1 • His mother dealt drugs to support him
Sabrina Jackson gave birth to Curtis on July 6, 1975. She was 15. “She wanted to provide for me, but she didn’t see Burger King as an option,” 50 says. “She found other means: hustling.” His grandmother would mind him for weeks on end. “My mama substituted presents for time: Every time I seen her, it was Christmas.”
2 • She told him he’d been an immaculate conception
“One day I asked her, ‘Mama, why don’t I have a father?’” he recalls. “She said, ‘You was an immaculate conception, like Jesus.’ She was just trying to make me feel special.”
3 • To this day, he’s never met his dad
“I don’t know who he was, and I have no interest in knowing,” he says. “I mean, it’s a source of regret. He could have helped me in life. But that period has passed.”
4 • Before he was 50 Cent, he was Boo-Boo
“My aunt used to say, ‘Come here, Boo-Boo!’ and it just stuck.” Was it hard to command respect on the streets with a name so cuddly? “It’s scarier that way,” 50 says. “If someone calls themselves Terminator, you’re like, ‘Yeah, right!’”
5 • In 1994, he was sentenced to prison for possession of 280 grams of crack and 4 ounces of heroin
To avoid hard time, he enrolled in New York’s Shock Incarceration program: boot camp for felons. For six months upstate, he awoke at 5:30 A.M., did push-ups on his knuckles and sawed trees.
6 • His mom swung both ways
50 Cent recalls: “I ain’t see males around my mom. My mama liked women. But I would never see anything that would make me think something sexual was going on. It didn’t dawn on me till later.”
7 • When 50 was 8, his mother was murdered
Sabrina kept her own apartment across town. In 1983, someone drugged her and turned on her gas oven, leaving her to die. “When they found her, her body was fucked up,” 50 later recalled. Today, he says, “My biggest loss was my mom. Everything that went wrong was wrong because
she wasn’t there — if I wanted to go to the park and it started raining, it was raining ’cause my mother wasn’t there.”
8 • He followed in her drug-dealing footsteps just four years later
With 50, his grandparents and eight aunts and uncles all under one roof, money was tight. “Hustling was the only option,” he explains. “I wasn’t thinking about a career. I was looking for instant gratification.”
9 • He says his aunts and uncles were his first customers …
“They’d have parties, and at the time, cocaine was like marijuana — it was common. I’d say, ‘Yo, I’ll go pick it up for you,’ then run to the side of the house where I put it in a little bag. It went from there to me hustling from 3 to 6 P.M. every day. My grandparents thought I was
in an after-school program.”
10 • … but one uncle’s addiction almost got 50 killed
A complaint kept arising — his bags were light. He says he discovered his uncle Star had been dipping into his stash. “If the guys I had been selling light bags to thought I was cheating them on purpose, they would have killed me,” he later wrote in his autobiography. He beat his
uncle with a giant wooden fork in reprisal. “To this day, Star and I don’t speak much.”
11 • Even without giant utensils, he packed a killer right hook
When 50 was 14, an older neighborhood dealer opened up a small boxing gym for local kids. “When I wasn’t killing time in school, I was sparring in the gym or selling crack on the strip,” 50 recalled. He took what he learned in the ring out onto the streets: “At the
slightest infraction, I was punching someone in the face.”
12 • He lost his virginity at age 12
“It went well — I was 12 and she was 21!” he says, grinning. “I spent a night at my friend’s house, and his sister had her friend staying over, too. So I started to touch on her. I was a horny little dog, and I got away with it.”
13 • His secret stash spot? Women’s panties!
One morning, when he was 19, 50 was out hustling with the help of a girlfriend when the cops swooped in. “When they searched her, they found 36 vials of crack and 12 packs of heroin in her underwear,” he later recalled.
14 • The streets were 50’s business school. There were hostile takeovers …
At Shock, 50 met a stick-up kid from Brooklyn named Jah. “When we got out, I brought him into my area to rob all the dealers who weren’t part of my group. I said, ‘You can have all the money, just give me their pieces.’”
15 • … special promotions …
“I would take the pieces from Jah and give them away free with every purchase. So even if the fiends catch a sale with someone else, they would go, ‘Nah, I can get this for free!’”
16 • … and market saturation
“When there’s money to be made, there’s no hours, no going home,” 50 says. “In the music business, I adapt the same concepts. When it’s not 50 Cent’s album, it’s the G-Unit album. When it’s not Young Buck, it’s Lloyd Banks. I’m here constantly.”
17 • His next brush with the law involved a high-speed motor cycle chase — and cross-dressing
Shortly after his release, 50 was mis taken for a murder suspect who owned a motorcycle similar to his. When a squad car tried to stop 50 on Queens’s Guy Brewer Boulevard, he fled, escaping only after several squad cars and a helicopter had given chase. He snuck into his
grandmother’s house, donned a dress and a wig, and slipped past patrolmen outside. “They must have been like, ‘Damn, that’s an ugly bitch,’” 50 jokes. The real murderer was apprehended later that day.
18 • He’s a pretty easygoing dad
Does 50 let 10-year-old Marquise listen to his music? “Of course. If I say something a little racy, I’ll be like, ‘You know what that means?’ and he’ll be like, ‘Yeah.’ He already knows. The kids know. The problem is that their parents aren’t asking them the questions. I went into his
room the other night and he was on this porno site — big-booty girls. He was like, ‘I just clicked a link!’ Kids are gonna be kids, man.”
19 • A Queens hip-hop legend gave him his big break
The same year Marquise was born, in 1997, 50 Cent met Run-D.M.C.’s Jam Master Jay at a club. A childhood fan of Rakim, 50 had written only one rhyme, in 1995, for fun — “I don’t remember it exactly, but it was street,” he says. Jay was impressed by his singsong delivery and by his story, and brought 50 into his fold.
20 • Well, it was almost his big break
Things moved quickly: Jay brought 50 to the attention of Columbia Records, they signed him, he recorded an album, then … nothing. “When I met Jay, I wasn’t a starving artist,” 50 says. “But right after I committed to music, I starved.” To keep up with the bills, he returned
to hustling.
21 • He became a papa in 1997 — and started working on his crack-game exit strategy
When then-girlfriend Shaniqua Tompkins gave birth to his son Marquise, 50 quit dealing. As he puts it: “My mama’s motivation to get into the game was my motivation to get out.”
22 • OK, scratch that. A paid assassin gave him his big break
On May 24, 2000, a gunman shot 50 Cent nine times in front of his grandmother’s house. In his autobiography, 50 hints that the hit came about because he’d insulted drug kingpin Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff, but when asked explicitly in interviews about McGriff’s involvement, 50 has demurred. Either way, he was hospitalized, Columbia dropped him — and, unbeknownst to him, his glorious future was guaranteed.
23 • His next mentor was … “Weird Al”?
With a head full of new rhymes and no label to release them, 50 Cent turned to New York’s mix-tape circuit. Instead of filling the samizdat titles with throwaway rhymes, he approached them like albums: “I wrote my freestyles in song format.” He also recorded parodies of hits. As he put it later, “I took the ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic approach.”
24 • After he got shot, he began wearing a bulletproof vest — and still wears one today
When 50 started booking shows, advertising his whereabouts made him nervous. “I wore a vest ’cause I knew it could pop off,” he explains. During 50’s first tour, Marquise wore one, too.
25 • Eminem heard one of 50’s mix tapes, flew him to L.A. and, with Dr. Dre, signed him to a million-dollar deal
“I was at the airport to go see them when my vest set off the metal detector,” 50 recalls. A TSA supervisor who’d heard his songs let him through anyway. “If they hadn’t let me take the vest, I probably wouldn’t have gone.”
26 • His is the fastest-selling debut of all time
In its first week, 2003’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’ sold nearly 900,000 copies — and did it again in week two.
27 • He’s available for Bar mitzvahs!
“The last Bar Mitzvah I booked, I got paid $500,000 for 30 minutes,” 50 explains. “That’s not a fixed rate, but it’s in the ballpark.”
28 • He collects his own brand of sneakers
“I got 500 pairs,” he says. “All G-Unit. A bunch of different colors, limited editions. Tony Yayo is a size over me, but he’ll squeeze his feet into mine and borrow them.”
29 • He likes George Bush
After Kanye West railed on Dubya post-Katrina, 50 defended the prez, calling him a “gangsta.”
30 • He keeps his most revealing music for himself
On 2005’s “Hate It or Love It,” 50 rapped about his mother’s bisexuality — but that was an exception. “You don’t want to be too complex,” he says. “I have records that I wrote for myself, and they’re playing on my computer at home. Sort of like a diary. But I’m not gonna waste the public’s time with them.”
31 • He’s buddies with Robert de Niro
50’s burgeoning acting career has been respectable — the autobiographical Get Rich or Die Tryin’; the war flick Home of the Brave — if not spectacularly successful. But his biggest role yet is ahead of him, starring opposite De Niro in the upcoming thriller New Orleans. “He invited me to his house — gave me that De Niro look, sizing me up,” 50 says. “But I passed the test.”
32 • His new album has one hell of a guest list
Curtis, which 50 says will include several returns to the street-hardened, wisecracking “old 50,” also features collaborations with Akon, Nicole Scherzinger, Robin Thicke, Mary J. Blige and Justin Timberlake. “Basically,” 50 explains, “it’s one of my best pieces of work.”
33 • Next stop: retirement!
… Sort of. 50 has alluded to leaving rap behind once his five-record contract expires. “I’ll put out albums like Dre, every five years or every seven,” he clarifies. “I enjoy rapping, but there’s so much more out there.”
