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The Supreme Team
When the crack era jumped off in the 1980s, many street legends were born in a hail of gunfire. Business minded and ruthless dudes seized the opportunities afforded them, and certain individuals out of the city s five boroughs became synonymous with the definition of the new era black gangster. Drugs, murder, kidnappings, shootings, more drugs, and more murder were the rule of the day. They called it The Game, but it was a vicious attempt to come up by any means necessary. In the late 1980s, the mindset was get mine or be mine, and nobody embodied this attitude more than the Supreme Team.
The Supreme Team has gone down in street legend and the lyrical lore of hip-hop and gangsta rap as one of the most vicious crews to ever emerge on the streets of New York. Their mythical and iconic status inspired hip-hop culture and rap superstars like 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Biggie, Nas and Ja Rule. Born at the same time as crack, hip-hop was heavily influenced by the drug crews that controlled New York s streets. And the cliché of art imitating life and vice versa came full circle in the saga of the Supreme Team's infamous leaders- Kenneth Supreme McGriff and Gerald Prince Miller. In the maelstrom of the mid-80s crack storm and burgeoning hip-hop scene, their influence and relevance left a lasting impression.
Going from drug baron to federal prisoner to hip-hop maestro to life in prison, Supreme was involved in hip-hop and the crack trade from day one. His run stretched decades, but in the end he fell victim to the pitfalls of the game like all before him had. His nephew, the enigmatic Prince, who had a rapid, violent, and furious rise in the streets also fell hard and fast to the tune of seven life sentences. The Supreme Team has been romanticized and glorified in hip-hop, but the truth of the matter is that most of their members are currently in prison for life or have spent decades of their prime years behind bars. This book looks at the team s climatic rise from its inception to its inevitable fall. It looks at Supreme s redemption with Murder Inc. and his relapse back into crime. This book is the Supreme Team story in all its glory, infamy, and tragedy. It s a tale of turns, twists, and fate. Meet the gangsters from Queens where the drug game influenced the style and swagger of street culture, hip-hop and gangsta rap and made the infamous cast of characters from the Supreme Team icons in the annals of urban lore.
The Supreme Team has gone down in street legend and the lyrical lore of hip-hop and gangsta rap as one of the most vicious crews to ever emerge on the streets of New York. Their mythical and iconic status inspired hip-hop culture and rap superstars like 50 Cent, Jay-Z, Biggie, Nas and Ja Rule. Born at the same time as crack, hip-hop was heavily influenced by the drug crews that controlled New York s streets. And the cliché of art imitating life and vice versa came full circle in the saga of the Supreme Team's infamous leaders- Kenneth Supreme McGriff and Gerald Prince Miller. In the maelstrom of the mid-80s crack storm and burgeoning hip-hop scene, their influence and relevance left a lasting impression.
Going from drug baron to federal prisoner to hip-hop maestro to life in prison, Supreme was involved in hip-hop and the crack trade from day one. His run stretched decades, but in the end he fell victim to the pitfalls of the game like all before him had. His nephew, the enigmatic Prince, who had a rapid, violent, and furious rise in the streets also fell hard and fast to the tune of seven life sentences. The Supreme Team has been romanticized and glorified in hip-hop, but the truth of the matter is that most of their members are currently in prison for life or have spent decades of their prime years behind bars. This book looks at the team s climatic rise from its inception to its inevitable fall. It looks at Supreme s redemption with Murder Inc. and his relapse back into crime. This book is the Supreme Team story in all its glory, infamy, and tragedy. It s a tale of turns, twists, and fate. Meet the gangsters from Queens where the drug game influenced the style and swagger of street culture, hip-hop and gangsta rap and made the infamous cast of characters from the Supreme Team icons in the annals of urban lore.
245 pages, Paperback
First published February 6, 2012
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120 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
October 4, 2019
Couldn't finish this book. I previously read Ethan Brown's Queens Reigns Supreme, which is a thoroughly researched, hold no punches treatise on the legacy of Queens' most infamous 80's drug crews with a balanced voice. In short it was a tough act to follow. But even so, Seth Ferranti's obvious talent for writing prose could not save this book from its wild bias and poor editing.
Problem, the first: there is no discernible outline or direction to this book. Yes it is broken out into chapters but Ferranti usually just gushes over Supreme's business savvy, charisma and penchant for leadership and then throws in a couple of paragraphs on the stated topic. Had I not been a true crime aficionado and avid reader of publications like F.E.D.S. Or Dons & Divas, I would have been thoroughly confused by the timeline. Note to readers: there isn't one.
Problem, the second: Mr. Ferranti is apparently a fan of these same magazines as his book reads like a very long F.E.D.S. feature. In short form, it can be very entertaining to read the first hand accounts of underworld anti-heroes but a whole book worth? I was over all of the self-congratulatory quotes and gratuitous praise before the end of the first chapter. I can't tell you how many times I read some variation on the sentence "people were jealous of him/me/us" and "he/we/I is/are/am (a) stand up dude(s)" or "he was a straight up gangster". And I only made it to chapter 3.
Problem, the third: I think the author was writing this under threat of violence so I sort of understand but even when we seem to be approaching some less than flattering truths about these guys he back pedals in throws in some anonymous source who says "but don't get me wrong *insert name here* was a stand up guy/straight up gangsta.
Is Preme running a cult of personality from his prison cell? The whole thing reads like aimless propaganda or a love letter to the guy. I'd heard that even people that aren't into urban literature enjoyed this but now I'd like the names and numbers of those people so I can ask them why they lied. And I actually ENJOY hood lit. This was meant to be my junk food, light reading between more challenging texts but I'm exhausted from reading his and my head literally hurts.
Glad to see Mr. Ferranti flexing his pen to make money legitimately. I like his prose style. but he is in serious need of a real editor. It really makes all the difference.
Problem, the first: there is no discernible outline or direction to this book. Yes it is broken out into chapters but Ferranti usually just gushes over Supreme's business savvy, charisma and penchant for leadership and then throws in a couple of paragraphs on the stated topic. Had I not been a true crime aficionado and avid reader of publications like F.E.D.S. Or Dons & Divas, I would have been thoroughly confused by the timeline. Note to readers: there isn't one.
Problem, the second: Mr. Ferranti is apparently a fan of these same magazines as his book reads like a very long F.E.D.S. feature. In short form, it can be very entertaining to read the first hand accounts of underworld anti-heroes but a whole book worth? I was over all of the self-congratulatory quotes and gratuitous praise before the end of the first chapter. I can't tell you how many times I read some variation on the sentence "people were jealous of him/me/us" and "he/we/I is/are/am (a) stand up dude(s)" or "he was a straight up gangster". And I only made it to chapter 3.
Problem, the third: I think the author was writing this under threat of violence so I sort of understand but even when we seem to be approaching some less than flattering truths about these guys he back pedals in throws in some anonymous source who says "but don't get me wrong *insert name here* was a stand up guy/straight up gangsta.
Is Preme running a cult of personality from his prison cell? The whole thing reads like aimless propaganda or a love letter to the guy. I'd heard that even people that aren't into urban literature enjoyed this but now I'd like the names and numbers of those people so I can ask them why they lied. And I actually ENJOY hood lit. This was meant to be my junk food, light reading between more challenging texts but I'm exhausted from reading his and my head literally hurts.
Glad to see Mr. Ferranti flexing his pen to make money legitimately. I like his prose style. but he is in serious need of a real editor. It really makes all the difference.
November 26, 2021
Good book
This book was very good.I enjoyed it tremendously and learned quite a lot about the drug culture during the 80's and 90's.I don't think that I could have lived in that environment and felt safe but I feel that those young men should have not received life sentences.
This book was very good.I enjoyed it tremendously and learned quite a lot about the drug culture during the 80's and 90's.I don't think that I could have lived in that environment and felt safe but I feel that those young men should have not received life sentences.
April 12, 2018
Legendary
Book was good, I was a young boy see these dudes in Queens, Supreme and Prince. It’s a good book Queens stand up
Book was good, I was a young boy see these dudes in Queens, Supreme and Prince. It’s a good book Queens stand up
April 21, 2018
The main quandary at the heart of most gangland tales can be summed up by an old saw: "Those who talk, don't know, and those who know, don't talk." If you listened to hip-hop in the early or mid-90s, or if you got into it later (post-Golden Age but still pre-auto-tune and mumble rap) you've heard the Supreme Team name-checked repeatedly. Who were they?
This book does a decent job of giving the bold outlines of the South Side crew who put the Borough of Queens on the map in the 80s, both in a good way (birthing the style of legendary rappers like LL Cool J and Run DMC) and in a very bad way (immiserating the once working- and middle-class neighborhood) by getting rich off the crack boom in the 80s. The 'Preme Team brain trust was a Manichean duo consisting of Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff, and his nephew Gerald "Prince" Miller.
The book does a fair job comparing and contrasting these two personalities, one a diplomat and shrewd chess fanatic, the other a younger, flashier hothead who basically commandeered housing projects in Jamaica, Queens and ruled New York from his rooftop perch like a Taliban warlord.
The problem with the book is that its prose is redundant, cliche-ridden, and as alluded to at the beginning of my review, most of the information on offer comes either from overzealous prison snitches trying to get their sentences reduced, or from tabloid style contemporary accounts about some mythical "Black John Gotti" that doesn't seem to have much to do with the actual Kenneth McGriff.
Lastly, the book is written by an ex-con whose effort and ambition I salute, but whose mixture of machismo and self-pity is a familiar con that works well on the gullible and overly-sympathetic, but is transparent to anyone who has a nominal 101 knowledge of the criminal mind and how it operates. Ferranti segues from describing his subjects as super-hard, cold-blooded, nigh-on Nietzschean ghetto supermen in one sentence, and then behaves a paragraph later as if McGriff and Co. could have all been W.E.B DuBois or Martin Luther King Jr., if not for a corrupt justice system. After awhile it gets insulting, and moreover tiresome. Not recommended, though it wasn't so bad as to have a total chilling effect on my interest in Mr. Ferrenti's work, on this and other subjects.
This book does a decent job of giving the bold outlines of the South Side crew who put the Borough of Queens on the map in the 80s, both in a good way (birthing the style of legendary rappers like LL Cool J and Run DMC) and in a very bad way (immiserating the once working- and middle-class neighborhood) by getting rich off the crack boom in the 80s. The 'Preme Team brain trust was a Manichean duo consisting of Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff, and his nephew Gerald "Prince" Miller.
The book does a fair job comparing and contrasting these two personalities, one a diplomat and shrewd chess fanatic, the other a younger, flashier hothead who basically commandeered housing projects in Jamaica, Queens and ruled New York from his rooftop perch like a Taliban warlord.
The problem with the book is that its prose is redundant, cliche-ridden, and as alluded to at the beginning of my review, most of the information on offer comes either from overzealous prison snitches trying to get their sentences reduced, or from tabloid style contemporary accounts about some mythical "Black John Gotti" that doesn't seem to have much to do with the actual Kenneth McGriff.
Lastly, the book is written by an ex-con whose effort and ambition I salute, but whose mixture of machismo and self-pity is a familiar con that works well on the gullible and overly-sympathetic, but is transparent to anyone who has a nominal 101 knowledge of the criminal mind and how it operates. Ferranti segues from describing his subjects as super-hard, cold-blooded, nigh-on Nietzschean ghetto supermen in one sentence, and then behaves a paragraph later as if McGriff and Co. could have all been W.E.B DuBois or Martin Luther King Jr., if not for a corrupt justice system. After awhile it gets insulting, and moreover tiresome. Not recommended, though it wasn't so bad as to have a total chilling effect on my interest in Mr. Ferrenti's work, on this and other subjects.
July 4, 2015
Worth it for the subject matter, but the writing is a bit of a chore, full of repetition and cliché. Footnotes and endnotes are nonexistent...
And similar to most crime writing that is close to the subject, it is incredibly cagey with the "did he/didn't he" stuff, except when it comes to known informants, who obviously did everything they were accused of.
Lots of good background info, especially about the 80s Queens scene, but so much of the material presented here is questionable - seemingly by design.
Still, it put all of this info together - info otherwise scattered across websites, bootleg DVDs, and crime mags - in one pretty readable book. That earns it a 3... a low 3.
And similar to most crime writing that is close to the subject, it is incredibly cagey with the "did he/didn't he" stuff, except when it comes to known informants, who obviously did everything they were accused of.
Lots of good background info, especially about the 80s Queens scene, but so much of the material presented here is questionable - seemingly by design.
Still, it put all of this info together - info otherwise scattered across websites, bootleg DVDs, and crime mags - in one pretty readable book. That earns it a 3... a low 3.
March 18, 2014
This book was interesting as it was intriguing. It's not my typical genre, but I was sucked in from the very first page. Seth Ferranti did excellent job writing this book. All the details written in this book are factual accounts as he had personal access to those he mentioned. He writes with passion and authenticity. This book is the real deal. I highly recommend it.
May 3, 2016
Amazing
Excellent book and very well written. If you're from this era you will enjoy this read every page gets better and better. This book also gave me a whole new perception of 50 ( the rapper).
Excellent book and very well written. If you're from this era you will enjoy this read every page gets better and better. This book also gave me a whole new perception of 50 ( the rapper).
August 26, 2014
It was ok
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews