The Darkest Hearts

by Nelson George

  D handed him the pickle jar.

  Ice continued, “Now, I don’t like being asked about. It gets people thinking about me and where I’m at . . . All right, flip him.”

  The two thugs stood Fade up, pulled down his pants and underwear, and shoved him facedown into the tub.

  Both Fade and D shouted, “What the fuck?!”

  Ice opened the pickle jar. He poured the pungent green pickle juice over the man’s backside, then took a pickle in his hand and held it next to the man’s face. “You want this?”

  “NO! NO! NO!”

  “Don’t ever talk about me again. I hear about you even saying my name and I’ll use more than pickle juice on that ass. You gonna be shitting green. You hear me?”

  “YES! YES!”

  Ice said, “All right,” and the two thugs jerked Fade upright and perched him on the edge of the bathtub. Ice stood in front of his victim and held the pickle an inch from his face. “What is the moral of this story?”

  “K-keep your name outta my mouth,” Fade stammered.

  Ice then tossed the pickle on the floor and walked out.

  * * *

  Back in the car, Ice’s two thugs became quite animated, laughing about what they’d just done. Ice didn’t say a thing. He just looked out the window at Brooklyn, old and new. D matched his silence.

  When D got out of the car, he turned to Ice and said, “Message received.”

  Ice nodded and the car pulled off.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  I FEEL IT COMING

  The FBI’s main Manhattan office was at 26 Federal Plaza on Broadway near City Hall, but D’s meeting with Conrad was a few blocks uptown in a building near Canal Street. This seemed a good sign to D, suggesting that this case wasn’t a priority at an investigative agency whose Most Wanted List was filled with cybercrime suspects and violent gang members. A conspiracy against hip hop, even if it led to the murder of an (ex) agent, couldn’t be very important in the larger scheme of things. Ex-director James Comey was still in the headlines, and based on Amos’s tip, he hoped Conrad was too worried about job security to squeeze D hard.

  After he went through security, D sat on a hard plastic chair in a drab bureaucratic room. He looked up at Trump’s visage grinning at him next to a drooping American flag. He’d contemplated bringing an attorney but decided to go it alone. Maybe that was misplaced optimism but instinct told him going solo was the best introductory move with Conrad.

  Conrad was a ruddy-faced, middle-aged man with red thinning hair, a decent dark-blue suit, and a studious manner. He seemed more of an insurance claims adjuster than a grand inquisitor, but D was aware that real government agents didn’t aspire to be James Bond. It was best not to underestimate them. Instead of some institutional-looking interview room, Conrad led him into a small office with bad lighting, cheap-looking furniture, and a boring view of a charmless building across Broadway.

  Next to the corner bookshelf was a photo of Conrad and a smiling woman holding an impressive striped bass. The office was otherwise bereft of personal items. Behind the desk, two boxes sat on the windowsill along with several black binders.

  After a few pleasantries, Conrad grabbed a binder from one of the boxes, opened to the first page, and began: “Malik Jones broke into your office on Broadway in 2011? Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know he was a former FBI agent?”

  “No. I just knew him as a thug from the West Coast hip hop scene.”

  Conrad said, “I knew him back when he was still an agent. His transformation was shocking.”

  “I didn’t know about any of that,” D said firmly, hoping he wasn’t hitting that fiction too hard.

  “His real name was Anthony Jackson. You dated his wife.”

  D lied badly: “What? Who?”

  “Amina Jackson. They had been married during his FBI days. We believe Jackson had her murdered to cover his tracks.”

  “Then,” D said slowly, “I should have killed him that night at my office. If I’d known he was behind Amina’s death, I would have shown no mercy.”

  Conrad just looked at D for a beat and then said, “Thankfully, you showed good judgment, Mr. Hunter. I interviewed Jackson at a federal penitentiary two months ago. He asked for me since we’d worked together. He told me an incredible unsubstantiated story about hip hop. I’ve never been anything but a casual fan. The fact that there were people who thought it corrupted America’s young people was hard to believe. Then Jackson directed me to the case of a man named Eric Mayer, another ex-FBI agent who became involved with it. Did you know Eric Mayer?”

  “Not well,” D said. “I met him a few times through business. I believe he hired my old security company—”

  “D Security?”

  “Yes, that was the name. I believe he hired us to work an event or two back in the late nineties.”

  “What did you think of Mayer?”

  “Thought he was a wannabe Lyor Cohen.”

  “Who?”

  D decided to provide some hip hop history: “Lyor Cohen. Back in day he managed a lot of hip hop artists. Ran Def Jam during the nineties. Now works for YouTube. Jewish guy—maybe even Israeli—who always got on well with black folks. That’s what Mayer aspired to.”

  “So you didn’t have a personal relationship with him?”

  “No.” This wasn’t actually a lie, other than D allowing Ice to kill him.

  Conrad reached into a file on his desk, pulled out some papers, and slid them over to D. There were e-mails about D. There were travel itineraries and hotel receipts. There were photos of D outside D Security’s old offices in SoHo. There was a sheet with his old Manhattan home address on Seventh Avenue, his D Security business landlines, his old BlackBerry number, and his Social Security number. D flashed back to the NYPD’s “hip hop cop,” who used to surveil MCs for the police.

  “Why do you think he was so interested in you, Mr. Hunter?”

  There were a million bad answers to that question and about a half of them passed through D’s mind before he parted his lips and told the truth: “Dwayne Robinson.”

  “The murdered hip hop writer?”

  “Dwayne would have said he wrote about black music—African American music—and that hip hop was only the current branch of that tree. He knew about all forms of black music. But let me jump ahead a bit so we don’t have to do a long, drawn-out verbal dance.”

  Conrad seemed a little irritated by D’s tone. But staying professional, he just crossed his hands and said, “Please, Mr. Hunter, go on.”

  “Dwayne was working on a book called The Plot Against Hip Hop when he was murdered. I never saw the whole manuscript, ’cause it was stolen after he died. But I know that Mayer was someone Dwayne thought was destructive to hip hop culture and that he had a chapter in the book outlining the reasons why.”

  Conrad took this in and then asked, “How does that explain his interest in you?”

  “I was close with Dwayne,” D explained. “He was my mentor. I wouldn’t be doing the things I now do in business without his guidance. Mayer must have known that. Maybe he was afraid of me and wanted to find some dirt. In truth, I don’t really wanna know.”

  Conrad nodded. “Glad you are so forthcoming, Mr. Hunter. You say you’ve never read the manuscript?”

  “Only bits and pieces. But D told me a lot about what he was trying to do.”

  Conrad reached down, pulled a cardboard box out of a leather bag, and placed it on the table. “Take a look.”

  D gasped. He hadn’t expected this. “Is this the manuscript?”

  “It is. There are a couple of chapters I’d like your feedback on.” Conrad pulled out a paper-clipped chapter and handed it to D. “Give it a read. I’ll call you in two hours. I think you’ll get through these pages fast.”

  D picked up the box, and a moment later he was tearing up.

  Conrad watched him dispassionately. “Please feel free to take it with you. Let’s speak in tw
o hours,” he said.

  D wiped his eyes and left the room in silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  ON TO THE NEXT ONE

  D sat at a table in Hampton Chutney, an Indian dosa joint in SoHo that had been his go-to spot back in the day. He was buried in the thoughts of a dead writer. Dwayne Robinson wrote:

  There are many popular conspiracy theories related to hip hop. One of the most popular is about a “secret meeting” redirecting hip hop into its gangsta rap era, as if the culture’s embrace of crack narratives started on the West Coast or that hip hop could be controlled top-down when all its innovations, themes, and techniques flowed from the street.

  If you were going to control hip hop from the outside, it would have to be done inside out, like a bug buried deep in a computer program that would slowly subvert the system. And that is exactly what is happening. Hip hop, being an agile beast, has leaped in and out of outsider’s clutches.

  However, these agent provocateurs are around and they are busy building their own empires, not simply to make money, but to serve the goals of those who care little for the culture and the community that nurtured it.

  The central figure in the plot against hip hop is a man named Samuel Kurtz, CEO of Diversified International Brands and owner of a plethora of other companies. In 2009, he spoke at the Culture and Conscience Conference in Boca Raton, Florida, to about twenty people in a conference room at the Boca Raton Resort & Club Hotel. Unknown to Kurtz, someone recorded his remarks. I purchased a copy of the transcript for five hundred dollars from someone who attended the meeting. I have heard the actual tape but was not allowed to have a copy. This is legit.

  For all you hip hop conspiracy folks, here you go. For all of you who don’t believe in conspiracies, I hate to open your eyes but this is the blue pill. At the conference, Samuel Kurtz gave a talk called “The Sociocultural Tools of Neoconservative Capitalism.”

  Kurtz’s opening remarks concerned hip hop as a marketing tool. “When this hip hop thing first caught on, it appalled me. It was loud, too ghetto, and seemed dangerous for the country. Then when Run-D.M.C. made a very effective sneaker deal with Adidas, I realized that this thing was an advertising delivery system. It sold ideas, attitudes, and products. Its words went right into the consciousness of the listeners. Unlike advertising, where there can be resistance and tuning out, rap was readily accepted and rappers were natural product endorsers and spokespeople.”

  This is eerie, D thought. Kurtz had said the same thing to these neocons that he’d said in the meeting with D. Am I, in my eagerness to make a big deal, as greedy and mean as this bunch?

  But then, instead of hyping his new beverage, Kurtz’s remarks took a sinister turn:

  “The promotion of very narrow values in hip hop music goes hand in hand with targeted government policies. In turn, they can create extremely lucrative business opportunities for us. The street-drug culture that hip hop glamorizes, and in many cases is funded by, leads to arrests and incarceration. Investments in the private prison industry have been bolstered by the laws passed at the height of the nineties crack economy (one thing we can actually thank the Clintons for).”

  This last comment received loud, sarcastic laughter from the collected fat cats. Kurtz continued: “Minimum mandatory sentencing turned our speculation in private prisons into cash cows that have transformed so many American towns, generating jobs in a wide spectrum of businesses while throwing off dollars that turn into cash-flow funds that help elect politicians who support our ideas. It has been a perfect storm.

  “Going forward, I am investing in charter schools. The goal here is to both run education more efficiently, but also to control the information about American values that are inculcated. In addition, the removal of resources from public education is a direct way to keep large percentages of minority children on the school-to-prison pipeline, which fills our private prisons and allows us to tap into a huge supply of low-cost labor for decades to come. The public sector pays for the care and feeding of the incarcerated workers. The profits generated flow to prison owners, vendors, and the companies’ contracts to have their products made. Even in the face of automated factories of the future, the cost efficiency of the incarcerated will be hard to beat.

  “Another link in this chain is that the more minorities who are in jail, the fewer who have the right to vote. This is crucial in states and districts where the white-vs.-minority count is close and the balance of power can be swung. Disenfranchising thousands of voters can be key in keeping our candidates in office and our agenda moving forward.

  “Right now I am extremely bullish on alcohol and energy drinks. Cheap alcoholic beverages laced with high levels of sugar and packaged in the colors of children’s candy are a huge focus for my company in the years ahead. Linked with the right pop culture or music figures, it can generate substantial profits and increase petty crime rates, which helps both our financial and political goals.”

  After Kurtz finished his horrifying vision of how hip hop could be a tool in the enslavement of a generation of minority youth, applause burst from his listeners. Then they broke for lunch. On the afternoon agenda were remarks by Dinesh D’Souza on making right-wing documentaries and Coachella owner Philip Anschutz of AEG on turning left-wing culture into right-wing income. For these businessmen/activists pushing a right-wing agenda, hip hop was not a revolutionary opposition. It was a world of small-time musicians who could be tools to help maintain the master’s house. They were mental slaves to the rhythm of capitalism. But what Kurtz didn’t say is that his involvement with hip hop didn’t end with liquor deals and ad campaigns. The truth was, Kurtz wanted a way to steer the culture and tamp down its progressive tendencies. He found the most unlikely collaborators in that (mis)adventure.

  D set the manuscript aside, took another bite of his dosa, and looked out on Grand Street. He could see where this was going. He knew this part of the tale all too well. The only mystery that remained was why Amos Pilgrim collaborated with Samuel Kurtz. D continued reading:

  Amos Pilgrim is a legend in the music business. He is not simply a talent manager and label owner, but a connector of people, jobs, and money. His name comes up in a variety of contexts, doing a variety of things. But no one has ever accused Pilgrim of being a crook, which, in the music business, is an amazing accomplishment. In all my years covering the music industry, I’ve never heard a discouraging word aimed at Amos Pilgrim. He is more than respected. He is beloved.

  At some point in the early nineties, Pilgrim realized that hip hop was no longer a subgenre. It was going to dominate black music, which meant it would eventually dominate American music and then the world, just as jazz, rock and roll, disco, and other black music had before. Pilgrim got it in his head that he should control hip hop, or at least have a strong grip on its lever so he could direct it and fulfill his neoliberal agenda.

  At the Ivy in Beverly Hills in the summer of 1993, Pilgrim and Kurtz had dinner. On the agenda was a promotional deal involving various black advertising agencies and Kurtz’s brands. But that was just the excuse for two businessmen to have a wide-ranging conversation about political and cultural trends. Pilgrim was on the board for a couple of Kurtz’s businesses, while Kurtz had contributed generously to several charities that Pilgrim supported. They were people who had money, made each other more money, embraced each other’s charitable ventures, and enjoyed sitting and trading visions for the nation.

  So Pilgrim told Kurtz of his plan to plant agents in hip hop’s East and West Coast scenes to steer them in specific directions, with a special emphasis on co-opting the volatile, charismatic Tupac Shakur, whose family has a political background and links to important figures on both coasts. Kurtz was fascinated and offered his assistance, suggesting that operatives trained in surveillance, counterintelligence, and undercover ops would be necessary to fulfill Pilgrim’s vision. Kurtz put Pilgrim in contact with executives at White Cube, an organization with both aboveground online digital i
ntelligence and underground tactical intelligence.

  With White Cube’s help, Pilgrim was able to identify several Federal Bureau of Investigation agents to be recruited. After a year of background checks and an ample financial offer, two FBI agents—Eric Mayer and Anthony Jackson, a.k.a. Malik Jones—joined Pilgrim’s project. Technically speaking, Mayer and Jackson/Jones both resigned from the Bureau. According to files obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, both men had taken early retirement to work in private security. In fact, both used a Kurtz holding company as their forwarding address.

  I believe they never fully left the FBI. Even as they reported to Pilgrim, they passed along information about hip hop figures (who, in the eyes of many in the FBI, were all associated with drug traffickers) to law enforcement. They also funneled information to Kurtz that helped the marketing of various consumer products. In the first two years of this operation, Pilgrim received regular updates on their activities and they often made moves based on his orders.

  Eventually or, perhaps given the nature of hip hop, unavoidably, by year three, both agents went rogue. Each chose a side in the East Coast/West Coast rap war of the midnineties, losing contact with their original selves in the fractured dual-identity dreamscape of hip hop. They lived their own real-life gangsta videos. Soon, they were gunning for each other as if they were rival rap moguls. How this affected their contact with the FBI is unfortunately unclear, but their fixation on Tupac did continue. In fact, Mayer was traveling to the Upstate New York prison where Tupac was held in 1996, arriving a day after Suge Knight and attorney David Kenner made their infamous jailhouse deal with the MC.

  I can’t confirm with absolute certainty that Mayer and Jackson/Jones played a role in the assassinations of the Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac. They weren’t triggermen. They didn’t order either shot. But both were trained in subversion and innuendo. Both understood the art of misdirection. There is no doubt in my mind that using the tools employed against Dr. Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers, and many black elected officials, these two men helped inflame the climate that resulted in the culture-altering shootings in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.