From Queenie to Diddy
This is a different story. The Diddy nitty gritty.
Here’s a story you won’t read anywhere else. I’m focusing on the 100-year New York City-based organized crime timeline of family and finance that brings us present-day to Sean John Combs, full gov.
Back in September when the Bad Boy Records CEO aka LOVE aka Diddy aka P Diddy aka Puff Daddy announced that he would be giving his label’s artists their publishing rights, my antenna went up. This was not the move of a shrewd businessman. It smelled of a major p.r. stunt to get in the good graces of the people because foul & damaging news about him was about to go public.
Everything since—from Diddy allegedly putting the hit out on Tupac, blowing up Kid Cudi’s car, much less the abuse, violence, and seediness with women, men, and kids, has barely just begun and will likely be trickling out on a weekly basis as the drip of accusations turns into an eventual waterfall.
9/17/2024 Update—Now that Diddy’s been arrested and the indictment unsealed, know this. Media is playing up the parties. Why? Because it’s sordid, and that sells. The parties are essential for blackmailing, but it all goes far deeper.
This is a different story. Call it the Diddy nitty gritty. How his power and money began in a direct lineage over 100 years ago.
It starts with Stephanie St. Clair, known as Madame Queenie or just Queenie. In 1912 she immigrated to New York from the island of Martinique. Barely five years later, as a 20-year-old, she flipped drug money to start what became the top numbers game in Harlem. Whether called the policy game, numbers, or an alternative to a banking system that Black citizens were largely shut out of, Madame Queenie made the largely male-dominated underground economy hum a full 50 years before the modern lottery system was implemented across the U.S. She was a key part of the Harlem Renaissance, resisted police corruption and the Jewish & Italian gangsters who wanted a piece of Harlem, and ran newspaper ads to educate people or to just tell them how it was.
Eventually, in the late 1930s, Queenie needed to lay low of NYPD, so she scaled her involvement from the numbers game, wrote newspaper columns about issues in the Black community and briefly married a man who ran an Islamic Buddhist temple, worked to end discriminatory hiring practices, and was known as “the Harlem Hitler.”
Queenie’s incredible life is documented in the book Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem by Raphael Confiant, of which the English translation was published by New Orleans publisher Dialogos. Speaking of books, The Book of Numbers by sadly unheralded Robert Deane Pharr is out of print but well worth seeking out to better understand the era and the game.
Queenie’s driver, eventual chief lieutenant, and the one running the show upon her retirement was a young man from South Caroline named Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, named for the bump on the back of his head. The two of them took on Dutch Schulz and the other mobsters, though she was omitted from the very loosely documented story in Godfather of Harlem starring Forest Whitaker as Bumpy. Same as Queenie, Bumpy was both ruthless and had a social conscience to uplift his people.
Bumpy’s driver and soon-enough his right-hand man was Frank Lucas. Lucas, originally from North Carolina, had been sent to NYC for the same reason as Bumpy had, both men had witnessed horrific racist incidents as children and had an outward anger in them that had family fearing for their lives. Like both Bumpy and Queenie before him, Lucas resisted the Mafia and NYPD while expanding business to another level. Lucas was famously played by Denzel Washington in American Gangster, which documented the business tactic of going directly to Asia to smuggle drugs into the U.S.
Photo below: Frank Lucas in 1971 at the Muhammad Ali/Joe Frazier fight.
Lucas’ driver was Melvin Combs who was shot and killed in 1972 at age 33 when his baby was only 2 years old. The boy’s name? Sean John Combs. It would be absurd to claim that a toddler was schooled by his father, but watch what comes next.
Historically, music clubs and labels have often been seeded and/or backed by organized crime or drug money. I can immediately think of labels as examples of this in New Orleans. Flenory brothers Demetrius (Big Meech) and Terry (Southwest T) started the Black Mafia Family (BMF) in Detroit between the mid-1980s to 1990 and eventually spread their drug operation across the entire country with key spots in Los Angeles (receiving the drugs) and Atlanta (distribution). Per DEA informant files, the start-up cash for Bad Boy Records was delivered in 1993 to Diddy in NYC by top level east coast BMF soldiers.
The connection continued. Diddy’s first cousin is Darryl “Poppa” Taylor, a BMF soldier, convicted as one of their primary drug couriers. Poppa testified in court that he was introduced to Southwest T by Paul “P.J.” Buford, who at the time was Diddy’s chief of security. P.J., himself indicted in 2006 in the first BMF Fed crackdown, was Southwest T’s right-hand man in California on every level of the operation before working directly for Diddy in the early 2000s.
He’s not the only one of Combs bodyguards to have had major BMF ties. In fact, Tupac named Walter “King Tut” Johnson, Diddy’s bodyguard at the time, in the 1994 Quad Recording Studios ambush. Tut himself had boasted to a C.I. that he did it. According to federal agents, Diddy denied any knowledge of Tut even though he employed him and had paid part of his prior legal fees. Tut, along with Jacques “Haitian Jack” Agnant (whose life is a story in its own right), as Brooklyn teenagers, started out robbing drug dealers and even 300 congregants in a Kingdom Hall during service. And it was the church Tut’s mother attended. Later on, Tut became closely affiliated with BMF.
According to the DEA, BMF worked directly with Mexican drug cartels. Their Atlanta base alone distributed over 2,500 kilos of cocaine monthly. They charged $20k per kilo at their stash houses for what would be street value of $90k per key. Southwest T had been shot in the eye and used the insurance payout to buy a line of cars, including stretch limos, and had P.J. customize them to transport money and cocaine in hidden compartments.
Although Big Meech eventually tried to go legit with an ATL music label, he was too late. Little did he know that the Feds had an ongoing 14-year investigation. By 20006-2007 the Flenory brothers—Big Meech & Southwest T—and 150 other BMF members or associates were indicted all over the country for racketeering, narcotics trafficking, tax evasion, and money laundering. Prosecutors alleged BMF was operating a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar drug empire. Remember that Detroit was where it all began and ultimately where the home base was located.
More recently, in May 2020, when Southwest T was released from the pen early due to covid, 50 Cent went public to make sure Diddy, along with Jeezy and Irv Gotti, did right and paid T what he was owed.
Just this week, on December 6th, Diddy was sued by Jane Doe for sex trafficking, violence, and gang rape. Doe, who was at the time in 2003, a 17-year-old from Detroit, also alleged that “Combs and his associates spent a significant amount of time in Detroit, and that Combs had many connections in Michigan—primarily the Black Mafia Family.”
The obvious question is, if the Feds know all this (which they do), why has Diddy himself never been indicted? And what’s been happening since? There’s been whispering for years that Combs was an informant, which is ironic considering his father was shot and killed for mistakenly being thought a police informant.
Regardless, the line from Queenie to Diddy is beginning to come into much clearer focus.