Free The Plot Against Hip Hop by Nelson George Page B

been in law enforcement nearly twentyfive years, D, and ‘sounds like a cop’ does mean something to me. But I couldn’t cosign that in this case. On the other hand, the name Malik—that’s actually useful. I’ll call Robinson’s wife and ask her if they have any friends with that name.”
    “I bet that’s why his office was ransacked. Malik was there looking for any references to himself. Looking for the manuscript.”
    Fly Ty sighed. “All this tells us is that a man named Malik was involved in some project that Robinson was investigating about a book that had something to do with hip hop. We also know he wasn’t gonna cooperate with Robinson in his research and that he knew someone who’d feel threatened by what Robinson was writing. That’s all helpful.”
    “What’s also helpful is that the person who was threatened probably wasn’t two teenage Bloods. That was a hit, Fly Ty.”
    “Okay, Mr. Detective. You are making a leap. Maybe it’s a smart one, but we are a long way from having any evidence linking those two killers to anything else.”
    “What about Truegod’s death?”
    “Lots of loose links. But NYPD isn’t in the business of saving hip hop. If you can find some more substantial link between these two deaths other than an obscure marketing plan, we’ll dig deeper.”
    “I’ma hold you to that, Fly Ty.”
    D caught a bus on Fifth Avenue; as it rolled downtown, he sat there thinking about money, secrets, and hip hop. The first two were the chief reasons many people were killed. Hip hop now seemed to be reason number three.
    So who made money off the Sawyer memorandum? Who would benefit from hip hop becoming a highly marketable commodity and sapped of any political edge? A taxi paused next to the bus with an ad for Cîroc vodka on top; Diddy posed suavely next to a bottle. That was gonna be the problem trying to solve Dwayne’s death. So many different kinds of people were getting paid off hip hop in so many different ways that it made the whole industry suspect. D needed to put himself back in the late ’80s/early ’90s and see what people and corporations had benefitted during that transitional period.
    What the hell could they have done that justified two murders twenty years after the fact? The memorandum was a starting point and Diddy’s alcohol ad was one possible end. What was the through line in the history of hip hop that results in Dwayne Robinson being stabbed dead on Crosby Street in Soho?

CHAPTER 15
    A NTE U P
    B rownsville was still awash in blood. Despite New York City’s alltime low murder rate and crime figures that made the metropolis one of the safest big cities in America, in good old Brownsville—a Brooklyn neighborhood of endless public housing tracts, generations of poverty, and restless, hungry youth—folks were still getting killed regularly for stupid shit.
    On the walls of apartment buildings, elevated subway stations, and malt liquor billboards, the C and B of Crips and Bloods were ubiquitous. Pint-sized gangbangers, strapped, insecure, and terribly thin-skinned, perpetuated self-genocide with a ruthlessness too reminiscent of Rwanda. Though they shared the names of infamous South Central gangstas, the menace involved wasn’t drive-bys or the economic imperatives of crack-era cartels.
    In twenty-first century Brownsville, the landscape was littered with minigangs—cousins, project floor neighbors, homies who met in juvie—who were organized around low-level drug deals, extortion, and assault. Some were as young as ten and had the nasty intelligence of the kids from Brazil’s City of God, with whom they shared dismal prospects and the same desire for validation.
    Ever since the days of Murder Incorporated, when tough Depressionera Jews from Brownsville carried out hits for the Mob, the neighborhood had spawned more than its share of hard-eyed, violent men. It’s one reason Brownsville had a long tradition of adroit, dynamic fighters, with Mike Tyson