Picture yourself on 150th Street, South Jamaica, Queens, 1980. You’re 17, maybe 18. You can see Manhattan from certain rooftops on a clear day. The skyline sitting there like a promise somebody made and never kept. The money is over there. The opportunity is over there. You know this because the television tells you every single night.
What the television doesn’t tell you is how to get there from here. No towers, no banks, no ladder, anyone built for you. Just public housing, shuttered storefronts, and a generation of young men the city had already written off. Redlinining, de-industrialization, a fiscal crisis in 1975 that nearly finished the whole burough.
And then right on time, crack cocaine arrives. 1982. Suddenly, there is a career path. There is money. There is a way out. Two men on that ladder are already climbing faster than everyone else. Lorenzo Nichols, born December 25th, 1958, Christmas Day, Birmingham, Alabama. Raised by his grandmother. relocated to Queens around age 10, drops out before ninth grade, convicted on two robbery counts in 1976, sentenced to 18 years, walks out in 1980 after serving only a fraction of it.
The streets gave him back early. The streets always collect. His name on the block is Fat Cat because of what writer Ethan Brown described as his linebacker thick neck. A head so big it nearly blocked out his friends faces and snapshots and his rangy beard. The most dangerous man in the room always looks like the most relaxed. One mile away, Kenneth McGriff, born September 19th, 1959, South Jamaica, born and raised, gets his name Supreme from a philosophy, not the streets.
becomes a 5enter at junior high school 72 in 1971. Starts as a stash house guard, watching, learning, waiting. By the early 1980s, he organizes the Supreme Team around the Basley Park houses, recruiting both black and Latino members, bypassing the mafia entirely, plugging straight into Colombian cocaine suppliers. Two men, same block, one year apart.
150th Street and South Road, Jamaica, Queens. Remember that address. Let me tell you what $20 million a year looks like in 1985 Queens. It doesn’t look like a skyscraper. It doesn’t look like Wall Street. It looks like a deli, a back office, a softspoken man in street clothes who never raises his voice because he doesn’t have to.
Big Max Deli, 150th Street, Jamaica, Queens. Fat Cat calls it simply the block. From a back office in that building, Lorenzo Nichols runs a cocaine and heroin operation, bringing in an estimated $20 million annually. The assistant DA who eventually prosecuted him put it like this. And I want you to hear this quote carefully because it tells you everything.
If you put him in a brown corduroy jacket with patches on the elbows, he would look like a college professor. He’s a soft-spoken guy, but those guys are the most dangerous. He could say, “Kill him in a real soft voice.” And there were bodies stacked up like cords of wood in Jamaica. As a result, corduroy jacket, soft voice, bodies like cords of wood.
That’s fat cat. His operation runs on family, literally. his mother, two of his sisters, childhood associates, and his key enforcer Howard Papy Mason, a prison friend who started as Fat Cat’s security detail before building his own crew, the Bibos. Essentially, a military wing operating under Fat Cat’s umbrella.
You want to understand how this empire is structured? Think of Fat Cat as the chairman and Papy as the general. Different titles, One Direction. Now go one mile east. Basisley Park houses. 1,057 residents packed into a public housing complex in South Jamaica. And somewhere inside that building or just outside it on every shift every hour, the Supreme team is working.
At their 1987 peak, they are generating over $200,000 a day in street level crack sales. Not a week, a day. To put that in perspective, that’s $73 million a year minimum moving through one housing project in Queens. The Federal Reserve could never. The operation is layered like an onion by design. Rooftop sentinels with two-way radios watching for police, armed bodyguards, crews of street level sellers who don’t know the men above them.
The whole structure built to ensure that if the bottom layer gets arrested, the top layer stays clean. And the language they use to talk to each other, that’s where it gets fascinating. The Supreme Team communicates in 5enter Supreme Mathematics and the Supreme Alphabet, a coded numerical and linguistic system rooted in their religious philosophy.
They turned a belief system into an encryption tool. In 1985, the NYPD didn’t even know what they were listening to on the wiretaps. By the time law enforcement cracked the code, it had already yielded evidence linking the team to illegal weapons and a murder inquiry as far south as South Carolina. The alliance between the two operations is simple.
Fat Cat supplies Supreme’s crew with powder cocaine. Supreme’s team processes it into crack and moves it on the street. CEO meets military. Product meets distribution. 20 million meets 73 million. And while all of this is happening, the money, the product, the coded phone calls, the rooftop lookouts, a generation of young men is watching.
The Supreme Team Party at the Latin Quarter in Manhattan. The Red Parrot. Brooklyn’s Empire Roller Dome. Disco fever in the South Bronx. The cars, the clothes, the way they carry themselves in a room. Every young man in Queens who wants to be somebody is studying these two operations like they’re a master class.
Nas is watching. Jaw Rule is watching. A kid named Curtis Jackson, who the world will eventually know as 50 Cent, is watching from the same streets. Here’s the detail that almost nobody talks about. Gerald Prince Miller, Supreme’s nephew, his second in command, grew up in the same building as a young journalist and screenwriter named Barry Michael Cooper.
Cooper is watching the Supreme Team operate from his window. He takes notes. He writes a Village Voice article. He gets hired to rewrite a screenplay. And in 1991, that screenplay becomes New Jack City, the film where Wesley Snipes plays Nino Brown, a crack kingpin whose gang, the Cash Money Brothers, dominates a Queen’s housing project called the Carter Apartments.
The Carter Apartments is the Basley Park Houses. Nino Brown is Kenneth McGriff. The Cash Money Brothers are the supreme team. The film costs $8 million. It makes nearly 50 million at the box office. Barry Michael Cooper later said, “If there was no New Jack, there would be no boys in the hood. There would be no menace to society.
” Gerald Prince Miller walked out of federal prison in September 2024. 4 months later, on January 22nd, 2025, Barry Michael Cooper died in Baltimore, aged 66. Two men from the same building. One built the empire, one turned it into art. Cooper lived to see Miller walk free, but neither one ever got to sit across from the other and talk about what it all meant.
Here is where the story stops being a drug story. Because everything we just talked about, the rooftop sentinels, the coded language, the 20 million, the 73 million, the layered operation, none of that fully explains how the Supreme Team survived as long as it did. How they kept running when every law enforcement agency in New York City was watching.
How they always seemed to be one step ahead. The answer isn’t genius. Well, it’s partly genius, but mostly the answer is that they bought the government. Not metaphorically, not in some abstract systemic way, literally, specifically, by name. Two names to be exact. Parole officer Ena Mcgriff, no relation to Kenneth, which is either a coincidence or the universe’s idea of dark humor, and a parole division secretary named Ronnie Younger.
Both of them New York State employees. Both of them assigned to the exact apparatus created to monitor and control the Supreme Team’s members. And both of them for a period of years completely and thoroughly on the team’s payroll. Here’s how it happened. Ena McGriff was assigned to supervise Supreme Team Security Chief Ernesto Pinella’s parole.
She became romantically involved with him. Ronnie Younger, her secretary, became romantically involved with Prince Miller. You cannot make this up. The two women responsible for keeping these men in line were sleeping with them. And once that line was crossed, everything that came after it was almost inevitable.
What did the Supreme Team get for their investment? Everything. Ena Mcgriff falsely certified that Pineella was complying with his parole requirements, keeping him out of jail and on the streets. She and Younger handed over information from confidential parole files. They supplied false identification documents.
They provided the locations of other paroleies, men who might be rivals, witnesses, or threats. And McGriff, who as a uniform parole officer legally carried a firearm, supplied actual ammunition directly to Supreme Team members, a governmentissued badge, a governmentissued gun, and she was resupplying a drug gang with the bullets. But it gets worse, much worse.
In 1986, Fat Cat, now incarcerated, suspected two brothers named Henry and Isaac Balden of robbing his organization. He reached out to Prince Miller for help locating them. Miller paid Ena McGriff and Ronnie Younger $3,000 for the Balden’s home addresses. $3,000. The women pulled the files, wrote down the addresses by hand, and handed them over.
Investigators later recovered those handwritten notes in a Supreme Team apartment raid. Younger’s handwriting on one part, Ena McGriff’s on another. Henry Balden’s address in the Bronx where he was subsequently shot. Isaac Balden’s mother’s address near which he was shot and killed. $3,000, two lives. That same year, Ena McGriff handed Pineella copies of official parole division documents, revealing that a Supreme Team member named James Page was cooperating with federal authorities.
The moment Kenneth McGriff, already arrested on federal charges, received that information, he ordered Paige killed. Pineella arranged the murder, a government document used to identify an informant used to order a murder Now, late 1987, a joint NYPD and FBI task force executes search warrants on multiple Supreme Team locations simultaneously.
It should be a devastating blow, the kind of raid that ends organizations. Instead, the Supreme Team is tipped off shortly before agents arrive. They move 11 kg of cocaine and $200,000 off the premises before law enforcement gets through the door. When agents finally enter, they find weapons, trade hardware, photographs, documents, and instructional manuals on criminal conduct, but the main product is already gone.
Who warned them? No public record ever answers that question. No arrest was ever made for the tip. No name was ever charged. But you now know what I know. A parole officer was sleeping with a gang member, forging documents, handing over informant lists, supplying ammunition, pulling confidential government files on demand for $3,000 a pop.
I’m not saying she made that phone call. I’m just saying somebody did. And the Supreme Team walked away from a federal raid with 11 kilos and $200,000. You do the math. Here is the thing. Nobody in Washington, nobody at One Police Plaza, nobody writing drug policy in 1985 understood. Arresting these men didn’t stop anything. It didn’t slow the money.
It didn’t stop the product moving. It didn’t even pause the murders. If anything, and this is the part that should keep you up at night, it made some of it worse. Because when you cage a man who built something real and tell him it’s over, some men fold and some men pick up the phone. Fat Cat picked up the phone.
July 29th, 1985. Police raid Big Mac Deli. They find two firearms, heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and $180,000 in cash sitting in that back office like it’s a savings account. Fat Cat makes bail, because of course he does. 20 million a year by his very good lawyers. But his parole officer, a man named Brian Rooney, isn’t interested in lawyers.
Rooney determines Nicholls violated parole and sends him straight back to Rikers. Now, Brian Rooney, by all accounts, was a decent man. He showed compassion to the people he supervised. He sometimes put his own money into their commissary accounts. He was doing his job, the job he was paid to do, which was to hold Lorenzo Nichols accountable to the terms of his release.
Fat Cat’s response was to order his crew to quote, “Ruff him up. Just rough him up.” That was the instruction, just enough to make Rooney miss a court hearing. On October 10th, 1985, Brian Rooney was shot to death. He left behind a son named Thomas who was 18 months old when his father was murdered. 18 months old.
Thomas Rooney grew up without ever knowing his father’s face outside of photographs. Years later, Rooney’s old partner, Allan Ryder, said it plainly. There was no reason for him to do that. Brian was a good guy. Brian was a caring person. Fat Cat is now running his operation from a jail cell.
Supreme is arrested in 1987 following a joint state and federal investigation. Both men incarcerated, Empire intact. Into that vacuum steps, Gerald Prince Miller, Supreme’s nephew, second in command. And if Supreme was the businessman, Prince was something else entirely. 50 Cent, who grew up on these same streets and knew these men’s reputations before he knew how to drive, later wrapped it straight.
Supreme was the businessman and Prince was the killer. During 1987 alone, one calendar year, Miller and the incarcerated Mcgriff ordered at least eight homicides. Eight. While one man is in federal custody and the other is building toward his own arrest, the machine doesn’t need its operators present. It just runs.
And then comes August 1989. And this is the part where I need you to set everything else aside for a moment. Two Colombian cocaine suppliers identified in court testimony only as Fernando and George, surnames unknown, arrive at a Supreme Team apartment in Basley Park for what they believe is a routine drug transaction. The team has decided not to pay for this shipment. They’ve decided to take it.
Fernando and George never left that apartment alive. What the federal court record describes documented in the United States versus Miller second circuit ruling is one of the most brutal acts in this entire story. The jury ultimately acquitted on the charge. The bodies were never formally identified.
The government couldn’t even confirm their real names. They exist in the official record only as Fernando and George. Men who came to do business and were never seen again. Every war has a moment where one side goes too far. This is that moment. 3:10 in the morning, February 26th, 1988, 107th Avenue and Inwood Street, South Jamaica, Queens.
A marked NYPD patrol car sits at the curb outside a modest house belonging to a gy immigrant named Arjun. A man who had done something quietly extraordinary and quietly idle in equal measure. He had called the police repeatedly to report the drug activity on his street. His house had already been firebombed twice and so the NYPD assigned him a protective detail.
That detail on this particular overnight shift is one officer. Edward Burn, 22 years old, joined the force July 15th, 1986, stationed at the 103rd precinct, 5 days past his 22nd birthday, sitting upright in his cruiser with a folded copy of the Daily News on the seat and a portable AM FM radio beside him.
Four men drive past the car once, then again, they reportedly discussed not doing it, deciding it would look weak to kill a female cop or a black officer. So, they waited for Edward Burn. They shot him five times. Edward Burn was pronounced dead at the hospital. The order came from Howard Papy Mason, Fat Cat’s enforcer, calling from a jail cell 2 days after his own gun conviction, fronting $8,000 to make it happen.
The four shooters, Philip Copelan, Todd Scott, Scott Cobb, and David mccclary. Mason called it a symbolic message. The symbol landed differently than he intended. By August 1988, more than 400 NYPD officers and federal agents sweeped through South Jamaica in a single coordinated operation. Mason and 36 others are charged.
An FBI tap on Fat Cat’s sister, Viola. Mason’s lover, his employee, hands prosecutors everything they need. 37 arrests, including Viola, including Fat Cat’s elderly mother. The Queen’s drug war has just become national news. George Herbert Walker Bush, then vice president running for president of the United States, carries Edward Burns badge with him on the campaign trail, a dead rookie cop’s badge in a vice president’s pocket on the road to the White House.
From this moment forward, the government isn’t sending narcotics officers to Queens. It’s sending everything. RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, signed into law in 1970, designed specifically to dismantle the Italian Mafia. The genius of RICO, and it is a kind of genius, even if you’re on the wrong end of it, is that it doesn’t charge you for one crime.
It charges your entire organization for everything collectively going back years. every murder, every drug deal, every phone call, every handshake, one indictment, one conspiracy, all of you all at once. When the government turns that weapon on Queens in the late 1980s, it arrives with receipts, 100 wiretap conversations, 80 prosecution witnesses, crime scene photographs, telephone records, fingerprint evidence, firearms, narcotics paraphernalia, and most devastatingly, the people who were in the room. Ernesto Pinella, the Supreme
Team’s own chief of security, testifying for the prosecution. Julio Hernandez, security force. Trent Morris, primary drug courier. And Ena McGriff, the corrupt parole officer who sold confidential government documents to the gang, sitting in the witness box, testifying against the men she had armed and protected and lied for.
The organization eats itself. It always does. In 1993, Gerald Prince Miller and nine codefendants are convicted of narcotics trafficking and racketeering after a jury trial. Miller is sentenced to six life terms. Six. The judge looks at eight homicides in a single year at Colombian suppliers murdered in plastic bags at a government employee turned a gang asset.
and hands down six consecutive life sentences. Kenneth McGriff, meanwhile, had pleaded guilty back in 1989 to engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise. 12 years. He is released on parole in 1995. Compared to his nephew’s six lives, 12 years feels almost like a clerical error. And fat cat, Lorenzo Nichols pleads guilty in 1992.
25 years to life for ordering Brian Rooney’s murder, an additional 40-year federal sentence for drug charges and racketeering. Running concurrently, he receives a lighter sentence for cooperating with authorities. He cooperates. That decision made in a sealed courtroom in exchange for years off a sentence sets off a chain reaction that nobody in that room could have predicted.
A young rapper from South Jamaica named Curtis Jackson grows up hearing these stories. In 2000, he puts out a mixtape track called Ghetto Kurime, Forgive Me. And in it, he raps directly about Fat Cat’s cooperation. I used to idolize Cat. Hurt me in my heart to hear that [ __ ] snitched on Pap. That lyric leaks.
Kenneth McGriff hears it and everything that follows. The attempts on 50 Cents Life, the Murder Inc. investigation, the Jamm J probe, the federal racketeering case that sends McGriff away forever. Every single domino traces back to one cooperation deal, one sealed courtroom. 1992, one decision, 15 years of consequences. The government won the battle, but the war wasn’t finished yet.
1995, Kenneth Supreme McGriff walks out of federal prison after serving roughly 6 years of a 12-year sentence. He has a plan, movies, music, the legitimate world. He connects with a childhood friend from South Jamaica named Irv Lorenzo, the man the industry knows as Irv Goi, who by this point is running Murder Inc.
Records, one of the hottest rap labels in America. Jaw Rule is on the roster. Ashanti, the money is real. Together, Mcgriff and Gotti produce a straight to video film called Crime Partners 2000 featuring Jaw Rule, Snoop Dogg, and Ice Tea. Supreme McGriff, former crack kingpin, federal convict, is now in the entertainment business. And honestly, for a minute, it almost looks like a redemption arc.
Then prosecutors alleged he never stopped dealing. New York, Baltimore, a narcotics corridor running up the east coast and that murder inc. The label, the offices, the bank accounts was being used to launder over $1 million in drug money. Vudy and his brother Chris are indicted. They fight it. In 2005, they are acquitted. Mcgriff is not.
Meanwhile, that 50 cent lyric is still burning. The ghetto Quran track. Federal investigators documented plainly in a 2003 IRS affidavit. Messages transmitted over the Murder Inc. pager indicate that Mcgriff is involved in an ongoing plot to kill this rap artist and that he communicates with Murder Inc.
employees concerning the target. an active murder plot tracked through a pager by the IRS when Jam Master J run DMC’s legendary DJ and 50 Cents early mentor is shot dead in his Queen’s recording studio on October 30th, 2002. McGriff’s name enters that investigation, too. The theory Jay had defied an industry blacklist against 50 Cent and paid for it.
That theory was wrong. It took 22 years to find out. A jury convicted Ronald Washington and Carl Jordan Jr. in February 2024. Jordan’s conviction was later overturned in December 2025. A third man, Jay Bryant, pleaded guilty in April 2026. The real motive was a cocaine deal in Baltimore that Jay had cut Washington out of.
Mcgriff had nothing to do with it, but his shadow fell across that investigation for over two decades. Anyway, that’s the kind of gravity you accumulate when you build what he built. On February 9th, 2007, Kenneth Supreme McGriff is sentenced to life in prison without parole, convicted of paying $50,000 for the 2001 murders of rapper Eric E.
Moneybag, Smith, and Troy Singleton. Before the marshalss took him, he turned to face three rows of family and friends. He waved. He tapped his chest above his heart. He is currently housed at USP Bowmont in Jefferson County, Texas. No release date. Here is where we land. September 20th, 2024. After 34 years in federal prison, six life sentences handed down in 1993, Gerald Prince Miller walks out a free man.
The mechanism that freed him was the First Step Act, a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill signed by Donald Trump in 2018. In his letter to the court requesting release, Miller quoted the late Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, “Wisdom too often never comes, and one ought not reject it merely because it comes too late. From inside prison, he had already been doing the work.
Youth outreach, conflict mediation, prison staff submitted letters attesting that when trouble broke out on the yard, they called Miller. He would talk to people. Fight stopped. He runs a youth outreach organization in Queens now. Same neighborhood, same zip code, different mission. Lorenzo Fatcat Nichols left federal custody in March 2023.
Released 3 years early after a judge ruled he had effectively served his 40-year sentence. He is 66 years old. He still has a 10-year sentence waiting in Florida stemming from a 2007 car theft and fraud conviction. His attorney is challenging it on conflict of interest grounds. Fat Cat in a letter to the parole board wrote, “There is nothing smart or glorious about being a drug dealer.
I take full accountability for my actions that left a trail of destruction and tore many families apart. 36 years to get there, but he got there. Kenneth Supreme McGriff is at USP Bumont, Jefferson County, Texas. Life without parole, no release date, no firststep act motion on record. the man who tapped his chest above his heart before the marshals took him.
Still inside, Barry Michael Cooper, who grew up in the same building as Prince Miller, who watched the Supreme Team operate from his window and turned it into New Jack City, who changed American cinema, died on January 22nd, 2025. 66 years old, he lived to see Miller walk free. He just never got to ask him what it felt like.
From 1990 to 2008, felonies in New York City dropped by 72%, twice the national average. Officers who were there will tell you it started the night Edward Burn was killed on 107th Avenue. One murder, one badge in a vice president’s pocket. 72%. Three men, same block, same decade, same choices. until the choices weren’t the same anymore.
One is free and working with kids. One is in Texas with no release date. One is Fighting Florida. The corner on 150th Street doesn’t know any of their names. It never did. That was always the point.
