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Lock 'Em Down, Lock 'Em Up

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Details about Caldwell's life began to emerge. He had a history of drug-related arrests and was a high-ranking member of the Conservative Vice Lords, a powerful west Chicago street gang. According to court documents later filed by DEA agent William Warren, in July 2001 an informant told the Chicago DEA that he'd bought about a kilo of cocaine a week from Caldwell for about five years, ending in 1997. The agents set up a sting, providing the informant with $2,700 to be used to buy 4.5 ounces of crack. They recorded telephone conversations leading up to the drug deal, then videotaped the exchange. Hoping to build a more wide-reaching case, the DEA orchestrated two more buys in July and August 2002, including one in which an informant wore a wire.

On October 15, 2003, Warren filed his complaint and Caldwell was arrested. On the eve of his trial in May 2006, facing life in prison if convicted, Caldwell pleaded guilty to selling multiple kilograms of cocaine, crack and heroin, and to possession of a firearm by a felon. He forfeited $2 million in cash and seized property.

In exchange for his cooperation in other cases, Caldwell was sentenced to fourteen and a half years in federal prison, where he now resides.

Miles Davis grew up in East St. Louis before moving to New York at age eighteen to attend Juilliard and jam with Charlie Parker. While living in the city, Annie Mae Bullock met her future husband Ike Turner in an east-side bar called Club Manhattan. The great Peetie Wheatstraw, a pianist widely regarded as one the most influential blues musicians of all time, honed his chops in the clubs of East St. Louis. These days, however, most of the folks in East St. Louis interested in blues, jazz and rock & roll are old enough to have seen the those artists perform in their prime.

"Hip-hop is the only music where I'm from," says L.E.D. co-CEO John Bacon, who graduated from East St. Louis High School in 1991. "The people don't really listen to nothing else."

But while its neighbor across the river has produced several hip-hop superstars (most notably the multi-platinum selling artist Nelly), East St. Louis has yet to see any of its homegrown hip-hop talent blossom in the national spotlight. L.E.D. aimed to change all that.

In October 2005 Bacon and Singleton signed Young Beano, who had a single called "Skip 2 Da Lou" that had caught on as a regional club hit. Beano says it was Singleton who approached him about joining the label.

"He was just a cool person. He was down-to-earth. And I knew he was going to do what I needed him to do, and that was push the music," recalls Beano, who explains that his stage name is an acronym for Born Eternal Angel No Other. "They didn't really offer me nothing real dramatic, but I knew they had what I needed at the time, and that was a team and money."

Shortly thereafter, Beano (given name: Joe Vence) recorded "Money Snap," a song ostensibly about going clubbing after receiving an income-tax refund. As its title indicates, "Money Snap" fits squarely in the genre of snap, a downtempo style of Southern hip-hop that's tailor-made for dance clubs, which is where the song quickly became popular.

"You can do a dance to it. Everybody can sing along. He's not rappin' too hard, he's understandable. You can relate to what he's saying, I mean everybody trying to get that money. It just works," sums up DJ Charlie Chan Soprano of Hot 104.1, who spins at several area nightspots. "You can still play it now [in the club] and they love it. It's a classic record."

L.E.D. paid several thousand dollars for Beano and another L.E.D. rapper, Dun Deal, to appear on the cover of inBox Magazine and DVD, an East St. Louis-based pay-for-coverage magazine. They booked concerts throughout the region and rented out the now-defunct downtown club Dreams for a record-release party.

"They'd give me two or three hundred dollars to throw out into the crowd when I performed 'Money Snap,'" Beano says. "I'd never really traveled with my music, I was basically just in St. Louis," he adds. "What I owe them for was taking my music to different cities and getting new fans."

Says Singleton: "I'm hands-on. I'm involved with everything except for production. I promote, I look for talent, I finance. Starting off [Lock 'Em Down] was basically trying to help family members. The more involved I got in it, the more attached I got to it. I got to love it."

According to DJ Sir Thurl of 100.3 The Beat, at its peak "Money Snap" received nearly 50 plays per week on his radio station. L.E.D. produced two remixes of the song, one featuring members of Nelly's crew, the St. Lunatics. Eventually, major record labels came calling.

"They had a record that was bubbling. It was huge regionally in St. Louis and it spread a little bit outside of St. Louis. I thought the record had a shot," says Al Lindstrom, the CEO of ALMG, a national promotions and management group that works with several major labels and represents artists R. Kelly and Timbaland, among others. "I offered to work the record nationally for them. And they just disappeared. They just never came back. I told them what the cost would be to do the project, and it never happened. They just disappeared."

Ask anyone involved with L.E.D. what happened to Beano and they're quick to blame the DEA investigation.

"That hurts Beano," says Shondale "Diesel" Rounds, L.E.D.'s president. "They say, 'I don't want to fuck with him because he's got all that going on.' Other artists, like T.I. for example, he has a criminal history in his past. It's behind him. People in the industry see this and say, 'He's got it in front of him and we don't want anything to do with it.'"

Singleton admits that he suspected Martin Caldwell was involved in some sort of criminal activity but says he thought it best to keep his head down and not ask questions when he and LaKeith Cross visited Chicago.

"I noticed he had a lot going on," Singleton elaborates. "We'd party all the time. But like I say, you don't just go and ask people [that]. That's not normal. I knew somewhat [that he was a gang leader], but Chicago's west side is known for Vice Lords. But I'm not the type of guy to ask questions. Stuff like that can get you in trouble."

Though Singleton may have been unaware of it at the time, trouble is precisely what he got.

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