Jam Master Jay’s Deadly Debt

Jam Master Jay was most likely murdered over an unpaid drug debt, according to a story in the December issue of Playboy magazine’s Frank Owen. The mag’s story details how Ronald ‘Tinard’ Washington, a suspect in the Run DMC deejay’s murder who was part of a teenage burglary crew with Jay in Queens, accompanied the Run-DMC DJ to Baltimore, where they gave 10 kilos of cocaine to sell to a street-level dealer named Yaqin, another former member of their old Queens crew. Yaqin ran off with the coke, Owen reports, leaving Jay owing $180,000 to a major-league drug dealer. “Everybody in Jay’s inner circle knows that Jay was involved in arranging drug deals,” a source told Owen. “But nobody wants to talk about it because they don’t want to tarnish his image.”