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    Tales of the Black Underworld Fuel Rap. ValTown Recounts Them.

    ValTown, an account on X and other social media platforms, spotlights gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and 1990s — and how crime and celebrity often intersect.Beginning in the late 2010s, Brian Valmond started shining a light on stories that are often shaded by secrecy, exaggeration, self-protection and self-aggrandizing.His subject matter is, by and large, the world of Black gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and ’90s — topics that have also long driven the aesthetics and narratives of hip-hop. Since 2017, Valmond, 25, has been using his @_ValTown_ account on Twitter, now known as X, to unravel these tales bit by bit in threads that become mini events. His stories are tantalizing and sometimes surprising, especially when he highlights the links between the criminal underworld and the realm of celebrity, underscoring the blurred lines between those two milieus.“The Italian Mafia, they’re all in the media, they’re glamorized and they have their underworld legends, whereas the Black underworld is very villainized as predators,” Valmond said in an October interview at a Brooklyn park. “So, I wanted to show, not to glorify it, but say, we have our underworld legends as well.”On his accounts — he’s accumulated more than 180,000 followers on X, and over 100,000 on Instagram — Valmond has examined drug lords and gangsters from all over the country: well-known figures like Harlem’s Rich Porter and Azie Faison (whose stories shaped the film “Paid in Full,” starring Cam’ron); or Atlanta’s Black Mafia Family, crucial in the early career of Jeezy; or the original 50 Cent, from whom the rapper got his name. After he wrote about Freeway Rick Ross, the Los Angeles cocaine kingpin, Ross invited Valmond to spend time with him in California.Valmond also probes the places where crime and music have collided, detailing the sometimes unsavory pasts of well-known hip-hop executives like Suge Knight and Big U, or the story of Peter Shue, the club promoter, drug dealer and reported paramour of Madonna. He’s posted a detailed history of Sean Combs’s father, Melvin Combs, a purported associate of the 1970s Harlem crime boss Nicky Barnes. And sometimes, he simply unearths unexpected behind-the-scenes factoids, like a recent thread about the tough-guy exploits of the pioneering pop rapper MC Hammer.“The Italian Mafia, they’re all in the media, they’re glamorized and they have their underworld legends, whereas the Black underworld is very villainized as predators,” Valmond said.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSome of Valmond’s work, particularly about the intersection of hip-hop stars and street life, involves “the kind of things people talked about in hushed tones but never made it into print journalism, because they weren’t stories that could be sourced in a credible way, but they were common knowledge to people in the scene,” said the journalist Noah Callahan-Bever. Valmond’s threads, he said, “gave these stories the folklore, the grandeur they deserved.”Crucial to Valmond’s approach are old photographs, which he tracks down from various online sources, and sometimes from family members or associates of the figures he’s spotlighting. The photos are not simply nostalgia — they are also historical references of style and attitude presentations that have trickled out into the mainstream via hip-hop, which took those street reference points and made them into culture. The photos, which capture fleeting poses of chest-puffing celebration (think fresh-off-the-lot sports cars, ostentatiously large gold chains, ritzy nightclubs, spotless designer clothes) are often the most solid documentation of a moment that only tenuously documented itself.“That era is almost extinct, right?” said Shawn Hartwell, who served two decades on racketeering charges for crimes committed when he was a teenager. “And he’s keeping it alive so people could say, Yo, remember one time it was like this? Other than that, you gonna wipe a whole culture or a generation away.”But the excess on display, those photos reflect a complex and tragic reality. “When you see them old pictures, you barely see life. You see survival mode,” Hartwell said. “That’s survival, that’s not glamour. And some people don’t know that because they not in that mode.“Most of the people in those pictures have life sentences,” he added, “or died.”For Valmond, there’s a fine line between glamorization of street life and reality check. “Somebody might watch a show like ‘Snowfall’ and be like, Oh wow, I want to be a drug dealer,” he said. “But it’s like, that’s not the story. Yeah, it might be glorious now, but it’s going to end up pretty bad.”Valmond is a humble and unassuming chronicler of a deeply chaotic time. Dressed quietly, in a black tracksuit, he asked as many questions as he answered, his demeanor bookish and focused.He was raised by strict Caribbean parents — his mother is from Haiti and his father is from Dominica — and spent his early years in Far Rockaway, Queens, then moved with his family to Delaware, where he still resides. He returned to New York during summers, and stayed close with friends who were being drawn into street life.At the suggestion of a high school English teacher, Valmond began to explore writing screenplays, but also took notice of the stories unfolding right before him.“In my neighborhood growing up, if you weren’t playing basketball or if you weren’t like a artsy type of kid, you sold drugs,” he said.For Valmond, there’s a fine line between glamorization of street life and reality check. Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesIn 2017, he spent a fruitless summer in between his first two years of college calling Hollywood studio phone numbers he found online to pitch a script, to no avail.“I tried to put it in this fictional world, but then those things started to actually happen in my real life,” he explained. “Like, my friends started to die, my friends started to go to jail and things started to get very real around the time that I started writing. So I was like, maybe it’s a bigger purpose. Maybe let me start telling the stories of people that actually been through this in real life.”Later that year, he saw a Twitter thread that spoke to him, and decided to make his own. Before long, he was posting prolifically.“I was going to school,” he recalled, “but I wasn’t going to class. I was checking into the library and I would stay there all day researching, getting pictures, putting threads together.”His first two threads tackled the Queens drug kingpin Lorenzo (Fat Cat) Nichols and the Los Angeles gangster Freeway Rick Ross. He soon posted about Robert Sandifer, who was murdered at 11 years old by members of his own gang, a gruesome and vivid crime that led to a Time magazine cover story in 1994.There are some precedents for Valmond’s coverage. In the 2000s, street magazines like F.E.D.S. and Don Diva emerged to document underworld figures, sometimes in their own words. Some YouTube channels trade in old street-life war stories. And in earlier phases of the internet, message boards and blogs touched on these subjects as well.Though Valmond begins with news reports and other published information, some facts are impossible to independently verify. Memories can be hazy, and reputations are sometimes built on bluster. His threads can sometimes land closer to apocrypha than unassailable truth. (There are a handful of other Twitter and Instagram accounts that stake out similar content, but Valmond’s have been the most in-depth and consistent.)The internet is both infinite and shortsighted — stories can be forever archived, and also forever forgotten. Many of these tales were known in their time, but lost to history. Valmond thrills in resurfacing them, and in the connectivity that social media allows: Not only researching and relaying these stories, but sometimes using them to connect with people involved, and unearthing even more information.Luc (Spoon) Stephen, a film producer and onetime associate of Fat Cat Nichols, took notice of Valmond’s 2017 thread on the drug dealer. Like Valmond, Stephen is from Queens, and of Haitian descent. He admired Valmond’s curiosity and dedication to the truth, and began sharing stories with him and making introductions.“A lot of the younger people don’t listen, but he soaks it up and he has to evaluate from there, he has to check it again,” Stephen said in an interview. “I could take a key and I can turn it in the lock and open the lock and then walk away, but now he has to open the door and explore.”In 2018, when Callahan-Bever was working as the executive vice president of brand strategy and content at Def Jam Records, he hired Valmond as an intern, once he found out how young he was: “I sort of assumed he was an older guy based on the topics and depth of knowledge, but he was still in college.”Valmond said the experience was eye-opening. “That was the first time for me that I’d seen that my skill set could put me in an environment beyond the neighborhood,” he said.Valmond’s ongoing work reflects shifting norms around public discussion of street tales. In recent years, a smattering of films and television programs have tackled these eras, including the documentary series “Hip Hop Uncovered” and “American Gangster,” the film “Paid in Full” and the TV dramas “BMF” and “Power,” both executive produced in part by 50 Cent.Today, many online hip-hop media sites and personalities focus heavily on criminal affiliations of musicians, or those close to them — a near unthinkable turn from a couple of decades ago when criminal records weren’t as available or easily disseminated, and when performers may have woven street tales into their songs but otherwise largely aimed to keep their nonmusical life private. Some outlets are also preoccupied with whether musicians involved in criminal cases cooperated with the authorities, aiming to make distinctions between artists with varying levels of street credibility.To Valmond, those are moot questions: “I post everybody, whether they cooperated, whether they were, quote-unquote, stand-up. That just puts everything on a level playing field. So people know, like, he’s not picking and choosing sides.”In recent months, Valmond has also expanded into longer video content, including “Rich in the Hood,” a podcast interview series and a six-part documentary series on YouTube more extensively covering some of the subjects of Valmond’s threads — “making it cinematic,” Valmond said — and “Blood Currency,” a show on his Patreon that looks at criminal enterprises from around the globe.“I still get pushback from my community where people would be like, ‘You’re glorifying drug dealers.’ Or, ‘How could you post these people that poison the neighborhood?’” Valmond said. “That’s because they’re so used to seeing it glamorized on television and in movies. It’s like, no, I’m not doing that. Just take the time, read it and you’ll see for yourself what it is I’m trying to convey.” More

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    Vincent Asaro, Mobster Acquitted in Lufthansa Heist, Dies at 86

    In a stunning verdict, he was found not guilty of participating in the storied 1978 theft, retold in the film “Goodfellas.” Then he went to prison over a road rage incident.Vincent Asaro, a career mobster who was found not guilty of murder and of helping to organize the staggering $6 million Lufthansa heist at John F. Kennedy Airport — one of the biggest cash heists in American history — only to be sentenced to prison when he was 82 over road-rage revenge, died on Sunday in Queens. He was 86.His death was confirmed by Gerald McMahon, a lawyer who successfully represented him in the Lufthansa case. No cause was given.The brazen theft in 1978 of $5 million in cash and $1 million in jewels from a vault at a Lufthansa hangar at Kennedy Airport figured prominently in the book “Wiseguy” (1985) by Nicholas Pileggi and the Martin Scorsese film “Goodfellas” (1990).The authorities had suspected the Mafia’s involvement, but the case remained unsolved and the investigation closed until Mr. Asaro was arrested in 2014, linking him and the Bonanno crime family to the robbery.He was also accused of using a dog chain in 1969 to strangle Paul Katz, the owner of a warehouse where Mr. Asaro and James (Jimmy the Gent) Burke, who was suspected of masterminding the Lufthansa theft (and who was portrayed by Robert DeNiro in “Goodfellas”), stored their stolen loot. Mr. Asaro and Mr. Burke had believed that Mr. Katz was an informer after the warehouse was raided by the police.The stolen van that authorities believed was used in the Lufthansa robbery at John F. Kennedy Airport in December 1978.Ken Murray/Associated PressThe indictment implicated Mr. Asaro in a sweeping conspiracy in which he was also accused of robbing FedEx (then Federal Express) of $1.25 million of gold salts, which can be used in medicinal treatments; bullying his way into the pornography business; and seeking, unsuccessfully, to bump off a cousin who had testified about an insurance scam.Mr. Asaro’s 2015 trial was a sensation.Though the robbery had taken place more than three decades earlier, it had been immortalized in the book and film, and even for younger New Yorkers it felt like a coda to the “Godfather” era.Moreover, the key witness against Mr. Asaro was another cousin, Gaspare Valenti, who had been a government informant since 2008 and had secretly recorded Mr. Asaro from 2010 to 2013.Mr. Valenti’s testimony on the stand was a jaw-dropping breach of the Mafia’s code of silence.It also revealed the devolution of a ruthless mobster who in his day job could suggest to customers which fences to buy from his store in Ozone Park, Queens, while in his other life he could impatiently advise a younger mob associate who had asked him how best to collect a debt: “Stab him today.”Mr. Asaro’s acquittal in 2015 was so stunning — not only to the prosecution, but to Mr. Asaro himself — that as he left the courthouse and got into a car, he giddily joked, “Don’t let them see the body in the trunk.”A jubilant Mr. Asaro leaving court in Brooklyn in 2015 after he was acquitted. As he got into a car, he giddily joked: “Don’t let them see the body in the trunk.”Robert Stolarik for The New York TimesIronically, the automobile reference returned to haunt him two years later. He was accused of recruiting a mob associate, who in turn recruited John J. Gotti, the grandson of the former Gambino family boss, to torch the car of a motorist who had cut off Mr. Asaro at a traffic light.The driver was pursued at high speed by Mr. Asaro to no avail. The associate used law enforcement sources to track the license plate, after which Mr. Gotti and two other men located the car in Broad Channel, Queens, doused it with gasoline and set it ablaze. An off-duty police officer parked nearby witnessed the auto-da-fe and pursued the arsonists, but they sped away in a Jaguar.Surprisingly, after a lifetime of denying culpability in crime, Mr. Asaro not only pleaded guilty but also apologized for what he acknowledged was “a stupid thing I did.”He could have been sentenced to 20 years in prison. The prosecution asked for 15, pointing out that although he had “participated in racketeering, murder, robbery, extortion, loan-sharking, gambling and other illegal conduct, he has served less than eight years in jail.”In December 2017, U.S. District Judge Allyne Ross ordered him to serve eight years — which, at 80, Mr. Asaro described as “a death sentence” — and to pay $21,276 in restitution to the owner of the car.“If he had not aged out of a life of crime at the age of 77,” Judge Ross said, referring to his age during the opening phases of the Lufthansa trial, over which she presided, “I have little hope that he will do so.”Two years after the Lufthansa trial, Mr. Asaro was sentenced to eight years in prison over a road rage incident, in which he ordered an associate to torch the car of a motorist who had cut him off at a traffic light.Justin Lane/European Pressphoto AgencyVincent A. Asaro was born on July 10, 1937, in Queens to Joseph and Victoria Asaro, who separated when he was a teenager. His uncle, Michael Zaffarano, owned buildings housing adult theaters, distributed pornography and worked as a bodyguard for Joseph Bonanno, who ran his eponymous crime family for nearly four decades.In 1957, Mr. Asaro married Theresa Myler; they divorced in 2005.Mr. Asaro’s survivors include his son, Jerome. He was arrested with his father in 2014, pleaded guilty to racketeering and was sentenced to seven and a half years’ imprisonment.Mr. Asaro racked up numerous charges and convictions over the course of his life. Among them, he was convicted in federal court in 1970 and 1972 for the theft of an interstate shipment and burglary of a post office. In 1998, he was sentenced in state court in New York to four to 12 years in prison for enterprise corruption and criminal possession of stolen property.Three decades after the notorious Lufthansa heist, the beggarly but still choleric gangster had, according to prosecutors, squandered his $500,000 share of the loot on gambling and depleted whatever he had collected from his unforgiving manner of pursuing delinquent borrowers. He had hocked his jewelry and was seen shopping at a Waldbaum’s supermarket for orzo and lentils.According to a conversation recorded by Mr. Valenti that was played in court in 2015, he was even unwelcome at the local social club where he had celebrated the heist. “People hate me in there,” Mr. Asaro said. “I don’t pay my dues.”Even his estranged son, whom he had initiated into the Mafia and had by then outranked him, rebuffed him when he desperately sought to borrow money, according to another recording.Mr. Asaro had a stroke during his imprisonment for ordering the arson, which left him partly paralyzed. In 2020, he was granted a compassionate release from the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Mo., because of his age and vulnerability to Covid-19.“He obviously had nine lives,” Mr. McMahon said after Mr. Asaro’s death. “But this must have been the tenth.”Joseph Goldstein More

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    After Threats in Mexico, Peso Pluma Postpones U.S. Concerts

    The breakout musician has not given a reason for rescheduling the dates. The authorities in Mexico are investigating the credibility of written threats against him.A string of concerts in the United States by the breakout Mexican singer-songwriter Peso Pluma were postponed this week after written threats were apparently issued by a major drug cartel. The authorities said they were investigating the credibility of the threats, which were written on banners and posted publicly in the border city Tijuana.Ticketmaster and Live Nation said that Peso Pluma shows scheduled from Thursday to Sunday, in Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis and Birmingham, had been rescheduled for later this fall; his performances are set to resume on Sept. 30 in Chula Vista, Calif. A representative for Peso Pluma did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the scheduling changes.The singer, who performed at the MTV Video Music Awards on Tuesday night, is in the middle of his North American Doble P Tour, following the release of his third album, “Génesis,” which has helped lead an international surge in what is known in the United States under the umbrella term “regional Mexican music.” The album reached No. 3 on the Billboard chart upon its release in June, and has tallied hundreds of millions of digital streams.Peso Pluma — who was born Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, and whose stage name translates to Featherweight — specializes in corridos tumbados, a modern form of the drug-trade songs known as narcocorridos, combining regional Mexican styles like ranchera, norteño, banda and mariachi with influences from American and Latin rap.On Tuesday morning, three threatening banners, or narcomantas, were spotted in different areas of Tijuana. The messages, written in big red letters, were addressed to Peso Pluma, who is scheduled to perform in the city on Oct. 14.“This is for you, Peso Pluma,” one of the banners read in Spanish. “Refrain from appearing this October 14. Because it will be your last presentation.”The banner was signed with the initials of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, or Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the most powerful and brutal cartels in Mexico, and a major rival to the Sinaloa Cartel. It said the artist would face consequences for being “disrespectful and loose-mouthed.”Edgar Mendoza, a state prosecutor in Baja, Calif., told the local press that one person had been detained on drug and terrorism charges after being found in the vicinity of one of the banners.The mayor of Tijuana, Montserrat Caballero, who is living in military headquarters, initially said the banners would be investigated while concert security was ramped up. As of Friday afternoon, tickets for Peso Pluma’s concert there next month remained on sale.However, on Tuesday, Caballero said in a radio interview that artists like Peso Pluma had potentially invited the attention of the cartels with their lyrics. “Let’s be clear: They sing and make an apology of crime and thus they should know the risk and consequences,” Caballero told Azucena Uresti, the host of Radio Fórmula, in a phone interview.She added that whether the authorities canceled the concert would be contingent on whether the narcomantas were the work of organized crime or ordinary citizens. Caballero, who is from the governing party Morena, moved into the military headquarters of the 28th Infantry Battalion after one of her bodyguards suffered an armed attack, and has said she is being targeted by organized crime for confiscating arms.Other Mexican musicians have drawn attention to the risks of the genre as well. Natanael Cano, who is considered a pioneer of corridos tumbados, recently stopped mid-song during a concert in Sonora, remarking that he was “going to get killed.” The lyrics of the song, “Cuerno Azulado,” allude to drug deals and potential government involvement, including a line assumed to be a reference to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo.Narcomantas have long been used by cartels and organized crime to leave public messages for authorities, rivals or the community at large. Popularized at the height of the drug war in the 2010s, the banners can be used to promote or assuage fear, although it is often unclear who is responsible for making them and how credible their messages are.Peso Pluma had previously been expected to appear at a concert at the Chevron Stadium in Tijuana in March, alongside the artists Eden Muñoz, Roberto Tapia and El Fantasma. But in late February, Tapia Entertainment, which was organizing the show, said tickets would be reimbursed “due to insecurity and threats towards other events.”Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, criticized some of the country’s current popular music in June, invoking Peso Pluma’s hit song “AMG,” about a Mercedes-Benz. “As if material things were the most important things — brand clothes, houses, jewelry, power or arrogance,” he said. “There are other options, there are other alternatives, it’s possible to be happy in another way.” More