Blown Away

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e was a criminal from the ghettos of North Phil­adelphia, a bear of a man with a reputation for allegedly ripping off other drug dealers, a person whose childhood nickname, Pooh, was enough to strike fear in the heart of rivals. A real gangster this one: He'd been shot on the street before and had done hard time for drug trafficking.

She was a nice Jewish girl from the Philadelphia sub­urbs, a 34-year-old eye-catching blonde hip-hop socialite with a big mouth and the smile of a pageant queen, who threw high-profile parties that attracted celebrities such as Donald Trump, Carmen Electra and the Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. She was even on first-name terms with Mayor Michael Nutter.

And together—according to the testimony of another man who will soon be involved—Will Hook and Rian Thai planned a robbery. If all went as planned, the job would net them a half-million-dollar payday, the score of a lifetime.

Though it's hard to know for sure, the plot might have been hatched one June night at Hook's home in Straw­berry Mansion, a bleak neighborhood where graffitied walls memorialize the names of dead drug dealers and where it's as easy to buy crack as it is to buy a carton ol

milk. A party was going on. It must have seemed odd to see a young, attractive blonde woman amid the mass of black hip-hop hangers-on and drug kin. But then, everyone knew Rian Thai. She was Philly club-scene royalty, and she went where she pleased.

The idea seemed bulletproof. Thai knew a major drug dealer who was coming into town looking to buy a substantial amount of cocaine. He was driving a tractor trailer and intended to purchase the drugs and then trans­port them to Detroit, where there was an ongoing cocaine drought. Thai had persuaded the dealer to stay at her place in a trendy apartment com­plex called the Piazza at Schmidts in the gentrified neighborhood of Northern Liberties. All Thai had to do was lure him out of the apartment and Hook would sneak in and steal the money and the drugs.

It was what Hook liked to call a sweat

beat, an easy takedown, a simple rip-and-run. What could possibly go wrong?

There was nothing about the circum­stances of Thai's upbringing that could predict what she would later become. She grew up in a leafy townhouse community called Lafayette Hill, only a 25-minute drive from the city but a world away from the gritty glamour of the Philly club scene. It's the sort of place where the loudest sounds you hear are dogs bark­ing and children playing in the street. Her father worked as a butcher at a Path-mark supermarket. Her mother was a homemaker. She celebrated Yom Kip-pur and Passover at the local country club, though she was far from rich. Not that she wanted for anything. Her par­ents adored her and showered her with everything their limited means allowed.

While she was in high school Thai earned the pet name Joan Rivers because of her distinctive raspy voice that filled a room and didn't seem to fit her little body. She was so proud of the nickname she had it emblazoned on the back of a football jersey.

"She was a real yenta, loud and obnox­ious," says Jade Connelly, who met Thai in fifth grade and later attended Plym­outh Whitemarsh High School with her.

Thai's mother, Sandy, had another name for her—B.R., Bad Rian—because she stayed out late and often incurred her parents' displeasure.

"She was always a party girl who got herself into a shitload of trouble," says another friend, Jennifer George. "And she loved it."

Thai's high spirits made her unsuit­able for academic pursuits. "She wasn't going to get into Harvard, that's for sure,' quips Connelly. But she had other talents, namely her gregariousncss, her ability to mix and mingle with all sorts of people without judging them. Peo­ple liked Thai. She had an infectious personality. And Thai liked people, so ajob in the hospitality industry seemed the perfect career choice. Growing up as she did in the 1980s and 1990s, when hip-hop crystallized into a moneyed sub­culture glorified incessantly on television and in magazines, the lure of Philadel­phia's scene drew her in.

As a kid she saw local boys DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince rocket to star­dom, but the real neighborhood hip-hop scene was a lot more rough. Philly's hip-hop world has intersected with the drug world going back to Schoolly D in the 1980s. There was the famous case of RAM Squad, a rap crew that grew up in the notorious Richard Allen housing projects; it produced a number of under­ground hits, including "Sex, Money and Drugs," before one of its members pleaded guilty (continued on page 111)

BLOWN AWAY

(continued from page 36) to federal charges that he oversaw a sizable cocaine-distribution network. There was Alton Coles, a.k.a. Ace Capone, who before he was sentenced to life in prison in 2009 operated the Philly-based label Take Down Records. Coles enjoyed having his picture taken with the mayor and the police commis­sioner at antiviolence rallies while flooding the Philly streets with, by one estimate, two tons of cocaine and nearly half a ton of crack. Success, money and fame in the Philadelphia hip-hop world seemed inextricably linked to drugs and violence, and it was all glorified in song after song, video after video.

Like so many suburban kids of her genera­tion, Thai found in the city exactly what was missing from the sedate streets where she lived: notoriety, excitement, glamour, danger. When she was 17 she lied about her age and got a job as a bartender. When her mother and older sister found she was working ille­gally in bars, they distributed fliers to bar owners with Thai's photograph, warning not to employ her, because she was underage. For a while a picture of Thai was posted in dozens of Philadelphia drinking establishments.

But Thai was undeterred. She got her big break in the late 1990s when she started throwing hip-hop parties at a place called Bluezette, a restaurant in Old City, which she quickly turned into a high-profile lounge that attracted professional football and bas­ketball players. It also attracted some of the

city's top drug dealers, who were eager to show off their wealth.

"There was a point where Philly tran-sitioned from big-room clubs to more intimate lounges," says DJ Excel, who met Thai almost a decade ago. "Once the whole bottle-service thing hit big, the big clubs died out. It wasn't about pulling large numbers of people anymore. It was about pulling in cus­tomers who were willing to spend hundreds of dollars on a bottle of champagne."

Soon Thai was a familiar presence in the clubs, the hyperactive white girl with the raspy voice and the gleaming teeth, car­rying a Marlboro Red in one hand and a cell phone in the other, with a glass of Grey Goose (which she called water) waiting for. her at the bar. She would direct the party, posing for pictures with celebrities and spouting her favorite catchphrases: "I got you, baby boy" (if she liked you) and "Fuck-out-of-here, you on my heels" (if she didn't).

Even as she was making good money pro­moting parties, the dark side of the scene began to draw her in. In 2000 she was arrested at Philadelphia International Air­port returning from Amsterdam with 200 methamphetamine tablets in her suitcase. She didn't do jail time but was sentenced to home confinement. Once, in 2004, she was snatched off the street and held hostage over a drug debt. She was released unharmed after a few days and never told detectives who her captors were.

"She never used the word kidnapped. She would say 'I've been captured before,'" says

Jose Duran, who worked with Thai at the swank restaurant Ms. Tootsie's and who had planned to open a lounge with her. "She didn't like to talk about it. Obviously it scared her, so she tried to put it out of her mind."

It was around this time that Thai appears to have begun living a double life. Her name started to surface on police wiretaps dur­ing a number of major drug investigations, though she was never charged in any of the cases. "She was no small potatoes," one anonymous law-enforcement source told the Philadelphia Daily News.

As one of Philadelphia's top party promot­ers, Thai was privy to powerful personalities in the entertainment industry and in the drug underworld. She stood at the nexus of a trickle-up economy, an intermingling of dirty and clean money. "You see those worlds intertwined all the time in Philadel­phia, going back to the 1960s," says Sean Patrick Griffin, author of Black Brothers, Inc.: The Violent Rise and Fall of Philadelphia's Black Mafia, about the ruthless gang that ruled the local drug trade in the 1960s and 1970s. The figure from the past most reminiscent of Thai, says Griffin, is Major Benjamin Cox-son, an outwardly respectable businessman and mayoral candidate who was even pro­filed in Time magazine before he was shot execution-style in 1973. Coxson was a finan­cier for the Black Mafia and also rented out luxury apartments, some of which were used as stash houses, others as the site for sex-and drug-saturated after-hours parties for music and sporting celebrities.

"It was only the real exclusive people who could get into these parties," says Griffin. "Very much like Rian Thai, Coxson brought together high society and low society. Thai was the hip-hop generation's version of Major Coxson."

Rather than being a disadvantage on the hip-hop scene, Thai's skin color proved to be a benefit. DJ Excel says, "Because she was a white girl from the suburbs, she was able to convince club owners who didn't want hip-hop because of its violent reputation to give it a try. Rian catered to a money scene, a crowd that knows how to act right. If a celebrity came into town and wanted to hear hip-hop, they'd go to one of Rian's parties because they knew they were safe."

Then, about a year ago, Thai made the decision—inexplicable to some of her pals—¦ to work at Plush, a bare-bones nightclub overshadowed by the rusting hulk of an abandoned power station across the road. Plush, despite its name, is anything but. A gray brick building housed in a vacant garage, it attracts a hard-core street crowd, thugs such as one Will Hook.

While Rian Thai was growing up in the sub­urbs, Hook was making a name for himself on the streets of Strawberry Mansion. Amid the boarded-up buildings, broken sidewalks and trash-strewn alleyways, the familiar grim lunar landscape of decay and disin­vestment hardly unique to Philadelphia, I look carved out a multiblock mini-empire, police say, employing approximately 15 peo­ple to sling cocaine in the 1990s. Hook was a well-known figure in the neighborhood. Six-foot-three with a permanent scowl on his face, he strolled down the street wear­ing a bulletproof vest, always accompanied by a team of henchmen.

"He did so much dirt to people, he's scared to be by himself," one drug-world source told the Philadelphia Daily News.

During the 1990s Hook declared war on his onetime friend and mentor Jack "Fussy" Jarmon. Hook and Jarmon supposedly grew up together on the same block, but as often happens in the drug game the two had a falling-out over money. Jarmon was an infamous local cocaine dealer frequently seen driving a Bentley. He was married to local rapper Charli Baltimore, perhaps best known for her affair with the Notori­ous B.I.G. Hook coveted Jarmon's territory and lifestyle, and he is suspected of expand­ing his empire by pushingjarmon out of the neighborhood altogether.

In 1998 police caught up with Hook, arresting him on drug trafficking charges. He was sentenced to a five-to-10-year stretch in prison. After he got out in 2006 he resumed his drug-dealing activities, but this time he was the target of a hostile takeover bid from a rival gang. In 2008, police say, Hook was shot in the Spring Garden section of Philadelphia but managed to survive the assassination attempt. Not so lucky was his alleged lieutenant, Brandon Edwards, who died in a hail of bullets a few months later as he left a nightclub.

Sometime around the night Thai was spot­ted at a party at Hook's home in June, Hook learned of a large shipment of cocaine that would soon arrive at her apartment at the Piazza at Schmidts. How would he know unless Thai told him? He began to plan a robbery. Though many of Thai's friends still maintain she had nothing to do with it, an associate of Hook's quotes him saying about the robbery, "Rian's cool. She's down with it." According to the source, Hook said they had to "break her off," meaning give Thai a cut of the proceeds from the crime. And Hook had an ace in the hole: a former girlfriend named Katoya Jones, 25, who had just moved onto the second floor of the same building where Thai lived, a $150 million arts-entertainment-retail-apartment complex that had become a beacon of prosperity in the formerly run­down Northern Liberties neighborhood.

The Friday night before the robbery, Hook met with Jones. After she picked up Hook from a multilevel strip club called Delilah's Den, he recruited her as his inside woman. Her job was to let Hook into the building so he could steal the money and the coke.

Leaving the strip club around midnight, they drove to the Piazza at Schmidts, where Hook pointed out a tractor trailer that belonged to a man named Timothy Gilmore. Gilmore was a former Detroit firefighter who had joined the department in 1996 but retired in 2007 due to job-related injuries. He had moved to Canal Winchester, Ohio, where he set up a trucking business that police believe served as a front for drug run­ning. Gilmore and his partner had arrived in town from Texas on Wednesday to buy drugs after dropping off a consignment ofBud-weiser in Maryland the previous day. Hook told Jones there was as much as half a mil­lion dollars in Thai's apartment just waiting to be snatched. While they never discussed the price for her cooperation, Jones expected $50,000 to $60,000 for her role.

Hook worried about the security cameras in the building, but Jones assured him, "The

cameras ain't about nothing as long as nobody gets killed." Jones went home that night, but a few hours later I look phoned her and asked her to let him into the building. Jones gave him her keys and then left for work.

That afternoon Hook called again and said he had made a blunder. "He told me he went to the wrong apartment and was done with it," Jones said later.

But Hook appears to have changed his mind soon after, though he was unwilling to risk a second burglary attempt himself. When Jones was home from work, Hook called again and asked her to "let his man in."

The crowd of yuppie hipsters gathered out­side Thai's building in the Piazza at Schmidts had no idea that a real-life crime drama was unfolding around them. Lurking at the edge of the Piazza, with its art galleries, outdoor cafes and chic boutiques, was a team of dim-witted but dangerous North Philly hoods.

The crew was on edge. A man working for Hook was driving around the neigh­borhood in a Pontiac and called to tell him he'd spotted a suspicious car. Hook sus­pected that a rival drug gang was moving in on his heist. Not only that, Gilmore was set to leave town for Detroit in the next couple of hours.

It was now or never. Around five in the afternoon, Katoya Jones let Donnell Murchison—a tall, lean, muscular man wearing tan trousers and a baseball cap pulled over his lugubrious face—into the building. Hook had briefly served time in the same prison as Murchison. He was a career criminal who had been released on parole in 2007 after serving 10 years of a 20-year sentence for the brutal armed rob­bery of a barbershop that netted him $20, a gold chain and a gold ring. Hook promised Murchison $100,000 and a kilo of coke if he helped with the robbery.

With Hook sitting in a white getaway van outside, Murchison jumped up on a radia­tor box in the lobby and waited. Not long after, two other men entered, one a thin guy in his mid-20s dressed in a red polo shirt and jeans, the other an overweight man in his 40s, 300 pounds or more, who wore a baggy white T-shirt that hung to his knees like a maternity gown. They walked toward the stairwell, eyes darting over their shoul­ders as they headed up to the seventh floor, where Thai lived. The trio made no effort to hide their faces from the building's security cameras, which were clearly visible.

The second and third men took position

in the stairwell, preparing for the ambush while Murchison strolled nonchalantly to the other end of the corridor to block off the only other line of escape. Meanwhile, a fourth member of the gang, a lookout, was positioned on the floor below, where he stared out the window, expecting the appearance of Thai at any moment.

Around 5:45 p.m. Thai, who was wear­ing a short khaki skirt with a glittery Ed Hardy-style tank top, strolled across the cob-blestoned square escorted by a companion who towered over her petite frame. It was Timothy Gilmore, who had just driven the big rig into town from Texas. Presumably the lookout called on his cell phone to warn his associates on the floor above about Thai's impending arrival. As Thai and the trucker stepped out of the elevator and headed toward her apartment, the heavyset gun­man and his partner silently glided through the stairwell door and rushed toward the couple with their guns drawn.

"Don't hurt me! Don't hurt me! I'll give you everything you want!" pleaded Thai as she fumbled for her keys while the fat guy held a nine-millimeter to her head.

But before she could open the apartment door, the trucker made a sudden move. He tried to fight back, grabbing for the younger guy's gun. When he failed he sprinted toward the elevators but was brought down by a fusillade of bullets.

In that moment of terror, with shots exploding everywhere, a bullet discharged from one of the hood's guns and drilled into the side of Thai's head, causing her to crumple to the floor, where she gurgled her last breath. The fat man lost his nerve and darted down the smoke-filled hallway, fol­lowed closely by the young guy in the red shirt. They both ran into a broom closet after mistaking it for the exit and then bumped into each other trying to get out.

Murchison was the cool one of the crew. He casually stepped over the trucker's body and, when he saw him moving, blasted one final bullet into his head. The other two had already left the building when he sauntered into the lobby as relaxed as could be, even politely waiting for a tenant carrying in an armchair to pass, before stepping into the getaway van parked outside.

As the van hurtled away from the crime scene, Hook was furious with the underlings in the backseat. Where was the coke? Where was the money?

Back on the seventh floor the scene resem­bled a horror movie. The door to Thai's apartment slowly creaked open and a giant of a man appeared, six feet six inches tall, maybe weighing 350 pounds. His name was Edward Emerson Jr. He was the trucker's petrified partner, who was inside the apart­ment and had taken refuge on a neighbor's balcony during the shooting. He gingerly walked around the two bodies in the hall­way, took the elevator down and walked out of the building with a large duffel bag slung over his shoulder, stuffed with dirty clothing and, police suspect, drugs.

Later that night Hook and Katoya Jones met at the Champagne Restaurant in the Germantown neighborhood, where Hook explained what had gone wrong. "They were rookies," he said. "They panicked.

That's why you never tell niggas how much money is involved."

He added ominously, "I may have to get rid of some of the people involved."

The news of Rian Thai's death spread quickly through Philadelphia via text message, cell phone and Thai's Facebook and MySpace pages. The overwhelming emotions were dis­belief and shock, not just at the method of Thai's dispatch but disbelief at what detec­tives found in her apartment: four kilograms of cocaine and more than $100,000 in cash. As people gathered in front of the obliga­tory candlelit memorial hastily assembled outside Thai's building, now surrounded by cop cars, her friends tried to make sense of what had just happened: Where did all that cocaine and cash come from?

Drug killings happen all the time in Kill-adelphia, the nickname the city acquired a couple of years ago when it averaged one murder and four shootings a day. Most of them rate barely a mention in the local. media, but this was a double stain on the city's reputation. It wasn't just that a white girl from the suburbs had been murdered in broad daylight by a gang of brazen black thugs. It was where and when it had taken place: less than two months after the much-ballyhooed opening of the Piazza at Schmidts, an important source of tax reve­nue for the city. It was bad timing for another reason, too. The reform-minded mayor, Michael Nutter, was about to announce a 30 percent decrease in murders over the past two years, a testament to the effective­ness of his crime-reduction program.

The arrests came in quick succession. Police apprehended the lead gunman, 33-year-old Donnell Murchison, after receiv­ing a tip that he was holed up in a row house in northeast Philly. Murchison attempted to escape through a second-floor window, but U.S. marshals staking out the property gave chase and apprehended him—but not before one of the marshals was hit by a van and had to be hospitalized. With every cop in the city on the lookout, Will Hook turned himself in. On July 13, with his pastor and parents in tow, the hard-looking Hook arrived at police headquarters, where his lawyer proclaimed his innocence to the assembled press. Hook was taken into custody and charged straight­away with burglary, and a murder charge was added the next day.

To this day, one question remains unan­swered: Who was Rian Thai? Was she the credulous suburban white girl who made a bad mistake and paid for it with her life? Or a natural-born hustler who leveraged her success as a party promoter into a second life as a significant player in the Philadel­phia drug underworld?

"We were raised in the burbs, and every­one in the burbs was trustworthy," says publicist Jennifer George, who learned of her friend's death when local rapper Ms. Jade phoned her, crying hysterically. George insists that Thai had nothing to do with planning the robbery that got her killed. "Ms. Jade used to say to Rian, 'You're too Joe,' meaning too nice, too trusting. In the hood, they're raised not to trust anybody."

But others disputed this characterization

of their friend. "Rian wasn't too Joe," says DJ Excel. "We're not talking about some stupid suburban white girl who got mixed up in some inner-city hip-hop shit. We're talking about a girl who knew fully 110 percent of what's going on, who she was involved with, what she was doing."

"You don't just wake up overnight and find four kilos of coke and $100,000 in your apartment," says another source. "Rian was always a hustler, even in high school. She was as ruthless as the gangster dudes she hung around with. Rian led two separate lives. She had this ability to com­partmentalize them."

The killer Murchison is the source connecting Thai to the planning of the robbery. To avoid the death penalty, he agreed to cooperate with authorities. According to Murchison, Hook told him Thai was in on the job, but police say they

have yet to corroborate those claims.

On Tuesday, June 30 Rian Thai was bur­ied not in the city where she lived but in the suburbs where she grew up. It was a bright and sunny day. An overflowing crowd attended, some high school acquaintances, others colleagues from the club scene. The ritual was brief. At the end of the ceremony, the rabbi instructed the mourners not to return to the grave for seven days, in keep­ing with the Jewish tradition of shivah.

As the mourners left the burial ground with their heads bowed, a gaggle of report­ers across the street shouted questions. "Did you know Rian? How'd you know her? What was she like?"

Nobody said a word.

'Amy and I are in a mixed marriage. I'm in favor of swapping and she's against it."

Additional reporting by Lera Kuzema.