Irv Gotti, who rose from spinning records as a D.J. in Queens parks to become a hip-hop and R&B titan as a founder of Murder Inc. Records, a label that turned Ja Rule and Ashanti into multiplatinum stars, died on Wednesday. He was 54.
His death was confirmed in a statement by Def Jam Recordings, which had been the parent label for Murder Inc., a company that Mr. Gotti and his brother Chris founded in 1998. The statement did not say where he died or cite a cause.
With his rise from the streets to the corporate suites, Mr. Gotti came to embody the rap ethos, living like a character from a hip-hop anthem. From his start in the music business selling his mixtapes at a local barbershop as a teenager, he went on to become a rap producer and later an A&R representative for Def Jam before starting his own label. He also made his name by helping propel Jay-Z and DMX to stardom.
Along the way he adopted the last name of the notorious Mafia boss John Gotti, head of the Gambino family (his birth name was Irving Domingo Lorenzo Jr.); named his label after a group of New York mob enforcers of the Depression era; christened his Manhattan recording studio the Crack House; and began to live a gilded lifestyle that any capo would envy, wearing ivory suits and fedoras and patrolling the streets of his home city in a chauffeur-driven Maybach.
At Def Jam, Mr. Gotti was an executive producer of DMX’s first album, “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot,” which was released in 1998 and debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. He also produced Ja Rule’s first album, “Venni Vetti Vecci” (1999), and was a force behind several successful releases by Ashanti in the early 2000s, including her debut, “Ashanti” (2002), and a follow-up, “Chapter II” (2003), both of which also entered Billboard’s album chart at No. 1.
Over the years, Mr. Gotti also worked on hits by Jennifer Lopez, Kanye West, Fat Joe and others. Overall, he was credited as a producer on 28 Hot 100 hits, according to Billboard.
Whether pushing snarling rap like DMX’s “Get at Me Dog” or more mainstream R&B fare, Mr. Gotti sought to preserve a ghetto feistiness in his work. “People get confused because it sells like pop music,” he said in a 2002 interview with The Guardian. “But we make Black music first and foremost, and all our records is ’hood first.”
Irving Domingo Lorenzo Jr. was born on June 26, 1970, in the Hollis neighborhood of Queens, the youngest of eight children. His father was a taxi driver, and his mother worked to instill the value of hard work in her offspring.
“I was fortunate my mother and father stayed together, but we really didn’t have no money,” he told The Guardian. “So that contributes to my hustler attitude.”
Information on survivors was not immediately available. His marriage to Debbie Lorenzo ended in 2013.
Adopting the name DJ Irv, he started playing local parties in his teens and mingling with future rap stars like Joseph Simmons — Run from Run-D.M.C. — and LL Cool J. He also started dealing drugs.
“You get lured in,” he told The Guardian. “It’s a stupid thing.”
Mr. Gotti’s music career took another step when he met a rapper named Mic Geronimo at a high school talent show in Queens. In 1995, he helped Mic Geronimo produce his first album, “The Natural.”
He made another stride toward the big time in 1996, when, still using the moniker DJ Irv, he produced “Can I Live,” a track on Jay-Z’s heralded debut studio album, “Reasonable Doubt.” Around that time, Jay-Z labeled him the “don of hip-hop” and suggested that he rechristen himself after the mob kingpin known as the Dapper Don.
Mr. Gotti eventually caught the eye of Lyor Cohen, Russell Simmons’s partner at Def Jam, who called him in for a meeting and asked him about his five-year plan. “I’m gonna become you, and I’ll destroy you,” Mr. Gotti recalled telling him. “I’m from the ’hood. You can’t know more about hip-hop than me.”
That was good enough for Mr. Cohen, who hired him to scout talent for the label. Mr. Gotti soon secured the services of DMX and others. The Island Def Jam Music Group eventually chipped in $3 million to start Murder Inc. in 1998.
Despite minting a stack of platinum records, the Gotti brothers soon found trouble. In 2003, the F.B.I. and the police raided Murder Inc.’s offices in Midtown Manhattan. The brothers were accused of laundering more than $1 million through their label for a friend, Kenneth McGriff, known as Supreme, who was a leader of a Queens drug gang.
The Gottis’ defense team — which included Gerald Shargel, who had represented John Gotti — argued that the brothers had turned to Mr. McGriff only for protection from potential extortion, as well as to give them street cachet. “It’s a war against hip-hop,” Ja Rule said on a lunch break during the trial, according to The New York Times. “They don’t like hip-hop.”
The brothers dropped “Murder” from the label’s name in an attempt to scrub its image. Even so, Island Def Jam cut ties.
The Gottis were acquitted in December 2005, but the damage was done. “They had everybody who loved me in corporate America — who felt I was a good guy — distance themselves from me,” Mr. Gotti told The Times. “All while I was saying, ‘I didn’t do this, I didn’t do this,’ and they was like, ‘OK, we’ll wait and see.’”
Afterward, the label struggled to reclaim its previous success, despite continuing to release albums by several acts. Among those acts was Ashanti, who eventually departed, in 2009.
Mr. Gotti began to branch out from music. He turned toward television as the creator of “Tales,” a hip-hop anthology series for the BET network, which ran for three seasons starting in 2017.
In a 2022 video interview with the podcast “Earn Your Leisure,” Mr. Gotti recalled an epiphany that inspired him to start his own label.
He was earning a salary of $60,000, he said, while the acts he worked with were earning hundreds of million dollars for their labels. It was dumb, he recalled thinking, “but I ain’t going to be dumb too long.”
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