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How a federal Ecstasy sting ended the party for Mac Dre's rap label, Thizz
VALLEJO, Calif. – This year, nearly two dozen people are scheduled to enter a federal courtroom to face charges related to the sale of Ecstasy and other drugs, including heroin, across Northern California and the country.
On its face, the case appears like any other federal drug sting. It was built over four years and began when a man named Michael Lott pulled a silver Mercedes-Benz into the parking lot of the Hiddenbrooke Golf Club in Vallejo, a struggling city about 30 miles from San Francisco, and allegedly tried to sell heroin to an undercover agent.
But the case has special significance for legions of aspiring rappers. At the time of his arrest, Lott was the self-proclaimed CEO of Thizz Entertainment, the rap label started by Andre Hicks, the late rapper and mogul widely known as Mac Dre.
The label once promised to put the Bay Area hip-hop scene on the map, bringing with it a tight-knit group of rappers from the Crest, a working-class neighborhood in Vallejo notorious for drugs and gang violence. Hicks’ crew helped popularize the Bay Area brand of party-centric hip-hop music called hyphy, launching rappers to major record stores and MTV.
But Hicks was killed, his violent death left unsolved. And now a decade of law enforcement scrutiny has cemented the fate of the independent label and the rappers who once aspired to mainstream success.
For police, the record label’s dramatic decline was predicted by listening to the music. Over two decades, Hicks and his rapping associates virtually taunted law enforcement.
Click for larger image
Andre Hicks, widely known as rapper Mac Dre, helped popularize the Bay Area brand of party-centric hip-hop called hyphy and formed record label Thizz Entertainment in 1999. He was shot and killed after a concert in Kansas City, Mo., in 2004.
Credit: Facebook.com
Amid the rising popularity of gangster rap, prosecutors increasingly mined its lyrics for evidence in criminal matters. In 1990, prosecutors tried three members of 2 Live Crew on obscenity charges after a lurid performance at a Florida nightclub. Prosecutors used Snoop Dogg’s “Murder Was the Case” during the rapper’s 1996 murder trial. The rappers were acquitted in both cases.
In 1992, some of Hicks’ songs, released through his own Romper Room Records label, implicated him in a series of robberies associated with the Crest’s Romper Room Gang. Although Hicks’ friends claimed the rapper was never an active participant in the crimes, he and two others were arrested and sent to federal prison. Hicks served five years.
Upon his release, Hicks quit rapping about robbery and moved on to partying. He dubbed his new entertainment company Thizz, a slang word for Ecstasy.
The new in-your-face branding caught on quickly and gave police a reason to keep following Hicks’ career. It was only a matter of time, they surmised, before they’d catch the Thizz crew with the real thing.
“They were all rap artists first – they had some pretty big names on that label,” said Sacramento County sheriff’s Detective Brad Rose, who helped crack the case. “But those drugs are highly profitable.”
Federal authorities would highlight the Thizz Entertainment connections when they announced their big takedown in April 2012.
But in the end, hundreds of pages of court records reveal that most of the people arrested in the operation had no connection to the label. A few were Thizz rappers and friends from the Crest. Michael Lott was not, in fact, CEO of the company, Hicks’ mother said. And as a businessman and a drug dealer, he was pretty much a failure.
Vallejo’s musical roots
During the heyday of funk in the ’70s, international stars like Con Funk Shun and Sly Stone had connections to Vallejo and its Crest neighborhood.
“We always have been a neighborhood where we get down with each other. We come from a city that has nothing,” said Jamal Rocker, a Vallejo-born rapper known as Mac Mall and contemporary of Hicks. “Like, when you hear the word ‘cuddie,’ it means cousin and friend. Even ‘cutthroat,’ that’s a term of endearment.”
Both Macs – Mac Dre and Mac Mall – are named in honor of one of the area’s first musical successes, Michael “The Mac” Robinson, a rapper with a pimp persona who was shot and killed in Vallejo in 1991. According to Rocker, Robinson provided the mold for many kids from the Crest – “it all started with Michael Robinson” – and fondly remembers once getting a ride in Robinson’s white Cadillac, where “there was so much bass I could barely breathe.”
It was within that small world in the mid-1990s that a group of around a dozen kids who grew up together became known as the Romper Room crew, first for general neighborhood mischief and then later as a criminal enterprise.
The core group consisted of Jamal Diggs (J-Diggs), Simon Curtis Nelson (Kilo Curt), Andre Cawthorne (Dre from the Bay), Troy Reddick (Coolio Da’Unda’Dogg) and Hicks.
Hicks, lean and outgoing, had been known as a rising star from a young age, making waves with a cassette tape featuring a standout single, “Too Hard for the Fuckin’ Radio,” in 1989 as a student at Hogan High School. His flow was fast and confident, and he built upon the bouncy bass that had its roots in the funk era.
But by that time, some of Hicks’ friends and collaborators had begun robbing banks. Vallejo police began focusing on the Crest with newfound intensity, and as they struggled to solve the crimes, Hicks rapped about it.
In one song, Hicks described a harrowing credit union robbery. In another song, which he dedicated to Vallejo police Detective Dave McGraw, Hicks taunted the department: “Punk police, what a one-track mind, man you can’t even find who’s been robbin’ you blind.”
In 1992, Hicks already had several arrests under his belt, for assault and weapons possession, when the department and federal authorities decided to follow him, a wired confidential informant and two fellow rappers, Diggs and Nelson, to Fresno, where Hicks recently had performed with Ice Cube.
For two days, more than 35 officers and FBI agents trailed the friends as they picked up girls, shopped for sneakers and purchased deodorant at Wal-Mart.
On the first day, surveillance agents said the group cased a downtown Bank of America by driving in circles around the block. The friends parked an extra car nearby. Agents suspected they would use it later for their getaway.
After a late night of playing dice with several women in their motel rooms, Hicks stayed behind as Diggs and Nelson returned to the bank, according to the surveillance notes.
But authorities had not been careful: A television news crew monitoring police radio traffic had heard officers as they prepared to disrupt the heist. As surveillance agents watched Diggs and Nelson park the car and take out masks, a news van arrived.
Spooked by the cameras, the two sped back to the motel for Hicks and headed home. Police pulled them over two hours later on a deserted stretch of road somewhere near Los Banos.
Prosecutors charged Diggs and Nelson with attempted robbery and Hicks with conspiracy. They dubbed Hicks the ringleader and played some of his songs in the courtroom to bolster their case.
Cont -
http://cironline.org/reports/how-federal-ecstasy-sting-ended-party-mac-dres-rap-label-thizz-5164
VALLEJO, Calif. – This year, nearly two dozen people are scheduled to enter a federal courtroom to face charges related to the sale of Ecstasy and other drugs, including heroin, across Northern California and the country.
On its face, the case appears like any other federal drug sting. It was built over four years and began when a man named Michael Lott pulled a silver Mercedes-Benz into the parking lot of the Hiddenbrooke Golf Club in Vallejo, a struggling city about 30 miles from San Francisco, and allegedly tried to sell heroin to an undercover agent.
But the case has special significance for legions of aspiring rappers. At the time of his arrest, Lott was the self-proclaimed CEO of Thizz Entertainment, the rap label started by Andre Hicks, the late rapper and mogul widely known as Mac Dre.
The label once promised to put the Bay Area hip-hop scene on the map, bringing with it a tight-knit group of rappers from the Crest, a working-class neighborhood in Vallejo notorious for drugs and gang violence. Hicks’ crew helped popularize the Bay Area brand of party-centric hip-hop music called hyphy, launching rappers to major record stores and MTV.
But Hicks was killed, his violent death left unsolved. And now a decade of law enforcement scrutiny has cemented the fate of the independent label and the rappers who once aspired to mainstream success.
For police, the record label’s dramatic decline was predicted by listening to the music. Over two decades, Hicks and his rapping associates virtually taunted law enforcement.
Click for larger image
Andre Hicks, widely known as rapper Mac Dre, helped popularize the Bay Area brand of party-centric hip-hop called hyphy and formed record label Thizz Entertainment in 1999. He was shot and killed after a concert in Kansas City, Mo., in 2004.
Credit: Facebook.com
Amid the rising popularity of gangster rap, prosecutors increasingly mined its lyrics for evidence in criminal matters. In 1990, prosecutors tried three members of 2 Live Crew on obscenity charges after a lurid performance at a Florida nightclub. Prosecutors used Snoop Dogg’s “Murder Was the Case” during the rapper’s 1996 murder trial. The rappers were acquitted in both cases.
In 1992, some of Hicks’ songs, released through his own Romper Room Records label, implicated him in a series of robberies associated with the Crest’s Romper Room Gang. Although Hicks’ friends claimed the rapper was never an active participant in the crimes, he and two others were arrested and sent to federal prison. Hicks served five years.
Upon his release, Hicks quit rapping about robbery and moved on to partying. He dubbed his new entertainment company Thizz, a slang word for Ecstasy.
The new in-your-face branding caught on quickly and gave police a reason to keep following Hicks’ career. It was only a matter of time, they surmised, before they’d catch the Thizz crew with the real thing.
“They were all rap artists first – they had some pretty big names on that label,” said Sacramento County sheriff’s Detective Brad Rose, who helped crack the case. “But those drugs are highly profitable.”
Federal authorities would highlight the Thizz Entertainment connections when they announced their big takedown in April 2012.
But in the end, hundreds of pages of court records reveal that most of the people arrested in the operation had no connection to the label. A few were Thizz rappers and friends from the Crest. Michael Lott was not, in fact, CEO of the company, Hicks’ mother said. And as a businessman and a drug dealer, he was pretty much a failure.
Vallejo’s musical roots
During the heyday of funk in the ’70s, international stars like Con Funk Shun and Sly Stone had connections to Vallejo and its Crest neighborhood.
“We always have been a neighborhood where we get down with each other. We come from a city that has nothing,” said Jamal Rocker, a Vallejo-born rapper known as Mac Mall and contemporary of Hicks. “Like, when you hear the word ‘cuddie,’ it means cousin and friend. Even ‘cutthroat,’ that’s a term of endearment.”
Both Macs – Mac Dre and Mac Mall – are named in honor of one of the area’s first musical successes, Michael “The Mac” Robinson, a rapper with a pimp persona who was shot and killed in Vallejo in 1991. According to Rocker, Robinson provided the mold for many kids from the Crest – “it all started with Michael Robinson” – and fondly remembers once getting a ride in Robinson’s white Cadillac, where “there was so much bass I could barely breathe.”
It was within that small world in the mid-1990s that a group of around a dozen kids who grew up together became known as the Romper Room crew, first for general neighborhood mischief and then later as a criminal enterprise.
The core group consisted of Jamal Diggs (J-Diggs), Simon Curtis Nelson (Kilo Curt), Andre Cawthorne (Dre from the Bay), Troy Reddick (Coolio Da’Unda’Dogg) and Hicks.
Hicks, lean and outgoing, had been known as a rising star from a young age, making waves with a cassette tape featuring a standout single, “Too Hard for the Fuckin’ Radio,” in 1989 as a student at Hogan High School. His flow was fast and confident, and he built upon the bouncy bass that had its roots in the funk era.
But by that time, some of Hicks’ friends and collaborators had begun robbing banks. Vallejo police began focusing on the Crest with newfound intensity, and as they struggled to solve the crimes, Hicks rapped about it.
In one song, Hicks described a harrowing credit union robbery. In another song, which he dedicated to Vallejo police Detective Dave McGraw, Hicks taunted the department: “Punk police, what a one-track mind, man you can’t even find who’s been robbin’ you blind.”
In 1992, Hicks already had several arrests under his belt, for assault and weapons possession, when the department and federal authorities decided to follow him, a wired confidential informant and two fellow rappers, Diggs and Nelson, to Fresno, where Hicks recently had performed with Ice Cube.
For two days, more than 35 officers and FBI agents trailed the friends as they picked up girls, shopped for sneakers and purchased deodorant at Wal-Mart.
On the first day, surveillance agents said the group cased a downtown Bank of America by driving in circles around the block. The friends parked an extra car nearby. Agents suspected they would use it later for their getaway.
After a late night of playing dice with several women in their motel rooms, Hicks stayed behind as Diggs and Nelson returned to the bank, according to the surveillance notes.
But authorities had not been careful: A television news crew monitoring police radio traffic had heard officers as they prepared to disrupt the heist. As surveillance agents watched Diggs and Nelson park the car and take out masks, a news van arrived.
Spooked by the cameras, the two sped back to the motel for Hicks and headed home. Police pulled them over two hours later on a deserted stretch of road somewhere near Los Banos.
Prosecutors charged Diggs and Nelson with attempted robbery and Hicks with conspiracy. They dubbed Hicks the ringleader and played some of his songs in the courtroom to bolster their case.
Cont -
http://cironline.org/reports/how-federal-ecstasy-sting-ended-party-mac-dres-rap-label-thizz-5164
