He started as just another kid on a grimy Queens block and ended up running one of the most feared drug crews New York had ever seen. On the street, they called him Fat Cat, a soft-spoken boss with a cold mind, big money, and a reputation for making problems disappear. But when the system pushed back, and a parole officer decided he wasn’t scared of the legend, the game turned personal.
What followed was a move so vicious it shocked even hardened hustlers, lit up the whole city, and turned this neighborhood kingpin into one of the most hated names in law enforcement. Years later, from behind the wall, he would say he was just an old man with regrets. Join us as we follow the rise, the war with the system, and the deadly order that turned Lorenzo Fat Cat Nichols into NYC’s most notorious kingpin.
Lorenzo Fat Cat Nichols did not start out as a famous name in the game. He was born in 1958 in Alabama and spent his early childhood in Birmingham, living with his grandmother and growing up far from the New York streets he would later control. When he was around 10 years old, he moved north to New York to live with his mother, Louisa, and her third husband.
Queens was a whole different world. Busy projects, crowded blocks, kids hanging out on corners instead of front porches. Nichols slipped into that world fast, he dropped out of school during 9th grade and started rolling with the Seven Crown street gang. Learning how the streets really worked.
By 1976, he was deep enough in the life to get convicted on two robbery counts, handed an 18-year sentence, and sent up state. Even though the judge gave him big time, he only did about two and a half years before getting back out and stepping into a city that was about to go crazy over dope money. When Nicholls came home around 1980, he was not trying to be just another corner boy.
He started organizing one of the early African-American drug rings in the projects of Jamaica Queens, moving past small robberies into serious narcotics. He linked up with the Italian mafia as his plug, buying product from them instead of depending on random middlemen, which gave him more control and more respect.
He pulled in many of his own family members, so the money stayed close, turning relatives into workers and trusted faces around him. At the same time, he recruited Howard Papy Mason, a friend from prison who would become a key part of his operation. Together, they ran a gang called the Bibos in the Jamaica neighborhood, selling drugs and stacking as much as $200,000 a month in profit.
Nicholls even supplied another gang headed by Kenneth Supreme McGriff, showing how deep his reach was in Queens. Piece by piece, he was turning from a young ex-con into a serious kingpin with crews corners and a growing name. Every boss needs a base. And for Nicholls, that spot was Big Mac’s Deli. The business came from family, too.
It had been owned by his wife Joannne’s father, and Nicholls turned it into the heart of his operation. From the outside, it looked like a regular neighborhood deli where people could grab food and talk on the block. On the inside, it was headquarters for what would be called a sophisticated drug trafficking organization.
running out of Jamaica, Queens. This is where his crew, men like Papy Mason, Luke Spoon Steven, and Joseph Mike Bones Rogers, checked in, took orders, and moved product. The money, the workers, the stash, the meetings with other crews, it all flowed through Big Macs. Ethan Brown and Queens Reigns Supreme, Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and The Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler described Nicholls with a linebacker thick neck, a head so big it nearly blocked out his friends faces and snapshots and his rangy beard.
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On the street, that look, plus the way he moved, earned him the nickname Fat Cat, and everyone around those projects knew the Delhi was his home base. While Nichols was building his empire, another monster crew was rising just a short ride away. The Supreme Team was an organized crime syndicate that started in the early 1980s in the Basisley Park houses in Jamaica, Queens.
A group of teenage 5enters turned their lessons and codes into a street structure with Kenneth Supreme Mcgriff as the leader and his nephew Gerald Prince Miller as second in command. Their focus was simple and deadly, the widespread distribution of crack cocaine. At its 1987 peak, the Supreme Team was pulling in more than $200,000 a day in receipts, running crack spots, and using violence and murder to keep a chokeold on the local drug trade.
This crew did not stand alone, either. They were known allies of the Lorenzo Nichols gang along with sets like the Crips and Black Disciples, and they clashed with rivals like the South Brooklyn Boys as the fight for territory got more and more bloody. Queens was not the only burrow in the war for the streets. Across the city, other sets were pushing their own product and reputation.
One of them was the Natas, a gang whose name comes from Na, meaning new birth in the Tyino Indian language. They started out in Puerto Rico in 1979, transforming themselves from a prison gang, into hardcore drug dealers. In New York, a chapter run by a mysterious female Khan, who called herself Lamadrina, tried to sell the group as an inmates rights movement.
But on the street, the reality was different. Their rivals list was long. Bloods, Crips, DDP, and other Hispanic gangs. For a boss like Fat Cat and Queens, this was the wider board he was playing on. Every burrow, every project had its own set of hitters, so alliances and beefs could make or break the flow of money. By the late 1980s, the drug game in New York was changing again.
Since 1989, heroin production worldwide had gone up, and that wave hit the city hard. As the purity of heroin rose and prices fell, street level markets got reshaped. Dealers who had ridden the cocaine and crack boom of the 1980s started adding heroin to the mix, putting bags right next to vials on the same corners.
Officials estimated there were somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million hardcore chronic heroin users in the country. But there were signs that a new heroin era was starting. There were more overdoses, more overdose deaths, and a bigger demand for treatment. Cops and feds were seizing larger amounts of heroin at every level of distribution and making more related arrests.
The media picked up on it, too, with wider coverage and scare stories about who was using. Some of the new faces were young middle or upper class European-Americans, young Puerto Ricans, and recent Haitian and Russian immigrants. While many young African-Americans were actually staying away from heroin, for crews like Nicholls’s and the circles he dealt with, the product on the table was shifting and the stakes only kept getting higher.
Running a big set out of a deli in Queens could only stay quiet for so long. By the mid 1980s, law enforcement was watching Nicholls closely. Big Mac Deli finally got hit. In June 1985, the spot was raided and Nichols was arrested on gun and drug charges. For a kingpin, getting snatched like that was more than just an inconvenience.
It put his whole organization under a microscope. He was able to make bail and touch the streets again. But the system was not done with him. Nicholls had an earlier parole hanging over his head from his robbery case. And once the new charges came into play, he was rearrested for violating that old parole.
The man who had turned a small neighborhood deli into the control room of a major operation was now back under state control, facing officers whose job was to watch his every move. And one of those parole officers would soon step straight into the line of fire of Lorenzo Fat Cat Nichols world. Once Brian Rooney slapped the cuffs on Lorenzo Fatcat Nichols for that parole violation, the relationship between the Kingpin and his parole officer turned into pure hate.
Nichols sat in jail stewing over the fact that this one parole officer had the power to snatch him off the block and shut down his whole flow. In the fall of 1985, Rooney got a call from a man tied into Fat Cat’s world, a street face named Perry Bellamy. Bellamy said he had important information, something Rooney needed to hear.
Rooney drove his beat up car to a bar in Queens called the Dog House and picked Bellamy up. Later that night, they parked up on a quiet stretch of 119th Avenue. Rooney had no idea that a Dotson 280Z was rolling up with the shooter riding shotgun and that he was about to be the one in the crosshairs. What happened next looked like a straightup contract hit.
Rooney was sitting in his car with Bellamy when the Datson slid alongside. One of the men in that ride raised a gun and opened fire into Rooney’s window before the officer could even pull his own weapon from his waistband. The parole officer, who had just testified against Nicholls at the violation hearing, was hit repeatedly and died from his wounds.
Bellamy, who had been in the car when the shots rang out, bailed out and ran toward Basley Park. On the street, people whispered that the hit had been put together from behind bars by Fatcat himself, payback for being sent back to prison. For law enforcement, this was not just another murder. This was a parole officer getting taken out in the middle of a gang war.
Two weeks later, on October 25th, 1985, detectives moved in on Bellamy. Detective James Wedell had heard from an informant that Bellamy knew something about the Rooney murder and that he had helped the cops before in other cases. Around 11:30 in the morning, Wadell approached Bellamy on the street in Jamaica and asked him to ride with him to the 113th precinct.
Bellamy agreed. He was put in a dormstyle room used by officers catching naps on long shifts. Sergeant Robert Plansker, who said he viewed Bellamy as a witness, not a suspect, sat down with him and just to be safe, read him his rights. In that first version, Bellamy claimed he flagged down Rooney’s car and warned him that there was a contract out on his life.
According to Bellamy, Rooney told him to hop in the car, drove towards Sutfin Boulevard, and that is when Bellamy saw a Dodson 280Z pull up with Papy Mason in the passenger seat. Bellamy said Mason raised a gun and fired over and over at Rooney, while Bellamy jumped out and ran toward Basley Park.
Cops told him he would likely be treated as a material witness and even offered hotel protection to keep him safe. Bellamy stayed around the precinct most of that day, dozing on the CS, waiting to see what would happen next. By around 8:00 p.m., he was taken over to the Queen’s District Attorney’s office to make a videotape statement. Before the cameras rolled, Detective Bernard Stefen also read him his rights and asked him again to walk through the night of the shooting.
This time, Bellamy pulled Fat Cat’s name directly into the story. He said that weeks before the murder, while he himself was locked in the Queen’s house of detention, he had overheard Nichols cursing his parole officer and saying he’s going to get what’s coming to him. On October 9th, 1985, the day before the murder, one of Nichols people told Bellamy to go meet this PO at a certain spot in Queens.
The next day, Bellamy watched as that same man called Rooney and told him to meet Bellamy on Sutfin Boulevard. When Rooney showed up, he asked where the caller was. Bellamy led him toward Basley Park. That is where, according to Bellamy, Mason stepped in and shot Rooney dead. After the hit, Bellamy said Mason ordered him into the car and threatened to kill him and his family if he ever talked.
Close to midnight, Bellamy repeated that same story on videotape in front of an assistant district attorney. Got moved to a Marriott hotel under guard with other witnesses. and then the following evening was arrested and charged with helping in the murder he had just described. Once the case headed to court, Bellamy and his lawyer tried to wipe those statements off the board.
His attorney argued that Bellamy had been held for over 12 hours, not told he could leave, not given proper food or calls, and that he was never really free. Bellamy himself later claimed he did not go with the police by choice. He said they threatened to take him if he refused and that once in the station he was strip searched and grilled by up to 10 different officials.
He denied being read his rights and said his request to reach his lawyer. The assistant DA he knew and his own mother were ignored. In front of the jury, he told a different story about the night of the murder, saying Rooney came to him asking for help with Nichols’s parole hearing and that they were on their way to Nicholls sister’s home when Mason suddenly appeared and opened fire.
Bellamy said he ran from the scene in fear. He also testified that he had tried to warn a detective about a contract on Rooney’s life even before the murder and that he called again 3 days after the shooting, but never got a call back. The defense painted him as a snitch the cops had turned into a scapegoat to cover their own mistakes.
They argued that it made no sense for Nicholls and his crew to trust someone known for cooperating to help with a hit on a law enforcement officer. Even with all that noise, and after 5 days of hard deliberation, the jury still came back with a guilty verdict on Bellamy. His later attempts to get the conviction knocked down on appeal were rejected.
While the Rooney case was still hanging over everyone, the state made sure Fat Cat would not see the streets for a long time. In January 1988, after a 10-week trial in Q Gardens, a jury found Nichols guilty on a long list of charges. He was hit for three counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance, criminal possession of marijuana, criminal use of drug paraphernalia, and six counts of criminal possession of a weapon.
The case all came out of that 1985 raid in Jamaica where cops acting on a tip hid a two-story building and found around $200,000 in cash. A big stash of cocaine and heroin, five handguns, a police radio scanner, and the tools of the trade. A woman arrested with him, Rita Mayor, walked free after the same jury cleared her of all charges.
But Nicholls was done. Queen’s District Attorney John J. Sanuchi stepped in front of reporters and called him one of the major drug dealers in all of New York City, saying his operation pulled in millions every year and stretched from Queens into Brooklyn and Nassau County. When Nichols stood in front of state supreme court Justice Vincent Naro, he was looking at a minimum of 15 years and a possible 25 to life.
The judge set sentencing for early February. Even before that 1988 guilty verdict, Rooney’s hand could still be felt. After the 1985 arrest at the Jamaica building, it was Rooney who had recommended that Nicholls not be allowed back out on the street. At first, Fat Cat had tried to play it off, telling Rooney he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, only in the deli to buy a sandwich.
But once Rooney got on the phone with the lead detective and heard what was really sitting in that office at the back of Big Macs, dope, guns, money, and a man literally sitting on two loaded pistols, he made his move. He locked Nicholls up on the parole violation, testified against him at the hearing, and got him remanded with no bail.
That choice made by a parole officer who probably thought he was just doing his job now sat in the background of every courtroom moment. Even as Nichols stood there on drug and gun charges, he was already facing a separate seconddegree murder charge in connection with Rooney’s death, waiting for that case to come for him. Being behind a wall did not mean Fat Cat stopped calling shots.
By the late 1980s, the courts finally caught up with what he had been doing from inside. In federal court, he pleaded guilty to two racketeering murders that had been carried out while he was locked up. The first was the killing of a young woman who should have been untouchable to him, his own girl and the mother of his son, Myrtle Horscham.
The second was the murder of a childhood friend and associate named Isaac Balden. When Nicholls appeared for his secret plea in front of Judge Edward R. Corman, the judge pushed him on why he had signed off on his girlfriend’s execution. Was one of the purposes of this to teach other people in the organization a lesson about not stealing from you? The judge asked.
Fat Cat answered, “It wasn’t just the stealing. It was the fact that she was my girl and that she took my money and spent it on another person.” When the judge pressed him, “Was there any other reason other than your desire other than jealousy, shall I say?” Nicholls admitted more. “Yeah,” he said.
“Because in other words, she made me look bad in front of people who was within the organization.” For Myrtle, that was all it took. Myrtle Horscham, better known on the street as Misha, was only 20. She was the mother of Nichols young son and played an active part in his operation, moving money and working the game.
When word came back that she had skimmed somewhere around $50 to $60,000, and even worse in Fat Cat’s eyes, spent that money on another man, the whole thing turned from business to straight ego. At first, Nichols said he let her tell her side and tried to stay calm. But then his top enforcer, Brian Glaze Gibbs, told him a different version that she had blown the money on this and that people were watching to see what Fat Cat would do.
According to Nicholls, Glaze pushed the pressure point, saying, “What you going to do, man? You look bad if you let her get away with this.” Nicholls finally gave the green light, saying, “Go ahead. Do what you got to do, but don’t do it at our house.” On December 20th, 1987, Glaze and three others put the play in motion.
They waited near a building in the 40s projects where Myrtle had left her son TC with a babysitter. Two shooters hid in the backseat of a friend’s car. When Myrtle came back with the baby and her friend Regina Brown, they forced both women into the car at gunpoint. The car was driven to a dead-end street with Glaze following behind.
Both women were hit at close range and left for dead in the car with TC there to see it. Myrtle died. Brown somehow crawled out and got help. TC was later dropped in his grandmother’s yard. From behind his cell, Nicholls had proved he could still hit close and cruel. The other killing Nicholls admitted to involved a man he described as the only person he had ever gone back to prison to visit, a childhood friend named Isaac Bowden.
After Bowden came home from his own bid, Nichols had given him support, money, and even helped him get a job at a construction company that looked clean on paper but sat close to Nichols’s world. But Balden had his own demons. He slipped back into using, fell in with a Bronx stickup man named Henry Bowden and ended up in on a home robbery that cut way too close.
In 1985, while Nickel’s girlfriend, Caralin Tyson, was at home. Henry, Isaac, and others broke in. Pistol whipped her and robbed her of cash and jewelry. It did not take long for word to come back that Isaac had been part of it. Nicholls confronted him, reminding him of how he had given him $20,000 when he was broke and locked up, and asked why he had set him up like that.
Balden apologized, blamed his head being messed up and gave up the names of the others. Nicholls told him to go back to Alabama and disappear. When a first attempt to hit Henry turned into a shootout that he survived, Nicholls then found out that Isaac had ignored the warning and had even told Henry that Fat Cat was coming for him.
On November 11th, 1986, someone caught up with Isaac on the street and shot him dead. As Nicholls later explained it, I loved him, but he gave me no choice, saying he could not go to the police and calling it the law of the jungle. While Nichols was stacking bodies from his cell to protect his name and his empire, his old security man turned rival, Howard Papy Mason, was causing a different kind of storm.
By early 1988, Mason was sitting in jail again on weapons charges, angry and feeling like the system had played him. From a jail house phone in Brooklyn, he sent out a message to his crew. A cop had to die. In the early morning of February 26th, 1988, a young officer named Edward Burn sat alone in a marked patrol car outside a house in South Jamaica.
The house belonged to a Gy immigrant who had been calling the police on local dealers and whose home had already been firebombed twice. Burn’s job that night was to sit on that corner and show the dealer someone was watching. Around 3:30 a.m., another car pulled up beside him. One man knocked on the passenger window to distract him while another crept up on the driver’s side with a 38 and shot him in the head multiple times.
Two more stood as lookouts. Burn died shortly after at the hospital. The hit lit up the whole country. Politicians called his family. News cameras rushed into South Jamaica. On the street, everyone understood what the message was supposed to be. This was payback for disrespect, a warning that if you cross certain crews, not even a police badge could save you.
The burn killing did not scare law enforcement away. It flipped the script. Top agents and prosecutors called it an insane move that had changed the rules of the ball game. They poured heat onto South Jamaica and started tapping phones tied to both the Bibos and the Nicholls crew. One of those lines belonged to Fat Cat’s sister, Viola, who was working directly for Mason and bagging crack for his Bibbo set.
The wire on her phone picked up more than random street talk. She was a junkie and a heavy talker, running a 100 calls a day, slipping into coded pig Latin street language with lines like styiz streety dong cuz everything is going to be dedite while still dropping pieces the feds could use. By August 1988, the US attorney’s office in Brooklyn had enough to go wide.
They unsealed a federal complaint and launched what they called Operation Horsecollar, a three-state sweep aimed right at the $20 million a year drug empire tied to Nickels and Mason. In August 1988, more than 400 agents and cops hit locations linked to Fat Cat and Papy. They moved not just in Queens, but across three states, kicking in doors at dawn.
Around 30 people were arrested in that one sweep alone. Nichols and Mason were both pulled from their upstate prison cells and hit with fresh federal cases. Five buildings in Queens were seized, including the burnedout house owned by Nichols’s mother, Louise Coleman, that had been firebombed earlier in the war, killing her wheelchairbound daughter, Mary.
Louise and her husband Amos were arrested down in Alabama, yanked out of bed in shackles. Fat Cat’s wife Joanne was taken in at a spot in Virginia. His sister, three nieces, a brother-in-law, and a girlfriend all got picked up. On Mason’s side, his mother Claudia and two girlfriends were also taken. The feds grabbed loaded machine guns, shotguns, cash, cocaine, and heroin.
To the young dealers on the street, Nicholls had been almost a legend, a Robin Hood figure who threw basketball tournaments, barbecues, and beach trips, all paid out of drug money. Now, those same kids watched his whole family and crew get rolled up in one operation. Even as she was spitting and cursing at cameras on the way into custody, Viola broke fast once she was inside.
She agreed to cooperate and ended up testifying at Mason’s trial for Officer Burn’s murder. She helped prosecutors decode the wire taps, turning all that pig Latin back into regular English for the jury. Her cooperation was rewarded. She got parrolled and hidden in the witness protection program. Fat Cat was furious. In a bug call from prison on his 30th birthday, Christmas Day 1988, he told her he would cop out if that was what it took to save his mother, and he made it clear he did not forgive his sister for jamming their own family. Even later, he
would say, “We don’t speak.” saying he could not side with trying to jam your mother, the person who gave you birth into this world. That phone call was also where you could hear his mind turning toward the deal that would change everything. By September 1989, the pressure finally cracked Fat Cat. The US Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn got him to sign a plea agreement that required him to be fully debriefed about everything he knew regarding narcotics and murders.
Under that paper, he agreed to give up his former associates, including details about his old lieutenant Papy Mason, who was facing his own federal racketeering and conspiracy charges, including the hit on Officer Burn. At first, the feds kept the whole thing sealed. The secret plea took place in the judge’s chambers, and the record was locked down to protect ongoing investigations and to keep Nicholls alive.
But once word leaked in the press that he was cooperating, reporters pushed to unseal the files. When the papers finally came out, the public saw how far he had gone. He had agreed to help the same system he had spent his life fighting. On the block, people joked that the cat has become a canary. For Nicholls, flipping was not some quick hustle.
He later said it felt real, real, real real bad. That he would wake up in the middle of the night wondering how he had let himself get into this position. But he also knew exactly why he had done it. His mother, Louise, was in deep. She had been charged in the same big case, accused of owning property used for drug trafficking, and at one point faced the kind of time that could keep a 70-something woman behind bars until death.
The government had direct buys from her and wire taps of her talking like any other player in the game, threatening to put two in the head of a dope fiend if he did not back off the store. For a son who had dragged his whole family into the drug world, the idea of watching his mother die in jail was too much. In the end, his plea helped her.
She pleaded guilty to lesser charges and walked with probation and a fine instead of decades in prison. Other women in his circle like his girlfriend Caralin Tyson and his wife Joanne also got deals that were lighter than what they might have faced if he had stayed quiet. He took the snitch jacket so they did not have to do heavy time.
On the other side of the courtroom, the face of the government became a young assistant US attorney named Leslie Caldwell. She had only been in that office a couple of years when she was handed the Mason case, which was already tied into Fat Cat’s world through Burn’s murder and the Bibbo’s connection.
Older judges doubted her at first, saying she was too inexperienced to handle something this big. But she locked in, spent long days and nights listening to thousands of FBI tapes, picking through obscinity lace calls and coded talk to find the pieces that link Mason to the burnt hit, and tied Nicholls into the wider racketeering web.
She built cases not just on drugs, but on violent enterprises and organized crews like the Supreme Team and the Bibos. In one trial, she got all four burned shooters convicted in state proceedings to back up the federal work. In another, she took Nicholls into a separate courtroom on the murder of a parole officer and saw to it that he ended up with serious times stacked on top of his state sentence.
People who worked with her said she was like a dog biting your leg. Once she locked on, she did not let go. By the early 1990s, the picture around Fat Cat was clear. He had already been given 25 years to life on his state drug and gun conviction. In federal court, he had pleaded guilty to ordering the murders of Merlin Isaac and picked up racketeering time that carried its own life terms.
On top of that, in 1992, he pleaded guilty to ordering the murder of parole officer Brian Rooney and was sentenced to another 25 years to life for that hit alone, along with extra time on drug and racketeering charges that added up to 40 more years. his cooperation never turned into the extraordinary miracle he might have hoped for.
Prosecutors said his help had been limited and that other informants had even tied him to more killings beyond the ones he had admitted. He sat in a federal facility under an alias, a ghost in the witness program, still under indictment from Queens for Rooney, even as he finished copying out in other courts.
When asked what he hoped for now, he said one simple thing, that he did not want to die in jail. that he wanted to die with my feet on the sidewalk, even if it meant doing 50 years and somehow still walking out. Every step he took had brought him to the one place every street boss says they fear most. A cell where all you have left are your memories, your regrets, and the sound of a door closing behind you.
Even after all the murder wraps, the drug cases, and the long bids, Fat Cat did not stop trying to run a hustle from behind the wall between 1999 and 2005. while he was supposed to be rotting in a cell. Investigators say he was quietly running a stolen car ring like it was just another corner. From prison, he helped move around 250 high-end rides, mostly luxury SUVs, out of South Florida and into buyer’s hands in 14 different states.
The play was simple but grimy. His crew would grab the cars, tweak the vehicle identification numbers just enough to slide past basic checks, retitle them, and push them back onto the street like they were clean. By the time the feds finally jammed the whole ring up, the cars they had flipped were worth around $8 million.
In 2006, Lorenzo Fat Cat Nicholls stood up again and pleaded guilty to racketeering charges tied to that auto scam. His own son, Lorenzo Nichols Jr., also took a plea and was hit with 7 years. Another name on the indictment was Richard White Boy Rick Worship out of Detroit, showing how deep and wide the network of old school dope boys and car thieves still ran.
Out of 11 main players, 10 took deals. Even locked up, the so-called retired Kingpin was still trying to eat off the game. By 2010, the same man who once gave orders on who lived and who died was now sitting in a maximum security cell in Clinton Correctional Facility. In a letter sent to the New York Daily News, Nichols said, “I came to prison a brazen young man in my 20s, and now I’m a humble middle-aged man of 51.
” He wrote that he had nothing but time to ponder his misdeeds and told the paper, “To the victims of my criminal activities, I offer my deepest regret and sincerest apology. On paper, it sounded like an OG trying to talk like a changed man. But on the street and in the NYPD, people were not buying that jail house soul talk so easily.
Cops who remembered the bodies tied to Fat Cat treated that letter like a bad joke. Patrolman’s benevolent association president, Patrick Lynch, read his words and fired back, calling it an apology of convenience. He did not sugarcoat his feelings at all. “We can’t go back in time and resurrect all the victims of this murdering mut,” Lynch said.
The only reason he stopped bringing death by guns and drugs to our streets is because we arrested and jailed him. To the union, Fat Cat was not some wise old head reflecting on the past. He was still the same man whose orders had left families broken and cops dead. That is why even as Nichols was talking about regret, the people representing officers on the front line were already gearing up to fight any move that might one day crack his cell door open.
Nichols himself claimed he did not expect mercy. In that same 2010 letter, he wrote that he was going to wave his right to appear in front of the parole board. Basically saying he was not even going to stand there and beg for release. He said straight out, “I want you to know I have no expectations of ever being released.
” He added, “I’ve accepted the consequences of the life I once lived and the choices I made so very long ago.” At the same time, he let everyone know that the punishment had not just landed on him. “I guess I’m writing to assure you and all who need to know I’m suffering, that my family and I are continually paying for crimes real and imagine,” he wrote, trying to show that his people were still catching the fallout.
“It sounded like a man resigned to die behind the wall, but the cops were not taking any chances that the system might soften with time.” New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly also stepped in, making sure the parole board heard from the top cop in the city. In a strong letter, he told the board that Nichols should not be parrolled now or ever, calling the drug lord’s record a direct assault on society.
Nichols answered Kelly in his own letter, saying, “I want you to know I have no expectations of ever being released and insisted again that he had accepted his fate.” Neither side trusted the other, and that gap was only going to grow when the parole clock started ticking louder. By 2021, some people were already worried that the year’s passing might make decision makers soft.
The Detectives Endowment Association put that fear in writing. They pushed a direct call to action titled, “Help keep the killer of parole officer Brian Rooney in prison.” They told people to send letters to Clinton Correctional Facility by a deadline of November 30th, 2021, urging the state to deny parole to Lorenzo Fatcat Nichols, listed under his prison number 88A1,7001.
In the DEA letter to supervising offender rehabilitation coordinator Jess Thomas, Union President Paul Dijakamo laid it out like a case file. He said the motive was revenge because Rooney had helped send the kingpin back to the penitentiary on that parole violation. The union’s message was clear. There might be parole for inmates, but for Rooney’s family and friends, there can never be any parole from the pain of that premeditated killing.
The DEA did not stop at telling the story. They reminded the parole board that Rooney had been killed simply for doing his job of safeguarding the citizens of New York. In their eyes, any talk about releasing Nicholls was a direct threat to public safety. The letter flat out said that the Division of Parole had a duty to safeguard the citizenry by keeping cowardly cop killers, especially those who kill in cold blood, behind bars for life.
Even with all that pressure, Nicholls still tried another angle. In 2022, at 63 years old, he filed a request for compassionate release from federal custody. This time, he did not lead with street talk. He led with health problems. In a letter to Judge Edward Corman in Brooklyn Federal Court on August 15th, he said he was dealing with high blood pressure and new migraine headaches.
He claimed that stress was weighing him down and pushing his blood pressure even higher. He said he had now developed migraines after receiving news of being incarcerated for four more years due to miscalculations and a failure to inform of a probation violation in which he was never charged, sentenced, nor knew existed.
On top of that, he complained that since being moved to his current facility, he had been denied the right to a vegan diet, which helps control his glucose and prostate levels. He also let the court know that his sister, his grandson, and his niece had died while he was locked up, and that the grief had hit him hard.
In his own words, “I try to stay strong, but the stress is waiting me down.” And he was scared his health would rapidly decline under those conditions. It was a different kind of plea, not about what he had done, but about the body and mind of an old head now saying he was tired. The feds were not impressed.
Brooklyn US Attorney Bon Peace filed a long answer, telling Judge Corman why this request should be denied. Prosecutors said straight up that Fat Cat’s migraine complaints is not an extraordinary and compelling reason to let him go. Peace wrote that Nicholls had not given any proof of serious diagnosed illnesses in his plea.
The filing pointed out that there was no medical record showing he actually needed a vegan diet and that the government is not aware of any medical requirement that Nichols consume a vegan diet. Even more important, peace said Nichols had not shown real remorse in that letter. At the same time, prosecutors reminded the court who they were dealing with.
They called him the kingpin of the Nicholls Enterprise. They pointed out that after Myrtle’s murder, Nichols rewarded the hit squad with $5,000 and 125 g of cocaine each, and that when he could not get his hands on an Foreman Perry Bellamy, he instead ordered Bellamy’s father, Maurice, shot in the head.
To the feds, nothing about migraines or vegan food could erase those receipts. While the legal papers were flying, the people who had actually worked with Brian Rooney were watching everything with disgust. Rooney’s old partner, retired parole officer Alan Ryder, was 76 years old by then, but his feelings about Fat Cat had not softened.
When he heard that Nicholls wanted out because of stress headaches, he said flat out that the Kingpin had too much blood on his hands and should rot in prison. Writer remembered Rooney as a good guy who showed compassion even to parole violators, sometimes taking money out of his own pocket and putting it in their commissary accounts so they could buy basic things inside.
He talked about Rooney’s son, Thomas, who was only 18 months old when his father was gunned down. “He doesn’t know his father, and my heart breaks for this little boy,” Writer said, pointing out that Thomas was now a grown man who had lived his whole life with that hole. Writer said he had no compassion for Nicholls and that maybe God will forgive him, but I certainly can’t.
Police Union Chief Patrick Lynch also weighed in again when the compassionate release play hit the news. He was furious that a man convicted of ordering a cop killing was talking about his own stress and anxiety as a reason to go home. “It’s infuriating to hear this cop killer whine that he should be released due to stress and anxiety,” Lynch said.
He asked, “What about the stress and anxiety of the Burn and Rooney families?” Not to mention the cops who patrol the same streets where these heroes were assassinated. He called Nichols complaints crocodile tears and said, “We have zero sympathy for the crocodile tears of a cop killing drug lord.
The judge shouldn’t have any either.” In the eyes of the unions, every new letter from Nichols was just another attempt to slide out of the consequences while the families of the dead officers had to carry the weight for life. Inside the system, Nichols was still talking and trying to shape his story. When he faced the parole board, he denied being involved in the Edward Burn murder, saying he was tired of being tied to that case.
Once even writing, “I’m surprised someone hasn’t placed me on the grassy null in Dallas yet.” But when it came to Brian Rooney, he told the board that he took full responsibility for the parole officer’s death while trying to soften his role. He claimed that he only wanted Rooney roughed up so the officer would miss a crucial hearing, not killed.
“If I never set that in motion, it wouldn’t have happened.” he said, then admitted that to the family it means nothing, that that wasn’t the intent. Ryder did not buy that either. He said Rooney was marked for death because he had so-called disrespected Nicholls by taking him into custody on the parole violation.
By that time, the shooters tied to Rooney’s killing and one of their brothers had finished their federal sentences. The accomplice who lured Rooney to the spot, Perry Bellamy, was parrolled in 2020. Nicholls, for his part, told the board that he did not expect to walk free until he was in his 70s. Even that prediction would soon be tested.
In 2023, after decades of saying he would probably die in prison, Fat Cat caught a break he had been chasing in different ways for years. Brooklyn federal judge Edward Corman ruled that Nicholls would be released from federal prison 3 years early, saying that Nichols had in effect already served his 40-year federal sentence. The judge did not say Fat Cat was suddenly a saint or that his health demanded release.
Instead, he focused on the math. Corman wrote that if he had sentenced Nichols today, he could have fixed the Bureau of Prisons problem by giving him 36 years instead of 40, since he had always expected Nicholls to get credit for four years he had already spent in state prison before the 1992 federal sentence.
Thanks to the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill signed in 2018. The judge now had the discretion to correct that. Nichols had already served time in state and federal custody, but he still owed time to the feds. With this new decision, Corman basically said that part of the tab had now been paid.
Nichols lawyer, Richard Levit, painted his client as a changed man. In a filing to Corman before the ruling, he called Nichols rehabilitated and said he wanted to be a motivating force who would try to repair the damage he had caused. Levit quoted a December 2021 letter that Nichols had sent to the state parole board.
In that letter, Fat Cat wrote, “The past 36 years has given me a lot of time to reflect and be honest with myself that selling drugs was no shortcut to success.” He said, “There is nothing smart or glorious about being a drug dealer.” And admitted, “I now realize how young and ignorant I was. I take full accountability for my actions that left a trail of destruction and tore many families apart.
” After Corman’s decision, Levit called it a good result and said his client was looking forward to his eventual release. As far as we’re concerned, this chapter of his life’s closed, Levit said, talking like the story was finally moving out of the courtroom and onto whatever comes next. Even after the federal sentence was cut down, Fatcat did not walk straight out the gate.
Corman’s ruling meant that Nichols would stay at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn until federal officials could transfer him to Florida. down there. A separate 10-year sentence was still waiting for him in Martin County for his role in that car theft and title fraud ring, the one that had moved high-end rides years earlier.
Levit’s filing hinted that Nicholls might try to challenge that Florida conviction, too. He had pleaded guilty there in exchange for 10 years for himself and probation for his son, who was also charged. Later, he found out that his son had been cooperating with the authorities at the same time. Father and son had shared the same lawyer, which Levit said strongly supported a claim that Nicholls had been denied his right to conflict-free counsel.
While the lawyers were talking about appeals and second chances, cops were still heated. PBA President Patrick Lynch said that not even a millisecond should have been shaved off this murderous drug lord sentence, reminding everyone that our hero brother Pa, Eddie Burn, and parole officer Brian Rooney are not coming home anytime soon.
In his words, “This cop killer must not be sent home ever.” From his side of the glass, Nicholls was already talking like a tired OG who just wanted a quiet life. In his compassionate release letter, he had also written, “I am now an old man who dreams of going home to be with my wife, children, and grandchildren someday.” Reports said that if he did walk out, his plan was to live with his wife in Jacksonville, Florida, and work at her catering company.
He told the court, “I pray that you will grant this petition for compassionate release and allow me to go home to be with my family.” Federal records later showed that as of March 16th, 2023, he was no longer in federal custody. In the end, Lorenzo Fat Cat Nichols went from a block boss who had cops, killers, and hustler saying his name to an aging shot caller fighting headaches, parole boards, and his own past from inside a cell.
So, now that you’ve heard it all, do you see him as a cold-blooded kingpin who should never touch free pavement again, or a broken man who’s already paid enough? And can someone who put a price on a parole officer’s head ever really be forgiven? Or is there some point where time, age, and regret should matter more than the past?
