Shortly after 4 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2005, Joe Smith was found riddled with bullets in the backseat of an SUV at a Getty station in Southwest Philadelphia.
Smith, a barrel-chested, 30-year-old drug dealer, had been shot 20 times in the chest, abdomen, arms, legs, back and pelvis. Two shots perforated his right lung. Another shot, fired from a gun pressed against his back, sliced through his liver and right kidney.
Before he died, Smith named the man who had shot him.
The homicide, one of the first of 380 that year in Philadelphia, received scant attention - one paragraph in The Inquirer, no mention at all in the Philadelphia Daily News.
It was, however, big news for a group of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) agents and Philadelphia police narcotics investigators who had been working to build a case against Alton "Ace Capone" Coles - a seemingly successful Philadelphia rap music executive whose high-flying lifestyle they had been tracking for more than two years.
Coles portrayed himself then - and portrays himself now - as a businessman who was producing videos and CDs for the company he founded, Take Down Records, and promoting parties and after-concert events for big-name rap acts.
"I'm not the leader or boss of nothing besides Take Down Records, and that's that," Coles said from prison last week. "I'm not no boss of a street organization running a big, giant drug conspiracy."
The 240-pound rap mogul drove a $220,000 Bentley, was building a $480,000 home in a South Jersey suburb, and had been a fixture at antiviolence rallies, often posing with top officials in the city, including Mayor Street and Police Commissioner Sylvester M. Johnson.
"He was cultured. Very charming," said Barry Michael Cooper, 49, a screenwriter who had hoped to develop a reality TV pilot tracking Coles' legitimate rise in the rap music world.
To federal authorities, Coles' livelihood was anything but legitimate.
