Let me tell you about a Friday, May 22nd, 1987. Friday before Memorial Day weekend, Elmont, Long Island, the quiet side of the city line where drug money bought split level homes with Mercedes in the driveway and Lincoln Town Cars out front. A woman named Joanne Nichols is driving that black Mercedes to the supermarket.
errands, normal Friday stuff. Men in an unmarked car pull her over. They flash what look like police badges. They tell her she’s wanted for questioning in a murder. She gets in their car. What choice does she have? They handcuff her. Then they cover her eyes with surgical cotton and gauze. Not a blindfold surgical cotton.
The kind of detail that tells you somebody planned this. And they transfer her to a van. That’s when they tell her the truth. She’s been kidnapped. I freaked out, she’ll say later. I remember throwing up for 2 days. Joanne Nicholls sits blindfolded and shackled in an apartment somewhere in Brooklyn. Two days. She doesn’t know where she is.
She doesn’t know if she’s coming home. Now, her husband, Lorenzo Nichols, known as Fat Cat, running an estimated $20 million a year cocaine and heroin operation out of a back office in Jamaica, Queens. A man who had his own parole officer shot dead for sending him back to prison. a man who while sitting in a cell gave the order to have the mother of his own child killed, who had a quiet voice and stacked bodies like Corgwood.
According to the detective who arrested him, the original ransom demand wasn’t money. It was 10 kg of cocaine. Think about that for a second. Somebody went after Fat Cat and asked to be paid in his own product. The audacity. At the end, the number shifts. $77,000 cash. Joanne is released after two days. The man behind all of it was from Red Hook, Brooklyn.
His name was Kelvin Dove. The streets called him King Alla. And here is the first wild thing I need you to understand before we go any further. He lived Red Hook, Brooklyn, 1953. Kelvin Dove is born into a neighborhood that the city of New York has spent decades designing to be forgotten. The Gowanas Expressway, built in 1941 by Robert Moses, runs along the edge of Red Hook like a wall.
Water on three sides, highway on the fourth, no subway, no bank. until 1997. The docks that once gave this place its reason for existing started going quiet in the 1960s when shipping containers moved the industry to New Jersey. The jobs left, the people stayed. That’s the short version of the neighborhood. Here’s the version that matters more.
In 1964, when Kelvin Dove is 11 years old, a man named Clarence, 13X, walks away from the Nation of Islam and starts teaching something new on the streets of Harlem. He was a student of Malcolm X. He called his movement the 5% nation, the Nation of Gods and Earths. His core teaching, the black man is God, not metaphor, not poetry. The black man is God.
And every man who understands that has a responsibility to teach the 85% who’ve been kept in ignorance by the 10% who run things. By 1965, his students are carrying that message into Brooklyn into what 5enters call Medina, named after the second holiest city in Islam, the city where the prophet went when Mecca cast him out. That’s not an accident.
That’s a statement. Kelvin Dove is 12 years old when that teaching arrives in his neighborhood. Let that land for a second. 12. Growing up in a place where the city’s indifference is not an abstraction. It’s a highway. It’s a missing bank. It’s docks that went silent before you were old enough to work them.
And into that specific silence comes a philosophy that says, “You are not forgotten. You are God.” The knowledge was just hidden from you. Now go find it. He finds it. By the time he is a young man, Kelvin Dove is King Allah. He teaches knowledge of self up and down the Red Hook projects. By community account, he is one of the most respected 5enter figures in all of Brooklyn and all of Medina through the 1960s and into the 70s and beyond.
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He is not a peripheral figure. He is a god in the truest 5enter sense of that word. A man who carries the teaching, who shapes young minds, who commands real respect on real blocks. He is also running in the streets. Both things are true simultaneously. I know that makes some people uncomfortable. Keep that discomfort. You’ll need it later.
Here is the context that makes this story bigger than one man. The Supreme Team, the notorious Queen’s drug crew whose mythology is now baked into hip-hop folklore, started as a group of 5enters. Rake joined the 5enters in 1985 and changed what rap lyrics could sound like. Big Daddy Kane came up through 5enter ciphers in Brooklyn projects.
Wu Tang Clan, Brand Nubian, Nas, Buster Rhymes, Gang Star. The entire golden age of hip hop is built on 5% of language and philosophy. King Allah is operating in the same world that produces all of it. The god who feeds minds on the block and the gangster who runs the street economy.
These are not opposites in Red Hook in the 1970s. They are often the same person navigating the same city with the same tools. He just takes it further than most. By 1987, Kelvin Dove is 34 years old. He has been King Allah for over two decades. He has earned a reputation that carries weight from Red Hook to Harlem. He is a man who knows exactly who he is and exactly what he is capable of.
and he has just decided to go after the most dangerous drug kingpin in Queens. You can’t understand the play without knowing who was sitting across the table. And the man sitting across that table was not somebody you played with. Jamaica, Queens, the block, a stretch of 150th Street, the back office of a grocery store called Big Max Deli, a business Fat Cat inherited from his father-in-law, which is either ironic or perfect depending on how you look at it.
From that back office, Lorenzo Fatcat Nichols runs a cocaine and heroin wholesale operation that earns an estimated $20 million a year. He’s not a street dealer. He’s a distributor. He moves kilograms. His standard price, $50,000 per kilo of cocaine. His top lieutenant personally earned $2.5 million over four years.
At its peak, prosecutors described the Nicholls enterprise as bringing in $100,000 a week. But this isn’t primarily a story about money. Is a story about what Fat Cat was willing to do to protect it. July 29th, 1985. Queens police descend on Big Mac’s deli with a search warrant. When two officers enter the back office, they find Fat Cat at his desk.
He starts to stand and reach toward his chair. They tell him to freeze. He stops. When they check the chair, he’d been sitting on two loaded pistols hidden under a cloth. Detective Sergeant Michael McGuinness, who was in that room, 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. Fat Cat is remanded when his parole officer, Brian Rooney, personally testifies against him. Two and a half months later, October 10th, 1985, Brian Rooney is lured to Basley Park in Queens and shot dead. Fat Cat will eventually plead guilty to ordering that murder.
$5,000 was the contract price. $5,000 for a man’s life. The man doing his job. From his prison cell, Fat Cat keeps running the operation. November 1986, he orders a rival named Isaac Balden killed. Late December 1987, he orders the murder of Myrtle Horscham, 20 years old, the mother of one of his sons, because she stole money from his organization.
Four hitmen track her down on a street in Jamaica, Queens. She is shot multiple times and killed. Her child, who was with her, is left unharmed on his grandmother’s lawn. Fat Cat pays each man $5,000 and 125 grams of cocaine. That is who Kevin Dove decided to go after. I’ll be honest, when I first looked at this story, I thought either this man is brilliant or he’s got a death wish.
The deeper I went into it, the more it started to look like both. and the outcome, him walking away from this. I don’t think that was just intelligence. I think it was timing, but we’ll get to that. Here is what the kidnapping tells you about King Allah. Regardless of anything else, this isn’t a crime of opportunity.
This isn’t some reckless gra. The men who take Joanne Nichols off the road don’t jump her in a parking lot. They have an unmarked car. They have fake police badges. They know her address. They know her car. They know her routine that she’d be driving herself to the supermarket on that particular Friday morning.
They have surgical supplies for the blindfold. They have a predetermined holding location in Brooklyn. This is organized. This is planned. This is someone who studied the target and found the one vulnerability that a man running a drug empire from inside a prison cell could not protect. his wife separated from him and living in Long Island.
Fat Cat from his prison cell gets the news. The demand comes in 10 kg of cocaine first, then it shifts. $77,000. In the end, the money is paid. After 2 days, Joanne is released. A year later, May 12th, 1988, a man named Richard Frasier of Brooklyn is convicted in Nassau County Court for his role in the kidnapping, firstderee kidnapping and grand lasso.
That conviction is in the court record. It was upheld on appeal in 1992. Now, here is where the primary sourcing gets interesting. Brian Glaze Gibbs, Fat Cat’s own enforcer. The man who personally carried out murders on Fat Cat’s orders. A man who knows exactly how this world operated has spoken on camera about what happened.
Gibbs says King Allah orchestrated the kidnapping and what comes next confirms without naming names that Fat Cat knew exactly who was responsible. In his only interview ever given to journalist Frederick Dannon for Vanity Fair magazine in April 1991, Fatcat is talking about the firebombing of his mother’s house that happens a year after the kidnapping.
He says, and I’m quoting directly, Glaze said, “I know where the mother of the man responsible for the firebombing lives. When she opened the door, let me kill his mother.” I said no. Even though my sister was laying in the funeral home, I couldn’t see that. Fat Cat declines. Not out of mercy. His actual explanation, I’m superstitious.
I believed it would bring me bad luck. That’s it. That is the reason King Allah’s mother doesn’t die. Superstition. The most feared drug kingpin in Queens passes on the kill because he doesn’t want bad luck. You literally cannot make this up. But what that quote tells us, what it proves is that Fat Cat knew.
He knew who did the kidnapping. He knew where to find that person’s mother. And he chose not to move for now. Almost exactly 1 year after Joanne Nichols is released. Early morning, May 20th, 1988, just after 12:30 a.m., South Jamaica, Queens, a gunman crouches behind a car parked across the street from the tan house on the block where Fat Cat grew up.
His mother, Louise Coleman, 71 years old, is inside. her husband Amos, her daughter Mary, Mary’s children, three grandchildren. Mary Nichols is 48 years old. She is wheelchair bound. She suffered a stroke years earlier. She weighs 250 lb. Mary has nothing to do with any of this. She is a woman in a wheelchair in her mother’s house at 12:30 in the morning, which should be the safest place a person can be.
The gunman opens fire on the house. over a dozen rounds, then throws an incendiary device through the ground floor window. He runs to a gray Buick where three accompllices are waiting. They drive away. Louise Coleman is watching television when she sees the door and the curtains burst into flames. She grabs her husband. She grabs three grandchildren.
She gets them out. Then she goes back for Mary. She tries to push her daughter out of the second floor window. 250 pounds, wheelchair bound, flames climbing the walls. Louise Coleman tries to save her daughter and she cannot do it. She has to leave. She has to choose to live. Firefighters find Mary Nichols in a second floor bedroom dead.
Winnow Nichols, Mary’s 10-year-old son, is pulled out of the building with second and third degree burns on his face and both arms. Four suspects are eventually arrested. Three are convicted. According to Brian Glaze Gibbs, King Alla is behind this, too. The account says King Alla told a respected 5enter elder referred to as Allah justice that Gibbs himself lived in Fat Cat’s mother’s house.
A lie, a deliberate lie used to weaponize the anger of a spiritual man into carrying out an attack on an address where Gibbs did not live. A woman in a wheelchair dies because of a lie told in the name of street beef. Here is the contradiction. King Allah spent decades teaching men to see through lies. And the weapon he used in this moment, according to the people who were there, was a lie.
The god built his whole life on truth. And in this moment, a lie is what gets someone killed. I’m not delivering a verdict here. I’m just telling you what the evidence says. You draw your own conclusion. So, here’s the question, and it is the obvious question. How How does a man kidnap Fat Cat’s wife, orchestrate an attack on Fat Cat’s mother’s house that kills Fat Cat’s sister, and then just go to prison for the kidnapping, and serve his time? Where is the retaliation? Where are the bodies? Where is the fat cat response? The answer is in the
calendar. And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. King Allah moves against Fat Cat in May of 1987. Fat Cat knows who is responsible within months. His enforcer, Glaze, offers to handle it. Fat Cat declines. Superstition. Bad luck. You heard him. Then the firebombing. May 20th, 1988. 3 months later, August 11th, 1988, Operation Horse Collar.
More than 400 federal agents and police officers descend simultaneously on the block in Queens and on locations in three states. They arrest 37 people in a single morning. Louise Coleman and Amos Coleman arrested in Birmingham, Alabama. Joanne Nichols arrested in Norfol, Virginia. Brian Glaze Gibbs picked up at a McDonald’s in South Carolina.
Fat Cat himself arrested in his cell at Walill Correctional Facility. Mason arrested in upstate New York. Five buildings seized. The entire Nicholls organization is dismantled before breakfast. The New York Daily News headline, Fat Cat’s empire crumbles. Then September 1989, Fat Cat, the man who ran a $20 million operation from a back office who ordered murders from his prison cell who was described by a federal prosecutor as probably the biggest drug dealer in Queens, signs a plea agreement.
He consents to be quote fully debriefed on his knowledge of narcotics trafficking and homicide. He cooperates with federal prosecutors. He is placed in the witness protection program under an assumed name. The cat becomes a canary. That’s not me being poetic. That’s the actual phrase used by people who watched it happen.
The army that would have reached King Allah gone. The man who would have ordered the retaliation cooperating with the government. The entire infrastructure of violence that made Fat Cat’s name something to fear. dismantled by 400 federal agents over the course of one morning. King Allah didn’t survive because he was untouchable.
He survived because he moved against a collapsing empire at the exact moment the floor was falling out from under it. Whether that was calculation or luck or some combination of the two, I genuinely do not know. But the timing is precise enough that it makes you wonder. He and his codefendant Vincent Chambers go to prison for the kidnapping.
The sentence by community account is approximately 23 years. He does the time. Post 2010, King Allah walks out of prison and returns to Red Hook. By community account, he spends his final years as one of the strongest leaders in Brooklyn, teaching again, building again, returning something to these blocks. He passes away in 2016.
Mary Nichols deserves to be named here. 48 years old, wheelchair bound in her mother’s house at 12:30 in the morning. Her son survived with burns on his face. She didn’t ask to be in this story, but she’s in it. King Allah built his whole life on knowledge of self. The teaching that the black man sees through deception to reach real truth.
The act that defines his street legacy by the account of men who were there was a lie told in the dark that sent fire to the wrong house. The god is gone. Red Hook is still here. The contradiction is still here. Kelvin Dove, King Allah, God of Medina, 1953 to 2016. Now you know.
