men do all of that dangerous work, and then he showed up at the end and took the reward. The hustlers ran the race. He waited at the finish line with a gun. This is where the story takes a turn nobody expected even back then. The most repeated tale about E-Money Bags doesn’t happen on a corner. It happens in a movie theater.
The Sunrise Multiplex out in Valley Stream on Long Island during a screening of The Godfather Part III. The story goes that Smith’s crew and a rival crew ran into each other in that theater. Guns came out in the dark, and when it was over a 15-year-old was dead. People in that area will tell you that’s the reason metal detectors went up at that theater.
Now, that’s the legend. We need to be straight about that. That account comes from street memory and one secondary write-up, not a court file. So, treat it as the kind of story the neighborhood passed down, true in spirit, fuzzy in the details. But, it tells you how people saw him. They saw a man who would bring a war into a Sunday matinee.
His reputation got big enough that it bled into the music. He got close, genuinely close, with Prodigy of Mobb Deep. He recorded with Nas, with Noreaga, with Kool G Rap. In 1999, he put out his own album with a title that tells you everything about how he saw himself. He called it In E-Money Bags We Trust.
And the line that really put his name in the air came from somewhere unexpected. On a Nas record from 1996, Affirmative Action, Foxy Brown name-dropped him in a single bar, E Money Bags got Moet Chandon. That’s it, one line. But for a stick-up kid from Queens to get sung about on a Nas album, that was a kind of immortality. Most people never heard about this part of him, the rapper part, the part that wanted the spotlight as bad as the cash.
Up to this point, E Money Bags had been winning. He robbed the most dangerous men in New York, and they ate it. He got his name in the music. He was the rare man who lived in two worlds and got over in both. That was about to flip. And it was about to flip because of one call, one bullet, and one man whose death he probably didn’t even mean to cause.
To understand what came for Eric Smith, you have to understand who else owned these streets. And in South Jamaica, Queens, one organization owned more of them than anybody, the Supreme Team. The Supreme Team was built in the early 1980s out of the Baisley Park Houses by a young man named Kenneth McGriff.
On the street, they called him Supreme. He started it with a group of young men who followed the teachings of the 5% Nation, which is where a lot of the names came from, Supreme, Justice, names that sounded like titles, because to them they were. By the federal government’s own numbers, at the operation’s peak in 1987, the Supreme Team’s drug money from street-level sales was bringing in more than $200,000 a day.
I mean, think about that for a second. $200,000 a day in 1987 money out of one set of housing projects in Queens. McGriff’s own nephew, a man they called Prince, ran the muscle. Prince Miller would eventually go away for a string of murders, and Supreme would do a stretch of his own in the ’90s. This was not a corner. This was a corporation with bodies attached to it.
When the Supreme Team had a problem, the problem disappeared. At the very end of 1999, Eric Smith and Kenneth McGriff’s world collided and the exact reason depends again on who you ask. The version Prodigy told in his memoir is small and stupid and human, which is usually how these things actually start. It was about money.
The way Prodigy tells it, Smith was buying a car through a woman connected to McGriff’s circle and he had put down a deposit somewhere between a thousand and twenty-five hundred dollars. When the deal went sideways, Smith wanted his deposit back. That was it. That was the spark. Not a kingdom, not a war, a car note and a refund.
What is not in dispute is what happened next. Eric Smith spotted McGriff sitting in a vehicle near the Coliseum mall on Jamaica Avenue and Smith opened fire on that vehicle. The bullets were meant for Supreme. They didn’t find Supreme. They found a man sitting with him, a Supreme Team lieutenant and McGriff’s close friend, a man the streets called Black Just. His real name was Colbert Johnson.
McGriff said later that he pulled his own gun, that it jammed, that he ditched it and drove his friend to the hospital himself. It didn’t matter. Colbert Johnson bled out. He died on December 11th, 1999 and this is the detail that explains everything that comes after. So, pay attention to this next part.
Black Just wasn’t just another name. Years earlier, he had been a mentor to a young hustler from the same South Jamaica blocks, a kid named Curtis Jackson. You know him as 50 Cent. So, when Eric Smith fired those shots, he didn’t just kill Kenneth McGriff’s friend. He pulled a thread that ran through half the bloodshed in Queens for the next two years.
What comes next is the part that still doesn’t make sense unless you understand how a man like Supreme keeps score. But by the year 2000, this wasn’t just about a stick-up artist and a kingpin anymore. Kenneth McGriff had come home from a prison stretch in 1997 and he had reinvented himself.
He wasn’t just a man from the Basley Park projects. He was a man with a foot in the music industry. McGriff linked up with a childhood neighborhood friend named Irving Lorenzo. You know him better as Irv Gotti, the head of Murder Inc. Records, the label that turned Ja Rule and Ashanti into superstars. The two of them made a straight-to-video movie together called Crime Partners with Ja Rule, Snoop Dogg, and Ice-T in it.
Now, here’s where the government got interested. Federal prosecutors would later allege that McGriff was washing more than a million dollars of drug money through that record label. They alleged Irv Gotti cut McGriff more than $280,000 in checks. In January 2003, federal agents raided the Murder Inc. offices in Manhattan.
I want to be fair here because the whole point of telling this right is to tell it straight. Irv Gotti and his brother Chris were charged with money laundering. And in December 2005, a jury found them not guilty. They beat it. That part is settled. But the version you’ve heard about why Eric Smith died, that’s not the full picture.
There’s a second theory and it runs straight through Murder Inc. Because according to Prodigy’s account and to things Irv Gotti himself has hinted at years later, Eric Smith didn’t just rob anonymous dealers. The story goes that he robbed Irv Gotti, robbed Chris Gotti, robbed Ja Rule, took their chains, allegedly set up by someone inside their own camp who paged Smith their location.
On a podcast in 2022, more than 20 years later, Irv Gotti got cryptic about it. He talked about how a certain man had been texting the other side telling them where they were. And he said about that man that they did something that they paid for. He never named the murder. He was never charged with it. But the people listening knew exactly which barbecue he was talking about.
And while all of this was building, the McGriff name got tangled into one more feud, the most famous one of all. Because remember the kid Black just mentored, 50 Cent. In 2000, 50 Cent recorded a song called Ghetto Quran. In it, he did something you did not do in Queens. He named names. He called out McGriff. He called out Prince.
He ran through the Supreme Team roll call like a history lesson. To a young rapper, it was him showing he knew the streets. To the men he named, it was something closer to a snitch jacket set to a beat. And here is the line in that song that should make the hair on your neck stand up.
In that same roll call, 50 Cent rapped, “And I’m cleaning this up, Troy and E Money Bags.” He named two men in one breath, Troy and Eric Smith. In about 18 months, those exact two names, Troy and E Money Bags, would be the two murders that a federal jury convicted Kenneth McGriff of committing. The song wrote their names down before the case did.
On May 24th, 2000, 50 Cent was shot nine times outside his grandmother’s house in South Jamaica. He lived. Federal investigators came to believe that shooting was payback for Ghetto Quran. McGriff was never charged for it. And one quick note, because this is the part people always get wrong. A lot of people will tell you E Money Bags died in 2000. He didn’t.
The shooting everyone’s remembering from 2000 is 50 Cent’s. Eric Smith still had more than a year to live. He just didn’t know how short that year was going to be. A summer night in Queens Village. A neighborhood barbecue on 111th Road near Whit Hof Street. People out, music going, the smell of a grill. Eric Smith pulled up in his Lincoln Navigator and parked.
On his wrist was a diamond-studded Rolex. In his pocket, his wallet and a little cash. He had spent a decade walking up on dangerous men. Now, three or four men walked up on him. Witnesses said some of them wore white gloves. They opened fire into the truck with 9 mm handguns from so close that the shell casings landed inside the vehicle with him.
The Justice Department’s own account says it plainly, the shooters hit Eric Smith 11 times point-blank as he sat in his parked truck. Then they were gone into a waiting Mercedes into the dark. And here’s the detail that tells you this was never a robbery. When the police got to that truck, the diamond Rolex was still on his wrist.
The $40 was still in his pocket. The wallet was untouched. For 10 years every man Eric Smith robbed had to make a choice, eat it or come back. They couldn’t call the police. So this is what it looks like when they finally come back. They didn’t take his money. They didn’t want his money. They left the Rolex on his wrist on purpose.
This wasn’t a stick-up, it was an answer. For a few weeks it was just another unsolved Queens murder. Then in late August 2001, federal agents raided a stash house connected to Kenneth McGriff. Not in New York, in Owings Mills, Maryland. Inside they found $30,000 in cash. They found cocaine and heroin. And they found something nobody expected, a surveillance video tape.
The tape was dated July 13th through July 16th, the same days leading up to the murder and on it was footage of Eric Smith driving, parking, leaving his Lee’s Light Days on 111th Road, filmed from a window across the street. Investigators worked out who shot that tape, a McGriff drug associate named Dennis Crosby, who went by Divine and his girlfriend, a woman named Nicole Brown.
They filmed Eric Smith from Brown’s apartment. Brown later admitted she kept the camera on him until about 20 minutes before he was killed. Sit with that. Somebody pointed a camera at a man and recorded his patterns, his comings and goings for days, and then turned it off 20 minutes before the gunmen arrived. That’s not anger. That’s not a moment.
That’s a job. And there was a man hired to do the job. His name was Emmanuel Mosley. They called him dog. Mosley would later plead guilty to killing Eric Smith and to a second murder, and he would testify for the government. And his testimony is where the wires all connect. Mosley said McGriff first came to him about killing two other men because they had, in Mosley’s words, “Smacked up a friend of McGriff’s in a recording studio.
” That friend, Mosley testified, was Irv Gotti. Then McGriff redirected him. Before those other men, there was someone who had to go first, E-Money Bags. And McGriff put a contract on the table, $50,000, $50,000. That was the price on the man who once felt like he was worth a whole city. And after it was done, according to the Associated Press, McGriff sent a text message to a friend, four words, “You missed the party.
You missed the party.” That’s a man who had been keeping score since December 11th, 1999, finally settling the bill. And the killing didn’t stay in Queens. The same organization was tied to a double murder down in Maryland that summer. >> >> Two men named Calvin Clarrett and Dwayne Thomas gunned down in August 2001.
A McGriff associate named Victor Wright was convicted of those killings and sentenced to life. The further investigators pulled the thread, the more bodies came loose from it. But Supreme wasn’t finished. Remember the song, Troy and E-Money Bags. On October 21st, 2001, 3 months after Eric Smith died, a man named Troy Singleton was murdered, too.
The streets called him Big Nose Troy. The reason, according to the cooperating witness, was almost worse than revenge. McGriff didn’t kill Troy over an old debt. He killed Troy because he was afraid Troy might come back at him for Eric Smith. He killed a man to prevent a murder that hadn’t happened yet. The same story one more time with new names.
A man dies. The fear of payback creates the next body. And a line in a four-year-old rap song slowly turns into a list of the dead. It took years to build, but the surveillance tape changed everything. It put Kenneth McGriff’s people across the street from Eric Smith in the days before he died on camera, on tape with dates.
On February 1st, 2007, in federal court in Brooklyn, a jury found Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff guilty. Guilty of running a racketeering enterprise. Guilty of two murder-for-hire killings, Eric Smith and Troy Singleton. Guilty of trafficking drugs and washing the money. The judge who oversaw it, Frederick Block, had seen plenty of organized crime cases.
This one still stood out. The government had asked for the death penalty. The jury deadlocked nine to three in favor of life. So, on March 9th, 2007, the judge sentenced Kenneth McGriff to life in prison with no parole. The man who once pulled $200,000 a day out of South Jamaica will die in a federal cell. The prosecutor put it about as plainly as anyone could.
She called McGriff one of the most dangerous, feared, ruthless gangsters in all of Queens. And she said the thing that ties this whole story together. When Supreme got in a fight with somebody, he didn’t go to the cops. He didn’t hire a lawyer. He hired a hit team. It went exactly how you think it went.
The man who built his life robbing people who couldn’t call the police was finally killed by a man who, for the very same reasons, would never call them, either. Two men living off the same silence. One of them just had $50,000 in a camera. Eric Smith left behind one album, a handful of verses, a son who carries his name, and a story that keeps getting told wrong.
He’s still in the music if you know where to listen. Nas mentioned him. Foxy Brown put him in a bar in 1996. Prodigy filled pages of his memoir with him, and a young 50 Cent put his name in a song right next to Troy’s, never knowing he was writing a list. Even Russell Simmons on national television once grouped his name with the unsolved ghosts of the era.
They don’t know who killed Tupac, who killed Biggie, who killed E-Money Bags, who killed Jam Master Jay. Except in his case, eventually they did. The whole saga eventually got written down for real. Journalist named Ethan Brown laid it all out in a book called Queens Reign Supreme. Years later, a documentary series put the Supreme Team story on a streaming platform for the world to see.
So, in a strange way, Eric Smith finally got the thing the rappers around him were always chasing. He got the story told on a national stage. He just had to die for it, and he never got to see it. And the version that survived is a court file and a true crime series, not the movie a man like him would have wanted.
So, here’s the part I won’t do for you. I won’t tell you what to think about Eric Smith. Some people from those blocks will tell you the system built him. That a kid from the projects in the ’80s and ’90s, Brooklyn or Queens, take your pick, was handed a short menu of ways to be powerful, and he picked the one that was in front of him.
That nobody was ever going to make a clean Hollywood movie about him the way they did for the Italians who did far worse. And some people from those exact same blocks will tell you the opposite. That plenty of kids grew up in those same buildings and didn’t spend a decade robbing men at gunpoint. That he made his choices.
That he fired the shots that killed Colbert Johnson, and that everything after was just the bill arriving. The real question isn’t which one of those is true. The real question is why we only ever get to ask it after the man is already in the ground. We started this on a quiet stretch of Queens, where the most dangerous job in the borough was robbing the people who couldn’t call the police.
Eric Smith was the best in the city at that job. He did it for years. He did it kingpins. And in the end, the very thing that made him untouchable, that his victims could never go to the law, is the exact thing that meant no law was ever coming to save him, either. They left the Rolex on his wrist. They didn’t want his money.
By then, the only thing anybody wanted from E-Money Bags was the one thing he could never give back.
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
