The Rap.(Styles Security and Executive Protection's Derrick Parker)(Brief biography)

Derrick Parker is the hip-hop cop. Although he no longer serves on the police force--he retired from the New York Police Department in 2002, as a twenty-year veteran with the rank of detective, first grade--that is still how people think of him. For years, Detective Parker was the department's hip-hop expert, and, starting in 1999, he headed a special intelligence unit that focussed on rap and hip-hop crime. Now he has his own security firm in midtown. When a crime takes place in the rap and hip-hop world (a common occurrence) and no leads or witnesses can be found (ditto), Derrick Parker is still the person to call. In the past, he has consulted with police not just from New York but from Miami, Orlando, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. Rap music exists in a strange symbiosis with crime, and those close to the music are usually unwilling to talk to the police. This combination makes Derrick's skills unique; he probably knows more about crimes in the rap and hip-hop community than anybody but the perpetrators themselves.

His company, Styles Security and Executive Protection, on West Twenty-seventh Street, provides security for concerts, night clubs, retail stores, and construction sites, along with executive protection and private investigation. The work allows Derrick to expand a circle of acquaintance already staggeringly large. He seems to know everybody. In the rap world, this familiarity extends from stars like Jay-Z and Foxy Brown to the dancers in the videos to Steve, the guy on the sidewalk who hands out rap-show flyers from a shopping bag. Derrick can tell you who shot Tupac Shakur and Jam Master Jay, and he has a fair idea of who killed Biggie Smalls. Just because a murder is unsolved doesn't mean nobody knows who did it. Information seeks out Derrick through the air, arrives with the R. & B. ringtone of his cell phone. "The street will tell you everything you need to know, if you wait patiently," he says. "The street knows everything."

Derrick turned forty-seven last May. He still has a kid's round, unlined face and a kid's openmouthed smile--the kind that goes up and down as much as it goes across. The expression conveys total delight; for all the mayhem and wickedness he has dealt with in his professional life, he is a remarkably lighthearted guy. Derrick stands six feet three and weighs about three hundred pounds. With his size and presence, you tend to see only angles of him, not all of him at one time. He is black, but now and then people mistake him for Indian or Latino, and he can get away with Italian, too. Strangers sometimes come up to him and start right in speaking Spanish, of which he knows only a few words.

He favors well-tailored suits in black or charcoal gray, purple shirts, and lavender ties. When called to testify in court, he dresses in a gray pin-striped suit, a white shirt with collar and cuffs of a creamier shade, and a tie striped white, light blue, and gray. A single-carat diamond-stud earring highlights his left earlobe. On occasion, he wears on his right hip or under his left arm a .40-calibre Glock automatic, a pistol he likes for its stopping power. "If you are shot with a forty-calibre you will definitely be wounded, possibly seriously enough to lead to your demise," he says. But in twenty years with the N.Y.P.D. and five in private security he has never fired his gun except at the range.

His hands are large and thick, and he knows certain things like the back of them. To underscore this point, he will hold up one hand and tap its back significantly with the other, meanwhile tucking his chin into his collar and looking at you through his eyebrows. The gesture is that of an experienced interrogator. One particular thing he knows like the back of his hand is the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. He was born there, in St. John's Episcopal Hospital (now Interfaith Medical Center), and both sets of his grandparents lived there. Later, his father, Lionel, a cop with the Sanitation Department, moved the family to St. Albans, in Queens. From visiting his grandparents back in Bed-Stuy, growing up in the black middle class of St. Albans, and attending mostly white Bayside High, to which he was bused, Derrick absorbed a cross-section of New York. With this background, he can talk to anybody. White cops saw him as black, but fellow black cops used to tease him, "You ain' black, you're from Bayside!"

Derrick's mother, born Dolores Bryant, came from black show-business aristocracy. Her father, Willie Bryant, was the leader of a well-known swing band in the thirties and forties. He was also an uptown celebrity, then and into the fifties, as the master of ceremonies at the Apollo Theatre. The city named him "Mayor of Harlem" (an honorary position) in 1952. Later, he moved to California, where he worked as a disk jockey and an actor for several years. Willie Bryant was light-skinned and could play non-black roles. Dolores says that Derrick reminds her of her father--"Especially when he quirks his eyebrow at you after he tells a joke. My daddy used to do his eyebrow just that way." For complicated reasons involving his grandparents' divorce, his grandmother's remarriage to a man whom Derrick knew as his grandfather but who was really his step-grandfather, and Willie Bryant's early death, in California, in 1964, Derrick never saw him face to face. But as a boy he did watch him in reruns of "The Untouchables." Dolores remembers that in one episode her father played a crony of the gangster Frank Nitti and in another he was a detective helping Eliot Ness.

On an October night a couple of years ago, two crimes took place on the same block of West Twenty-first Street in Manhattan. At about midnight, a gold-and-diamond chain reportedly worth fifty thousand dollars was snatched from the neck of Sebastian Telfair, a professional basketball player then with the Boston Celtics. The theft occurred outside Justin's, a bar and soul-food restaurant frequented by rap stars. Telfair did not call the police or ask anybody else to; but by some accounts he was seen talking on his cell phone afterward. Then, within the half hour, somebody shot Fabolous, the rap star, in the thigh as he stood in a parking lot just up the street. On the way to Bellevue Hospital, the car in which Fabolous was riding was pulled over by the police, who found two handguns in it.