Irv Gotti (1970-2025), the Don of Hip Hop

According to Irving Domingo Lorenzo, Jr., who passed away on February 5^th, 2025, after a series of strokes at the age of 54, he was 11 when his mother caught him stealing a hundred dollars from a neighbor’s purse. His reward: a beating so thorough that Irving referred to it years afterwards as the moment he turned his life around. The problem with that claim is that it contradicts Irv’s public and professional profile. Despite his tremendous music industry success and towering contributions to hip hop being a global powerhouse, he became one of the culture’s most controversial and embattled executive figures. Despite his black American and Filipino heritage, his persona was crafted after predominantly Italian American organized crime families. And that was symbolized by his shortened first name next to the surname of one of the more popular mob bosses:

Gotti.

Born on June 26^th, 1970, as the youngest of eight kids, Irv grew up in Jamaica, Queens, New York. Amid the crack epidemic in the 1980s, life was tough. At the age of 15, Irv lost one of his best friends to gun violence. He once remarked that people adopted crack and guns as their uniforms. Irv wanted to get out of the hood, but to do that, he realized that the life of an armed street pharmacist was far less appealing than one in hip hop.

Soon after he lost his friend, Irv started getting involved in the music industry. Going by the name DJ Irv, spinning records at parties in Queens, he eventually aligned himself with fellow Queens native Mic Geronimo and even got to produce two tracks off the rapper’s 1995 debut album, The Natural. One of those tracks, “Shit’s Real,” was the album’s first single. By then, Irv was an industry facilitator, a talent scout at TVT Records. Indeed, the other song he produced for Mic Geronimo, “Time to Build,” brought together three guest MCs that Irv would eventually guide into their respective breakthrough moments.

Irv had met the fast-rapping Brooklynite, Jay-Z, back in 1987, when the latter was under the mentorship of Jaz-O. Noting something special in Jay, Irv kept in touch. When Jay-Z was working on his 1996 debut, Reasonable Doubt, Irv, who had moved from TVT to Def Jam as an A&R executive, not only produced one of the cuts in the album, “Can I Live,” but also brought another cut, a single named “Ain’t No Nigga,” to Funkmaster Flex, the designated NYC gatekeeper as hip hop radio host at Hot 97. The success of “Ain’t No Nigga”—it peaked at #50 on the Billboard Hot 100—was instrumental in transforming Jay from an aspirant struggling for a record deal to a joint venture between Roc-A-Fella, the company he co-founded, and Def Jam in 1997. By then, Jay-Z, impressed by Irv’s facilitation skills, proclaimed him as “The Don of Hip-Hop” and gave him the moniker that would make him famous, as well as seal his notoriety.

Also inking a deal with Def Jam as a recording artist in ’97, thanks to Irv’s help, was DMX. It was through Jay-Z that Irv got to meet the street trouble-scarred often-imprisoned teenager from then-little-known Yonkers, New York, in 1988. Unlike Jay in the early ‘90s, X did get a record deal: with Columbia Records in ‘92. But he lost it when his debut single flopped. It’s likely that DMX would have continued his wayward path if Irv hadn’t convinced Lyor Cohen, the president of Def Jam, to give him a shot. DMX, still recuperating from a broken jaw, impressed his makeshift audience enough with his freestyle to get a second break. Irv would be a co-executive producer on DMX’s debut album, 1998’s four-times Platinum It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot and ended up behind the boards for five songs spread across X’s first three albums, including the hit single, “What’s My Name?”

But Irv didn’t connect with anyone better than fellow Queensite Jeffery Atkins, better known as Ja Rule. A street hustler from Hollis, Queens, Ja first linked up with Irv in ’93, right before he formed the group Cash Money Click with two other aspiring rappers. Irv produced a few songs for the group, which got a record deal with TVT Records. Things looked promising; one of their songs, 1994’s “4 My Click,” featured Mic Geronimo and got substantial airplay. But right before their album was about to drop, one of the group members went to prison. There would be no career for the Cash Money Click.

Ja Rule was now without a deal, but he still hung on. Irv was a rising producer and A&R executive, with enough clout and success to get the approval to launch his own imprint under Def Jam in 1998: Murder Inc. Records.

Murder Inc. was supposed to be a unifying moniker. Irv had dreams of all three men he was involved with—Jay-Z, DMX, and Ja Rule—joining forces to create a supergroup. It was a tall order. Jay-Z and DMX became superstars in ’98, with Ja Rule still an up-and-comer, featuring on tracks with those two, in addition to others such as The Lox, Nas, and Method Man. And even Jay and X were too distinctive as rap powerhouses to envision a supergroup ever working, not to mention that they had residual tension from a battle they had in a Bronx billiard room back in ’94. Murder Inc. was going to be a record label, and the third member of the failed collective, Ja Rule, would be the first and flagship signee.

Irv co-wrote and produced “Holla, Holla,” the single that became Ja Rule’s breakthrough. Peaking at #35 on the Billboard Hot 100, “Holla, Holla” was the launchpad for a hitmaking run that would span five calendar years. Several other artists came on board, but it was obvious that it was Ja Rule and Glen Cove, NY, songstress, Ashanti, that comprised the main driving force behind Murder Inc.’s success. Between 1999 and 2003, the record label released 11 albums, eight of which were RIAA-certified at 12.5 million sales in the United States alone, and three of which peaked at #1; as well as notched 17 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, three of which went to #1. No hip hop or R&B imprint was more successful during that time.

And such an imprint couldn’t have had a more suitable label head. With the girth of an elderly don, the rapid verbal swagger, and a laughter that suggests the soul of a mischievous child trapped in an adult’s body, Irv Gotti was, to borrow the title from a fictional drug lord, King of New York. Or maybe king of the world. No entity in hip hop had a stranglehold on the pop charts like Murder Inc. during the first few years of the 2000s. And as an extension of Def Jam, Irv’s Murder Inc. was the greatest contributor to the company’s golden years.

But it also meant that Irv was going to have some powerful adversaries. 50 Cent may have hailed from the same neighborhood as Irv, but he was no friend. There had been bad blood between 50 and Ja Rule since the late ‘90s, and Fiddy did not like the association between Ja’s boss and a certain drug kingpin who he suspected of having him shot in 2000 (more on him later). And now that the former had Interscope backing him under the guise of Shady/Aftermath, 50 was primed to take down Irv’s crown jewel. As the disses began to fly, 50 Cent, painting himself as a disruptive, anti-establishment figure, was cool. Ja Rule, who, with Irv, had carved himself a niche as a thugged-out loverboy with multiple hits and multi-platinum albums, seemed to have worn out his welcome and was now uncool.

And then there was the trial. The year 2003 had barely begun when the feds and NYPD investigators raided Murder Inc.’s headquarters, the culmination of an investigation into the connection between the company’s founders, Irv and his brother, Chris, and Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff, founder of a crime organization known as The Supreme Team (and the guy suspected of ordering a hit on 50 Cent.) Back in 1994, Griff, fresh out of jail, had sought the assistance of Irv in producing a movie based on a novel by urban fiction author Donald Goines. Griff’s reputation, his continued connection with Irv, and Irv’s subsequent ascendancy in the music industry raised the eyebrows of the authorities. The Gotti brothers were charged with money laundering, seemingly doomed in the type of trial that few defendants escape unscathed. After a two-year legal ordeal, the brothers were finally acquitted of all charges in December 2005.

But just like O.J. Simpson, they were sadly mistaken if everything was going to be back to normal. Def Jam cut ties with Murder Inc. Ja Rule and Ashanti’s sales plummeted. Exhausted by the legal turmoil and bad publicity, Irv attempted a rebrand. The company would no longer be Murder Inc. It would simply be known as The Inc.

The Inc. managed to achieve some measure of success for the rest of the 2000s. But rebrand or not, Irv was never going to rescale those heights he enjoyed at the turn and top of the decade. Maybe Nas could have helped turned things around; instead, he went with his former rival and Irv’s friend: Jay-Z.

Still, Irv, ever the instinctive and astute businessman, had other endeavors. As early as 2007, Irv was into producing TV series, starting with Gotti’s Way, a reality show that focused on him and his family. More notably, however, was being the creator and executive producer of Tales, a cinematic scripted series that is inspired by classic and current hip hop songs, even down to the episode titles.

Despite his impact, it’s hard to ignore that Irv Gotti was one of hip hop’s more polarizing figures. Although he’s responsible for Ashanti’s success, he admitted in the five-part TV documentary on Murder Inc., which aired in 2022, that he had a sexual relationship with his artist (while married), and Ashanti herself recounted years of verbal and emotional abuse. Although he was a production veteran who had worked on dozens of studio albums and movie soundtracks across hip hop and R&B, Irv’s reputation as a producer is at best marginal, and he has even been accused of stealing credit. Although he generated millions of dollars from record sales and found additional success as a TV producer, Irv insisted on holding on to his artists’ masters, thereby painting him in the eyes of many as an unscrupulous and gluttonous music exec. And the ill will from the peak of conflict of the 2000s remained, carrying over into the next two decades, to the extent that 50 Cent mocked Irv as he lay on what would become his deathbed.

Irv Gotti had diabetes, exacerbated with a fast life and questionable diet. A series of strokes convinced him to improve his eating and drinking habits. But the years of damage had been done. The final stroke rendered him non-responsive and eventually extinguished the life of one of the most dynamic, versatile, and accomplished music executives in rap history.

With Murder Inc. Records, Irv Gotti made it very clear: he served Black pop. And it was Black pop that was between two extremes: the gangsta rap of Death Row in the mid-‘90s and the glossy Bad Boy era of the late ‘90s. Although it tends to get overlooked due to Irv’s notoriety and larger-than-life personality, it’s a third dimension that is worth lauding more often in hip hop history. Through his work and output, Irv Gotti is rightfully regarded as the genre’s ultimate boss.

May the soul of Irving Domingo Lorenzo, Jr., better known as Irv Gotti, rest in beats, rhymes, and peace.