This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Artist News Legal
Lawyer demands information on claims that Wu-Tang Clan ordered 1999 murder
By Andy Malt | Published on Thursday 5 November 2015
A lawyer representing convicted drug dealer Anthony Christian is demanding to see police files related to claims that a 1999 murder, which his client was found guilty of orchestrating, was actually ordered by members of the Wu-Tang Clan.
Anthony Christian and his brother Harvey were found guilty last year of running an illegal drug operation in New York for 20 years, and were also convicted for organising the murder of Jerome Estella.
But, as his client awaits sentencing, lawyer Michael Gold has argued that FBI files show that Estella’s murder was actually carried out in June 1999 “at the instruction of members of the Wu-Tang Clan, a rap group, as revenge for robberies”. He is now requesting access to all police files relating to the murder investigation, along with others into the death of another man, Corey Brooker, the same month.
References to an FBI investigation into RZA and Raekwon first surfaced in 2012, when bandmate Ol Dirty Bastard’s FBI file was released under a Freedom Of Information request. It was claimed that the two Wu-Tang founders ordered the murders in retaliation for the robberies of family members.
“These reports seem to suggest someone else was liable for those murders. I’m not suggesting that Wu-Tang committed these crimes, the FBI did”, Gold told the Staten Island Advance. “What I’m trying to ascertain is their stated belief in an official file that Wu-Tang ordered this homicide”.
Prosecutors contend that Gold had access to all of the information he is now referring to prior to the trial, and that none of it constitutes evidence that might have exonerated his client.
They do note, however, that the man who actually shot Estella – Brian Humphreys – who testified against the Christian brothers at trial, did say that his victim robbed RZA’s little brother. Meanwhile another informant, Paul Ford, is said to have claimed that Brooker robbed RZA’s brother and Raekwon’s cousin, leading to RZA putting a $30,000 contract out to kill him.
But at trial the prosecution put it that Christian and Ford had actually ordered Humphreys to kill Brooker, simply because he was a rival dealer. And that Estella was then killed to stop him from warning Brooker of the plan. Humphreys was actually arrested on the day of Estella’s death, but Brooker was nonetheless killed three days later. His murder remains unsolved.
Gold says that far from receiving all of this information before the Christians’ trial, he was given documents with “a few remote references to Wu-Tang, but nothing that went as far as the released FBI files”.
A decision is yet to be made on Gold’s request for the other police files. The Wu-Tang Clan have not commented on the claims.
