March 15, 2022 — Gangster Disciples’ shot caller turned author and aspiring fashion designer Johnny (Crusher) Jackson is being financed by the Godfather of Southern Hip Hop, Houston rap impresario James (J Prince) Smith. In his days running the streets of Chicago’s Southside, Crusher Jackson was in charge of hundreds of teenage workers and couriers for the GD’s drug activities. He went down alongside legendary GD boss Larry Hoover in 1995’s Operation Headache, a federal narcotics and racketeering conspiracy, spending nearly five years living as a fugitive of the law in Wisconsin.
Jackson, 50, was released from a life federal prison sentence in late 2019 via the First Step Act and has started a clothing brand called Gentlemen of a Distinguished Nature and continued authoring urban fiction, a skill he developed while incarcerated. His benefactor: J Prince, the man who founded the groundbreaking Rap-A-Lot Records and brought Southern rap to the masses in the form of the Geto Boys.
With a boost from J Prince, Jackson has taken his new brand and its’ platform global. The Gangsta’s Demise series of books attracts a cult-like following. The clothing line (GDN) is beginning to get substantial traction, both on-line, across social media and in brick-and-mortar department stores
The 57-year old J Prince founded Rap-A-Lot Records in 1987. Per DEA records, less than a year earlier in October 1986, informants told the government that Los Angeles drug kingpin Michael (Harry O) Harris gave Prince $200,000 in startup capital for his fledgling rap label. Harry O admitted to the L.A. Times that he gave Prince cash on a handshake deal and didn’t expect Prince to have the success he did with Rap-A-Lot Records.
J Prince denies ever taking any money from Harry O in his founding of Rap-A-Lot Records. J Prince called Harry O a “lying snitch” to the L.A. Times in 1998 when the allegation first surfaced. Harry O told the Times that he and Prince had fallen out in the mid-1990s over the management of New York rapper Dana Dane. Also financing the start of the game-changing Death Row Records, Harry O, 61, corralled a sentence commutation from the Trump White House and came out of prison last year, five years early.
J Prince held Crusher Jackson a welcome home party in Chicago when he walked free and returned to the Windy City in November 2019. Jackson’s parole restrictions have prevented him from visiting J Prince in Texas.