Rhonda sat on her sofa, watching BET and sipping a wine cooler. “Slap Ya Self,” the new video of the song from Don B.’s group Bad Blood, was playing on her forty-inch television. When Don B. got his company up and running, he immediately started snatching up the hungriest young niggaz in the hood and taking them under his wing. They all had aspirations of becoming stars, but so far Bad Blood had shown the most potential.

The group was composed of five young men, each representing a different borough. Lah and Jynx were from Queens and Staten Island, respectively. They were just two pretty boys that Don B. put down with the group for marketing purposes. They had all the young girls in the hood going crazy over them. The heart of the group was True, Lex, and Pain.

Lex was the gold-toothed Brooklyn kid with the extra-hard bop. Before joining the group, he made his bread stealing. He fashioned himself a modern-day cowboy by carjacking and robbing subway trains. Lex would wait until the train went through a long tunnel, like the one running from 110th and Central Park North to Ninety-sixth Street, and hit as many cars as he could before dashing off to another station. He knew Pain from high school and occasionally made trips to Harlem.

Pain was from the Bronx, the Gun Hill projects to be more specific. He had been in and out of detention centers and jails since he was thirteen. When he wasn’t out trying to extort dealers, you could find him in the boxing gym, destroying heavy bags or opponents. Pain’s name fit him to a T, because that was all he ever caused or gave out, pain. One Christmas when his mother was asked by a relative what she wanted, she replied, “For my son to receive a lengthy jail sentence so this evil will be removed from my house.”

True was the glue that held them all together. He and Don B. had grown up in the same hood, so he knew the young man as well as he knew himself. True had gone from a snot-nose kid, slinging stones hand to hand, to a ghetto superstar. At the age of seventeen he was able to purchase his first Mercedes. Realizing that fast money might end up leading him to a bullet or a bid, he jumped on the chance to become one of Don B.’s protégés. The ironic part of it was that he was actually nice on the mic. All of the members of Bad Blood were talented, but True was a born celebrity.