The rap group got a record deal with Universal Music Group, went on tour, and distributed a CD in 2001 through JCOR Entertainment.
"They were a finger snap away from making it big," Epstein said recently. "But it never happened."
Although the dream of hip-hop glory fizzled, RAM Squad remains near the top of one chart.
Since the late 1990s, members of the rap group's musical entourage have been the focus of an FBI drug investigation. Court records and testimony indicate that the FBI makes little, if any, distinction between RAM Squad the rap group and RAM Squad the suspected drug ring.
None of the four principal members of the rap group has been charged with a federal drug offense, and since 1997 none has been convicted of any major crimes in state court.
But several producers and associates of the rap group have figured in prominent narcotics cases.
RAM Squad the performing group takes its name from Richard Allen Mob, an underworld organization that, according to court records and testimony, includes individuals with one foot in the music world and another in a world of drugs, murder and street cash. On the street and in law enforcement circles, the names RAM Squad and the Richard Allen Mob are often used interchangeably.
Many members of the organization come from the same North Philadelphia public housing site, childhood home to some of Philadelphia's most high-profile civic leaders and celebrities.
But Richard Allen Homes, which recently underwent a stunning face-lift by the Philadelphia Housing Authority, has also been a proving ground for black gangs and drug dealers, from the "Black Mafia" of the 1970s and '80s, to the "Junior Black Mafia" that was put out of commission in the early 1990s by federal convictions.
