HIS list of enemies is as long as his list of chart-topping hits. He has been shot, stabbed, censured and sued, yet the rapper known as 50 Cent reigns at the top of the hip-hop game.
Nominated for five Grammys tonight – including best new artist, best rap album and best rap song – 50 Cent has come a long way from the street thug who dealt drugs in the ‘hood.
Now working with Shady/Aftermath/Interscope Records, he has sold more than 600 million records, and performed more than 400 shows in the last 18 months, many of them in a bullet-proof vest, but the lines between past and present are sometimes a little blurry.
In his music and in his life, he brags that he is a real gangster, not that fake “wanksta” he has riffed about when he is criticizing other rappers.
He’s “the real deal,” according to his Web site, “a man of the streets, intimately familiar with its codes and its violence.” Yet, there is the clothing line, the sneaker deal and a hit-making record label, all the trappings of mainstream success.
Therein lies the rap about the rapper. To his most passionate fans, he is the consummate rhyme master with the ultimate street credibility. To his most ardent critics he is plain ol’ Curtis Jackson, a hustling opportunist who is no more of a hard-core thug than the radio deejays who play his CDs.
Donna Harris thinks he’s somewhere in between.
“When I saw him he was always smiling,” said Harris, a Queens parole officer who was assigned the future rapper’s case when he was released from prison in 1994 on drug-possession charges.
“I’m not saying he’s soft,” Harris said, “but the way you carry yourself in the street is different than the way you carry yourself with me. He didn’t have that street-thug persona with me.”
That didn’t stop him from talking like one. His first legit hit in 1999, after a bit of underground success, was “How to Rob an Industry N – – – – -,” and it thoroughly upset many as he spun rhymes about sticking up some of the industry’s untouchables.
Harris remembers hearing that tune for the first time.
“Oh! Curtis is on the radio,” she said of her parolee. “I was impressed. He was off and running.”
Harris, who’s been a Queens parole officer for nearly 12 years, has heard many of her charges talk about making it in the rap game or becoming the next Allen Iverson. But 50 Cent was different.
“I never had to threaten to lock him up,” she said. “He was focused on his music.”
For more than two years, 50 Cent was in her office every Tuesday. He urinated in a cup for his drug test, talked about his week and shared his dreams about making it in the rap game.
She did notice some changes after 50 Cent was shot.
He was sitting in a car in front of his grandfather’s South Jamaica home nearly four years ago when shots rang out. Nine bullets ripped through his body – one of them plunging into his cheek, leaving a life-long scar and a distinctive lisp.
“That’s probably what put his life on track,” said Cecil Cluster, 70, who lives across the street from the scene of the shooting. “Otherwise he would have ended up dead or in jail. He made it big. He turned it around.”
It all seemed to keep him focused on succeeding, in spite of his long list of haters. 50 Cent has had some high-profile rap battles.
For a while he and rapper Jay-Z were name-calling back and forth.
That beef ended and another began with Ja Rule – another rap phenomenon who recorded for the Murder Inc. label. The two have had a very vocal rap war trading whole songs dissing each other – Ja Rule said 50 Cent was only “worth two quarters” – but these days Ja Rule’s people say it has all been squashed.
“The feud is over,” said Ja Rule’s publicist Kelly Womack. “The past is behind them.”
But when asked if the two are friends, her answer is a bit more steely. “You don’t have to be friends with everybody,” she said.
Late last year 50 Cent was invited to sit down with Ja Rule and Minister Louis Farrakhan to iron out their differences, but 50 Cent refused and told MTV that it wasn’t a sincere offer.
REGARDLESS of the beefs and his gangsta persona, 50 Cent is a hero back home.
The neighborhood that gave rise to the rap star is a quiet street in Springfield Gardens, Queens. A steady hum drifts upward from the Belt Parkway at the end of the block, where neighbors remember 50 Cent as Curtis Jackson.
The 27-year-old rap star is still part of this South Jamaica community. His grandparents live in the same gray house and his visits always cause a stir.
“I watched him grow up. I never cared much for that music, but I remember him always practicing,” Cluster said.
Cluster recalled 50 Cent’s drug-dealing days – a lifestyle that earned him eight months behind bars, although a noted hip-hop magazine, The Source, said it was only seven months, in a “shock incarceration” boot camp. There are other allegations: the tough guy has orders of protection against people from Murder Inc.; he stole his moniker from an ’80s-era Brooklyn rapper.
“He’s a fraud,” Source co-founder and CEO David Mays told Page Six last year. “People in the inner city are being shot every day and have survived. The one thing that everyone knows about this guy is that he’s been shot nine times. It’s been highlighted by his management team, who have a vested interest in keeping all this drama out there.
“This guy travels with, like, 20 bodyguards, most of whom are police officers,” Mays continues. “He can’t go anywhere by himself in public. He has disrespected so many people and burned so many bridges that a lot of people just don’t like the guy.”
50 Cent could not be reached for comment. Devon, a resident of 50 Cent’s old neighborhood, has not been swayed.
“I kind of look up to him for coming from this background to being where he is today,” said Devon, 21.
Another neighbor said she doesn’t buy the hype.
“He’s a regular child,” the elderly resident said. “He grew up in the street like everybody else. He’s a nice fellow and when he sees me he runs up to give me a hug.”
50 CENT BIO
Real name: Curtis Jackson
Age: 27
Accomplishments: More than 6 million records sold.
Popular songs: “In Da Club,” “Wanksta,” “21 Questions.”
Run-ins: Shot nine times; stabbed outside a studio
Beefs with: Jay-Z, Ja Rule
Recently dated: Vivica A. Fox
Favorite attire: Bullet-proof vest
“Rap” Sheet for Curtis Jackson a.k.a. 50 Cent
* 1994: Served six months at an upstate correctional facility for drug possession.
* March 2000: He was beaten and stabbed outside the Hit Factory studio on West 54th Street by Irv “Gotti” Lorenzo – owner of Murder Inc.- Lorenzo’s brother, and fellow rapper Ramel “Black Child” Gill.
* May 24, 2000: He was shot nine times while sitting in a car outside his grandmother’s home in Queens. The physician who treated him for the bullet wounds is suing the multiplatinum artist for unpaid medical bills.
* Jan 1, 2003: 50 Cent and four members of his entourage were arrested outside the Copacabana, a New York City club, after cops found two loaded guns and a rack full of bulletproof vests in their armor-plated SUV.
* September 10, 2003: He was targeted again when a spray of bullets erupted from two men on his entourage in a Jersey City parking lot. No one was hit.