DISGRACELAND - GZA (Wu-Tang Chapter 10): Quantum Physics, Cop Killers, and a Stock-Trading Scumbag

Episode Date: October 19, 2023

GZA may be the only rapper who lectures about quantum physics at Ivy League institutions including Harvard and MIT. That honor stems from his acknowledged role as “the Genius” – the so-called ���Voltron head” of hip-hop’s most notorious group. A group that was targeted by the most hated man in America after that same man bought their one-of-a-kind album at auction for two million dollars. A group that nearly crumbled under the weight of resentment, acrimony, and lawsuits. A group whose past continued to come back to haunt them, particularly when Staten Island’s undisputed drug kingpins went on trial after a nearly 20-year reign of fear and violence.To see the full list of contributors, see the show notes at www.disgracelandpod.com.Sign up for our newsletter and get the inside dirt on events, merch and other awesomeness - GET THE NEWSLETTERFollow Jake and DISGRACELAND:InstagramYouTubeX (formerly Twitter) Facebook Fan GroupTikTok To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Double Elvis. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends.

Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things, Tana Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. On the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history,

including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Disgraceland is a production of Double Elvis.

The stories about the Wu-Tang clans, the Jizzah, are insane. He may be the only rapper. who lectures about quantum physics at Ivy League institutions, including Harvard and MIT. That honor stems from his acknowledged role as the genius, the so-called Voltron Head of Hip Hop's most notorious group. A group that was targeted by the most hated man in America, after that same man bought their one-of-a-kind album at auction for $2 million. A group that nearly crumbled under the country.

weight of resentment, acrimony, and lawsuits. A group whose past continued to come back to haunt them, particularly when Staten Island's undisputed drug kingpins went on trial after a nearly 20-year reign of fear and violence. A group that made great music. Music made even greater and more profound by the presence of the jizzah. Unlike that clip I played for you at the top of the show, that wasn't great music.

That was a preset loop from my Melotron called Life Moves Pretty Fast, MK.1. I played you that clip because I can't afford the rights to Hello by Adele. And why would I play you that specific slice of from the other side cheese could I afford it? Because that was the number one song in America on December 17, 2015, and that was the day that the Federal Bureau of Investigation made an early morning arrest in New York City after a prolonged investigation, an arrest that sent a shock through the Wu-Tang world.

On this episode, quantum physics, Ivy League institutions, the most hated man in America, from the other side cheese, and Wu-Tang clans the Jizzah. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is... disgrace land. Few people living in New York City in the 1970s were as uniquely prepared for the

dawn of rap music as Gary Grice. The boy the world would later know as the Gizza. But young Jizzah, aka the genius, aka young Gary here, didn't know that he was uniquely prepared for anything. All he knew were rhymes. The nursery rhymes in his mother goose book that he memorized as a kid, the rhymes on records by the spoken word group The Last Poets. He listened to those over and over repeating every verse, every inflection, every cadence. He mashed both worlds together in his head. Poems for kids and poems for adults. Two halves of one brain. On one side, Humpty Dumpty, all broken up but no one to put them back together again. On the other side, Jesus Christ himself, standing on the corner Lennick's in 125th, trying to catch the first cab out of Harlem.

You know, when the revolution comes. When the revolution did come, when Curtis Blow dropped the brakes in 1980, and Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five hit the R&B chart in 1982 with The Message, Gary, now a teenager, his head flowing with verses by local MCs like Spoonie G and Eddie Chiva, understood better than most what he was hearing. Hip-hop made sense. It was a language he was already speaking, the style he was already living. The hip-hop ciphers that broke out on street corners and block parties were all about inclusion.

The ciphers were circles, and circles were made to be unbroken. They brought people together. People who had no other options, no voice, like the punks across the pond in England, they had no future. Until now. Hip-hop made something out of nothing. Hip-hop triumphed over adversity. It brought meaning to the absurdity of life, and thus brought life to burnt-out

and deteriorating buildings in the South Bronx projects, where Gary here spent the summers with his father. The South Bronx was ground zero for hip-hop. DJs rolled up, plugged their huge speakers into a random light pole on the street, hijacked electricity, and started spinning. And next, a dude just jumped on the mic, and then another dude challenged the first dude. It was all about standing your ground, proving your words, mastering your flow.

Gary took that flow with him to his mom's place, first on Staten Island and later in Brooklyn. On paper, Staten Island was just another borough, but it was not the Bronx. And this being the late 70s and early 80s, news traveled as slow. as the Staten Island Ferry. So Gary's cousin, Bobby Diggs, aka the Rizza, got hip to the flow before the rest of Staten Island only because Gary brought it to him. Hip-hop blew Bobby's mind. Between the Kung Fu movies and now rap music, Bobby didn't sleep much.

Who needed sleep? Along with their third cousin, Russell Jones, aka A. San Unique, aka Old Dirty Bastert. The cousins just wanted to walk the streets at all hours and look for a cipher, a circle of other emcees dropping freestyles off the top of their domes. Ciphers were where you learned. Ciphers were where you picked a fight. Not physically, but with your words, with your rhymes, with your flow. Gary learned quick.

Soon, he was like the lone wolf and Shogun assassin. Only if the lone wolf wasn't alone but instead had a wolf pack. And this wasn't the peaceful Edo period in Japan. This was New York in the 1980s. Muggers, murderers, thieves and dope fiends were behind every corner. Fear City was not for the faint of heart. You had to be sharp. Your words, your delivery, your confidence.

It had to be Gustav. Some cheap Gins shit. The rush you got when you brought fire to the cypher, when you were funky, cool, confident, like butter, or better yet, like mercury, both liquid and metal at the same time, that rush was incredible. Nothing felt better. Gary loved that feeling, so he did it more. He battled.

He learned. He got better. And soon, he was coming in for the kill. A choice verse was like a broad sword to the chest. In? Out. A couplet here. A rhyme there.

Knees buckled in blood ran red. He was ruthless. He sliced necks. He cut heads. And the heads rolled. But as the decade rolled on and rap music gained commercial traction, the genre was increasingly vilified by those who didn't understand it the way Gary did. Tipper Gore, a Democrat senator's wife from Tennessee,

led the charge of the Parents' Music Resource Center. We have the PMRC to thank for those parental advisory stickers as well as the erroneous claim that rap simply glorified violence and degraded women. In 1988, Hollis Queens' own run DMC held a press conference to blast the media and come to rap's defense after a fan died at a hip-hop show at the Nassau Coliseum. Writing about that show, the New York Times described rap music as, quote, a rhymed chant to an electronically produced beat, unquote, and reported that the violence at this particular show was,

and I also quote, the latest in a wave that seems to follow rap performances almost as closely as its fans decked out in gold chains. That wasn't what hip-hop was about at all. Not to Gary, it wasn't. Hip-hop was lyrical. It came from the streets, sure, but it also came from the heart,

from the depths of your imagination. It was poetry and mathematics, Mother Goose, and last poets. It didn't have to be about your life. life, it could be about anything. It was multidimensional, cosmic. Rap was dust and stars. And in Gary's hands, rap was straight up genius.

But genius isn't recognized by everyone. Mediocrity is much easier to spot. And thus, mediocrity dominates the conversation. Turns out, mediocrity wants to rule the world. There's two golden rules that. Many men should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl. You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.

And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield. And in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me?

The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters into their own hands. They said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe.

On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of family secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle.

Each week, we dive head first into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook. and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of showed me out of the way and said, move. And he went out of the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off. And that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets, starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia When like young people come up to me and they want to be an act or whatever,

my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises. And his entire the Kardashians family over there, everybody's going,

And the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting.

I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Martin Shikrelli had something that no one else had. Wu-Tang Clan's seventh studio album. Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was one of a kind. A singular copy had been made. Just literally one copy. Two compact discs housed at a silver jewel-encrusted box with a wax wu-tank seal and liner notes bound in leather. There was, quite literally, nothing else in the world like it.

It wasn't just music, it was art. It was 2016. The year prior, Shikrelli put up $2 million at auction to own the world's rare. album. He paid more money for once upon a time and shallow in than anyone had paid for an album in history. Two million dollars. That's nuts. It's fucking crazy. For Shikrelli, though, it was a drop in the bucket. He had that kind of money, or at least he made it look like he had that kind of money. His parents worked hard for their money. Immigrants who came to Brooklyn and found work pushing brooms, definition of working class. Not entirely.

unlike the guys in Wu-Tang. And also not unlike a lot of the guys in Wu-Tang, Shikrelli dropped out of high school to hustle. But he didn't hustle dice games like Method Man, and he didn't hustle crack like U-God, Rayquan, and Deck. Shikreli had a different hustle. The stock market. Incredibly, he was buying shares of a little company called Amazon

at just 15 years old. He interned for Wall Street hedge funds before he was 21. He grew tall by short-selling biotech stocks. He played huge wrists and used the art of bullshit to cover his ass when those wrists didn't pay off. His pharmaceutical company infamously bought the rights to market Dariprim, a drug used by AIDS patients. Chakrelli immediately raised the cost from $12.50 to $750. And that's over 5,000% per. The Daily Beast labeled Shikreli, the most hated man in America.

And it wasn't just his wealth or his greed or his bullshit or the fact that he made a life-saving drug next to impossible for sick people to afford. It was his smirk. The shit-eating granny flashed every time he was on the news sent a very clear message. He may be despised and he may be a scam artist, but one thing could not be denied. He was untouchable. Every time he smirked, he confirmed this.

Very entitled and very smug and very safe, in his white-collar tower. What's my name, as Smirk seemed to say. Fuck you. That's my name. It was the same smirk he was flashing now in a video posted online, flanked by three men wearing masks over their faces. Shekrelli gave the patent an insufferable smirk

as he addressed one particular member of the hip-hop group who was one-of-a-kind album he just purchased. Dennis, I'm going to call you by your government name. You're not a ghost face killer. I'm sorry. You're an old man that's lost his right. relevance and you're trying to reclaim a spotlight from my spotlight. And that's not okay.

Most people don't even try to beef with me. You know why? Because nobody's that dumb. And for whatever reason, you think that's okay to beef with me. That's a big mistake. Shikrelli, of course, was addressing Ghostface Killer, a Kohl, who called Shikreli a shithead when TMZ asked him to comment on the buyer Woutain's unprecedented work of art.

Ghost wasn't wrong. He told his truth, but hearing that truth pushed Shikrelli over the edge. His verbal missive online turned downright threatening. I'm going to erase you from the record books of rap. I butter your bread, you understand me? Without me, you're nothing. Stop acting, stop pretending, stop lying, be real, and don't ever fucking mention my name again. Or there will be more of a price to pay than just this video.

Shikrelly's threats may have phased a weaker person, but not ghost face. In fact, Ghost could not wait to respond to that fake-ass supervillains video. And my god, man, did he respond? Google Ghost's 11-minute video in which he destroys the farmer bro with humor and heart and the help of his sister and his mother, but I digress. It's reasonable, however, to think that ghosts and the rest of Wu-Tang were aware of and perhaps concerned with the unspoken threat in play. You could laugh all you wanted at.

Shikrelli's weak thug act, but you could not deny this, that a man could be so entitled, so untouchable, so above the law, that he could take whatever he wanted. Didn't matter if ghosts could out disson or the jizzah could out genius him. This guy had money, influence, and power, just like the PMRC back in the day. Today, it was a silver jewel-encrusted box, and tomorrow it can beat everything else. We'll be right back after this world, word, word. There's two golden rules that any man should live by. Rule one, never mess with a country girl.

You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes. And rule two, never mess with her friends either. We always say that, trust your girlfriends. I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of the girlfriends... Oh my God, this is the same man. A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist. I felt like I got hit by it. a truck. I thought, how could this happen to me? The cops didn't seem to care. So they take matters

into their own hands. They said, oh, hell no. I vowed. I will be his last target. He's going to get what he deserves. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe. On the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny. Shapiro. And these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. And just then, we felt the plain turn in the air, so much so that the bags that were under people's seats just kind of flew into the aisle. Each week, we dive head first into the complex power of secrecy, how it shapes our identities and relationships, and how it

ultimately can reveal to us our truest selves. My daughter, she's pretending she doesn't know, but is trying to cook and feed me and keep me alive because I wasn't eating anything and me pretending like everything was fine. He kind of showed me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to season 14 of Family Secrets starting May 7th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. And like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever.

And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance. Like he's about to attack me. Like making karate noises.

And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going. And the air marshal is trying. trying to grab my arms and screaming. And I immediately know that I've been at sleepwalking. David O'Yellowo. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban.

Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gaten Madarazzo from Stranger Things Tena Monsu Camilla Morone Carrie Kenny Silver

and more Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea On the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts Or wherever you get your podcasts Jizzah was pissed He knew he was getting fucked They were all getting fucked

Kid Capri Grandadie, IU Cool G rap, Master Ace Each given a $25 per DM on this 10 city promotional tour while the sponsor their record label, Cold Chilling, was pulling down $60,000 a night. 60 grand. Now that was cold. It was also a wake-up call. The labels, the music industry at large, they didn't care about you. They only cared about how you could make money for them. And also,

they cared about keeping as much of that money from you as possible. Jizzah, just 24 years old, wide-eyed, optimistic, Hungary, was about to be taught a major lesson in how the world really worked. Cold Chillon, the label, was not going to change Jizzah's life. He was going to have to find another way. 1991, one year before the dawn of Wutang, Jizzo was still going by his original stage name, The Genius. His Cold Chilin record solo debut, words from the genius, was barely making a dent. To be completely honest, it tanked.

Very few people heard it, lost out there somewhere between the tone lokes and the NWA's and the public enemies. Jiza gave it his all. He poured his heart and sold to every line on every track. Cold chill and poured it all down the drain. In Jizz's eyes, they didn't give him a chance. They didn't give his promotional budget enough zeros. And now they're offering him this, mere pennies on the dollar while they raked in the big bucks. Jizzah may have been young, but he knew a screw job when he saw one.

Not that life as an undervalued cold chilling artist was unique. Far from it. Like Hunter S. Thompson once said, The entertainment world is a, quote, long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs for no good reason, unquote. He was actually talking about the television industry, but it tracks for the music biz too.

These recording deals were almost always made by young artists, desperate to change their reality. And desperation will make you do just about anything. And in the case of guys like Jizzo and his brothers in Wu-Tang, a record deal meant they were doing the impossible. They were making something of their lives. A record deal meant you could stop running, stop dealing, stop living hand and mouth.

Thus, it was easy to sign on the dotted line, but even easier to feel like a dupe when you realized you'd been played. Thing is, getting played wasn't something that was exclusive to an artist's formative years. Cold chilling wouldn't be the only time Jizzah was going to do the math and scratch his head. Hey, Dirty Baby, I Got Your Money. It was a line that the Rizza likely never uttered, but Old Dirty Bastars' 1999 hit single was allegedly written about Rizza and how he initially balked at letting ODB out of his Woutang contract.

As we covered in an earlier episode, that sentiment was echoed by many in the group who said they didn't have an easy time parting ways with Wu-Tang productions. Additionally, U-God claimed in his autobiography that Riza's deep knowledge of the music industry put the rest of the group at a distinct disadvantage. From what I can tell, he got rich, Yuga got rope, but I still don't know what I'm due. This confusion and resentment never went away. It bubbled up time and again, and most notably around the creation of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the one-of-a-kind album sold to Farmerbrough Martin Shrekly in 2015. An album which you got called, quote, some sucker shit, pure and simple, unquote. Ray Kwan agreed.

In his own book, Ray called what went down during the making of that album as, quote, some of the dirtiest shit I've ever heard of. Once Upon a Time in Shao Lin was conceived by Silverin. Rings, a Dutch Moroccan rapper and producer originally discovered by ODB and Method Man and signed a Wu-Tang Records by Rizza. The concept of a single copy of a single album sold to a single buyer was, of course, the end result of the increasingly worthless nature of all recorded music, most of which is now given away from next to nothing. But Silver Rings's idea was not exactly a new one. It harkens back to the golden age of classical music when music was not just art, but

work and work was time and time was money. Back when composers like Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart, to name a few, were put on retainer, were hired outright by wealthy patrons or royalty to make their music. According to the market, and they were fairly compensated. But there was only one Mozart, not a clan of Mozart's, and that's where the problem with one, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin starts. The problem of fair compensation. Depending on which member of Wu-Tang you ask, they were either compensated very little or not at all for this album.

And they were compensated very little or not at all for random verses they laid down here and there, versus they weren't even aware were being used for a new Wu-Tang record, a record that was produced in secret, a record that sold for $2 million. And where was that money going they wanted to know? At every step, Wu-Tang were kept in the dark. Even when the album went up for auction,

most of the guys in the group had never heard it. Wu-Tang weren't the only ones complaining. The artists who created the intricate silver box said he never got paid either. Hey, Silver Rings, baby, you got my money? And the question was asked in vain. Silver Rings wasn't answering. He wasn't in Shaolin anymore. So the disgruntled artist went after whoever he could track down.

he sued some of the guys in Wu-Tang, who, as it turns out, were busy suing Wu-Tang productions. After the biggest sale on the history of recorded music, Wu-Tang Clan was splintering. The lawsuits, the acrimony, the resentment. It was the perfect moment for a guy like Martin Shikreli to weasel his way in and take advantage of the crumbling foundation. But Shikreli wasn't the only one Wu-Tang had to worry about. Because just as the group was attempting to sort out what we were. would become of their future. Their past was working overtime trying to catch up to them. Rinell Wilson shot the first detective in the back of the head at point-blank range.

He didn't know the cop had two sons waiting for him at home, not that it would have mattered. The other detective sitting inside the unmarked police car begged for his life while the first one bled out on his seat. He had three kids for Christ's sake, and he told Wilson he'd give him whatever he wanted. He wouldn't say shit about any of this, just don't kill him, not here. not now. Wilson wasn't listening. All his life, he'd known chaos and hardship. He saw plenty of foster homes and psychovals, but no happy endings, ever.

The only thing that mattered in life was getting what you wanted, by any means necessary. And right now, Wilson wanted two things. First, the $1,200 that the undercover detectives were carrying for this botched buy-and-bust operation. And second, no witness. He pointed his pistol at the whimpering detective and pulled the trigger. Then he dumped the two lifeless bodies in the middle of a Staten Island street and drove off into the night with the cash. NYPD arrested Wilson two days later. They found some remedial rap lyrics he scribbled on a piece of paper, bragging about being a cop killer two times over.

Hip-hot and death. Not so strange bedfellows. Two constants in the shift. shithole of a city. So went to thinking by members of law enforcement anyway. Ronald Wilson didn't give a damn what the cops thought. He had no regrets and no remorse. And the prosecution told the jury that only a man with no remorse didn't take the stand. And so the jury sentenced Wilson to die. This was in 2007. Three years later, Wilson's sentence was overturned by a federal appellate panel. The prosecution had violated Wilson's right not to testify when they told the jury that stuff about remorse and testifying. Didn't matter if that sentiment was ultimately true or not.

The law was the law. Back in Park Hill, Staten Island, where the law was anyone's guess, Wilson's temporary reversal of fortune was caused for celebration. Wilson's fellow sympathizers in the bloods partied in a parking lot, including Anthony and Harvey Christian, a.k.a. the Christian brothers. a.k.a. the undisputed kingpins of the Park Hill drug trade for close to two decades now. I should say that the Christian brothers allegedly celebrated a cop killer's stay of execution, as this detail was provided in the sworn testimony in one of their former associates,

who, in 2014, turned snitch for the feds when the Christian brothers were arrested and put on trial. Anthony and Harvey Christian were accused of running a feared and violent enterprise, charged with racketeering, firearms possession, multiple counts of drug trafficking and murder conspiracies, including in the case of Anthony Christian, the murder of a man named Jerome Boo Boo Estrella. Now, if the name Jerome Estrella sounds familiar to you, it should. You may remember him from our previous episode of Disgraceland about mass to killa. Estrella was the bloods member murdered in 1999, a murder that at the time the feds were

trying to pin on Wu-Tang Clan. Reason being that Estrella had supposedly robbed the Rizzo's little brother, and according to testimony from former gang members turned snitches, the murder was payback, alleged to have been ordered by Wu-Tang. Of course, the FBI's designation of Wu-Tang Clan as a major crime organization was old news. Their five-year investigation was closed shut, had been for a decade, and their file, which made connections between the hip-hop group and numerous murders, not to mention the never-ending transgressions of old dirty bastard, was stashed deep in the bowels of a government building.

Case closed. But nothing is ever truly closed. The past is never truly dead. It's only a matter of time before it wakes up again. Sometimes, though, it wakes up in Steubenville, other times on Staten Island. Once it woke up at the House of Blues in Los Angeles, when a crypt tried to put a piece in met the man's hand after the notorious BIG was gunned down. And now, in a high-profile case involving two of New York City's most dangerous drug kingpins, it woke up again. Anthony Christian's lawyer heard about the FBI's file on Woutang Clan. He demanded to see it.

What if the Bureau's cold case had hot legs? What of all that existing due diligence could actually clear Anthony Christian's name? What I'm trying to ascertain, the lawyer said, is the FBI's stated belief in an official file that Wu-Tang ordered this homicide. He wasn't suggesting that Wu-Tang committed a crime. The FBI had gone ahead and done that already. Thursday, December 17, 2015, 6 a.m. New York City was still shrouded in darkness when the knock came at the apartment door. And then, another.

Finally, the door opened. Federal agents were neatly pressed suits with guns at their hips and badges around their necks flooded inside. The man inside the apartment was barely awake, or maybe he'd never gone to sleep the night before. It was hard to tell with the ones who lived outside the law for so long. The lead agent told the man to put his hands behind his back, and the man did as he was told, and the agent got out his handcuffs. He locked them tight around the man's wrists.

and began to read him his rights. The agent led the man to the front door of the apartment building and out into the treeline streets of Murray Hill. The sun was struggling to come up. A crowd of reporters struggled to get a quote. The man wasn't talking. His gray hoodie was pulled over his head. He didn't say a word.

He just let the feds walk him to wear an unmarked car idled on the side of the street. And then he quietly ducked inside. After a prolonged investigation, after years of surveillance and COs and dead-end leads of knowing in their guts that they were right, the FBI finally had vindication. They made an arrest, and they had their guy. But this was not a member of Wu-Tang being led away by the FBI. The man in cuffs wasn't ghost-faced killer, nor was it the Rizza or the Jizzah. It was Martin Shikrelli. Shikrelli's perp walk was broadcast on every major network.

There was headline news. The feds had an avalanche of evidence against him. As one agent put it, Shikreli was being charged with the securities fraud trifecta, a lies, deceit, and greed. Martin Shikreli's sudden fall from a smug untouchable to a disgraced conman was satisfying to watch for most, not least of all, Wutang Clan.

He'd defrauded investors and stole millions. and now everything was being taken away from him, including the $2 million album, which was sitting in a temperature-controlled room at the Department of Justice. Wu-Tang, meanwhile, were cleared of any wrongdoing in the eyes of the federal government. Drug Kingpin Anthony Christian and his lawyer tried for a year to get the FBI's Wutang case reopened but were unsuccessful. The Christian brothers were eventually found guilty on all charges.

Harvey Christian received a 50-year sentence, while Anthony, who was also found guilty of the murder of Jerome Boo Boo Estrella, got life. Martin Shikrelli got seven years for fraud. Ghost's face killer, the Method man, got a photo with James Comey, former FBI director backstage at a taping of The Late Show with Stephen Colpair. Ghost posted it on his Instagram. The U.S. government eventually resold once upon a time in Shaolin in order to satisfy the balance of Martin Shikreli's debt.

It was purchased by a group of NFT collectors called Pleaser Dow. And don't ask me to properly pronounce that or to explain decentralized organizations or non-fundurable tokens. I'm not going to do it, but I am going to tell you that they paid twice what Shikrelli paid for it. Per the terms of the original sale, public release of the album is forbidden until the year 2103. And Jiza, aka the genius, aka the man Riza, once called the Hezza. head of Wu-Tang's Voltron assembly, was standing at the podium in a lecture hall at MIT. At first, it felt funny to be there, like he was a man out of place, like maybe he should stay in his lane. But this was his lane. Thought, imagination, expression, no matter if it was in the classroom or on the street corner.

All of it was cosmic. Everything was connected by dust and stars. Words themselves were electrically charged and electrical charges made up subatomic particles. Something like that. He was still learning. Since he was a little kid, he never stopped learning. But now, in addition to battling rappers and a cipher back in the neighborhood, he was trading thoughts with marine biologists and astrophysicists. And just think, him, Gary Grice, a kid from the South Bronx, from Brooklyn, from Staten Island,

A kid obsessed with hip-hunk. That musical form once derided by the public and misrepresented by the media. He was here now as an ambassador of that music and that culture, at the forefront of higher education, waxing existential to college students about quantum physics, about time and space. But mostly about rap music. How he'd been there for the Big Bang back in the 70s,

and now how he was here, over four decades later, still, watching the so-called globalization of hip-hop take over the entire world. From New York, all the way to Japan, Europe, Africa, and everywhere in between. Just like hip-hop, Jizzah could not and would not stop. From MIT, he went to NYU, and then from NYU to Harvard, and from Harvard to Oxford. He didn't want to rule the world, and there were enough mediocre people already trying to do that. The Martin Shikrelli's and the FBI's and the Christian brothers, he was just trying to understand it. How so many were content to wallow and mediocrity, but yet had so much promise for genius.

How the years were long and the challenges were deep. There was tragedy. There was triumph. And there were moments that burned bright. And there were times when, as Jiza explained about the current status of Wu-Tang, that match burns out. But there was always light somewhere. The cipher was never completely broken. Nothing was ever truly over.

After all, the universe was expanding. I'm Jake Brennan, and this is Disgraceland. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page at disgracelandpod.com. If you're listening as a Disgraceland All-Axist member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now

by going to disgracelandpod.com slash membership. Members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad-free. Plus, you'll get one brand new exclusive episode every month, weekly unscripted bonus episodes, special audio collections, and early access to merchandise and events. Visit disgracelampod.com slash membership for detail. Rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook at Disgracelam Pod, and on YouTube at YouTube.com slash at DisgracelandPod.

Rockerola. When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands. I vowed. I will be his last target. He is not going to get away with this. He's going to get what he deserves. We always say that trust your girlfriends. Listen to the girlfriends. Trust me, babe, on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcast. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, and my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yellow-O.

I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things, Tana Monshu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sometimes a suspect is found guilty before a verdict is ever read in court. on the Wicked Words podcast, I talk with the writers who dig deep into the cases that changed history, including Marsha Clark, who went from prosecuting one of the most famous murder cases to writing crime fiction. It doesn't matter that you didn't take part in the murder. If you were at the scene at all, you're guilty of murder. Every week, the real story is revealed. Join us every Monday for new episodes of Wicked Words. Listen to Wicked Words on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.