1998 was a major turning point. The feds started coming down on everybody. Hard.
Things had been headed that way for a while. Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs fucked up the streets. The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 had eliminated parole and established mandatory minimums requiring offenders to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences. Two years later, at the height of the crack epidemic, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, mandating a minimum sentence of five years for possession of five grams of crack. But you had to have more than five hundred grams to get the same sentence if you were caught with the powder.
A small amendment to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1988 put a lot of my homies behind bars. The conspiracy amendment made it so that every person involved in a conspiracy could be held accountable for every crime committed within that conspiracy. Now the lookout boy or the bomb man were getting the same sentences as the kingpin. Due to case-processing delays in the courts, the impact of these laws wasn’t fully felt until the nineties. That’s when niggas started doing a lot of snitching.
But it wasn’t just the weight niggas was moving that eventually did them in. It was also the bodies they were dropping.
On September 6, 1992, Boobie got shot five times in the parking lot outside of Club Rollexx, an infamous Miami strip joint. They said Boobie tried to give it to some nigga but his gun jammed and the guy gave it to him instead. Boobie had scars all across his stomach and had to wear a colostomy bag after that.
My corner so polluted, young niggas lootin’
I studied Kenneth Williams, I’m one hell of a student
Remarkable hustle, my nigga’s coming home
I kept a candle lit, my nigga never rolled
Niggas caught him slippin’, gave him a shitbag
Five shots to the stomach, Tupac gift pack
—“Mafia Music III,” Mastermind (2014)
Like the Dadeland Mall shooting in ’79, the shootout at Rollexx triggered an era of violence The Miami Herald dubbed “A Decade of Death.” Once these rival gangs declared war on each other—the Boobie Boys in Carol City, the Thomas Family in River City, the John Does in Liberty City, the Vondas in Overtown—Dade County became a combat zone. They started going tit for tat with the killings. On any given day, at any given moment, cars full of niggas with sticks were riding around the city looking for an enemy to open fire on.
In 1996 and ’97 Miami was the murder capital of the United States. The headlines prompted the formation of a federal task force to put an end to the bloodshed. Their investigation gave birth to the whole “Boobie Boys” thing. That was a name the government came up with so that they could go after all their targets together under the umbrella of organized crime, instead of having to figure out all these unsolved shootings on a case-by-case basis. Boobie had been a mentor of mine, and we made plays together, but I was never some lieutenant under him or part of any gang. It just didn’t work like that.
On February 23, 1998, the task force released the findings of their investigation, pinning thirty-five homicides and more than a hundred shootings on the gang wars between the Boobie Boys, the Vondas, the Thomas Family and the John Does. When the federal indictment came down a month later, Boobie did the one thing I’d never seen him do. He ran.
Four months later the feds rushed Jabbar’s trap in Southside Jacksonville. I missed that raid by the skin of my teeth. I’d been in Jacksonville the week before. The indictment implicated Big Mike, Jabbar, his cousin Tarvoris, and a few others in a decades-long conspiracy to distribute cocaine and heroin throughout the Southeast United States. The way the feds were telling it, Jabbar had followed in his daddy’s footsteps and taken over the family business.
I found out what happened through 30. 30 was me and Jabbar’s little homie. He’d gone to school with J at Miami Central and had been running with us in Jacksonville. He was riding shotgun in Jabbar’s Chevy when it all went down. They had gotten tipped off by one of Mike’s former accomplices that the feds were coming. He’d met up with them and lifted his shirt up to show he was wearing a wire. But we never trusted this guy. J thought he was trying to get them to flee the trap so that he could go take the stash or the money they had buried in the back. Jabbar’s plan was to go to over there, pick up the money and then get out of town for a little while, to be safe. But when they got to the house there were agents everywhere. 30, being the wild nigga he is, was ready to take them on a high-speed but Jabbar told him to pull over. There was nowhere to run. They had them.
The feds brought 30 in for questioning but he wasn’t listed in the indictment. They confiscated the five bands he had on him but eventually let him go. But before they did that they asked him about me. Throughout the course of their surveillance the feds had seen 30 and Jabbar coming and going with a big black fat nigga in a truck. That was my car. A two-tone candy-painted Dodge Ram 1500 on seventeen-inch chrome Daytons.
With everything that was going on it was too hot for me to be in Florida. I had to get the hell out of Dodge. 30 was in need of a place to lay low as much as I was and he said he had an older sister in Marietta, Georgia, where we could stay at. We picked up one of 30’s buddies, Kase, and were on our way.
When we got to the house we were greeted by Tomcat, 30’s brother-in-law. At the time he opened his doors to us, Tomcat didn’t know that we were on the run and he most definitely didn’t know that we would end up sleeping on his floor for the next three months.
30 convinced Tomcat to let us stay with him by pitching him on these two buddies of his who rapped. Tomcat was working as a runner for some ambulance chaser lawyer at the time but he was a self-taught audio engineer and he was trying to make a lane for himself in Atlanta’s rap scene. He wanted to put Kase and I together in a group called The Connect.
I wasn’t too interested in being in another group. I already had Triple C’s. But Kase had a bit of a buzz back home. He’d gotten a feature on Trick Daddy’s last album. That made him much more established than I was. Aligning myself with Kase might be not be a bad idea.
One of the lawyers Tomcat worked with claimed to have a line on Shaquille O’Neal. This was when Shaq was in the rap game and had his own imprint under Universal Records called T.W.Is.M. (The World Is Mine). I figured this lawyer was fronting but he actually came through and arranged for us to meet Shaq at the All-Star Cafe on Peachtree Street.
Kase and I took turns freestyling for Shaq for over an hour. With every punchline I dropped, Shaq was getting more and more excited. One line in particular most definitely got his attention.
I’ll hit you knee high, slap you straight out your fucking Filas!
Shaq stood up from his chair and took a lap around the restaurant after that one.
We left that dinner meeting convinced that The Connect would soon be offered a deal at T.W.Is.M. But a week later the lawyer Tomcat had been in touch with got indicted on money laundering charges. Tomcat wasn’t able to get back in touch with Shaq’s manager and that was pretty much the end of that. The Connect fizzled out soon after and Kase went back to Miami.
The T.W.Is.M. situation had been a bust but Tomcat soon introduced me to two important players in my early music career, DJ Greg Street and Russell “Big Block” Spencer.
Greg Street is best known as the host of The Greg Street Show on Atlanta’s urban radio station V-103. He’s hugely influential in Southern hip-hop and has had a hand in a lot of success stories that have come from below the Mason-Dixon line.
The same can be said about Block. Niggas know Block as the founder of Block Entertainment, the label behind Boyz N Da Hood and Young Joc, but this is way before any of that. I was first introduced to Block because I was looking for a weed connect in Atlanta.
Block had good weed but he also had a lot of connections. Block used to hang with Tupac and the Outlawz back when Pac was living in Atlanta, and he took me to meet Pac’s cousin Kastro. Then he brought me to Noontime Studios where I met and started building relationships with industry players like Henry “Noonie” Lee, Ryan Glover and Chris Hicks. Block plugged me in with a lot of people in Atlanta.
The most important person Block and Greg Street introduced me to at this time was Tony Draper. Tony Draper was the founder of Suave House, the Houston-based label behind the rise of artists like 8-Ball and MJG, Crime Boss, Tela and South Circle. Draper had partnered with Block and Greg Street to help him establish a Suave House presence in Atlanta. He could see the city was bubbling with talent and fitting to blow. Draper was in the process of building a Suave House satellite office in Dunwoody but in the meantime he’d set up a recording studio in Greg Street’s basement at his house in Stone Mountain.
Greg Street had Tristan “T-Mix” Jones staying with him. T-Mix was the in-house producer for Suave House and the genius behind the signature Memphis sound on all the early 8-Ball and MJG albums I’d come up listening to. That smooth, fly, player pimp shit.
Greg told me that I was welcome to work out of his studio and as soon as he extended that invitation I knew I’d be there every day until somebody told me to stop coming. I was such a big fan of 8-Ball and MJG, and the opportunity to record alongside T-Mix was something I had to take full advantage of. It would be the first time I worked with someone who knew more about making music than I did.
Greg Street’s hospitality extended beyond free studio time. I would raid his fridge for food, and on nights that Tomcat needed a break from hosting me, Greg would let me spend the night.
Block was managing an artist named Lil Noah and had gotten Tony Draper to sign him to Suave House. Noah had talent but he was pretty green when it came to songwriting so I started helping him put records together. Draper eventually caught wind that there was some big nigga in Greg Street’s basement writing all of Noah’s raps. So he flew out to Atlanta to see what this Teflon Don cat was all about. That was the name I was going by at the time. I’d repainted my Ram truck purple with ghost flames and gotten “Teflon Don... Album Coming Soon” painted on the side.
I was surprised to see that Draper was so young. He was only a year older than me but had already accomplished so much in the game. It’s one thing to do that as an artist. Rapping is a young man’s sport. But as an executive and CEO? To come up out of the mud and do it all independent? That shit was impressive.
I was working with Noah on a song called “Bird Bath” when Draper showed up to the studio. He heard me lay my verse on there and it was all he needed to hear. As soon as I stepped out of the booth he told me he wanted to sign me to Suave House.
“What’s your name?”
“Teflon Don,” I told him.
“You’re my next 8-Ball, Tef,” he said. “You’re the next Biggie.”
After I signed to Suave House, Draper started bringing me city to city, taking me to different music conferences and introducing me to his network in the industry. He had quite the Rolodex.
Draper took me out to Houston’s Fifth Ward, where I got to meet and play basketball with J. Prince in the middle of the night. J. Prince was the founder of Rap-A-Lot Records and as far as I was concerned, he was as much of a pioneer as Luke. J. Prince was the inspiration for a sixteen-year-old Tony Draper to launch Suave House and he paved the way for niggas like Master P to launch No Limit Records and for Bryan “Birdman” Williams and his brother to launch Cash Money Records. Rap-A-Lot was the blueprint for building an independent hip-hop label in the South.
Draper knew that meeting a Southern king like J. Prince was a dream come true for me but he wanted to get me rapping over some East Coast beats. So he flew me out to New York to work with Redman and Erick Sermon. Redman picked me up at the airport in his BMW X5 truck. I couldn’t believe it was him that came to get me. Red was riding high from the success of Doc’s Da Name 2000 and Blackout!, two critically acclaimed, platinum-selling albums.
Before we headed out to Erick Sermon’s crib in Long Island, we stopped in Harlem to pick up a jar from Branson. Branson was the infamous weed man to the stars. I’d heard his name in the raps of Redman, Biggie, Ma$e and Rakim. He was the inspiration behind “Samson,” the drug dealer character in a new stoner comedy called Half Baked, starring Dave Chappelle.
I hadn’t been in New York an hour and everything about it was surreal. I was really here sitting in the back of Redman’s truck. We’d just picked up weed from Branson and now we were on our way over to Erick Sermon’s house. Redman was a bona fide superstar at this time but the fact that I was about to cut a few records in The Green Eyed Bandit’s basement was what really fucked me up. I came of age in rap’s golden era and EPMD had a major influence on me. I’m getting ahead of myself here but my whole “Maybach Music” series of songs was inspired by EPMD’s “Jane” saga, where every album they put out had a new song that continued the “Jane” character’s storyline.
As we rode past Shea Stadium I remember taking a second to let the moment sink in.
This ain’t no regular shit, homie. This means something. Make it count.
One of the records we did that week, “Ain’t SHHH to Discuss,” would end up on Erick Sermon’s 2000 album Erick Onasis. It would be my first placement on a major-label album. E-Double’s still got an unreleased record we did back then I know would still fuck people up if they heard it today. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that. We’ll get that Michael Jackson sample cleared one day, big homie.
It was after one of these trips that Draper told me he had a surprise for me. When I got home there was a package. I opened it up and almost shed a tear. He’d sent me a Rolex watch. It was my first, and it wasn’t a bust-down. It wasn’t a plain Jane either. It was iced-out, with real Rolex diamonds. That bitch was mint.
I have always loved watches. I consider myself to be a collector of timepieces. When I was young I could only afford Geneva and Guess. Those were the days I used to daydream about the Breitling Emergency watch that would send a helicopter to your location if you pulled the pin out. Once I got money I started collecting them. I got the Audemars Piguet that Arnold Schwarzenegger wore in Terminator 3. Dr. Dre once gave me a $100,000 Hublot as a birthday present and Drake once gifted me a Presidential Rolex.
But none of those watches hold the same sentimental value as the Rolex Tony Draper gave me in 2000. The watch wasn’t an advance. It wasn’t his way of paying me back for something. There were no strings attached to it. It was just a gift that came from the goodness of his heart. A way of showing his appreciation for me as his artist and as his friend.
Draper didn’t know how much the gift meant to me. That’s because I never let him know how broke I was. After Jabbar got indicted I’d decided to fall back from the streets a little bit and try to dedicate myself to my music. That decision had hurt my pockets. The little money I did have I put toward keeping up appearances. I kept myself looking fresh and I always had a nice ride. At some point I turned in my show truck and got the new Cadillac Escalade. But my life was nowhere near as glamorous as I made it out to be.
When I would go out to Houston to see Draper I would have to sleep in my car because I didn’t have money for a hotel. Draper would take me around and introduce me to all these legends of the game and I looked like I belonged among them. When Scarface pulled up on us in his black 600 Benz outside the Sharpstown Mall on the southwest side of Houston—right at the corner of Fondren and Bellaire Boulevard—I didn’t feel out of place. I looked like an established artist. But at night I would find a rest area on the highway to pull over and knock out for a few hours. When I woke up I’d meet back up with Draper acting like I’d just left the fucking St. Regis.
Draper would have never allowed that to happen if he knew that I needed a place to stay. But I didn’t want him to know that. I didn’t want to look like a beggar with my hand out. Even when I first met Draper and I was sleeping in Greg Street’s basement, I’d given off the impression that I was this big boss rich nigga. I had him fooled too.