phr
Bluelighter
The Takedown of Ace Capone
George Anastasia
Philadelphia Inquirer
11/10/07
It was a bold move by an ambitious, young rap mogul.
At a time when authorities suspected he controlled a vast cocaine operation in Southwest Philadelphia, Alton Coles decided to shoot a video about that very world.
New Jack City: The Next Generation would depict the violent rise of a fictional Southwest Philadelphia cocaine ring that used fear, intimidation and murder to take over the streets.
Coles, under his hip-hop nickname "Ace Capone," would star in the 2003 rap music drama as a ruthless cocaine kingpin.
It was, federal authorities now allege, a role the rap music impresario knew well.
"He was already living that life when he made that movie," says John Hageman, spokesman for the Philadelphia office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
But it would take hundreds of hours of surveillance, thousands of wiretapped conversations, scores of undercover drug buys, and the testimony of more than a dozen cooperating witnesses for police and ATF agents to make their case against Coles.
Set in an underworld of drugs and guns, greed and power, their investigation offers insight into a violent street-corner culture that is ripping some Philadelphia neighborhoods apart.
In January, Coles is to go on trial in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, charged with running one of the largest drug operations ever prosecuted in the city - a $25 million network that authorities say flooded the streets with crack and powder cocaine.
"This gang was responsible for about 100,000 individual doses' hitting the streets each week over a seven-year period," said U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan.
The 197-count case, involving 22 defendants, includes charges of money laundering, weapons offenses and drug dealing. The organization, the indictment alleges, moved a ton of cocaine and a half-ton of crack onto the Philadelphia market between 1999 and 2005.
Coles, who has been charged with heading the criminal enterprise, is named in 64 of those counts. He has pleaded not guilty.
According to ATF agents, that enterprise was responsible for 21 shootings and seven murders, though only one shooting is listed in the indictment.
Five codefendants are set to be tried with Coles. Sixteen others either have pleaded guilty or are to be tried later. Several are believed to be cooperating.
"The government got a lot of people into a big case and created a conspiracy that don't exist," Coles said in a telephone interview from the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia last week.
"These are serious charges, but I'm not the guy that they allege me to be. . . . I'm not no boss of a street organization running a big, giant drug conspiracy."
He called New Jack City: The Next Generation "a street movie."
"It's not a story of my life. . . . You wouldn't take Denzel Washington and indict him for being a drug dealer because he played one in American Gangster."
Prosecutors see it differently.
By the time Coles, 33, started to make his video, federal authorities say, he had already blurred the lines between the make-believe world of gangsta rap videos and the take-no-prisoners street life of a cocaine trafficker.
Rap mogul on the rise
Screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper - whose 1991 movie New Jack City, starring Wesley Snipes, is regarded by some as The Godfather of urban gangster films - was charmed by Coles and his West Philadelphia sidekick, Tim Baukman, when they met in the fall of 2002.
By then, Coles and Baukman, who went under the hip-hop name "Tim Gotti," had founded Take Down Records, a label that was promoting up-and-coming rappers in town.
Coles also was staging concerts, including a show billed as a "hip-hop explosion" at the Spectrum, and was hosting parties and after-concert events for a young, urban crowd.
His weekly Friday night parties at the Palmer Social Club, at Sixth and Spring Garden, attracted crowds of 1,000 or more, with lines sometimes stretching around the block.
Coles drove around town in a $220,000 blue Bentley while taking care of business for his recording artists and setting up his promotional events.
Dressed in baggy pants, an expensive team jersey, and a matching cap, he usually wore a gold or silver neck chain with the diamond-encrusted initials TD - for Take Down - as big as a fist dangling at his chest.
He was a regular at "stop the violence" antidrug rallies sponsored by political and civic groups, never missing an opportunity, it seemed, to have his photo taken standing next to some top city official.
So it wasn't surprising that in 2002 Cooper saw Coles as an up-and-coming, well-connected, street-smart music industry entrepreneur.
The Harlem-born screenwriter, who now lives in Baltimore, had been introduced to the young rap mogul by Joseph M. Marrone, Coles' entertainment lawyer.
Marrone and Cooper had hit on the idea of a reality TV series built around two guys from the streets who were trying to start a record label.
It was the story of Coles, Baukman, and Take Down Records: the rise of two young, savvy independent record company executives.
Cooper, 49, says he came away from their first meeting impressed.
"You know, there's that lyric from Jay-Z, 'Real recognizes real and you're lookin' real to me,' " Cooper said of the encounter.
"They weren't extravagant guys," he said, before catching himself and laughing. "Besides the Bentley in the 'hood. But these guys didn't flaunt it like that."
The car, the bling, the outfits were the trappings of their business, he said.
The entertainment business.
"If it was a facade," he said, "it was a very good one."
"One time, I came up to Philadelphia and they took me to a Bennigan's," Cooper recalled with another chuckle. "There were two Bentleys in the parking lot. [Allen] Iverson [then of the 76ers] was there. And we sat there eating wings and watching a ball game."
Marrone came up with the name for the reality series: Streets Inc. Cooper started to shoot some video to pitch the idea to a network.
Around the same time, Coles and Baukman began planning New Jack City: The Next Generation.
Cooper had no involvement in that project, which was, in some ways, an homage to the original movie he had written.
The video also was a takeoff on State Property, a full-length feature released early in 2002 starring Philadelphia rapper Beanie Sigel, a friend of Coles'.
The two video projects, which would move forward in 2003, offered different pictures of a street-hustling Alton Coles.
In Streets Inc., he was Ace Capone, a savvy, urban entrepreneur who saw hip-hop music as a way for young corner boys to get out of the 'hood.
In New Jack City: The Next Generation, he was Ace Capone, cocaine kingpin.
Police were leaning toward the second image as they began pursuing leads about Coles from a Darby Borough police officer. But in 2002, no one in law enforcement was exactly sure who Coles was or what role he might have been playing in the drug underworld.
That spring, a killing outside the Philadelphia Zoo offered the first hints.
New image emerges
On the surface, it looked like a drug deal gone bad.
Two brothers from New Castle, Del., had arranged to buy a "quarter brick" - a half-pound - of crack from Randall "Iran" Austin.
They set the meeting for 7 p.m. on April 14, at their usual spot - along 34th Street outside the fence by the zoo.
The brothers, arriving in a Buick LeSabre, brought $10,500 in cash. And a gun.
Austin, driving a silver Mercedes, had eight ounces of crack. And a gun.
Things quickly went awry. Either the brothers tried to steal the crack, or Austin tried to grab the cash.
In the end, one brother ended up dead, shot in the back and lying in the street. The other, his body spilling out of the LeSabre, survived a bullet to the stomach. He told police Austin had shot them.
Austin, then 26, was no stranger to narcotics investigators. By 2002, the West Philadelphia High School dropout had four drug convictions.
The police search led detectives to Austin's apartment just off Belmont Avenue, where they spotted the silver Mercedes parked in a garage.
As police arrived, a man walking toward an Infiniti Q45 parked outside the apartment hit his car alarm - "an attempt to warn someone inside," according to an ATF document.
The man, Terry "Taz" Walker, denied he lived in the apartment. But one of his keys opened the front door.
After obtaining a search warrant, police entered the unit. Inside Austin's apartment, they found seven guns, more than a pound of cocaine, and equipment to weigh, cut and package it.
Walker, then 27, was questioned and released. Like Austin, he had had prior encounters with the law, including convictions for drug possession and aggravated assault.
Investigators working the homicide were told by street sources that both Austin and Walker worked for Alton Coles and that Coles headed Take Down Records.
Inside Walker's Infiniti, investigators found a Take Down Records jacket with his nickname, "Taz," inscribed on it.
With that, a picture of Coles as a player in the drug underworld began to emerge.
Early arrests
A 240-pounder who was known as "Fat Boy" before he took on the "Ace Capone" persona at Take Down Records, Coles says he grew up "rough" - largely abandoned by his parents and raised by an aunt and grandmother.
The oldest of four brothers, he looked out for his siblings. "I was both their father and their big brother," he said.
After getting into trouble for dealing drugs as a youth, Coles said, he graduated from high school in Glen Mills in 1992. Then, having learned to cut hair at an uncle's shop in Darby, he went on to open two barbershops of his own - Outline I in Chester and Outline II in West Philadelphia - before gravitating toward the music business and promotion.
"I like money," Coles said. "If an idea crosses my mind and it makes sense, I go with it. I got self-discipline. I'm just a go-getter."
Lt. Rick Gibney of the Darby Borough Police Department, which had arrested Coles "five or six times," suspected his real business was drug dealing.
"I always thought he was a knucklehead," said Gibney. "But then we started to hear that he had taken over West Chester, that he was the guy."
Gibney said at first he couldn't believe that Coles had attained status in the drug underworld. But then he noticed that defendants and informants, who allegedly were getting their coke from Coles' people, were refusing to talk about "the Fat Boy."
"They wouldn't roll," Gibney said. "They were afraid of what might happen to them."
Gibney said that he'd had several discussions with Philadelphia police and federal narcotics investigators about Coles late in 1999 and early in 2000, but that no one was ready to commit the manpower and resources to focus on his operation.
Like many major investigations, the Coles case emerged from unconnected criminal incidents investigated by different law enforcement agencies.
The murder outside the zoo put Alton "Ace Capone" Coles on the radar screens of Philadelphia homicide and narcotics detectives and of the ATF. As his name continued to pop up in seemingly unrelated cases, those agencies started files on the record company executive and those who appeared to be working for him.
A bust near Tamika's
On Jan. 21, 2003, Philadelphia police narcotics investigator Thomas Liciardello was watching Tamika's Lounge at 58th Street and Elmwood Avenue from an unmarked car, waiting for a drug deal to go down.
The corner is the kind of Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood that would soon appear in Coles' New Jack City and in Cooper's Streets Inc.
Across the street from Tamika's is a shuttered day-care center. On the other corners are a used-car lot, an abandoned deli, and overgrown ball fields.
Liciardello had an informant who had given up details about a pending coke deal.
A guy named Ace and a guy named Taz were supposed to show up at Tamika's that afternoon with nine ounces of cocaine.
As Liciardello watched, a maroon Mercury sedan rolled up and Terry "Taz" Walker jumped out, he later testified.
Walker looked inside Tamika's but apparently did not see the person he was expecting. He then walked back to the Mercury, reached inside his jacket, and handed the driver a white bag.
Walker returned to the bar as the Mercury drove off - with a police backup team tailing it. A few blocks away, the driver, Hakiem "Unk" Johnson, then 42, was arrested.
Johnson was Alton Coles' uncle.
Inside Johnson's hoodie, police found a white bag containing two clear plastic bags, each with 41/2 ounces of cocaine.
And on his cell phone, the record of incoming calls indicated that someone named Ace had called while Johnson was parked outside Tamika's Lounge.
A thriving business
To his entertainment lawyer, Coles appeared to be on a roll in 2003.
He was producing his version of New Jack City: The Next Generation.
The gritty story of a Philadelphia drug czar opens with Ace Capone in a voice over:
"Welcome to the streets of Philadelphia where n-s is scratchin' and survivin' to get that change. Only problem is, there ain't enough to go around. So we get it the best way we know how - the coke game. And believe me, it's a dirty a- game."
About the same time, the United Paramount Network (UPN) had put up $100,000 to fund Streets Inc. - the reality TV pilot about Take Down Records that Cooper was putting together.
And Coles had a thriving business hosting parties and after-concert events for big-name rappers at area clubs. Local rappers, wannabes and others would flock to these parties, paying cash at the door to get in.
"Ace was good at that," said Joseph Marrone, the lawyer who worked with Coles on entertainment issues. "He was able to talk to people outside the city. He had contacts. To me, the guy was going places."
Lisa Natson, the popular radio personality known as "Golden Girl" from Power 99 FM, agrees.
Natson said she worked as a consultant for Coles and Take Down Records and hosted his parties at Palmer, which by 2003 had become "the hot spot" on Friday nights.
Coles had approached her during an NBA All-Star weekend event in Philadelphia in February 2002, she recalled.
"When I first met him, he already had the look of a hip-hop star. . . . But businesswise, he was really focused. He knew what he wanted to do. He knew about branding, about getting Take Down Records out there."
She said he wanted to get into promotion. The parties at Palmer, she said, were his launching pad.
Starting at 10 p.m. and going strong until 4 a.m., they were, she said, like no other event in the city.
"There's no one out there now promoting who knew the business the way Ace did," she said.
It didn't hurt, she added, that celebrities like Allen Iverson and Donovan McNabb and rappers like Kanye West dropped by.
"It was a phenomenal thing," she said.
Like screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper, Natson said she never saw any signs of the drug world when she was around Coles.
In fact, she said, Coles and Take Down Records sometimes sponsored her radio station's "Peace on the Streets" rallies, often providing artists who performed at the events.
"He was trying to help," she said, which makes the charges he now faces difficult to comprehend.
"I don't believe it," Natson said. "This was a guy who had everything going for him. He was making money . . . riding in a Bentley . . . living the life of a rock star."
Investigators knew about the parties, and about Coles' high-profile promotions. Informants told them that he was using the events to launder drug proceeds, that the cash spent to rent the club, pay for the liquor, and provide security came from drug deals.
It came back to Coles, they said, washed clean as profits from a legitimate business enterprise.
Philly Swain, 26, a rapper who'd appeared with Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel and Memphis Bleek at a Take Down Records concert at the Spectrum, often worked the door at Palmer. To him, Coles and Baukman seemed staunchly antidrug.
"I was a nickel-and-dime dude for a while," Swain said recently, referring to his involvement in the drug trade. "I was in and out of jail. They told me I needed to get focused."
Swain said Coles and Baukman saw Take Down Records as the way to get Philly rap a national reputation.
"They were tired of seeing Philly messed up. . . . They wanted to show the hood there was a way out."
That's why, Swain said, Coles attended and helped promote antidrug rallies.
In the summer of 2003, Swain said, "we were doing one every week."
Occasionally, Coles and Baukman would pose at the rallies with some of the city's top officials, including Mayor Street, Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson, and District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham.
All of them said that they did not know either Coles or Baukman. Mayor Street goes to "an awful lot of antiviolence rallies . . . and his picture is taken frequently," said his spokesman, Joe Grace.
Coles would hang those photos in his Take Down Records office.
As for the gangster nicknames - Capone and Gotti - they were an affectation, Swain said. Part of the rap business.
"You know how many Gottis there are?" he said. "Noriegas?
"It's a rap thing. . . . You can't call yourself Ace Goody Two-Shoes. Nobody would respect you."
The message that rap was a way out of the 'hood was one that Cooper emphasized in the opening scene of the pilot for Streets Inc.
Coles and Baukman are driving around Philadelphia in a Mercedes. A cameraman is in the backseat. Coles is behind the wheel and doing most of the talking:
"Man, when you black and you from the 'hood, the odds is against you. There's only a couple of ways to get money - if you play ball, football or basketball. . . . Rappin'.
"Now rap, hip-hop takin' over. That's the only couple ways dudes is really gettin' out the 'hood, man.
"And that's why we got this record label."
Connections, questions
As Coles was wheeling and dealing in the entertainment world, investigators looking into his suspected drug operation in 2003 were beginning to track businesses that he and his associates had set up and properties they owned.
Coles, they knew, had founded the record company with Baukman. They also believed Coles had an interest in a construction company and a possible link to an auto dealership.
They discovered that Coles had real estate holdings that were listed in the names of women who were politely described as Cole's paramours in ATF reports. There were at least three such women.
One lived in a North Philadelphia apartment that authorities believed was a "stash house" for drugs and guns. Another had a home outside Woodstown, N.J., where Coles allegedly kept pit bulls and cash. A third lived with Coles in a posh, three-story townhouse in Newark, Del.
Cars were also listed in their names, including Cadillacs, Jaguars, BMWs, and assorted brands of SUVs.
Agents also tracked a stream of cash deposits into and out of bank accounts held by Coles and Baukman. The transactions involved hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the same time, records indicated, neither Coles nor Baukman filed income-tax returns.
Both also listed some assets in the names of their underage children. Baukman, for example, was living with a woman in an apartment in the 2900 block of Schoolhouse Lane.
The renter of record was his 9-year-old son.
Pulling the various threads together, investigators could now see the structure of what they believed was a drug network.
Coles was at the top, they said. Baukman was his chief lieutenant. Then there were wholesalers, retailers, and guys who ran the corners.
"Unk" Johnson and "Taz" Walker appeared to be midlevel operatives who helped distribute drugs. Johnson had a crew of corner boys working for him, authorities believed. Walker allegedly moved "weight," large, wholesale quantities of cocaine, for the organization.
Most street sales took place in Southwest Philadelphia, around the Philadelphia Housing Authority's Paschall Homes and on several other corners, including 56th and Woodland, 71st and Greenway, and the 2000 block of Cecil Street.
There was also a network operating in West Chester.
A major supplier lived in South Jersey, near Salem.
And there were connections into Baltimore and into North and South Philadelphia.
Gangsta for real?
In the summer of 2004, as Cooper continued to pitch Streets Inc. and Take Down Records prepared to release New Jack City, a joint task force of ATF agents and Philadelphia narcotics investigators targeted the Coles organization. They stepped up surveillance, increased undercover drug buys, and intensified efforts to develop informants.
The operation was coordinated by the Philadelphia office of the federally funded High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, an agency that is both a clearinghouse for drug data and a catalyst for investigations.
Coles was arrested twice that year on gun-possession charges but not prosecuted while the feds quietly worked their case. If he was aware of the additional scrutiny, it did not slow him down.
In June, Take Down Records sponsored a "School Let Out/Stop the Violence Summer Jam" at the Blue Horizon, a North Broad Street venue for boxing matches, concerts and receptions. "This will be a celebration of Philly hip-hop and a positive message for kids," Coles told the Philadelphia Daily News.
Also that summer, New Jack City: The Next Generation went on sale for $14.95 in video stores and at Take Down Records events.
The cover of the DVD featured a menacing picture of Ace Capone and Tim Gotti. Each was dressed in black. A goateed Capone, a cigarello dangling from his mouth, held an automatic pistol in each hand, one of which rested on Gotti's shoulder.
Gotti, bearded and wearing sunglasses, also held a gun in each hand, his arms crossed at his waist.
A parental advisory sticker warned of "explicit lyrics." A blurb on the cover touted the video as the story of a crime family "where survival depends on friends, trust and power."
54 shots in a few minutes
Shortly after 9 p.m. on Oct. 22, 2004, shots rang out along the 5700 block of Kingsessing Avenue, near Cecil Street.
For a minute or two, the neighborhood was a fire zone.
When the shooting stopped, a suspected drug dealer lay on the sidewalk, bleeding from gunshot wounds to the leg, hand and shoulder. He told police he had no idea who had shot him or why.
Later, federal prosecutors would allege that the shooters that night included Coles, Baukman, and several of their associates.
But at the time, no one knew who was behind the gunfire. To many, it was another flash point of violence typical of city neighborhoods where drug gangs operate.
Residents knew the drill.
One woman told police that when she heard the start of shooting, she instinctively dived onto her kitchen floor. A bullet ripped through her front door.
Another neighbor had a bullet hole in her porch window, and a third complained about bullet holes in the trunk and rear windows of his 1995 Cutlass Supreme that was parked on the street.
By the time police arrived, the shooters had disappeared.
On the street, investigators recovered 39 9mm shell casings, 15 .40-caliber shell casings, and one live 9mm round.
In the span of two or three minutes on a fall night in a Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood, 54 shots had been fired by men trying to gun down one another.
Police suspected a shoot-out between rival drug organizations. It would take an unexpected conversation overheard on a wiretap on Coles' phone before investigators could put it all together.
Investigators were focused on Ace Capone and Tim Gotti: suspected drug dealers.
Barry Michael Cooper, working on Streets Inc., was focused on Ace Capone and Tim Gotti: gritty record moguls.
But when executives at UPN saw a draft of his pilot, they decided to pass.
"They said it was too real," Cooper recalled.
Tomorrow
A brutal murder yields more clues.
Link!
Tapped Out
The story so far
ATF agents and Philadelphia narcotics detectives had spent two years building a case against a rap music entrepreneur who they believed was running a $25 million drug ring - one of Philadelphia's largest. People connected to drug deals, shootings, and murders seemed to work for him, but investigators needed more evidence.
Second of two parts.
Shortly after 4 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2005, Joe Smith was found riddled with bullets in the backseat of an SUV at a Getty station in Southwest Philadelphia.
Smith, a barrel-chested, 30-year-old drug dealer, had been shot 20 times in the chest, abdomen, arms, legs, back and pelvis. Two shots perforated his right lung. Another shot, fired from a gun pressed against his back, sliced through his liver and right kidney.
Before he died, Smith named the man who had shot him.
The homicide, one of the first of 380 that year in Philadelphia, received scant attention - one paragraph in The Inquirer, no mention at all in the Philadelphia Daily News.
It was, however, big news for a group of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents and Philadelphia police narcotics investigators who had been working to build a case against Alton "Ace Capone" Coles - a seemingly successful Philadelphia rap music executive whose high-flying lifestyle they had been tracking for more than two years.
Coles portrayed himself then - and portrays himself now - as a businessman who was producing videos and CDs for the company he founded, Take Down Records, and promoting parties and after-concert events for big-name rap acts.
"I'm not the leader or boss of nothing besides Take Down Records, and that's that," Coles said from prison last week. "I'm not no boss of a street organization running a big, giant drug conspiracy."
The 240-pound rap mogul drove a $220,000 Bentley, was building a $480,000 home in a South Jersey suburb, and had been a fixture at antiviolence rallies, often posing with top officials in the city, including Mayor Street and Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson.
"He was cultured. Very charming," said Barry Michael Cooper, 49, a screenwriter who had hoped to develop a reality TV pilot tracking Coles' legitimate rise in the rap music world.
To federal authorities, Coles' livelihood was anything but legitimate.
His dying words
Joe Smith was still alive and able to speak when emergency medical technicians found him in the backseat of his van.
As an EMT tried to stop the bleeding, he noticed that flexicuffs - plastic handcuffs - were dangling from Smith's wrists.
Police theorized that Smith had been the target of a drug underworld abduction - what is known on the streets as a "trunking." They figured he had been grabbed, cuffed, then thrown in the back of his own vehicle.
At some point, he managed to break the cuffs.
That's when the shooting apparently started.
Smith, in the ambulance, told one of the EMTs, "Terry Walker did it. Terry Walker did it."
Terry "Taz" Walker, 31, was someone investigators knew.
He and Coles' uncle had been arrested two years earlier on drug- and gun-possession charges tied to a bust at Tamika's Lounge, a Southwest Philadelphia bar.
Walker also was an associate of another reputed Coles organization drug dealer who was then awaiting trial in connection with a 2002 murder outside the Philadelphia Zoo.
Smith's murder, investigators believed, was the result of a botched attempt by the Coles organization to hold him for ransom - a ploy not uncommon in turf wars involving drug gangs.
Walker was a suspected enforcer for the organization, which authorities said was becoming more violent as it expanded its operations beyond Southwest Philadelphia.
The trunking theory gained support as the homicide investigation unfolded.
Another Southwest Philadelphia drug dealer told police that on the morning Smith was killed, they'd had drinks together at the Gold Coast Bar at 40th Street and Lancaster Avenue. Smith had said that he was going to meet Walker that afternoon to settle a dispute over a $1,500 drug debt, the dealer said.
With that information and Smith's dying declaration, police picked up Walker and charged him with murder, robbery, unlawful restraint and firearms offenses.
The case against him became even stronger when his DNA matched a trail of blood leading from the vehicle and blood found on the backseat.
'Whatever we gotta do'
At the time Joe Smith was killed, Coles' image on the streets was that of a savvy, hustling, independent record company entrepreneur.
ATF and police investigative files, however, depicted him as a man suspected of calling the shots for an organization that abducted and ambushed rivals, killed competitors, and moved large quantities of cocaine and crack.
Ironically, that was the same picture Coles - as "Ace Capone" - painted in his 31-minute rap music video New Jack City: The Next Generation, in which he played the role of a Southwest Philadelphia drug lord.
The video featured music from rappers who recorded for Coles' Take Down Records label; a story line splattered with gangland-style assassinations; a sex scene involving nude go-go dancers gyrating to hip-hop; and street-smart Ace Capone as head of the notorious "Take Down Family."
"We do whatever we gotta do," gang leader Capone says as the story opens. This is followed by a scene in which a drug rival is brought to a basement, forced to beg for his life, and then shot in the head.
Investigators shook their heads at the audacity of it all. The words, the attitude and the violence were typical of what they had been seeing for months as they intensified the tracking of Coles and his associates.
Surveillance and tips from informants gave them a street-level view of the organization. This helped them set up hand-to-hand drug buys from street corner dealers. It also allowed them to more easily follow Coles - who seldom slept in one place for more than a few nights - as he moved around the city and into Delaware and New Jersey.
But by the spring of 2005, investigators determined that they needed more to make their case. They wanted to be inside the organization.
They wanted - needed - wiretaps.
The court-authorized tapping of Coles' cell phone began on May 19, 2005.
In the first 15 days, the ATF intercepted 4,300 calls, according to one affidavit. On average, Coles made or received about 280 calls a day.
One of the first conversations paid immediate dividends.
Three days earlier, Jamar "Mar" Campbell, a Coles associate, had been arrested in the parking lot of an apartment complex near the Granite Run Mall in Delaware County.
Tipped off by an informant, Delaware County detectives had nabbed the 6-foot, 220-pound Campbell carrying five ounces of cocaine and a .40-caliber Glock handgun.
He'd been released on bail, but his gold Buick Park Avenue had been impounded. On the phone, he told Coles his "work" was still in the car.
Campbell was a volunteer firefighter, and among the things he wanted to recover were fire boots and pants that he kept in the trunk.
The next day, he called Coles again: He now had a lawyer who was trying to get his "stuff" back.
"I didn't tell him what was in the boots," Campbell said as the ATF listened.
Later that night, Coles was heard phoning a girlfriend and complaining: "Mar got locked up. . . . I took a loss on this."
By then, county detectives had inventoried Campbell's car and returned the fire pants and boots to the Green Ridge Fire Company.
As a result of the wiretaps, the ATF asked to inspect the gear.
An ATF agent examining the pants noticed that inside the left leg - "between the outer protective layer . . . and the inner insulation," according to an ATF report - there was a brown bag. Inside that bag was a plastic bag containing a half pound of cocaine.
Campbell's arrest provided one other dividend to investigators.
The gun that police seized when they arrested him matched several of the fired cartridge casings found at a notorious shoot-out on Kingsessing Avenue in October 2004. Authorities had suspected that the firefight, in which 54 shots were fired in about two minutes, was tied to a drug dispute between the Coles organization and another drug gang.
Now they had evidence to back that up.
Buying a second Bentley?
During the next three months, the ATF overheard Coles conducting business, talking in code, barking at underlings, and constantly cautioning others to be wary of law enforcement surveillance and informants.
They also caught glimpses of Coles' personal life.
To his associate, Tim "Gotti" Baukman, Coles complained about the aggravation of moving. He and his current girlfriend had vacated a townhouse in Newark, Del., and were building a $480,000 home near Mullica Hill, Gloucester County.
Coles was putting his clothing and furniture in storage and was camping out in an apartment until the house was ready.
"I hate this," he said. "I swear, I ain't moving no more. This is the last time."
He then complained about "the crew" moving his stuff: "I gotta be here to make sure they don't break nothing."
In a conversation with another girlfriend, Coles was heard debating the pros and cons of buying a second Bentley.
She argued against the $200,000 purchase.
"What the hell is the purpose of having two Bentleys?" she asked.
"One is a four-door, one is a coupe," Coles replied.
Eventually, Coles saw the logic in her argument and asked her instead to look up information about a BMW.
"What's up, pimp?" was the greeting Coles typically used for male associates.
And while code words were apparently used in most conversations to refer to drugs or guns, Coles occasionally seemed to let down his guard.
Agents monitored more than 900 calls between Coles and a drug dealer who appeared to be conducting business even though he was in a halfway house and still on probation for a drug-trafficking conviction.
They also learned that the dealer was concerned about failing a urine test for his probation officer.
Agents said they heard Coles on another call tell an associate that the dealer had to be more careful while cutting and packing cocaine.
"I put the mask on, and the gloves," Coles said.
'Didn't play his mirrors'
On June 28, 2005, agents were listening as Baltimore-based rap music promoter Gary "Dirtbike Hov" Creek set up a meeting with Coles.
A few days earlier, Creek, then 23, had been released on bail after being arrested in Maryland on drug charges. His incarceration had forced him to miss a June 23 rap party he'd promoted there with Coles.
Based on the wiretap conversations, the ATF and Philadelphia police staked out a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot on Island Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia. They expected Creek to rendezvous there with the Coles organization to buy more than a half-kilogram of cocaine.
Undercover police and ATF agents, in unmarked cars, watched as a silver Lexus, driven by Creek, and a red Honda pulled into the lot around 3:15 p.m. A few minutes later, a silver Cadillac pulled in.
Agents recognized the Cadillac as a car that Coles, Baukman, and another suspected associate, Donte Tucker, frequently used.
They watched as a woman got out of the Honda, entered the Cadillac, then carried a white paper bag back to her car.
The Lexus and Honda exited the parking lot. A half-mile later, both were pulled over by surveillance police.
What followed was more Dazed and Confused than New Jack City.
According to a police report, the woman in the Honda "became very nervous and began breathing heavily."
A male passenger in the Lexus "became extremely agitated and began to tremble."
And Creek proclaimed loudly, "Nothing in these cars is mine."
After obtaining a search warrant, police discovered a half kilogram of cocaine in the Honda. Creek and his three associates were arrested and charged with narcotics offenses.
Later that day, Coles appeared to abandon his usually cautious phone demeanor while talking with a woman in Baltimore. Coles complained to her that Creek had stayed in the parking lot too long and was unfamiliar with "those narc cars."
Then he asked the woman whether any of the others - in particular, the female driver of the red Honda - might have been undercover police.
"My man thought she was a cop," Coles said. "She never ordered nothing to eat."
Later, Coles was heard saying that Creek should have been more aware of his surroundings.
"Hov didn't play his mirrors," Coles said. "If he had, he would have been cool."
Instead, he was in jail.
Time running out
Early in August, about a month after the KFC bust, Alton Coles and his girlfriend, Aysa Richardson, moved into their new home in South Jersey.
The two-story mini-mansion was one of about a dozen built in an upscale residential community that abutted cow pastures and cornfields a two-mile drive from the quaint antique shops and restaurants of Mullica Hill.
As Coles moved in, his time was running out.
ATF agents Michael Ricko and Anthony Tropea, who had spearheaded the investigation, had obtained search warrants and had set up 24-hour surveillance on Coles.
"They knew where he was day and night," said agent John Hageman, a spokesman for the Philadelphia ATF office.
The plan was to launch a series of coordinated "no knock" raids at dawn on Aug. 10.
More than 200 law enforcement personnel - local and county police, state police, and ATF and Drug Enforcement Administration agents - would simultaneously descend on homes and apartments in Southwest and North Philadelphia, East Falls, Chester, West Chester and South Jersey.
Many of the suspects were considered armed and potentially violent, so investigators got court approval to bust in the doors without announcing their presence.
Three hours before the raids were to begin, agents monitoring Coles' phones overheard the first of eight calls he would make that morning to Monique Pullins, a girlfriend living in North Philadelphia. The calls went out between 3:07 a.m. and 3:50 a.m. Most lasted less than a minute.
Agents heard the always cautious and now apparently concerned Coles tell her to get rid of the "black thing" he had left at her apartment - a gun, agents believed. First he told her to put it in a bag and drop it down the building's trash chute.
After she'd done that, he told her to retrieve it in the morning and "take it to work" or "leave it over somebody else house."
"Why you telling me all this?" Pullins asked.
"Evidently it a little bit of drama, but you cool. Just do what I ask you to do. . . . Nothing to get upset over. . . . All right?"
Guns and lots of cash
At 6 a.m., agents - some armed with assault rifles - launched their raids.
At a modest bi-level home on Burdens Hill Road in the small town of Quinton, N.J., they came through the front door looking for James Morris, suspected of being a major cocaine supplier for the Coles network. He was asleep in the master bedroom. Also in the house were two young children and their mother, Thais Thompson.
Cash was stashed everywhere.
It was on the floor and in a purse in the master bedroom where Morris had been sleeping, in a dresser drawer and in a bag in the closet of another bedroom, in the pockets of a pair of men's jeans in the living room, in a New York & Co. shopping bag in the attic, in two duffle bags and a Gap shopping bag stashed behind a loveseat in the basement, and in a suitcase in the storage shed behind the home.
Agents also found an electronic money counter, a 9mm Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol, and bullets.
According to an ATF report, as agents left, Morris noted that "it's not illegal to have a money-counting machine." He also wanted to know how he could get his money back.
A final count of the cash seized in the house that day: $559,396.21.
In all, authorities grabbed more than $800,000 during the raids. This included $114,780 found bundled in rubber bands in a floor safe in a home just outside Woodstown, N.J., where another one of Coles' girlfriends lived.
They also seized an arsenal of weapons - 31 handguns, rifles and shotguns and nearly 500 rounds of ammunition.
The biggest cache was found in an apartment in the 300 block of East Essex Avenue in Lansdowne that was rented by Baukman. It included:
A Ruger rifle.
A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun.
A 9mm High Point rifle.
A 9mm Intratec semiautomatic handgun with its serial number obliterated.
A 9mm Leinad semiautomatic handgun and a magazine loaded with 32 live rounds of ammo.
A .22-caliber Stogeger Arms semiautomatic handgun loaded with 11 live rounds.
A .357 Magnum Dan Wesson revolver loaded with six live rounds.
A 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun.
A .22-caliber Magnum Davis Industries handgun.
A 9mm Feg semiautomatic handgun.
483 additional live rounds of ammunition.
Also found in the apartment was a heavy-duty hydraulic press typically used to form cocaine powder into kilogram "bricks."
ATF at Coles' new home
A few minutes before sunrise on a muggy summer morning, a team of more than a dozen ATF agents moved in on Alton Coles' home.
It sat on about a half-acre along Dillon's Lane in Harrison Township. Stands of trees lined either side of the property and stretched across the backyard. An all-window, high-ceilinged sun porch was attached to one side of the house, and a two-car garage was on the other. Cole's $220,000 Bentley was parked in one of the bays.
The agents, armed with shotguns, rifles and pistols, moved quickly toward the ornate, wooden front door. Others covered back and side entrances. All wore standard-issue blue uniforms with ATF Agent in large, yellow letters across the back of each shirt. Many had bulletproof vests.
A team trained in surreptitious entry breached the front door, and the agents poured into the house.
Coles and Richardson were asleep in the master bedroom when the raid began.
According to one ATF report, as he emerged from the bedroom in his underwear, Coles appeared more perplexed than surprised to see a group of armed agents swarming through the house.
"How did you guys find me?" he allegedly asked. "I've only been here, like, a week."
197-count indictment
Coles was arrested that morning on gun-possession charges. During the next several months, the case was expanded to include charges of drug dealing, money laundering and conspiracy. Denied bail, he has been in the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia since that summer morning.
"This is beyond a nightmare. It's torture," Coles said last week. "These charges are not who I am."
Coles, Baukman, Richardson, Pullins, Morris, and Morris' girlfriend Thais Thompson are scheduled to go to trial Jan. 7 in the first case to come out of the 197-count, 22-defendant federal indictment. Among other things, Pullins is charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine and weapons offenses. Police recovered a Glock 9mm semiautomatic handgun in the trash bin when they raided her apartment on Aug. 10.
One defendant, Gary Creek, has pleaded guilty. Several others are believed to be cooperating. The rest are awaiting trial, including Terry "Taz" Walker, who was convicted in March and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Joe Smith.
If found guilty of the major drug-dealing, money-laundering and weapons charges, both Coles and Baukman could be sentenced to life in prison.
The evidence that is expected to be presented by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Richard A. Lloret and Michael J. Bresnick will include hundreds of secretly recorded conversations; testimony from more than a dozen witnesses who allegedly had dealings with the drug network; testimony from the agents and investigators who conducted the probe; financial and real estate records, including deeds, mortgages, bank statements, loan documents, and lists of automobiles that were bought and sold; and the guns and drugs seized during the raids.
The jury is also expected to be shown New Jack City: The Next Generation.
'The Hustle Diaries'
Screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper says he still cannot reconcile the Alton Coles and Tim Baukman described in the indictment with the two street-smart record company executives he met in 2002 when he began filming Streets Inc., the reality TV pilot that was to tell the story of their rise in the music industry.
"I understand they had to present a certain kind of image," said Cooper. "But I think they were a lot more complex than people will give them credit for."
Coles, he said, "sounded like somebody from a Fortune 500 company."
Cooper now hopes to resurrect Streets Inc. as The Hustle Diaries. Coles' trial and related publicity could help promote the project that he now says focuses on "how Ace and Tim misinterpreted the American dream."
A snippet from the new version appeared briefly on YouTube earlier this year.
It opens with a dark screen.
Then a scroll reads:
This is not The Wire.
This is not a Rap Video.
Next is a montage of Philadelphia street scenes with a voice-over that intones:
"Hello, America. Meet your two newest corporate superstars, Ace Capone and Tim Gotti, the CEOs of Take Down Records.
"These are two venture capitalists who understand two things: The shortest distance between the street corner and the board room is a Bentley. And the only difference between a gangster and a record executive is an expense account.
"Streets Incorporated!
Link!
George Anastasia
Philadelphia Inquirer
11/10/07
It was a bold move by an ambitious, young rap mogul.
At a time when authorities suspected he controlled a vast cocaine operation in Southwest Philadelphia, Alton Coles decided to shoot a video about that very world.
New Jack City: The Next Generation would depict the violent rise of a fictional Southwest Philadelphia cocaine ring that used fear, intimidation and murder to take over the streets.
Coles, under his hip-hop nickname "Ace Capone," would star in the 2003 rap music drama as a ruthless cocaine kingpin.
It was, federal authorities now allege, a role the rap music impresario knew well.
"He was already living that life when he made that movie," says John Hageman, spokesman for the Philadelphia office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).
But it would take hundreds of hours of surveillance, thousands of wiretapped conversations, scores of undercover drug buys, and the testimony of more than a dozen cooperating witnesses for police and ATF agents to make their case against Coles.
Set in an underworld of drugs and guns, greed and power, their investigation offers insight into a violent street-corner culture that is ripping some Philadelphia neighborhoods apart.
In January, Coles is to go on trial in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, charged with running one of the largest drug operations ever prosecuted in the city - a $25 million network that authorities say flooded the streets with crack and powder cocaine.
"This gang was responsible for about 100,000 individual doses' hitting the streets each week over a seven-year period," said U.S. Attorney Patrick L. Meehan.
The 197-count case, involving 22 defendants, includes charges of money laundering, weapons offenses and drug dealing. The organization, the indictment alleges, moved a ton of cocaine and a half-ton of crack onto the Philadelphia market between 1999 and 2005.
Coles, who has been charged with heading the criminal enterprise, is named in 64 of those counts. He has pleaded not guilty.
According to ATF agents, that enterprise was responsible for 21 shootings and seven murders, though only one shooting is listed in the indictment.
Five codefendants are set to be tried with Coles. Sixteen others either have pleaded guilty or are to be tried later. Several are believed to be cooperating.
"The government got a lot of people into a big case and created a conspiracy that don't exist," Coles said in a telephone interview from the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia last week.
"These are serious charges, but I'm not the guy that they allege me to be. . . . I'm not no boss of a street organization running a big, giant drug conspiracy."
He called New Jack City: The Next Generation "a street movie."
"It's not a story of my life. . . . You wouldn't take Denzel Washington and indict him for being a drug dealer because he played one in American Gangster."
Prosecutors see it differently.
By the time Coles, 33, started to make his video, federal authorities say, he had already blurred the lines between the make-believe world of gangsta rap videos and the take-no-prisoners street life of a cocaine trafficker.
Rap mogul on the rise
Screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper - whose 1991 movie New Jack City, starring Wesley Snipes, is regarded by some as The Godfather of urban gangster films - was charmed by Coles and his West Philadelphia sidekick, Tim Baukman, when they met in the fall of 2002.
By then, Coles and Baukman, who went under the hip-hop name "Tim Gotti," had founded Take Down Records, a label that was promoting up-and-coming rappers in town.
Coles also was staging concerts, including a show billed as a "hip-hop explosion" at the Spectrum, and was hosting parties and after-concert events for a young, urban crowd.
His weekly Friday night parties at the Palmer Social Club, at Sixth and Spring Garden, attracted crowds of 1,000 or more, with lines sometimes stretching around the block.
Coles drove around town in a $220,000 blue Bentley while taking care of business for his recording artists and setting up his promotional events.
Dressed in baggy pants, an expensive team jersey, and a matching cap, he usually wore a gold or silver neck chain with the diamond-encrusted initials TD - for Take Down - as big as a fist dangling at his chest.
He was a regular at "stop the violence" antidrug rallies sponsored by political and civic groups, never missing an opportunity, it seemed, to have his photo taken standing next to some top city official.
So it wasn't surprising that in 2002 Cooper saw Coles as an up-and-coming, well-connected, street-smart music industry entrepreneur.
The Harlem-born screenwriter, who now lives in Baltimore, had been introduced to the young rap mogul by Joseph M. Marrone, Coles' entertainment lawyer.
Marrone and Cooper had hit on the idea of a reality TV series built around two guys from the streets who were trying to start a record label.
It was the story of Coles, Baukman, and Take Down Records: the rise of two young, savvy independent record company executives.
Cooper, 49, says he came away from their first meeting impressed.
"You know, there's that lyric from Jay-Z, 'Real recognizes real and you're lookin' real to me,' " Cooper said of the encounter.
"They weren't extravagant guys," he said, before catching himself and laughing. "Besides the Bentley in the 'hood. But these guys didn't flaunt it like that."
The car, the bling, the outfits were the trappings of their business, he said.
The entertainment business.
"If it was a facade," he said, "it was a very good one."
"One time, I came up to Philadelphia and they took me to a Bennigan's," Cooper recalled with another chuckle. "There were two Bentleys in the parking lot. [Allen] Iverson [then of the 76ers] was there. And we sat there eating wings and watching a ball game."
Marrone came up with the name for the reality series: Streets Inc. Cooper started to shoot some video to pitch the idea to a network.
Around the same time, Coles and Baukman began planning New Jack City: The Next Generation.
Cooper had no involvement in that project, which was, in some ways, an homage to the original movie he had written.
The video also was a takeoff on State Property, a full-length feature released early in 2002 starring Philadelphia rapper Beanie Sigel, a friend of Coles'.
The two video projects, which would move forward in 2003, offered different pictures of a street-hustling Alton Coles.
In Streets Inc., he was Ace Capone, a savvy, urban entrepreneur who saw hip-hop music as a way for young corner boys to get out of the 'hood.
In New Jack City: The Next Generation, he was Ace Capone, cocaine kingpin.
Police were leaning toward the second image as they began pursuing leads about Coles from a Darby Borough police officer. But in 2002, no one in law enforcement was exactly sure who Coles was or what role he might have been playing in the drug underworld.
That spring, a killing outside the Philadelphia Zoo offered the first hints.
New image emerges
On the surface, it looked like a drug deal gone bad.
Two brothers from New Castle, Del., had arranged to buy a "quarter brick" - a half-pound - of crack from Randall "Iran" Austin.
They set the meeting for 7 p.m. on April 14, at their usual spot - along 34th Street outside the fence by the zoo.
The brothers, arriving in a Buick LeSabre, brought $10,500 in cash. And a gun.
Austin, driving a silver Mercedes, had eight ounces of crack. And a gun.
Things quickly went awry. Either the brothers tried to steal the crack, or Austin tried to grab the cash.
In the end, one brother ended up dead, shot in the back and lying in the street. The other, his body spilling out of the LeSabre, survived a bullet to the stomach. He told police Austin had shot them.
Austin, then 26, was no stranger to narcotics investigators. By 2002, the West Philadelphia High School dropout had four drug convictions.
The police search led detectives to Austin's apartment just off Belmont Avenue, where they spotted the silver Mercedes parked in a garage.
As police arrived, a man walking toward an Infiniti Q45 parked outside the apartment hit his car alarm - "an attempt to warn someone inside," according to an ATF document.
The man, Terry "Taz" Walker, denied he lived in the apartment. But one of his keys opened the front door.
After obtaining a search warrant, police entered the unit. Inside Austin's apartment, they found seven guns, more than a pound of cocaine, and equipment to weigh, cut and package it.
Walker, then 27, was questioned and released. Like Austin, he had had prior encounters with the law, including convictions for drug possession and aggravated assault.
Investigators working the homicide were told by street sources that both Austin and Walker worked for Alton Coles and that Coles headed Take Down Records.
Inside Walker's Infiniti, investigators found a Take Down Records jacket with his nickname, "Taz," inscribed on it.
With that, a picture of Coles as a player in the drug underworld began to emerge.
Early arrests
A 240-pounder who was known as "Fat Boy" before he took on the "Ace Capone" persona at Take Down Records, Coles says he grew up "rough" - largely abandoned by his parents and raised by an aunt and grandmother.
The oldest of four brothers, he looked out for his siblings. "I was both their father and their big brother," he said.
After getting into trouble for dealing drugs as a youth, Coles said, he graduated from high school in Glen Mills in 1992. Then, having learned to cut hair at an uncle's shop in Darby, he went on to open two barbershops of his own - Outline I in Chester and Outline II in West Philadelphia - before gravitating toward the music business and promotion.
"I like money," Coles said. "If an idea crosses my mind and it makes sense, I go with it. I got self-discipline. I'm just a go-getter."
Lt. Rick Gibney of the Darby Borough Police Department, which had arrested Coles "five or six times," suspected his real business was drug dealing.
"I always thought he was a knucklehead," said Gibney. "But then we started to hear that he had taken over West Chester, that he was the guy."
Gibney said at first he couldn't believe that Coles had attained status in the drug underworld. But then he noticed that defendants and informants, who allegedly were getting their coke from Coles' people, were refusing to talk about "the Fat Boy."
"They wouldn't roll," Gibney said. "They were afraid of what might happen to them."
Gibney said that he'd had several discussions with Philadelphia police and federal narcotics investigators about Coles late in 1999 and early in 2000, but that no one was ready to commit the manpower and resources to focus on his operation.
Like many major investigations, the Coles case emerged from unconnected criminal incidents investigated by different law enforcement agencies.
The murder outside the zoo put Alton "Ace Capone" Coles on the radar screens of Philadelphia homicide and narcotics detectives and of the ATF. As his name continued to pop up in seemingly unrelated cases, those agencies started files on the record company executive and those who appeared to be working for him.
A bust near Tamika's
On Jan. 21, 2003, Philadelphia police narcotics investigator Thomas Liciardello was watching Tamika's Lounge at 58th Street and Elmwood Avenue from an unmarked car, waiting for a drug deal to go down.
The corner is the kind of Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood that would soon appear in Coles' New Jack City and in Cooper's Streets Inc.
Across the street from Tamika's is a shuttered day-care center. On the other corners are a used-car lot, an abandoned deli, and overgrown ball fields.
Liciardello had an informant who had given up details about a pending coke deal.
A guy named Ace and a guy named Taz were supposed to show up at Tamika's that afternoon with nine ounces of cocaine.
As Liciardello watched, a maroon Mercury sedan rolled up and Terry "Taz" Walker jumped out, he later testified.
Walker looked inside Tamika's but apparently did not see the person he was expecting. He then walked back to the Mercury, reached inside his jacket, and handed the driver a white bag.
Walker returned to the bar as the Mercury drove off - with a police backup team tailing it. A few blocks away, the driver, Hakiem "Unk" Johnson, then 42, was arrested.
Johnson was Alton Coles' uncle.
Inside Johnson's hoodie, police found a white bag containing two clear plastic bags, each with 41/2 ounces of cocaine.
And on his cell phone, the record of incoming calls indicated that someone named Ace had called while Johnson was parked outside Tamika's Lounge.
A thriving business
To his entertainment lawyer, Coles appeared to be on a roll in 2003.
He was producing his version of New Jack City: The Next Generation.
The gritty story of a Philadelphia drug czar opens with Ace Capone in a voice over:
"Welcome to the streets of Philadelphia where n-s is scratchin' and survivin' to get that change. Only problem is, there ain't enough to go around. So we get it the best way we know how - the coke game. And believe me, it's a dirty a- game."
About the same time, the United Paramount Network (UPN) had put up $100,000 to fund Streets Inc. - the reality TV pilot about Take Down Records that Cooper was putting together.
And Coles had a thriving business hosting parties and after-concert events for big-name rappers at area clubs. Local rappers, wannabes and others would flock to these parties, paying cash at the door to get in.
"Ace was good at that," said Joseph Marrone, the lawyer who worked with Coles on entertainment issues. "He was able to talk to people outside the city. He had contacts. To me, the guy was going places."
Lisa Natson, the popular radio personality known as "Golden Girl" from Power 99 FM, agrees.
Natson said she worked as a consultant for Coles and Take Down Records and hosted his parties at Palmer, which by 2003 had become "the hot spot" on Friday nights.
Coles had approached her during an NBA All-Star weekend event in Philadelphia in February 2002, she recalled.
"When I first met him, he already had the look of a hip-hop star. . . . But businesswise, he was really focused. He knew what he wanted to do. He knew about branding, about getting Take Down Records out there."
She said he wanted to get into promotion. The parties at Palmer, she said, were his launching pad.
Starting at 10 p.m. and going strong until 4 a.m., they were, she said, like no other event in the city.
"There's no one out there now promoting who knew the business the way Ace did," she said.
It didn't hurt, she added, that celebrities like Allen Iverson and Donovan McNabb and rappers like Kanye West dropped by.
"It was a phenomenal thing," she said.
Like screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper, Natson said she never saw any signs of the drug world when she was around Coles.
In fact, she said, Coles and Take Down Records sometimes sponsored her radio station's "Peace on the Streets" rallies, often providing artists who performed at the events.
"He was trying to help," she said, which makes the charges he now faces difficult to comprehend.
"I don't believe it," Natson said. "This was a guy who had everything going for him. He was making money . . . riding in a Bentley . . . living the life of a rock star."
Investigators knew about the parties, and about Coles' high-profile promotions. Informants told them that he was using the events to launder drug proceeds, that the cash spent to rent the club, pay for the liquor, and provide security came from drug deals.
It came back to Coles, they said, washed clean as profits from a legitimate business enterprise.
Philly Swain, 26, a rapper who'd appeared with Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel and Memphis Bleek at a Take Down Records concert at the Spectrum, often worked the door at Palmer. To him, Coles and Baukman seemed staunchly antidrug.
"I was a nickel-and-dime dude for a while," Swain said recently, referring to his involvement in the drug trade. "I was in and out of jail. They told me I needed to get focused."
Swain said Coles and Baukman saw Take Down Records as the way to get Philly rap a national reputation.
"They were tired of seeing Philly messed up. . . . They wanted to show the hood there was a way out."
That's why, Swain said, Coles attended and helped promote antidrug rallies.
In the summer of 2003, Swain said, "we were doing one every week."
Occasionally, Coles and Baukman would pose at the rallies with some of the city's top officials, including Mayor Street, Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson, and District Attorney Lynne M. Abraham.
All of them said that they did not know either Coles or Baukman. Mayor Street goes to "an awful lot of antiviolence rallies . . . and his picture is taken frequently," said his spokesman, Joe Grace.
Coles would hang those photos in his Take Down Records office.
As for the gangster nicknames - Capone and Gotti - they were an affectation, Swain said. Part of the rap business.
"You know how many Gottis there are?" he said. "Noriegas?
"It's a rap thing. . . . You can't call yourself Ace Goody Two-Shoes. Nobody would respect you."
The message that rap was a way out of the 'hood was one that Cooper emphasized in the opening scene of the pilot for Streets Inc.
Coles and Baukman are driving around Philadelphia in a Mercedes. A cameraman is in the backseat. Coles is behind the wheel and doing most of the talking:
"Man, when you black and you from the 'hood, the odds is against you. There's only a couple of ways to get money - if you play ball, football or basketball. . . . Rappin'.
"Now rap, hip-hop takin' over. That's the only couple ways dudes is really gettin' out the 'hood, man.
"And that's why we got this record label."
Connections, questions
As Coles was wheeling and dealing in the entertainment world, investigators looking into his suspected drug operation in 2003 were beginning to track businesses that he and his associates had set up and properties they owned.
Coles, they knew, had founded the record company with Baukman. They also believed Coles had an interest in a construction company and a possible link to an auto dealership.
They discovered that Coles had real estate holdings that were listed in the names of women who were politely described as Cole's paramours in ATF reports. There were at least three such women.
One lived in a North Philadelphia apartment that authorities believed was a "stash house" for drugs and guns. Another had a home outside Woodstown, N.J., where Coles allegedly kept pit bulls and cash. A third lived with Coles in a posh, three-story townhouse in Newark, Del.
Cars were also listed in their names, including Cadillacs, Jaguars, BMWs, and assorted brands of SUVs.
Agents also tracked a stream of cash deposits into and out of bank accounts held by Coles and Baukman. The transactions involved hundreds of thousands of dollars. At the same time, records indicated, neither Coles nor Baukman filed income-tax returns.
Both also listed some assets in the names of their underage children. Baukman, for example, was living with a woman in an apartment in the 2900 block of Schoolhouse Lane.
The renter of record was his 9-year-old son.
Pulling the various threads together, investigators could now see the structure of what they believed was a drug network.
Coles was at the top, they said. Baukman was his chief lieutenant. Then there were wholesalers, retailers, and guys who ran the corners.
"Unk" Johnson and "Taz" Walker appeared to be midlevel operatives who helped distribute drugs. Johnson had a crew of corner boys working for him, authorities believed. Walker allegedly moved "weight," large, wholesale quantities of cocaine, for the organization.
Most street sales took place in Southwest Philadelphia, around the Philadelphia Housing Authority's Paschall Homes and on several other corners, including 56th and Woodland, 71st and Greenway, and the 2000 block of Cecil Street.
There was also a network operating in West Chester.
A major supplier lived in South Jersey, near Salem.
And there were connections into Baltimore and into North and South Philadelphia.
Gangsta for real?
In the summer of 2004, as Cooper continued to pitch Streets Inc. and Take Down Records prepared to release New Jack City, a joint task force of ATF agents and Philadelphia narcotics investigators targeted the Coles organization. They stepped up surveillance, increased undercover drug buys, and intensified efforts to develop informants.
The operation was coordinated by the Philadelphia office of the federally funded High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, an agency that is both a clearinghouse for drug data and a catalyst for investigations.
Coles was arrested twice that year on gun-possession charges but not prosecuted while the feds quietly worked their case. If he was aware of the additional scrutiny, it did not slow him down.
In June, Take Down Records sponsored a "School Let Out/Stop the Violence Summer Jam" at the Blue Horizon, a North Broad Street venue for boxing matches, concerts and receptions. "This will be a celebration of Philly hip-hop and a positive message for kids," Coles told the Philadelphia Daily News.
Also that summer, New Jack City: The Next Generation went on sale for $14.95 in video stores and at Take Down Records events.
The cover of the DVD featured a menacing picture of Ace Capone and Tim Gotti. Each was dressed in black. A goateed Capone, a cigarello dangling from his mouth, held an automatic pistol in each hand, one of which rested on Gotti's shoulder.
Gotti, bearded and wearing sunglasses, also held a gun in each hand, his arms crossed at his waist.
A parental advisory sticker warned of "explicit lyrics." A blurb on the cover touted the video as the story of a crime family "where survival depends on friends, trust and power."
54 shots in a few minutes
Shortly after 9 p.m. on Oct. 22, 2004, shots rang out along the 5700 block of Kingsessing Avenue, near Cecil Street.
For a minute or two, the neighborhood was a fire zone.
When the shooting stopped, a suspected drug dealer lay on the sidewalk, bleeding from gunshot wounds to the leg, hand and shoulder. He told police he had no idea who had shot him or why.
Later, federal prosecutors would allege that the shooters that night included Coles, Baukman, and several of their associates.
But at the time, no one knew who was behind the gunfire. To many, it was another flash point of violence typical of city neighborhoods where drug gangs operate.
Residents knew the drill.
One woman told police that when she heard the start of shooting, she instinctively dived onto her kitchen floor. A bullet ripped through her front door.
Another neighbor had a bullet hole in her porch window, and a third complained about bullet holes in the trunk and rear windows of his 1995 Cutlass Supreme that was parked on the street.
By the time police arrived, the shooters had disappeared.
On the street, investigators recovered 39 9mm shell casings, 15 .40-caliber shell casings, and one live 9mm round.
In the span of two or three minutes on a fall night in a Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood, 54 shots had been fired by men trying to gun down one another.
Police suspected a shoot-out between rival drug organizations. It would take an unexpected conversation overheard on a wiretap on Coles' phone before investigators could put it all together.
Investigators were focused on Ace Capone and Tim Gotti: suspected drug dealers.
Barry Michael Cooper, working on Streets Inc., was focused on Ace Capone and Tim Gotti: gritty record moguls.
But when executives at UPN saw a draft of his pilot, they decided to pass.
"They said it was too real," Cooper recalled.
Tomorrow
A brutal murder yields more clues.
Link!
Tapped Out
The story so far
ATF agents and Philadelphia narcotics detectives had spent two years building a case against a rap music entrepreneur who they believed was running a $25 million drug ring - one of Philadelphia's largest. People connected to drug deals, shootings, and murders seemed to work for him, but investigators needed more evidence.
Second of two parts.
Shortly after 4 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2005, Joe Smith was found riddled with bullets in the backseat of an SUV at a Getty station in Southwest Philadelphia.
Smith, a barrel-chested, 30-year-old drug dealer, had been shot 20 times in the chest, abdomen, arms, legs, back and pelvis. Two shots perforated his right lung. Another shot, fired from a gun pressed against his back, sliced through his liver and right kidney.
Before he died, Smith named the man who had shot him.
The homicide, one of the first of 380 that year in Philadelphia, received scant attention - one paragraph in The Inquirer, no mention at all in the Philadelphia Daily News.
It was, however, big news for a group of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents and Philadelphia police narcotics investigators who had been working to build a case against Alton "Ace Capone" Coles - a seemingly successful Philadelphia rap music executive whose high-flying lifestyle they had been tracking for more than two years.
Coles portrayed himself then - and portrays himself now - as a businessman who was producing videos and CDs for the company he founded, Take Down Records, and promoting parties and after-concert events for big-name rap acts.
"I'm not the leader or boss of nothing besides Take Down Records, and that's that," Coles said from prison last week. "I'm not no boss of a street organization running a big, giant drug conspiracy."
The 240-pound rap mogul drove a $220,000 Bentley, was building a $480,000 home in a South Jersey suburb, and had been a fixture at antiviolence rallies, often posing with top officials in the city, including Mayor Street and Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson.
"He was cultured. Very charming," said Barry Michael Cooper, 49, a screenwriter who had hoped to develop a reality TV pilot tracking Coles' legitimate rise in the rap music world.
To federal authorities, Coles' livelihood was anything but legitimate.
His dying words
Joe Smith was still alive and able to speak when emergency medical technicians found him in the backseat of his van.
As an EMT tried to stop the bleeding, he noticed that flexicuffs - plastic handcuffs - were dangling from Smith's wrists.
Police theorized that Smith had been the target of a drug underworld abduction - what is known on the streets as a "trunking." They figured he had been grabbed, cuffed, then thrown in the back of his own vehicle.
At some point, he managed to break the cuffs.
That's when the shooting apparently started.
Smith, in the ambulance, told one of the EMTs, "Terry Walker did it. Terry Walker did it."
Terry "Taz" Walker, 31, was someone investigators knew.
He and Coles' uncle had been arrested two years earlier on drug- and gun-possession charges tied to a bust at Tamika's Lounge, a Southwest Philadelphia bar.
Walker also was an associate of another reputed Coles organization drug dealer who was then awaiting trial in connection with a 2002 murder outside the Philadelphia Zoo.
Smith's murder, investigators believed, was the result of a botched attempt by the Coles organization to hold him for ransom - a ploy not uncommon in turf wars involving drug gangs.
Walker was a suspected enforcer for the organization, which authorities said was becoming more violent as it expanded its operations beyond Southwest Philadelphia.
The trunking theory gained support as the homicide investigation unfolded.
Another Southwest Philadelphia drug dealer told police that on the morning Smith was killed, they'd had drinks together at the Gold Coast Bar at 40th Street and Lancaster Avenue. Smith had said that he was going to meet Walker that afternoon to settle a dispute over a $1,500 drug debt, the dealer said.
With that information and Smith's dying declaration, police picked up Walker and charged him with murder, robbery, unlawful restraint and firearms offenses.
The case against him became even stronger when his DNA matched a trail of blood leading from the vehicle and blood found on the backseat.
'Whatever we gotta do'
At the time Joe Smith was killed, Coles' image on the streets was that of a savvy, hustling, independent record company entrepreneur.
ATF and police investigative files, however, depicted him as a man suspected of calling the shots for an organization that abducted and ambushed rivals, killed competitors, and moved large quantities of cocaine and crack.
Ironically, that was the same picture Coles - as "Ace Capone" - painted in his 31-minute rap music video New Jack City: The Next Generation, in which he played the role of a Southwest Philadelphia drug lord.
The video featured music from rappers who recorded for Coles' Take Down Records label; a story line splattered with gangland-style assassinations; a sex scene involving nude go-go dancers gyrating to hip-hop; and street-smart Ace Capone as head of the notorious "Take Down Family."
"We do whatever we gotta do," gang leader Capone says as the story opens. This is followed by a scene in which a drug rival is brought to a basement, forced to beg for his life, and then shot in the head.
Investigators shook their heads at the audacity of it all. The words, the attitude and the violence were typical of what they had been seeing for months as they intensified the tracking of Coles and his associates.
Surveillance and tips from informants gave them a street-level view of the organization. This helped them set up hand-to-hand drug buys from street corner dealers. It also allowed them to more easily follow Coles - who seldom slept in one place for more than a few nights - as he moved around the city and into Delaware and New Jersey.
But by the spring of 2005, investigators determined that they needed more to make their case. They wanted to be inside the organization.
They wanted - needed - wiretaps.
The court-authorized tapping of Coles' cell phone began on May 19, 2005.
In the first 15 days, the ATF intercepted 4,300 calls, according to one affidavit. On average, Coles made or received about 280 calls a day.
One of the first conversations paid immediate dividends.
Three days earlier, Jamar "Mar" Campbell, a Coles associate, had been arrested in the parking lot of an apartment complex near the Granite Run Mall in Delaware County.
Tipped off by an informant, Delaware County detectives had nabbed the 6-foot, 220-pound Campbell carrying five ounces of cocaine and a .40-caliber Glock handgun.
He'd been released on bail, but his gold Buick Park Avenue had been impounded. On the phone, he told Coles his "work" was still in the car.
Campbell was a volunteer firefighter, and among the things he wanted to recover were fire boots and pants that he kept in the trunk.
The next day, he called Coles again: He now had a lawyer who was trying to get his "stuff" back.
"I didn't tell him what was in the boots," Campbell said as the ATF listened.
Later that night, Coles was heard phoning a girlfriend and complaining: "Mar got locked up. . . . I took a loss on this."
By then, county detectives had inventoried Campbell's car and returned the fire pants and boots to the Green Ridge Fire Company.
As a result of the wiretaps, the ATF asked to inspect the gear.
An ATF agent examining the pants noticed that inside the left leg - "between the outer protective layer . . . and the inner insulation," according to an ATF report - there was a brown bag. Inside that bag was a plastic bag containing a half pound of cocaine.
Campbell's arrest provided one other dividend to investigators.
The gun that police seized when they arrested him matched several of the fired cartridge casings found at a notorious shoot-out on Kingsessing Avenue in October 2004. Authorities had suspected that the firefight, in which 54 shots were fired in about two minutes, was tied to a drug dispute between the Coles organization and another drug gang.
Now they had evidence to back that up.
Buying a second Bentley?
During the next three months, the ATF overheard Coles conducting business, talking in code, barking at underlings, and constantly cautioning others to be wary of law enforcement surveillance and informants.
They also caught glimpses of Coles' personal life.
To his associate, Tim "Gotti" Baukman, Coles complained about the aggravation of moving. He and his current girlfriend had vacated a townhouse in Newark, Del., and were building a $480,000 home near Mullica Hill, Gloucester County.
Coles was putting his clothing and furniture in storage and was camping out in an apartment until the house was ready.
"I hate this," he said. "I swear, I ain't moving no more. This is the last time."
He then complained about "the crew" moving his stuff: "I gotta be here to make sure they don't break nothing."
In a conversation with another girlfriend, Coles was heard debating the pros and cons of buying a second Bentley.
She argued against the $200,000 purchase.
"What the hell is the purpose of having two Bentleys?" she asked.
"One is a four-door, one is a coupe," Coles replied.
Eventually, Coles saw the logic in her argument and asked her instead to look up information about a BMW.
"What's up, pimp?" was the greeting Coles typically used for male associates.
And while code words were apparently used in most conversations to refer to drugs or guns, Coles occasionally seemed to let down his guard.
Agents monitored more than 900 calls between Coles and a drug dealer who appeared to be conducting business even though he was in a halfway house and still on probation for a drug-trafficking conviction.
They also learned that the dealer was concerned about failing a urine test for his probation officer.
Agents said they heard Coles on another call tell an associate that the dealer had to be more careful while cutting and packing cocaine.
"I put the mask on, and the gloves," Coles said.
'Didn't play his mirrors'
On June 28, 2005, agents were listening as Baltimore-based rap music promoter Gary "Dirtbike Hov" Creek set up a meeting with Coles.
A few days earlier, Creek, then 23, had been released on bail after being arrested in Maryland on drug charges. His incarceration had forced him to miss a June 23 rap party he'd promoted there with Coles.
Based on the wiretap conversations, the ATF and Philadelphia police staked out a Kentucky Fried Chicken parking lot on Island Avenue in Southwest Philadelphia. They expected Creek to rendezvous there with the Coles organization to buy more than a half-kilogram of cocaine.
Undercover police and ATF agents, in unmarked cars, watched as a silver Lexus, driven by Creek, and a red Honda pulled into the lot around 3:15 p.m. A few minutes later, a silver Cadillac pulled in.
Agents recognized the Cadillac as a car that Coles, Baukman, and another suspected associate, Donte Tucker, frequently used.
They watched as a woman got out of the Honda, entered the Cadillac, then carried a white paper bag back to her car.
The Lexus and Honda exited the parking lot. A half-mile later, both were pulled over by surveillance police.
What followed was more Dazed and Confused than New Jack City.
According to a police report, the woman in the Honda "became very nervous and began breathing heavily."
A male passenger in the Lexus "became extremely agitated and began to tremble."
And Creek proclaimed loudly, "Nothing in these cars is mine."
After obtaining a search warrant, police discovered a half kilogram of cocaine in the Honda. Creek and his three associates were arrested and charged with narcotics offenses.
Later that day, Coles appeared to abandon his usually cautious phone demeanor while talking with a woman in Baltimore. Coles complained to her that Creek had stayed in the parking lot too long and was unfamiliar with "those narc cars."
Then he asked the woman whether any of the others - in particular, the female driver of the red Honda - might have been undercover police.
"My man thought she was a cop," Coles said. "She never ordered nothing to eat."
Later, Coles was heard saying that Creek should have been more aware of his surroundings.
"Hov didn't play his mirrors," Coles said. "If he had, he would have been cool."
Instead, he was in jail.
Time running out
Early in August, about a month after the KFC bust, Alton Coles and his girlfriend, Aysa Richardson, moved into their new home in South Jersey.
The two-story mini-mansion was one of about a dozen built in an upscale residential community that abutted cow pastures and cornfields a two-mile drive from the quaint antique shops and restaurants of Mullica Hill.
As Coles moved in, his time was running out.
ATF agents Michael Ricko and Anthony Tropea, who had spearheaded the investigation, had obtained search warrants and had set up 24-hour surveillance on Coles.
"They knew where he was day and night," said agent John Hageman, a spokesman for the Philadelphia ATF office.
The plan was to launch a series of coordinated "no knock" raids at dawn on Aug. 10.
More than 200 law enforcement personnel - local and county police, state police, and ATF and Drug Enforcement Administration agents - would simultaneously descend on homes and apartments in Southwest and North Philadelphia, East Falls, Chester, West Chester and South Jersey.
Many of the suspects were considered armed and potentially violent, so investigators got court approval to bust in the doors without announcing their presence.
Three hours before the raids were to begin, agents monitoring Coles' phones overheard the first of eight calls he would make that morning to Monique Pullins, a girlfriend living in North Philadelphia. The calls went out between 3:07 a.m. and 3:50 a.m. Most lasted less than a minute.
Agents heard the always cautious and now apparently concerned Coles tell her to get rid of the "black thing" he had left at her apartment - a gun, agents believed. First he told her to put it in a bag and drop it down the building's trash chute.
After she'd done that, he told her to retrieve it in the morning and "take it to work" or "leave it over somebody else house."
"Why you telling me all this?" Pullins asked.
"Evidently it a little bit of drama, but you cool. Just do what I ask you to do. . . . Nothing to get upset over. . . . All right?"
Guns and lots of cash
At 6 a.m., agents - some armed with assault rifles - launched their raids.
At a modest bi-level home on Burdens Hill Road in the small town of Quinton, N.J., they came through the front door looking for James Morris, suspected of being a major cocaine supplier for the Coles network. He was asleep in the master bedroom. Also in the house were two young children and their mother, Thais Thompson.
Cash was stashed everywhere.
It was on the floor and in a purse in the master bedroom where Morris had been sleeping, in a dresser drawer and in a bag in the closet of another bedroom, in the pockets of a pair of men's jeans in the living room, in a New York & Co. shopping bag in the attic, in two duffle bags and a Gap shopping bag stashed behind a loveseat in the basement, and in a suitcase in the storage shed behind the home.
Agents also found an electronic money counter, a 9mm Smith & Wesson semiautomatic pistol, and bullets.
According to an ATF report, as agents left, Morris noted that "it's not illegal to have a money-counting machine." He also wanted to know how he could get his money back.
A final count of the cash seized in the house that day: $559,396.21.
In all, authorities grabbed more than $800,000 during the raids. This included $114,780 found bundled in rubber bands in a floor safe in a home just outside Woodstown, N.J., where another one of Coles' girlfriends lived.
They also seized an arsenal of weapons - 31 handguns, rifles and shotguns and nearly 500 rounds of ammunition.
The biggest cache was found in an apartment in the 300 block of East Essex Avenue in Lansdowne that was rented by Baukman. It included:
A Ruger rifle.
A Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun.
A 9mm High Point rifle.
A 9mm Intratec semiautomatic handgun with its serial number obliterated.
A 9mm Leinad semiautomatic handgun and a magazine loaded with 32 live rounds of ammo.
A .22-caliber Stogeger Arms semiautomatic handgun loaded with 11 live rounds.
A .357 Magnum Dan Wesson revolver loaded with six live rounds.
A 9mm Smith & Wesson handgun.
A .22-caliber Magnum Davis Industries handgun.
A 9mm Feg semiautomatic handgun.
483 additional live rounds of ammunition.
Also found in the apartment was a heavy-duty hydraulic press typically used to form cocaine powder into kilogram "bricks."
ATF at Coles' new home
A few minutes before sunrise on a muggy summer morning, a team of more than a dozen ATF agents moved in on Alton Coles' home.
It sat on about a half-acre along Dillon's Lane in Harrison Township. Stands of trees lined either side of the property and stretched across the backyard. An all-window, high-ceilinged sun porch was attached to one side of the house, and a two-car garage was on the other. Cole's $220,000 Bentley was parked in one of the bays.
The agents, armed with shotguns, rifles and pistols, moved quickly toward the ornate, wooden front door. Others covered back and side entrances. All wore standard-issue blue uniforms with ATF Agent in large, yellow letters across the back of each shirt. Many had bulletproof vests.
A team trained in surreptitious entry breached the front door, and the agents poured into the house.
Coles and Richardson were asleep in the master bedroom when the raid began.
According to one ATF report, as he emerged from the bedroom in his underwear, Coles appeared more perplexed than surprised to see a group of armed agents swarming through the house.
"How did you guys find me?" he allegedly asked. "I've only been here, like, a week."
197-count indictment
Coles was arrested that morning on gun-possession charges. During the next several months, the case was expanded to include charges of drug dealing, money laundering and conspiracy. Denied bail, he has been in the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia since that summer morning.
"This is beyond a nightmare. It's torture," Coles said last week. "These charges are not who I am."
Coles, Baukman, Richardson, Pullins, Morris, and Morris' girlfriend Thais Thompson are scheduled to go to trial Jan. 7 in the first case to come out of the 197-count, 22-defendant federal indictment. Among other things, Pullins is charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine and weapons offenses. Police recovered a Glock 9mm semiautomatic handgun in the trash bin when they raided her apartment on Aug. 10.
One defendant, Gary Creek, has pleaded guilty. Several others are believed to be cooperating. The rest are awaiting trial, including Terry "Taz" Walker, who was convicted in March and sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Joe Smith.
If found guilty of the major drug-dealing, money-laundering and weapons charges, both Coles and Baukman could be sentenced to life in prison.
The evidence that is expected to be presented by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Richard A. Lloret and Michael J. Bresnick will include hundreds of secretly recorded conversations; testimony from more than a dozen witnesses who allegedly had dealings with the drug network; testimony from the agents and investigators who conducted the probe; financial and real estate records, including deeds, mortgages, bank statements, loan documents, and lists of automobiles that were bought and sold; and the guns and drugs seized during the raids.
The jury is also expected to be shown New Jack City: The Next Generation.
'The Hustle Diaries'
Screenwriter Barry Michael Cooper says he still cannot reconcile the Alton Coles and Tim Baukman described in the indictment with the two street-smart record company executives he met in 2002 when he began filming Streets Inc., the reality TV pilot that was to tell the story of their rise in the music industry.
"I understand they had to present a certain kind of image," said Cooper. "But I think they were a lot more complex than people will give them credit for."
Coles, he said, "sounded like somebody from a Fortune 500 company."
Cooper now hopes to resurrect Streets Inc. as The Hustle Diaries. Coles' trial and related publicity could help promote the project that he now says focuses on "how Ace and Tim misinterpreted the American dream."
A snippet from the new version appeared briefly on YouTube earlier this year.
It opens with a dark screen.
Then a scroll reads:
This is not The Wire.
This is not a Rap Video.
Next is a montage of Philadelphia street scenes with a voice-over that intones:
"Hello, America. Meet your two newest corporate superstars, Ace Capone and Tim Gotti, the CEOs of Take Down Records.
"These are two venture capitalists who understand two things: The shortest distance between the street corner and the board room is a Bentley. And the only difference between a gangster and a record executive is an expense account.
"Streets Incorporated!
Link!
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