Irv Gotti, a music executive who founded Murder Inc. Records with his brother and built a hip-hop empire that produced some of the biggest rap and R&B albums of the early 21st century, has died at 54.
Gotti’s death was confirmed late Wednesday in a statement by Def Jam Recordings, which was the parent label for Murder Inc. when it was founded in 1998, and where he had also worked as an executive. The statement did not give a cause of death, or say when or where he had died.
Murder Inc., which Gotti started with his brother, Chris, helped launch the careers of the rapper Ja Rule and the R&B singer Ashanti, and their success propelled the label to prominence in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“I’m important in America because of hip-hop,” Gotti said in “The Murder Inc Story,” a BET documentary series released in 2022. “I love hip-hop with a passion.”
Gotti was born Irving Domingo Lorenzo Jr. in Queens on June 26, 1970. His father was a taxi driver, and he was the youngest of eight children, he said in the BET documentary. In his early teens, he said, he played for hours with turntables and a mixer that his siblings got for him, and he started working as a D.J. for parties when he was 15.
Later, he began working as a music producer and talent scout, and he was credited with helping discover the future hip-hop superstars Jay-Z and DMX. He became an A&R executive at Def Jam.
Gotti was also an executive producer of DMX’s 1998 debut album “It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot,” which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. He also produced Ja Rule’s 1999 debut album, “Venni Vetti Vecci,” and worked on several successful releases by Ashanti in the early 2000s, cementing his reputation as a hitmaker.
Gotti was credited as a producer on 28 Hot 100 hits, according to Billboard.
With the ascent came scrutiny. In 2003, the F.B.I. and the police raided Murder Inc.’s offices in New York. That was followed by a federal investigation into whether the label was founded with drug money. Gotti faced charges of laundering money for Kenneth McGriff, a convicted gang leader. In an attempt to clean up the image of his label, Gotti dropped “Murder” from its name.
“They had everybody who loved me in corporate America, who felt I was a good guy, distance themselves from me,” he said after his acquittal in 2005. “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.’”
A list of survivors was not immediately available.