Harlem Underworld: A Dope Empire, the Rise of R&B, and the Birth of Rap

The untold story of how a secret criminal empire set the stage for the transition of R&B to hip-hop’s mainstream takeover, and built an uptown nightlife scene where a new music was born

This is a story of how street money turns to gold. 

In the heart of 1960s Harlem, a Black, queer, South Carolinian known as Fat Jack Taylor built a dope empire while hanging around with Malcolm X and Jimi Hendrix. He laundered his proceeds into the music business, and conceived the Fair Play Committee, a rough-and-tumble team of Harlem militants and gangsters who implemented street tactics to persuade independent labels to treat their Black artists more equitably, helping push Issac Hayes’s classic Stax records like Hot Buttered Soul and Black Moses to the pop charts. 

Reading the room, CBS Records assembled the first all-Black music promotion team at a major corporation, the Original 13. They helped make Teddy Pendergrass a superstar while paving the way for Michael Jackson to become King of Pop with the CBS/Epic Records release, Thriller. 

Meanwhile, Fat Jack opened Harlem World, a nightclub where the first rap hit was conceived of, the new genre got its new handle as hip-hop, and artists like Kool Moe Dee and Doug E. Fresh and executive Andre Harrell of Uptown Records got their starts. And a new era of popular music was born . . . 

Based on dozens of interviews with key witnesses and participants, raw NYPD investigative files, and unexplored archival material, illustrated with previously unpublished photographs, Harlem Underworld shows how a loosely associated group of hustlers carved out a space in American media for Black music, reap the profits, and push music to the edge of a revolution that would change the world.