In the 1990s, hip-hop- related crime was out of control. There were robberies, kidnappings, assaults, death threats. In 1996, Tupac Shakur was shot dead in Las Vegas. A year later, the same happened to Biggie Smalls.

I was a detective in the NYPD at the time, and I knew a lot about hip-hop. When Biggie was murdered I told my bosses it was going to come back on to New York. “What does an incident in LA have to do with New York?” they asked. I said Biggie was from Brooklyn and that his funeral would be huge. They wanted me to stay out of it, but when rappers started receiving death threats they changed their minds. On the day of the funeral, 10,000 cops were on duty to control the crowds. I served as liaison between the police and the rappers.

I became the head of a one-man unit for rap-related crime. I was the hip-hop cop. Hip-hop had become infested with crime and gangsta rap was the most popular genre. Crack cocaine dealers wanted to get involved. Hip-hop was now a multi-million-dollar industry, and everyone wanted in. Rap had a bad reputation among cops, partly because of songs such as Ice-T's “Cop Killer”. A lot of police officers saw rappers as enemies and most rappers didn't like co-operating with cops.