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One night in the late 1980s, Carlis Thompson showed up at a New York City apartment owned by her cousin, Run-DMC pioneer DJ Jam Master Jay.
The group had a show that night, but when Thompson entered the apartment, he was not greeted by Jay, Joseph “Run” Simmons or Darryl “DMC” McDaniels. The men hanging out were strangers to Thompson and instantly annoyed him.
“You could tell they were scammers,” said Thompson, who would become warden of the Rikers Island prison complex.
Thompson entered the bedroom and hugged his cousin, whose real name was Jason Mizell. They caught up for a bit, Thompson said, and then it was time to head to the club.
“I will never forget it,” he said. “Jason pulled an Uzi out of a closet.”
Thompson was stunned…and alarmed.
“Because, are we going to a concert or are we going to war?” she asked.
“You never know,” Mizell responded, according to Thompson.
The exchange proved prophetic. Mizell was shot to death inside his Queens recording studio in 2002, a murder that shocked the hip-hop world and remained unsolved for nearly two decades.
Last week, two men from Mizell’s former neighborhood were convicted of the murder after a trial that exposed the difficult situation he was in before the murder.
With Run-DMC’s popularity waning, big payouts became harder to come by for Mizell, who was known for showering cash on his family, friends, and even acquaintances from his old haunts in Hollis, Queens. So he leveraged his old neighborhood contacts to conduct drug deals, according to court testimony, a decision that ultimately led to his murder.
For some who knew Mizell the longest, the convictions were bittersweet. In the days since the trial, they have wondered how different her life would have been if she had managed to leave behind the scammers and hangers-on from her past.
“That was my cousin’s downfall,” said Ryan “Doc” Thompson, who grew up with Mizell and was among his closest confidants. “It was too late to wash your hands of these people.”
Wendell Fite, a childhood friend of Mizell, better known by his stage name DJ Hurricane, offered a similar opinion.
“Jay was the kind of person who thought he could help anyone, no matter who they were,” he said. “Jay always had a big heart, that’s why he’s not here today, because he surrounded himself with the wrong people.”
Family ties
Mizell grew up on 203rd Street, one of three siblings whose mother was a school teacher and his father was a social worker. As a child, Mizell didn’t have to go far to visit one of his closest friends, a boy who became known as Darren “Big D” Jordan.
“He lived directly across the street,” Ryan Thompson said.
The two went back a long time. Their mothers were best friends and had attended the same church in Brooklyn. The Mizells moved to Hollis, a middle-class neighborhood at the time, to provide a better environment for their children.
Mizell joined a group of kids who were burglarizing houses and served time in a juvenile detention center. When he came out, he turned his attention to his turntable and became a founding member of Run-DMC.
But he stayed close to his old neighborhood friends. So after Jordan’s son, Karl “Little D” Jordan Jr., was born in 1984, it was no surprise that Mizell became a godfather of sorts to him.
“That’s how close these two families were growing up,” Ryan Thompson said.
But that was then. In an almost Shakespearean twist, Jordan Jr. was one of two men convicted of Mizell’s murder.
The young man, then 18, fired a bullet into Mizell’s head from inches away, a witness told jurors, in what prosecutors described as an act of revenge for being excluded from a lucrative cocaine business.
“It was an ambush, an execution,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Miranda Gonzalez told the jury in her opening statement, “motivated by greed and revenge.”
Jordan had been implicated in the murder for a long time, but his arrest in 2020 still came as a surprise to some of Mizell’s relatives.
“He looked up to Jay,” Ryan Thompson said. “Before he became a gangster, he was a nice kid who respected his elders.”
Prosecutors said in court documents that Jordan, an aspiring rapper, sold drugs for years after the murder.
That a member of the Jordan family was involved in the murder was especially difficult to understand, some people close to Mizell said, because of all he had done to help them. The renowned DJ had landed Jordan Jr.’s father a job at Russell Simmons’ artist management company in the late 1980s.
“Jay literally took Big D off the streets,” said an industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Mizell had also done favors for the second man convicted in the shooting, Ronald “Tinard” Washington.
Prosecutors said Washington was a career criminal who had been in and out of prison for much of his adult life. He served time for drugs, weapons and assault.
“He was a street thug, a tough guy,” a former NYPD detective who worked on the case in 2002 said in an interview after Washington’s arrest.
But Mizell never turned his back on the man. In the days before the murder, Washington slept on a couch in Mizell’s childhood home, where his sister lived, according to court testimony.
A family enigma
Run-DMC released their sixth album, “Down With the King,” in 1993. It would be the group’s last to reach the top of the charts.
Run-DMC had blazed a trail for other rappers, providing a sound (understated beats and socially conscious lyrics delivered boldly) and style (black hats, Adidas jumpsuits, slip-on sneakers) that made them famous around the world.
But the 1990s ushered in a sharper brand of hip-hop, with artists like Ice-T and Dr. Dre rapping about the grim realities of inner cities and the gangster lifestyle.
The members of Run-DMC faced a conundrum familiar to celebrities who achieved fame and fortune only to see it slip away later in life: What now?
Mizell launched his own label, JMJ Records, and found immediate success with one of his first groups, Onyx. But the company failed and some of the people around Mizell did not have his best interests in mind, according to family members and industry veterans.
That he turned to drugs to make ends meet, acting as a middleman in occasional cocaine deals, was shocking to many who had known him.
“It’s jaw-dropping and terribly sad,” said Bill Adler, Run-DMC’s longtime publicist. “He had earned a reputation as a very, very generous guy. When his ability to maintain that reputation began to decline, I think he felt compelled to look for other ways to support himself.”
DJ Hurricane said he sees it a little differently. He thinks Mizell’s drug activities arose less from financial need than from the company he kept.
“Jay was not a drug dealer. That’s for sure,” Hurricane said. “If anything, he knew someone who needed something and he knew someone who had what that person needed.”
“It’s easy to get involved in something like this,” he added. “It’s just being around the wrong people.”
Carlis Thompson said that after the Uzi incident, he stayed away from his cousin’s Hollis Team because he didn’t want to jeopardize his career in the New York City correctional system.
But at family events, Thompson urged Mizell to take better care of his money: invest in real estate or open a clothing store to capitalize on the Run-DMC brand.
Thompson made it a point to attend the murder trial. Following the guilty verdicts, he said he felt like he “could breathe again.”
But he couldn’t stop thinking about the other members of Mizell’s family: his mother Connie, his brother Marvin and his sister Bonita.
As the years passed with no arrests for the murder, they asked for witnesses and anyone else who knew anything to come forward. But they never got justice.
One by one, all of their family members died in the years before Jordan and Washington were arrested.
“His mother was the last one we buried,” Thompson said. “At that time, we didn’t have any arrests.”
“I try not to think about it,” Thompson added, “because it breaks my heart.”