Supreme is not being oversensitive. Just before our January meeting at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, I had come out with a book called Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip-Hop Hustler that chronicled his stewardship of the crack-dealing Supreme Team during the 1980s, including a raid on a stash house in which he was busted with blow on his face. “Cocaine on my face, huh?” he says sternly.
It should be a shit-your-pants encounter, but panic subsides when I size McGriff up: His slight five-foot-nine-inch frame is draped in a tan prison jumpsuit, and his graying beard makes him look older than his 45 years. But then Supreme’s power has never been overtly physical; rather, it comes from street wiles, charisma, and the implication of danger. He jokes with guards, laughing about the rap songs that reference him. One guard pokes his head into the room to ask, “Are you gonna make him famous?” Too late, I call back. He’s already famous.
Supreme is a towering street legend, mythologized for his ’80s crime exploits by Biggie, Nas, and the Game; he was also a key figure in the November 2005 trial of Murder Inc.’s Irv and Chris Lorenzo—the Gotti brothers—for laundering McGriff’s drug money. (They were acquitted.) Now Supreme is looking at a trial of his own: He’s accused of creating a violent drug-trafficking organization after his release from prison in the mid-1990s. Federal prosecutors contend that, like the Supreme Team in the 1980s, McGriff carried out Mafia-style murders while moving kilos of coke.
Though McGriff potentially faces the death penalty, the charges against him (to which he pleads not guilty) will be overshadowed in hip hop circles by another accusation (for which he has not been indicted): that he ordered the shooting of 50 Cent in 2000.
Despite Supreme’s fearsome rep, in person, he seems far from a typical thug. On his cell table are Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and Jimmy Carter’s Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis. He’s even capable of self-deprecation, a rare quality in a hustler. When I remind him that Irv Gotti said that upon meeting him he realized that Supreme was just “this little green-eyed motherfucker,” Preme laughs. “People always say that when they meet me,” he says, "they think I'm gonna be six-feet-eight, 250 pounds."
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