James Rosemond Convicted of Running Multimillion-Dollar Drug Ring

16:12 James Rosemond Convicted of Running Multimillion-Dollar Drug Ring 0 Comments

In hip-hop circles, James Rosemond was like a prince at the royal court, whose ties to rap music’s biggest stars were known far and wide. But a jury in Federal District Court in Brooklyn found on Tuesday that his real job was as a drug trafficker. Mr. Rosemond was convicted of running a drug operation that sold millions of dollars’ worth of cocaine, often moving it across the country in cases designed for musical equipment, a federal prosecutor said in a statement. Mr. Rosemond, widely known as Jimmy Henchman, was also convicted of financial crimes, obstruction of justice and possessing and using firearms. “Rosemond built and ran this drug trafficking organization in order to personally enrich himself and his associates,” Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a statement. “And profit he did. The paydays are over for Jimmy Henchman.” Mr. Rosemond’s lawyer, Gerald L. Shargel, would not discuss the specifics of the conviction, which came after a three-week trial. Speaking by telephone, he said he was “disappointed” in the verdict and planned to appeal. Even before the drug charges, Mr. Rosemond, who was arrested last June, was notorious in the hip-hop community. He had spent years trying to shake accusations of involvement in a bitter feud that led to the murders of two rap music legends: Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, better known as Notorious B.I.G. Both men were shot to death in the mid-1990s. Despite the accusations, Mr. Rosemond has never been charged in any killing, and he has maintained connections with hip-hop luminaries like Sean Combs, Wyclef Jean, Akon, the Game and 50 Cent. Federal prosecutors said in February that they were trying to gather evidence linking Mr. Rosemond, who ran an agency called Czar Entertainment, to a 2009 murder in the Bronx of an associate of 50 Cent, but Mr. Shargel said no charges had been filed. In its statement on Tuesday, the United States attorney’s office described Mr. Rosemond as the chief executive of a narcotics operation involved in shipping cocaine from Los Angeles for sale in the New York metropolitan area. It was often covered in mustard to prevent detection, and both money and drugs crisscrossed the country in musical-equipment boxes, the prosecutor said. In a sign of the sophistication of Mr. Rosemond’s enterprise, operatives often communicated using encrypted e-mail and telephone devices, prosecutors said. From 2008 to 2010, authorities in New York and California seized more than $2.8 million in drug proceeds from his organization, the statement said. As a result of the investigation into Mr. Rosemond’s activities, 19 people have been convicted on drug-trafficking and money-laundering charges.