Before I present Carl's work let me just say I stopped reading The Source after they published the recipe for making crack.

How did white Harvard grad David Mays end up atop the $100 million Source hip-hop empire?
David Mays is having Dinner with AL Sharpton in an hour, and he needs to freshen up his ghetto-mogul look: Trim the goatee; neaten that hairline. He surveys his Union Square penthouse with its retractable projection TV, empty bookshelves, big speakers, bigger fish tank, and home gym, as Bush, his lanky, Afro'd groomer, goes at him with a straight razor. It's an appropriately big-shot moment for the 33-year-old founder and CEO of The Source - once a photocopied tip sheet, which over the past fourteen years has grown into the official house organ of hip-hop and the cornerstone of a $100 million media empire. But when I suggest that it all seems so Untouchables, he misunderstands the reference.

"You mean the part when the guy gets his neck cut?"

For a quiet Jewish kid who liked to play chess and wasn't into the rap scene until he got to Harvard, Mays has become one of the most powerful men in hip-hop. And he knows exactly how to play the part. "He's just like the rappers," says Def Jam CEO Russell Simmons. "That's why he drives that big silly Bentley. He never went for that alternative 'I went to Harvard, I want to be into rap because it's this fuck-you to the world.' Rap is saying, I want me a piece of the world."
Mays's piece is straight out of Cribs: chauffeured SUV, gated mansion in Jersey, video games and private hoops with rap stars at Chelsea Piers ("He's got a little jump on him," attests Nelly.) He dates attractive black women. Still, he has some reason to worry about his neck.

The Source is a hugely successful magazine - it's fat with ads and cheap to produce. Right now, Mays is looking for "strategic investors," but the magazine may ultimately be for sale. This is largely because spin-offs and other Mays enterprises are having problems: The Source Sports folded earlier in the year; one of two syndicated TV shows was canceled this summer. And Mays is still recovering from dumping a pile of money down the Internet rat hole. At least this summer's Source Awards in Miami went off without Snoop Dogg having to pull a gun or, for that matter, anybody getting beaten up, unlike what happened in Pasadena last year.

But Miami wasn't perfect, and this is why he's dining with Sharpton. The day after the show, Mays's "partner and best friend," the Boston-based rapper Raymond Scott, was busted for speeding in his Ferrari. Scott allegedly shouted profanities while punching and kicking the arresting officer. In a news conference, Mays called it a case of racial profiling. He's already told Miami his awards won't be back.

This isn't the first time Mays has required Sharpton's services. Last year, he got the reverend to defend several members of Scott's rap group, the Made Men, who were accused of stabbing Boston Celtic Paul Pierce (in the trial they were found not guilty). One member of the group happens to be The Source's circulation coordinator, Tony Hurston. Mays dismisses the incident as "rapper profiling": The Made Men have a long police record in Boston for drug-related offenses and street thuggery.


Some who have known Mays since his Harvard days say this lifestyle is what seems to have attracted him to Scott, who has become a trusted adviser, and what keeps them inextricably linked, even though the relationship has repeatedly caused his editors to quit.
This summer, several Source editors were interviewed about Mays's relationship to Scott by FBI agents. "The question is, Has his posturing gone too far?" says a former editor, one of many interviewed for this story (most were too nervous to have their names used). Not that the job doesn't come with rewards: Ex-employees reminisce about assistants dripping in diamonds and the atmosphere of corporate-card hedonism. (Last year, American Express sued Source Publications for over $1.3 million in unpaid bills-including $233,045 in charges by Mays). "It was a locker room," says a former editor. "They'd rent out a whole floor of the Royalton and bring in strippers." Several former editors - who are, it must be said, a resentful bunch - claim that there were guns around the place and that the magazine had to deal with sexual-harassment complaints from female staff members. Mays denies both.

It's how dominantly Black D.C. is - that's the reason I am who I am," says Mays. "If I was from another city, I wouldn't have turned out the same way." Mays grew up on basketball and go-go shows. As a freshman at Harvard, he met John Shecter, another white guy who loved black music, and the two of them joined the school radio station. The next year, they moved into a dorm that was favored by black undergrads. "I started getting involved with the local scene," Mays says. The top local rap group at that time was the Almighty RSO, later known as the Made Men. Mays, then called Go-Go Dave, sold advertising for his rap radio show and put together a listener mailing list, which would eventually lead to a tip sheet he called The Source. "As a kid, he was quite entrepreneurial," says his dad, Arnold Mays, who worked in the city-planning office in D.C. "He didn't want to go to camp. He stayed home and had a lawn-mowing business."

After graduating in 1990, Mays pre-sold $70,000 in advertising to record labels to finance moving The Source to New York. He and Shecter partnered with two black Harvard students, Ed Young and James Bernard. They were joined by non-Ivy Leaguers like Reginald Dennis. "I was one of the few black guys there," recalls Dennis, who would become the music editor. "But finally, there was a magazine that talked about rap from our point of view. Not about the language, or whether it caused violence, or the political stances. It was accepted."

The Source was a hormonal place: The staff published the recipe for crack and got into spats with artists. Dennis recalls that Mays once recruited him to help confront an advertiser who wasn't paying up; they walked out of the cheapskate's office with a fax machine. Dennis was impressed: "He's going to stand up for himself. Now I can be comfortable telling the black guys why I work for a couple of white guys pimping the culture."

In 1992, Time Inc. decided that it needed to pimp the same culture and approached Mays and Shecter about buying them out. Gil Rogin, then a Time Inc. executive (and now editorial director of Miller Publishing, a.k.a. Vibe/Spin Ventures), says Mays was "very assured of himself. He wanted his own way." Mays says Time Inc. offered them $600,000, which they turned down. Time Inc. started Vibe, and Mays went on the offensive. Jonathan Van Meter, Vibe's first editor, says, "He was one of the people who said I was this white faggot who didn't have any street cred."
"Street cred" is what The Source had against Time Inc.'s millions. "Being exposed in The Source was like a white businessman being exposed in the Wall Street Journal," said Dennis. "Your entire peer group reads it. It would drive people crazy." But while the magazine was gaining visibility, the record companies weren't always happy. "What [the editors] had managed to do was basically alienate every major artist in the business," says Mays. "I mean, from Cypress Hill burning copies of The Source on stage to Public Enemy making a video of them trashing our offices."

Mays had read Robert Draper's Rolling Stone Magazine: The Uncensored History when he was in college, and had modeled himself after that publication's arbitrary and visionary proprietor, Jann Wenner. He finally gained full control of The Source in 1994, but he almost destroyed it in the process. The editors had decided not to cover the new Almighty RSO album because, Dennis and others say, it wasn't very good; moreover, Scott and his friends had been hanging around the office arguing with the staff, rifling through their stuff, and threatening them. Mays went behind his editors' backs and wrote a glowing profile under a fake name and slipped it in the issue. When it came out, James Bernard, who had become Shecter's co-editor, and Dennis led a revolt, got in a fight with the RSO at their record company's offices, and then faxed a multi-page screed on editorial independence to advertisers and journalists. The rest of the editorial staff walked out, too, leaving Mays to put out the issue with the business staff. Mays borrowed money and bought out Bernard and Shecter's stakes in the company. And Scott came in as an official partner in the business.

"Good riddance," says Mays today. "Not one of those people do you ever hear anything about them doing anything, for all their great talk." The industry needed The Source - especially a tamer one that respected the pop charts-and supported it: By 1997, it was thick with ads and profits. Circulation had shot up from 123,000 to 370,000. In the old days, this would have been called joining the Establishment. In this case, it was more like becoming the Establishment. "The walls between the industry and editorial don't really exist," says one former editor. Mays moved from Jersey City to a $7,500-a-month loft in Manhattan. Scott was more present, in new roles such as producer of the TV forays. When he wasn't there, one of the guys from his crew was usually hanging around Mays ("protecting his investments," jokes one ex-staffer). So it's not surprising that, in 1999, it happened again: The three top editors quit after Scott harangued them in a six-hour meeting over his perception that the magazine intentionally avoided covering his act or taking it seriously. The number of "mikes" - the magazine's rating system, illustrated with microphones - was increased on the issue's Made Men review, too.

Scott continues to enjoy Mays's patronage: He played at the Miami Source Awards as Benzino, his latest persona, dropping out of the rafters in a prop spaceship (and getting conked on the head when he clambered out of it onto the stage). The live audience, there to see Lil' Kim and Outkast, murmured in confusion. Mays and Scott's bizarre bond has inspired all sorts of reports in the music industry of Scott threatening Mays. What is certain is that Scott's career has benefited directly from the connection, and that Mays wears an M medallion around his neck, for Made Men.
The expendability of  its Editors has made little difference to the success of The Source: It was nominated for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2000. More important, it's easily the best-selling music title on the newsstand. It is said to make over $10 million a year. So why, with a recession under way, is he shopping it around now?

"It's a mystery to me," says Rogin, the Miller Publishing executive. "He seems to be interested in concentrating on his entertainment division," which produces records and TV. In the meantime, Mays has realized, as Jann Wenner did before him, that pop power can become political power. Hip-hop is just getting used to being the mainstream instead of fighting it. Former NAACP head Ben Chavis operates the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network out of Source-owned offices, and Mays has sponsored several mediagenic conferences to confront police brutality.

The night before the awards in Miami, The Source rented out Club Tropigala, a vast, Vegas-y, jungle-themed nightspot in the Fountainebleau Hotel, for the Source Youth Foundation Image Awards. Russell Simmons, who raised money for Hillary Clinton, co-sponsored it with McDonald's. James Prince, CEO of Rap-A-Lot Records, toasted Mays as "a black brother to me." Master P testified that "money can truly be made by us people coming from the ghetto!" And Jesse Jackson led the crowd in a chant of "Keep hope alive!" Mays's dad, Arnold, the president of the foundation, was there, too, in an old white dinner jacket. He said they'd "almost" gotten Bill Clinton to come. Afterward, he explained what the attraction was. "I think what we're going to see is that rap will be more politicized, because there's a lot of money in it," he said. "That's why Jesse Jackson was there. He has his nose to the wind - he knows where the money is."

Released: January 2004

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