She made 200,000 a week selling crack at 19, then vanished. Jemeker Thompson Hairston, Los Angeles, June 1993. A school auditorium in the city she had been running from for 18 months. Sixth grade graduation. Folding chairs in rows, parents with cameras, children in white shirts and clip-on ties.
In the back of the room, men in plain clothes sit very still. They are FBI agents from the LA field office. They have been watching this building since before the children arrived. They have been watching her mother’s house. They have been watching the Hollywood Hair Extension office she ran as a front.
They are looking for a 31-year-old black woman wanted out of the Southern District of Illinois on one count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine and five counts of money laundering. Jemeker Mosley Thompson, federal fugitive, 18 months under four aliases, wanted for moving kilograms of cocaine into a small Mississippi River town at $25,000 a piece on credit.
Over $100,000 in Western Union wire transfers already on file. She comes through the side door wearing a wig and dark glasses. 11 years old, her son. She has not seen him in months. They calculated that a mother in hiding could miss birthdays, could miss Christmases, could miss everything except this. They were right.
She sits down in the back row. The ceremony begins. A teacher reads names. Her son sees her from the line and his face changes the way a child’s face changes when the world becomes safe again for 1 minute. She does not wave, she does not stand. The agents wait until after the program. They wait until the parents are taking pictures.
Then they take her in front of him. She came back for the graduation. She knew what it would cost. She paid for it anyway. Start before the kilos. Start before the wig. She was 8 years old when the marshals came for her mother’s apartment in South Central. Eviction. The men took the furniture out to the sidewalk and stacked it on the strip of grass between the curb and the front door. A child’s bed on the lawn.
Pots and pans in the gutter. Neighbors looking from across the street and then looking away. She told the story the same way for the rest of her life. In interviews, on church stages, and on Christian television, and in the memoir she would write at 48. She said, “I knew then I wanted money. I knew then I wanted to control everything.
” 8 years old. They sent her to Hattiesburg, Mississippi to live with her grandmother. 6 years in the deep South. Pine trees and porch fans and a grandmother’s discipline that the L.A. streets had not offered. Church on Sunday. School clothes ironed on Saturday night. The kind of small town black southern household that built a generation of children who never forgot the difference between order and chaos because they had felt both.
She came back to Los Angeles at 14. Taller, sharper, a runner. She joined the track team. She had ambitions that pointed at the 1984 games. South Central in the late 1970s could still produce that kind of dream in a 14-year-old girl who had spent 6 years being told she was somebody. But the neighborhood she came back to was changing.
Crack was 3 years out. The Reagan recession was deepening. The cocaine that had been a Hollywood toy in the 1970s was about to be cut down with baking soda and water and sold in $10 rocks on the corners she grew up on. The Crips and the Bloods had split into sets, the sets into factions. The crash unit of the LAPD was forming up.
The Watts of the 1965 uprising was 20 years gone, but the wound it left was being reopened by a new economy nobody understood yet. South Central in 1976 and South Central in 1981 are two different cities. She met Anthony Mosley in that gap. He went by Daff. He was older. He was already in business.
Marijuana, at first in volume, which in late 1970s South Central was a real business and not a sideline. He kept his money in shoe boxes and in dresser drawers and in the pockets of jackets he never wore. He drove the kind of car that announced what he did before anyone heard him speak. He had a quiet presence and a way of moving through a room that did not invite questions.
She watched him work for a while. Then she started counting it for him. She was good at it. She was always good at it. By the time she was 18, she was holding paper. By the time she was 19, she was holding more than that. They married in 1980. She wore white. He stayed in the business. She had a son in 1982 and they named him after his father, Anthony Mosley Jr.
The next 4 years are the years that do not appear in court documents and barely appear in news. She helped him run his operation while raising the boy. The marijuana years gave way to powder cocaine. The powder cocaine years gave way to crack as the rock started coming into LA in 1984 and 1985. The money got faster, the cars got better.
The house in Encino came into the story somewhere in there. The townhouse in Westchester, the hair business in Hollywood that put celebrity heads in front of her mirrors and gave her a reason to deposit cash without explanation. Then one day she told Daff she wanted them to leave. Move to Texas. Get the boy out of LA. He said yes. She remembers him saying yes.
The next day he drove to a car wash in Los Angeles and somebody shot him dead. The case was never solved. The shooter was never named. No witness ever came forward. No suspect was ever charged. The LA County Coroner’s Office handled the body. The Los Angeles Police Department took the report. The file went cold the way files like that went cold in 1980s Los Angeles.
Which is to say it went cold quickly and quietly and the homicide rate in South Central was high enough that one more dead young black man at a car wash did not slow anything down. He left her with a son in diapers, a business that needed running, and the question every widow of a man in that life has to answer in the first week.
She answered it. She buried him. Then she took over. This is the part of the story where a male subject would have a mentor and a war and a sit-down. She did not have any of those things. She had what Daff had left her, connections, customers, debts owed to her, debts she owed. She picked up the phone.
She kept his suppliers paying out. She kept his customers paying in. The transition happened quietly because she made it happen quietly. The Hollywood hair business stayed open. It was already a real business by then. Wigs and extensions for studio clients, for music video shoots, for women in the industry who would pay $300 for a unit that cost 40.
It was a money laundering instrument, and it was also a money maker on its own terms. Both things were true. That was the discipline of her operation. Every front had to function as a business even when nobody was looking. By 1988, she had moved past being Daff’s widow, running Daff’s connections. She was building something of her own.
The supply line on the federal record ran from the Dominican Republic into the United States and out through coastal distribution channels and back to her. Her cost was the cost of a wholesale buyer who could move kilograms without flinching. She had the volume. She had the cash.
She had the reputation among suppliers as a woman who paid on time and did not blink. The client she built in the late 1980s were not in Los Angeles. That is what makes her story different. Every other major LA wholesale operator of the crack era, Freeway Ricky Ross, the men who supplied the sets in the corners, sold into the local pipeline.
The local pipeline was saturated. The local pipeline was full of guns and full of police and full of the eyes of every federal agency west of the Rockies. She sold east. Specifically, she sold east to a man named Percy Bratton in Alton, Illinois. The Alton connection did not come from a federal informant’s imagination.
It came from the way every cocaine pipeline came together in the late 1980s through a relationship and a need. Bratton was a musician with East St. Louis connections and a habit of moving through small Midwestern cities where the white powder market was thin and prices ran high. He came West looking for a wholesaler who would front.
He found her. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals would later describe the connection in a single phrase that captured what the prosecutors had to admit and could not quite reduce. They called him her main squeeze. Alton is a small Mississippi River town 20 miles up river from St. Louis, population under 30,000.
The kind of town where everybody who used cocaine in the late 1980s knew where it came in and the kind of town where the federal task force could rebuild a distribution chart on a chalkboard inside of 6 months once a cooperator started talking. Percy Bratton was that town’s connection. He was charming. He was connected.
He was Jemeker’s main squeeze in the words the Seventh Circuit would later use on the public record. He was also her primary Midwestern distributor. She fronted him kilograms, $25,000 a piece on credit. He moved them through a half dozen sub-distributors in Alton, Robert Gaston, Marcus McAllister called Marquis Bow, Mark Mike called Spike, Mark Shorter, men whose names would appear later in a 13-defendant federal indictment.
The Bratton family worked the chain. Sisters and cousins as couriers. Louis Bratton would later testify about flying to Los Angeles to pick up money from her with a girdle full of cash strapped to his body. $25,000 in a girdle on a commercial flight from St. Louis to LAX. That is how money moved. When she went to Alton herself, she went for the big pickups.
One time she flew in and left with 100,000 in cash. Court records confirm it. $100,000, one trip, one pickup, one woman. She had something she would not have wanted spelled out at the time. She had a position no other woman in the documented history of the 1980s American cocaine trade quite had. She was not Griselda Blanco in Miami working as a Medellin principal.
Blanco was cartel. She was not Thelma Wright in Philadelphia who inherited her dead husband’s heroin operation in 1986 and walked away in 1991 before any indictment. She was not the women around the Chambers brothers in Detroit who managed crack houses for male principals. She was running her own pipeline. She was sourcing it, financing it, fronting it, and collecting on it.
She had a 12-person crew that worked for her and a husband replacement figure in Bratton who worked under her. There was no man over her in the chart. On the open historical record, Jamila Thompson is among the very few black women of the crack era who built that. She was 26 years old. She kept building. By 1989, the operation had a rhythm.
Kilograms going east on credit, cash coming west by girdle and by Western Union wire. Western Union receipts in the trial record showed at least $40,000 wired from Alton to Los Angeles during the charged conspiracy period. The reporter covering the trial for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote that the actual figure was over 100,000.
The court only had to prove what they could prove. The street knew what the street knew. The Hollywood hair business was running. Celebrity clients walked in and out of the front door. Cash deposits walked out the back. She kept books. She kept records. She paid her taxes on what could be shown. She lived in Encino.
She drove the cars. She took her son to school. She was by any neighborhood I view a successful black businesswoman in Reagan’s Los Angeles. The kind the city’s papers like to feature in lifestyle sections. By any federal I view, she was a kingpin candidate without the kingpin charge. That distinction matters.
The continuing criminal enterprise statute, title 21, section 848, the federal kingpin law, carries a 20-year mandatory minimum. It requires the government to prove a continuing series of violations, a supervisory role over five or more people, and substantial income. Jemeker’s organization on paper met every element. She had Bratton.
Bratton had Gaston, McAlister, Mike, Shorter, the family couriers. That is more than five. The series of violations was documented. The substantial income was documented. The feds did not charge her with the kingpin statute. They charged her with section 846, conspiracy to distribute cocaine, plus five counts of money laundering.
The reason has never been spelled out in the public record. Possibly, the prosecutors thought the supervisory chain was thinner than it looked. Possibly, they wanted a cleaner verdict. Possibly, they wanted her in fast and did not want to gamble on the kingpin proof. It is one of the unwritten realities of her case. The government had a black woman running an independent multi-state cocaine pipeline in the 1980s and did not call her a kingpin in the indictment.
The street called her something else. The street called her queenpin. That name would not appear in any document until after she was free and her memoir made it a brand. In 1989, nobody was calling her anything. She was the woman with the hair business and the husband at the cemetery and the money. The federal file on her was opening, but it had not opened wide yet.
But the federal apparatus that was about to come for her was the same apparatus that in those same months was finishing the case against another independent operator a country away. In Washington, D.C. in 1989, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia was preparing to sentence a young man named Rayful Edmond III for moving more cocaine through one city in one year than most cartel-sponsored networks moved in five.
Rayful Edmond was 24. He had run D.C. He had eaten dinner at the Ritz. He had court-side seats at Capital Centre Bullets games. He had brought a Colombian connect onto American soil and operated a 1,700 lb monthly cocaine flow through a single city. The Feds put him away for life without parole on a kingpin conviction.
The case made every front page in the country. The trial was the federal courthouse event of the decade. Jemeker Thompson was not on any front page in 1989. Her organization was smaller, more disciplined, less violent, and pointed east into a small Illinois town nobody outside the Mississippi River corridor had heard of.
The Edmond machine collapsed loudly. Jemeker’s was collapsing quietly. The same federal will that brought down Edmond in DC was in those same months beginning the wire intercepts on Percy Bratton’s Alton phones. The Alton task force was finding her on tape one call at a time. The DEA agents working her case did not know yet that they were building the case against the woman.
They knew there was a Los Angeles voice on the phone with Bratton calling herself by a first name. They were pulling Western Union records. They were watching mail, but here is the part the eye test missed. She had no enforcers in the indictment. She had no street rivals. She had no body count. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in the document that closed her case in 1997 would document exactly two acts of violence on the record.
She had once threatened Bratton over slow payments. She had left threatening voicemails for a sub distributor known as Rabbit McTissic’s. That was the ceiling of her violence on the federal record. Threats. Two of them. Voicemails. The Kirkus review of her memoir would later call the violence in her story off-screen unexplored.
That is not a literary observation, it is a forensic one. Her organization did not kill people. The calling in her story was done to her. Death at the car wash, never solved. She built and ran her operation on the documented record without producing a single body. In 1989, she was 27 years old running an operation that fed an entire river towns cocaine economy, owning a hair business that styled celebrities, raising a son named after his murdered father, and a federal task force a thousand miles east had her on tape.
The feds came in 1991. Percy Bratton got caught with kilograms in his car. There are a hundred ways to fall in the wholesale cocaine business. His was the most ordinary one. A traffic stop, a search, product in the vehicle. The federal calculus came down on him quickly. Cooperate or die in a cell. He cooperated. He cooperated all the way.
He told the federal task force about the kilograms on credit at 25,000 a piece. He told them about the Bratton family couriers. He told them about Louie flying to LA with a girdle. He told them about Robert Gaston as the cocaine processor and safekeeper for virtually every deal he organized.
He told them about Marcus McAllister and Mark Mike and Mark Shorter and Eric Johnson. And he told them about her. He told them about the woman in Los Angeles who had been fronting him kilograms for two years. The voice on the phone calls, the hand that picked up $100,000 in cash from him in person. The supplier behind the Alton economy.
The indictment came down in late summer 1991. 13 defendants, United States District Court for the Southern District of Illinois, East Saint Louis Division. The lead defendant on her side of the chart was Jemeker Mosley-Thompson. She was warned. The memoir says she had sources inside her own network who got word to her before the agents came.
The federal version says they were closing in regardless. Both versions end the same way. By the time the FBI moved on her addresses in LA, she was gone. What followed is one of the longest documented fugitive runs by a black female federal narcotics defendant of the era. 18 months, four aliases, Jan Quinn, Wanda Jones, Lisa Jones, Tammy Jones.
She moved through the network she had built, from city to city, from state to state. Hattiesburg, where she still had family from her grandmother’s years, Detroit, where she had operational contacts, Atlanta, Miami. The memoir opens on the top floor of a luxury Miami Beach hotel where she watched cable news with the sound off and waited for her face to appear on it.
It never appeared. Her case did not make national television. It was a Southern District of Illinois prosecution, a regional federal indictment out of East Saint Louis. Local Alton coverage. Some Saint Louis Post-Dispatch reporting. The Los Angeles papers did not run her face. The national networks did not run her face.
She was never on America’s Most Wanted, despite what later retellings of her story would claim. 18 months later, her own attorney, in an interview about the case, would observe that she might have been free longer if she had stayed gone, but she did not stay be And the reason she did not stay gone was already 11 years old and starting sixth grade in Los Angeles.
The FBI knew the boy was at a graduation in June 1993. They knew her mother’s address. They knew the hair business address. They knew Anthony Jr. would be on a stage receiving a paper certificate that meant nothing to anyone but a mother who had not seen him in 18 months. They calculated that a mother in hiding could miss birthdays, could miss Christmases, could miss everything except this.
She came. They took her. She would describe the moment in a television interview on the Christian Broadcasting Network many years later. She said, “It was the worst feeling that any mother could feel for their child to see them get arrested.” She said, “The worst feeling.” Her son was 11. He went home with his grandmother that day.
The next time he saw his mother for any length of time, he was a teenager. The time after that, he was a man. The trial was in East St. Louis, Illinois in December 1993. She was the last of the 13 defendants to be tried. The other 12 had gone through the courts already. The appellate matter of their convictions reaching the seventh circuit the following summer in a case called United States versus McAlister.
By the time Jemeker stood trial, the cooperators were rehearsed and the evidence was tight. The government had her own wire records. They had her own cooperator testimony. They had the Western Union receipts. They had the kilograms. The prosecution was led by Assistant United States Attorney Robert L.
Garrison of the Criminal Division in Fairview Heights, Illinois. The defense was Howard B. Levy, a a Chicago lawyer. The jury heard from Percy Bratton, from Louis Bratton, from Nina Bratton, from Maina Bratton. They heard about the kilograms, the credit, the wire transfers, the girdle on the LAX-bound flight, the $100,000 she had picked up in Alton in person, the threats to Bratton over slow payments, the voicemails to a sub-distributor known on the streets as Rabbit McTizic.
Jemeker took the stand. The court record documents the choice plainly. She testified in her own defense, and she lied. She denied knowing about the conspiracy. She denied knowing Eric Johnson. She denied the girdle incident. She denied threatening Bratton. She denied the McTizic voicemails. Every denial was refuted by another witness, or by the records themselves.
The jury was watching. The judge was watching. The prosecutor was watching her bury herself one answer at a time. The jury convicted her on all counts. One count of conspiracy to distribute cocaine under Title 21, Section 846. Five counts of money laundering under Title 18. The sentencing judge, the docket name was not available in the open record, the appellate opinion does not include it, applied the federal sentencing guidelines, and added a two-level enhancement for obstruction of justice based on the perjury.
The top of the guideline range came out to 180 months, 15 years, concurrent on all counts. She had been facing 25 to life. The 15 years was in the prosecutor’s framing a substantial sentence. In her own framing, a mercy. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran the story on December 20th, 1993 under the byline of reporter Margaret Gillerman under the headline conviction ends cocaine case.
Alton Ring lasted 2 years. She appealed. The 7th Circuit affirmed in October 1997. The panel was Chief Judge Posner, Judge Manion, and Judge Evans who wrote the opinion. The conviction stood. The sentence stood. She was 35 years old. She did her time at FCY Pleasanton in California and FCY Victorville in the high desert. 12 years.
Her son grew up with his grandmother. He picked up a skateboard at some point in those years. The comedian Robin Harris had given him his first board before Harris died of a heart attack on a tour stop in March 1990 when the boy was eight and Gemmeker was still on the street. Harris had been dating Gemmeker after Darc’s death.
The board was a casual gift to the kid of the woman he was seeing. The kid turned out to be exceptional at it. Sponsored by Billabong out of nowhere. Second place at the Tampa Am contest as an unknown nobody in a skate press had heard of. Co-founder later of a skate brand called Black Sheep. None of that is on his mother’s CV.
All of it is on his. She came out in February 2005. 43 years old. She had converted to Christianity in prison and she came home into a ministry. She married Champ Hairston in 2006. She founded Second Chance Evangelist Ministries in Santa Clarita. She co-wrote a memoir with the music writer David Ritz published by Grand Central in 2010, titled Queen Pin.
Kirkus called it too shallow to satisfy, it sold anyway. The television came after the book. CBN’s 700 Club, A&E’s Gangsters: America’s Most Evil aired a profile of her in 2012. Netflix’s Drug Lords ran her episode in 2018. FX’s Snowfall is widely understood by entertainment writers to have based its character, Louie, Angela Lewis’s character on Jemeker and the Jerome character on Daff.
None of that is acknowledged as official adaptation, but the timing and the silhouettes line up. She picked up an honorary doctorate from a non-accredited religious university in 2023 and now goes by Dr. Hairston in promotional material. She wrote a second book that same year with her husband, American Queen Pin.
She runs a program called Letters from the Heart that corresponds with women in federal prison. She speaks at churches and at youth events. She has roughly 17,000 followers on Instagram. She is 63 years old. There are a few things the documented record refuses to give her and the script will not give them either.
There is no 200,000 a week peak figure in any court document or contemporaneous newspaper. That number lives only in the secondary literature. There is no America’s Most Wanted episode about her fugitive years, no matter what the internet says. There is no named body count because the body count of her organization on the federal record is zero.
There is no kingpin charge in her indictment because the government chose not to bring it. What there is is the document, the Seventh Circuit’s affirmance, three judges, 12 pages, names every operator and every wire and every kilogram. There is the Post-Dispatch story from December 1993.
There is the memoir, flawed but specific. There is the son who became a professional skateboarder and the mother who watched him do it from a prison telephone and then from a free woman’s living room. She built an independent multi-state wholesale cocaine pipeline as a black woman in the 1980s American crack economy. She ran it from a Hollywood hair business.
She ran it without producing a single documented body. She lost it to a cooperating distributor in a small town in Illinois. She went underground for 18 months under four names. She came back for her son’s graduation knowing what the cost would be and she paid it. She did 12 years and walked out into a ministry. That is the story that survives the documents.
The girl who watched her furniture stacked on the sidewalk at 8 years old said she wanted to control everything. For one decade and one Hollywood office with one phone line to a small Illinois river town, she did. The street collects from everyone eventually. It was collected from her at a sixth grade graduation in 1993.
She paid in full and then she walked out and told the story herself.
