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FBI Investigated 2 Wu-Tang Clan Members for 1999 Murder, Court Docs Show

By Nicholas Rizzi | November 5, 2015 11:26am
 Newly reveled court documents show the FBI investigated Wu-Tang Clan's RZA (left) and Raekwon for links to the murder of two drug dealers in 1999.
Newly reveled court documents show the FBI investigated Wu-Tang Clan's RZA (left) and Raekwon for links to the murder of two drug dealers in 1999.
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Karl Walter and Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

STATEN ISLAND — The FBI investigated Wu-Tang Clan members RZA and Raekwon in the 1999 murder of two drug dealers, after an informant claimed the rappers ordered the hit, according federal prosecutors.

The documents — first obtained by the Staten Island Advance were filed in the trial of brothers Anthony and Harvey Christian, who were found guilty last year for running a long-time drug ring in the Park Hill Apartments. In the trial, Anthony Christian was also linked to ordering the murder of Jerome "Boo Boo" Estella, 17, the Advance reported.

However, his lawyer, Michael Gold, claims that the FBI has information from Brian Humphreys, a Blood turned informant, that links the order to murder Estella and Corey "Shank Bank" Brooker to Robert Fitzgerald Diggs (RZA) and Corey Woods (Raekwon). The connection was made because Estella and Brooker had robbed family members of the rappers before their deaths.

"A couple of weeks before the Boo Boo shooting, Uncles (Paul Ford another informant) told Humphreys about a Blood named Boo Boo who just came home from jail. He stated that Boo Boo had robbed RZA’s little brother and had also gotten into something with the Christian brothers," federal prosecutors wrote in a response to a defense lawyer's motion.

In another section of the filing, a conversation between Ford, Humphreys and Anthony Christian links Raekwon and RZA to Brooker's death — with RZA spending $30,000 for the hit — as retaliation for robbing RZA's brother and Raekwon's cousin.

"Ford stated that he had previously heard that Shank Bank was killed by Phife. Ford believes that Phife collected money from RZA for executing the hit," according to the federal prosecutor's response to the motion, which does not identify Phife.

Gold asked prosecutors to give over the full FBI file on the murders, but a filing last month by Assistant U.S. Attorney Allon Lifshitz said the relevant information had already been provided before the trial.

Prosecutors also wrote that the file doesn't exonerate Anthony Christian for ordering the murders because, while they might have been motivated by the robbery of RZA and Raekwon's family members, both Ford and Humphreys said it was Christian who gave the instructions.