Prosecutors say Adolphus Symonette killed a man and engineered real estate fraud.
In hip-hop years, Sam Ferguson was geriatric. True, on that molasses-sticky August afternoon in 2009 as he whistled north on Florida's Turnpike, he was still three months shy of his 48th birthday. But years in the rap business are like time in a coal mine, especially when you came out of Carol City's drug-ridden '80s scene.
Courtesy of Miami-Dade Corrections
Michael the Black Man (AKA Maurice Woodside) has been charged with four felonies but never convicted.
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"P Man Sam," as everybody knew him, had outlived the thrill-ride highs of signing rappers such as Young & Restless and Distinguished Gentlemen to major-label deals. And he had outrun felony charges for coke, guns, and assault.
His tight-cropped hair was thinning at the temples, but his wide, white-toothed smile and friendly, deep-set eyes subtracted years. He knew he was lucky to be around.
In fact, his luck seemed to be improving thanks to a startling rebirth as a journalist. Ten months earlier, Ferguson had scooped the hip-hop world by persuading Miami giant Rick Ross to admit in a magazine piece that he'd once worked as a Florida prison guard. (An embarrassing revelation considering his image as a street-hardened drug dealer.)
The scoop earned Ferguson his own profile in Hip Hop Weekly as "The Man Behind the Admission."
It also garnered threats: "Ferguson is a liar. He's an informant, he's a rat, he's a bitch. Get at me in the streets, nigga — you know how we play. This shit is about to get deeper than rap," Ross blustered.
All that press had bought him a new national gig too: Miami president of Don Diva Magazine, a well-read hip-hop monthly.
Ferguson was so focused on his new career that he likely didn't even notice when a black-tinted car with clear taillights roared up to the passenger side of his burgundy sedan near the Griffin Road exit. It slowed to match his speed.
The driver's window slid down, and a steely gun barrel popped out. Before Ferguson could react, bullets peppered his car, piercing the shatter-proof glass and thudding into his body.
P Man Sam slumped over the wheel. His car slammed into the median, spun across the fast lane, and skidded to a halt.
By the time an ambulance had weaved through the backed-up traffic, Ferguson was dead.
That was just before 2 p.m. Within hours, the Internet buzzed with speculation: Had Ross ordered a revenge hit? Or had another rapper? Did Ferguson's rough past finally catch up with him?
But as detectives followed those labyrinthine clues, they instead discovered vestiges of a violent cult thought long dead: that of race-baiting ghetto savior Yahweh ben Yahweh, who 20 years earlier had been convicted of conspiring to murder 14 people.
This past February, prosecutors charged Adolphus Symonette, who as a child was raised in Yahweh's Temple of Love. He had begun running a criminal enterprise that included fraud, kidnapping, and Ferguson's murder.
But the waif-thin 28-year-old, who had virtually no criminal record before the indictment, says he didn't do it. The true criminal, he contends, is his charismatic uncle, Maurice, a fiery conservative activist better known as Michael the Black Man who was accused of two gruesome Yahweh murders in the '90s and has since been charged with — but never convicted of — four other felonies while starting his own bizarre religious enterprise.
"Adolphus is just telling you what he thinks will get him out of prison," Maurice responds to his nephew's claims.
Indeed there's no direct evidence tying the uncle to any of the crimes. But smokescreen or not, Adolphus Symonette's background as well as his defense throw back the curtain on a frightening reality: the strange, bloody legacy of the late Yahweh ben Yahweh lives on in the Magic City.
Maurice Woodside was 21 years old when he first met fiery preacher Hulon Mitchell Jr. around 1980. Maurice's younger brother Ricardo had already joined Mitchell's flock. "He got me by just walking up and saying, 'All white people are the Devil,' " says Maurice. "I was a real militant race warrior right then, so I said, 'Whoa! Yeah, that's right!' "
Over the next decade, Mitchell would transform from Afro-wearing black militant to murderous, robe-clad cult leader Yahweh ben Yahweh. The Oklahoman would demand his enemies heads be displayed on spikes and eventually would be sentenced to 20 years in the federal pen for conspiring in murders that included a gruesome beheading.
Ricardo and Maurice Woodside would play a big role in the rise and fall of the cult. The brothers grew up in a tight Carol City family, raised by their mother, Johnnie Simmons. Maurice says his father was Al Symonette, an Overtown architect who once owned a historic club called Knight Beat that hosted everyone from Aretha Franklin to B.B. King. (Maurice also claims his father is related to Sir Roland Symonette, the independent Bahamas' first prime minister, whose face now graces the island's $50 note.)
Al Symonette wasn't around much, but he passed on a love of R&B and jazz. Maurice and Ricardo, who is two years younger and has a different father, began singing together as kids and later formed a group called the Cool Dudes. They were "very, very close," Ricardo would later testify.
