Grant Williams and the Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah were best friends with big plans to make music. Then Grant was sentenced for a murder he didn’t commit.

On a chilly day in March 2022, Grant Williams stepped out of his Infiniti SUV and walked through the snow and hail to the middle of the basketball court in the Stapleton projects to see the new Wu-Tang Clan “W” emblem painted at its center. The logo was yellow against the black asphalt, the same colors used on the group’s first album. The design was laid down in the fall, but Grant hadn’t seen it. As the road manager for Wu-Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah, Grant spent weekdays working from home booking flights and calling promoters and weekends on tour.

“We [Grant and Ghostface] always had this plan and we were gonna do some type of music together,” Grant said.

COVID-19 made touring over the last two years a stop-and-start affair. “We only have a few dates left,” he said. “I wish I was back on the road so I could just knock it out.”

The pause gave him a chance to go back to Staten Island, catch up with old friends, and visit the housing project where at 11 years old, he met Dennis Coles, aka Ghostface Killah. “My mother and his mother; his family and my family, we’ve always been tight,” Grant said. “Me and Ghostface are more like brothers.”

On the benches, which used to line the courtyard inside Stapleton, Grant says he and Ghostface once sold crack. On those same benches, the two gathered the raw material for what would become one of the most heralded rap careers in the genre’s history. With Grant by his side, Ghostface began to stitch together arresting narratives of growing up in poverty and selling crack to survive.

At eye level, Stapleton in the winter of 2022 didn’t look special. Just another collection of unadorned, government-owned-and-operated buildings. It is mid-century brutalist efficiency — bricks, mortar, cinder blocks, and almost no flare. The outdoor breezeways, fronted by metal fencing, connect the apartment to the elevators in the middle of each building.

“It looks like a prison with the tiers. Prison looks just like this,” Grant said.

But it was from these projects, and nearby Park Hill apartments, that Wu-Tang Clan emerged. Their rise in the hip-hop world was both improbable and unprecedented. The group wasn’t a spin-off of an established rap crew, and no hip-hop act blessed them with a guest appearance to help launch their career. The bulk of the clan hail from Staten Island, which was not exactly a breeding ground for early rap music like the South Bronx, Harlem, or Queensbridge. “Wu-Tang was able to see what was going on in other boroughs and be influenced by it while at the same time developing their craft at their own speed without the competition, hype, or pressure that rappers in other parts of the city might have felt,” S.H. Fernando, Jr., author of the 2021 book From the Streets of Shaolin: The Wu-Tang Saga, told me.

Wu-Tang stirred its own buzz by working their records on college radio, touring historically black colleges, and building a critical mass of die-hard fans who soaked up the music as fast as the group could produce it. Their fans and the group united under the Wu-Tang “W,” which became a symbol of a hip-hop insurgency. Those same fans bought into the group’s comic-book-like origin story: Wu-Tang transformed their homebase of Staten Island into a place they called Shaolin, an invention drawn from equal parts real life in Black and Latino working-class sections of the borough— Park Hill and Stapleton–and the Shaolin of the Shaw Brothers martial-arts movies shown in the old theaters of the pre-Disney Times Square. The nine-man crew of rappers from Staten Island and Brooklyn told stories of despair laid over soul samples from The Emotions, The Charmels and Dave Porter.

Wu Tang’s rise came during the crack era. Their drug-dealer-themed rhymes at times felt autobiographical, and their ties to the local drug trade were not lost on the cops in Staten Island. “When they saw us become successful, pulling up in front of the projects in limos to take our friends to rap shows, the cops didn’t like that,” Grant told me. “So they just sat there and watched us.”

More than 30 years later, the logo, which singularly encapsulated the band, its sound, and the world from which the music came, had returned home. The Wu-Tang “W” on the basketball-court blacktop was both a tribute to a time and place in the housing project’s history and an attempt at branding. Grant paused over it for a second and then walked along the asphalt pathways, which were so wide the cops used to roll their cars through for drug raids. A steady cascade of snowflakes fell from the sky. Some got caught in Grant’s short, black hair, which bends in deep waves like the sea rolling in a storm. His face looked pained as he stopped at a spot just outside the court, about 100 feet from the logo.

“That’s where they said the guy dropped the hat,” Grant said, pausing at the same spot.

A green baseball hat emblazoned with the black flag and the Wu-Tang logo in the upper right-hand corner became the critical link between Grant Williams and the murder of a local drug dealer named Shdell Lewis on April 5, 1996. Flying off the head of the suspect that evening, the wing-like W of the Wu-Tang symbol tumbling to the pavement, it was a random castoff in the cacophony of pounding feet, quick deep breaths, and shouts following the murder, but it helped seal Grant’s fate and send him to prison for more than two decades for a murder he didn’t commit.

The trial of the People of the State of New York v. Grant Williams — a case that was thin on motive, plagued by conflicting eyewitness testimony, and not thoroughly investigated— played out over the course of two weeks in November 4 1997, but the forces had been building for decades. Poverty, a drug war, a gun war, and racialized politics created the conditions that made it easy to incarcerate someone with Grant’s background, robbing him of the chance to tell his story the way his friends did.

“I was accused of this murder,” Grant said. “That right there ruined any type of career I even thought about having because they incarcerated me unjustly.”

In 1987, two things were ubiquitous in New York and in Grant Williams’ life: Eric B. and Rakim’s hit “Paid in Full” thumping out of car stereos, shaking the very frame each time the baseline hit the bottom notes, and crack cocaine. 

“Crack hit like a hurricane,” Grant said. Those two worlds—drugs and music—would collide right inside Stapleton and change Grant’s life forever. 

In the late ‘80s, Grant hung around a group of young rappers from Staten Island, which was led by a tall, thin musical prodigy who moved to the borough from Brooklyn, and settled in the low-slung homes between Park Hill and Stapleton. Prince Rakeem, who would later go by his more popular rap moniker RZA, was both a rapper and producer who had tried and failed to launch a solo career on Tommy Boy Records. He began to pull together the rappers he found on Staten Island, planning what would be his second shot at a rap career.  Raekwon, U-God, Inspektah Deck, and Method Man, came from Park Hill; while  Ghostface Killah, came from Stapleton. By the time rap entered their lives, Grant and Ghostface Killah were almost inseparable. Grant could often be found in Ghostface’s childhood home at 212 Broad Street, one of the buildings that make up the Stapleton housing projects. (Ghostface Killah declined to participate in this story.)

“They had about 20, 30 people in a three-bedroom apartment. Seriously,” Grant said. “The bedrooms had at least five, six people in each bedroom. That house was always crazy, but it was family.” 

On a November 2021 episode of Drink Champs, the popular podcast where rappers, most of whom are north of 40 years old, recount their journeys through the early days of hip-hop, Raekwon described how close Grant and Ghostface had been since their youth. “Even though ni—-- know me as [Ghostface’s] right hand, this is Ghost’s golden right hand,” Raekwon said, pointing to Grant.

Grant just nodded. “I didn’t even want to be on the show, but Ghostface insisted. And I did it for him, because he’s my brother,” Grant told me after it aired. 

The party vibe inside 212 Broad Street made it the perfect place for the young Staten Island rappers to sharpen their skills. “I had DJ equipment, microphones and everything. So everybody would come up there. We would rhyme. I'd be DJing… and I rhymed a little too,” Grant recalled.

That same summer, Grant was splitting time between Stapleton, where his mother lived, and his father’s apartment a few blocks away. Grant’s dad was a mechanic, and, by all accounts, a guy who never had any trouble with the law. But crack changed that. 

“Do you remember those big metal cookie jars?” Grant asked me as he recalled a short stint living with his father. “I reached inside the cookie jar and I pulled out a handful of crack vials.” 

By 1987, Grant’s father had begun smoking crack and worked out a deal where he could return the empty vials to get a discount on the crack he purchased. The cookie jar full of crack vials shocked Grant. He told his mother and she demanded Grant move back in with her immediately. Before he left, Grant’s father pulled him into the bathroom and held up a crack vial. He tried to convince his son he wasn’t addicted. 

“I don’t know what people see in this,” he remembers his father saying. “How do they get hooked on this?” 

Grant knew better. The hurricane that hit Staten Island in 1987 left a trail of addiction, pain and splintered families in its wake. Grant’s family members and neighbors smoked in the stairwells, and one time he remembers seeing one of his teachers buying crack. 

By late summer tenants were leaving Grant’s father’s apartment building, fed up with the drug activity. And when they did, the apartments became safe spots to get high. 

“We [Ghostface and Grant] got our first crack, I don’t even know how we got it, we sold it and it was some money,” Grant remembers. “We both wanted money. That was the thing we had in common.” 

Standing outside his father’s apartment building at 100 Irving Place, Grant had an idea. 

“One day, I went up there, and I'm ashamed of this now that I am a grown man,” Grant said. “I seen a gold mine.”

Grant and Ghostface formed a small drug crew and transformed the apartment building into a drug emporium that generated, according to Grant, thousands of dollars each week. But, as so many morally complex Ghostface raps would later acknowledge, all that cash came at a cost. Grant gave drugs to his father, so he wouldn’t steal to support his habit. 

“When you are young as a kid growing up with nothing, [selling drugs] is a good time for you,” Grant said. “But it really, really destroyed communities.”

There was friction, according to Grant, between the drug operation run by him and his brother and a crew run by Walter Lewis Jr. aka Shorty Black, whose younger brother, Shdell Lewis, was an enforcer. The cops would leverage this rivalry against Grant later. But first they would wage an all-out assault on the young Black men caught up in the drug trade.

A singular event in New York City intensified its war on drugs. In 1988, the New York Police Department (NYPD) zeroed in on a drug crew in Jamaica, Queens, called the Bebos. A witness had come forward to testify against the crew, and the NYPD posted a young cop, 22-year-old Edward Byrne, outside the witness’ house to protect him. Howard “Pappy” Mason, a higher-up in the Bebos crew, ordered the assassination of Byrne from prison. Four men fired a total of five shots to Byrne’s head while he sat in his police car. Not long after the funeral, which was shown on television, New York City Mayor Ed Koch with the support of Governor Mario Cuomo launched the Tactical Narcotics Task Force (TNT). The plainclothes units flooded neighborhoods with officers posing as customers and arresting street-level drug dealers. The unit started in the same neighborhood where Byrne was killed. The strategy was rolled out in neighborhoods across the city with hundreds of plainclothes cops assigned to drug units. “When we got introduced to hustling, TNT was always on our ass,” Grant said. 

The benches in Stapleton were a known hangout for dealers but also a place where residents with no ties to the drug trade sat and talked. TNT didn’t make distinctions. “They would come and lock the whole bench up,” Grant said. “Mothers, everything, everybody went to jail, whether they had drugs on them or not.”

Being swept up in a drug raid had dire consequences for the mostly Black and Latinx residents in the projects. New York State had long been an innovator of sorts in handing out harsh penalties for drug dealers. The state’s Rockefeller Drug Laws, signed in 1973, carried a minimum sentence of 15 years, and as much as life in prison for selling two ounces of cocaine or heroin. In 1986, the federal government introduced sentencing guidelines that carried a five-year minimum for someone convicted of possessing five grams of crack packaged for sale. The same person would need to possess 500 grams of powder to receive the same sentence. This powder-to-rock-cocaine disparity disproportionately affected low-income Black and Latinx communities where cheaper crack was much more common than more expensive powder cocaine. The number of Black people in federal prison grew exponentially following the passage of the sentencing guidelines, with the Black inmate population in federal prison growing fivefold, according to the Equal Justice Institute.  

By the time New York City deployed TNT in its prosecution of the drug war in 1988, the federal government had become even more aggressive in its efforts to punish anyone connected to the crack-cocaine economy. Under the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act, possession of five grams of crack was punished by a minimum of five years in prison, even if the person could prove they were in possession of the drug for personal use.

The signal from the federal government and from local politicians to chase down anyone and everyone in the drug trade was readily received by the TNT cops. From 1988 to 1992, the four years TNT was most active, New York City sent more people to prison for drug offenses than in any other time in the city’s history, according to the Brennan Center for Criminal Justice. 

In 1991, Grant was arrested for directing an informant toward a drug sale, charged with third-degree sale of narcotics, and slapped with an additional gun-possession charge. It wasn’t his first run-in with the cops – he had a prior conviction for assault – and the prosecutors persuaded him to take a deal. He pleaded guilty to gun possession and selling crack. 

“They said, ‘Well, you’re not gonna win it,’” Grant remembers. “I took the time because I was a convicted felon, and I was young.” 

The case put him on the radar of detectives inside the 120th precinct on Staten Island. 

In late 1992, Grant was serving time inside Clinton Correctional Facility, 300 miles north of New York City, when he got a call from RZA. 

“He’s like, ‘Yo listen, we’re doing the group,’” Grant remembers.

RZA took the rappers on Staten Island and merged them with his own group All in Together, which included him and his cousins GZA and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, who were from Brooklyn. He added one more rapper from Brooklyn, Masta Killa, and Wu-Tang Clan was born. RZA commissioned a logo to slap on the white sleeve of the group’s first vinyl records. It looked like a bird about to take flight, but if you stared at it long enough, the wings of the bird looked like blades of an ax, ready to slice through flesh and bone. It was both aspirational and menacing. D.J. Mathematics, who designed the logo, had made what now stands as rap’s version of the Nike swoosh. Wu-Tang Clan was ready to take flight. 

The logo appeared on the cover of “Protect Ya Neck,” the group’s independently released single in December 1992. The song opened with audio from a martial-arts fight sequence. Wu-Tang Clan took the traditional posse cut—a hip-hop staple where three or more rappers jump on a record—and piled on tighter trimmed-down verses to fit eight of the nine members on the song. “It was like one of these records that hit a nerve,” famed music executive Dante Ross said in an interview with rap journalist Open Mike Eagle. “It sounded like the greatest posse cut you ever heard, but you didn’t know anyone in the group.”  

Grant was in his cell when he heard the record, blasting through the prison. “I’m like, those are my boys, it’s on now,” he said.

The group released its debut album, Enter The Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers in November 1993. While it wasn’t an instant hit, with each single and music video released by the group, the album gained more traction with fans. By the time the fourth and final single, 

“Can It All Be So Simple,” was released in early 1994, the insurgent rap group enjoyed heavy rotation on radio. 

The song, which opens with a sample of Glady Knight and the Pips standing, finds Raekwon recalling the poverty-stricken, crime-riddled environment of his youth, and Ghostface pivoting between his drug-dealing past and his record-selling future. Toward the end of his verse, Ghostface rhymes “receiving all kinds of call from upstate,” a nod to his friend Grant, who stayed in contact with Ghostface during his time in prison. 

The group turned to a then relatively unknown Hype Williams to direct the video for “Can It Be All So Simple.”

Williams, who would go on to direct videos for The Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, and Nas, cast the residents of Stapleton—a woman walking with her child; kids hopping a fence and running across the grass—as supporting actors and blasted lights onto the breezeways to make Stapleton look larger than it was. Shaolin was no longer just a Wu-Tang invention. It was now a real place for millions watching MTV and the Box, and Wu-Tang Clan was a music and cultural phenomenon. 

The group deftly capitalized on its early success. In 1995, video show host Ralph McDaniels went to Staten Island to film the opening of the Wu Wear store. McDaniels was no stranger to the Wu-Tang Clan. His wildly popular public-access rap-music video show broke the “Protect Ya Neck” video. He would later direct the video for the group’s breakout single “C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me).” 

The grainy footage of the store opening shows a younger Raekwon touring the shop, camera crew in tow, as he flips through racks of shirts, hats, and shorts. You can hear the intro to the song “Can It Be All So Simple” playing in the background. 

Musicians had sold merchandise before, a lot of concert T-shirts and posters at their live shows. Run DMC scored the first apparel endorsement off Adidas. And fashion designers, white and Black, courted, albeit somewhat quietly, Black teenagers and young adults. But Wu-Tang would fuse all three ideas and retain ownership at the same time. Wu Wear was intended to compete alongside major designers. And for a time it did. In the mid-1990s, Wu Wear was doing brisk business in its flagship store, where parents brought their kids from as far away as Michigan, Maine, California, and Europe, and in Macy’s, where the Wu-Tang “W” was displayed alongside the red, white, and blue nautical emblem of Tommy Hilfiger.

As McDaniel’s camera crew followed Raekwon around the store, the Park Hill rapper grabbed a pair of camouflage shorts. “The camouflage joints you know,” he said into the camera. He stopped and pulled his hat from his head and held it next to a pair of camouflage shorts. “You can bang it with the hat, however you want to do it.” On Raekwon’s green hat was a black flag on the front with the Wu-Tang “W” in the upper-right-hand corner of the flag. It was the same design as the hat found at the scene, a year later.

When Grant returned from prison, Wu-Tang had entered the next phase of RZA’s grand plan to dominate the music business. Each group member would release solo records, designed to make the Wu-Tang brand even stronger.

Method Man, a handsome, charismatic rapper, whose cadence seemed to glide over RZA’s soul-soaked production, was up first. He could be both rough and romantic, and his single “All I Need” came with a remix featuring Mary J. Blige, which vaulted the first Wu-Tang solo album, Tical, past one million units sold. Dante Ross signed Ol’ Dirty Bastard to a solo deal on Elektra Records, where his oddball sound earned him a Grammy nomination for his 1995 album Return to 36 Chambers.

Grant got his first taste of Wu-Tang’s ascent hanging out in the recording studio during the making of Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. The album, recorded in the spring of 1995, finds Raekwon playing mafioso over a cinematic score from RZA. Inspired by the movie Scarface, Raekwon enlists Ghostface Killah to play Manolo to his Tony Montana, minus the tragic ending. 

On the track “Ice Water,” Grant barks over the beat: “Let me tell you this one time/Tony Starks, Raekwon the chef/Cappachino [sic] and Golden Arms is coming through mad strong/From the isles of Shaolin.” The brief appearance was supposed to be a prelude of things to come.

As Wu-Tang ascended to mainstream fame, a former federal prosecutor, Rudy Giuliani, culled together a coalition of mostly white voters who wanted to take New York City back from its first Black mayor, David Dinkins. Giuliani vowed to reverse what he and his constituents perceived as “deviancy” and an “ever increasing tolerance of lawless behavior,” he said during his January 1994 inauguration speech. Giuliani promised to “raise standards and have greater expectations for the behavior of our people” and left it to the NYPD to enforce those standards. He merged the transit and housing authority cops with the NYPD and swelled the ranks of the police force to almost 40,000—a standing army ready to execute his orders. “They went from telling us don’t bother to bring guys in on certain charges to bringing everyone in who we could charge,” said Joseph Giacalone, who served in the NYPD from 1992 to 2012 and is the author of The Criminal Investigative Function: A Guide for New Investigators.

By the summer of 1995, Wu-Tang Clan and its members were enjoying the spoils of rap success. Grant and Ghostface made a trip from Staten Island to Manhattan to support fellow Wu-Tang Clan member Method Man, who had teamed up with his Def Jam Recordings labelmate Redman for a show at the Palladium. The Notorious B.I.G. was there with his crew, and at the time, there was a slow-brewing feud with the Brooklyn rapper. 

“You know how Wu-Tang was back in those days, we would pull up and people would get nervous,” Grant said. 

The Group was infamous for showing up with all nine of its members and an entourage that could number into the hundreds. When Grant and Ghostface returned to their parked car, the tires had been slashed. Grant got aggressive with the parking attendant when he demanded Ghostface be compensated for the damage. When the attendant went to hand Grant the money, Grant grabbed it and the cops were called. Ghostface and Grant were charged with robbery and possession of a weapon.

In April 1996, just as Ghostface was readying to make his solo debut, a war had erupted in Stapleton. The NYPD sent two cops to the projects in hopes they could stop the rival crews from carrying out retaliations. 

NYPD officers Donna Garrison and Scott McCarthy sat parked in an unmarked car across from 45 Warren Street in Stapleton projects. Staten Island was desperate to fill slots on its specialized units, according to Giacalone, leaving room for less experienced cops to work on street-crime units, and neither Garrison nor Scott had more than eight years as an New York City cop.

It was Good Friday, and as the afternoon began to melt into the early evening, the residents of Stapleton housing project in Staten Island gathered outside their buildings to take in the waning warmth of an early spring day. A teenager, Tyhe Everett, was among them, looking for a friend, when he saw Sean Davis and Shdell Lewis heading out to go shopping.

The pair both worked for Lewis’ brother Walter Lewis, Jr. aka Shorty Black, who, according to court documents, ran drugs in the Stapleton housing project, and they made it their business to make note of all men in their projects. With an intensifying beef between rival crews, everyone was on alert.  

Still, they barely noticed the man who passed by them, wearing a dark jacket and a green hat with a logo familiar in Staten Island and across the world. The Wu-Tang Clan’s “W” emblem was stitched across a baseball hat pulled low over his face.

As the cops observed the scene from their car, a trio of men walked by on their way into Stapleton. Mike Motley, who along with a friend and his brother-in-law Joaquin Galeas, came to the projects that day to visit relatives. The men made out that Garrison and McCarthy, who were sitting in an unmarked car, were undercover cops. As they walked through the crowd, Motley would later testify, he saw the shooter pass by Davis and Shdell Lewis and then double back. Then the shots rang out. 

The first volley of shots struck Lewis. He stumbled into the middle of Warren Street right in front of the Stapleton housing project. 

Galeas ducked behind a car. Three more shots rang out and ripped through Lewis' back, heart, and lungs. He died at 6:28 p.m.

Garrison and McCarthy heard the shots. She put the car in drive and sped toward the entrance of 45 Warren Street, where the shots had been fired. McCarthy jumped out first and began the pursuit. Garrison followed. McCarthy was faster and led the chase. The suspect ran through the breezeway lobby of 45 Warren Street and out the back, up and over a six-foot fence. According to McCarthy, the suspected shooter paused. He was 16 feet away. “Police don’t move. Drop the gun,” McCarthy would later testify to yelling at the suspect. At this distance, McCarthy said he could see the semiautomatic pistol the suspect held in his right hand; the brown paper bag in his left; the black leather jacket; the blue jeans; and the baseball cap on his head. The suspect fled again. McCarthy resumed the chase. 

They ran through the open breezeway at 29 Warren Street. As McCarthy and Garrison gave chase, the baseball cap the suspect was wearing fell off his head. Garrison, who would later testify that she never got close enough to identify the suspect by face, recovered the green baseball hat with the well-known Wu-Tang Clan “W.” She entered it into evidence.

According to McCarthy, he closed the distance between himself and the alleged shooter to about 20 feet at one point before the chase was cut short by the locked lobby door of 218 Broad Street, which slammed shut in the cop’s face. 

Shortly after he lost sight of the suspect, McCarthy called in the incident through his police radio. He told dispatch the shooter was “a male black wearing a black leather jacket … with blue jeans … five-foot-five, heavyset, round head, round face.” 

Meanwhile, Detective Robert Walsh, an NYPD veteran with 24 years on the force, had responded to the pair’s radio call. He arrived minutes after the shooting and found a crowd forming in front of 45 Warren Street. Among the onlookers was a man named Marcus Helale, whom the police knew to be an associate of the victim, Shdell Lewis. As the crowd tried to figure out what had happened, detectives from Staten Island’s 120th precinct, which was led by Walsh, brought Helale in for questioning.

Inside the police precinct, Helale told Walsh about the ongoing beef between his crew, and a crew with ties to Grant. He said Grant had warned them not to sell drugs in the projects. Helale said he had been roughed up by Grant and that Shdell Lewis had intervened, according to the notes Walsh took of the interview. The cops asked if Helale had seen the shooter and more specifically if he had seen Grant. Helale said he didn’t see any shooter in the courtyard, and he had not seen Grant in Stapleton all day. Helale got defensive and at one point told the cops he didn’t want to help them and refused to identify anyone in the pictures Walsh showed him. 

Still, Helale had given them Grant’s nickname “Boo-Boo,” and connected the parolee to a drug crew operating in Stapleton. Walsh dug through old photos of parolees and found a match for the nickname Boo-Boo under a picture of Grant. Walsh assembled a photo spread with Grant and five other men, all of whom looked similar. Grant stood 6’2” and was rail thin at the time, significantly taller than the man McCarthy described from the scene. However, when presented with the photo lineup, McCarthy picked out Grant. Walsh also received a positive ID of Grant from Motley, one of the pedestrians in the area.

Four hours had passed from the time Walsh heard the call over the radio. The detectives had their suspect and their bosses would be happy. “The detective bureau bore the brunt of the pressure,” Giacalone told me. “The command staff increased the pressure, because their careers and their promotions were based on reducing violence.” 

Before his shift ended, Walsh had one last job: to notify the Lewis family of Shdell’s death. He knocked on their door a little after 11:30 p.m. Lewis’ parents sat inside the apartment alongside Sean Davis. Walsh told the family the police had zeroed in on a suspect. He began asking about “Boo-Boo'' and “Un,” the two nicknames Grant used. When Grant’s name came up, Davis knew something was wrong with the investigation. Their exchange, however, would remain unknown to others involved in the case for more than a year.

For Walsh and McCarthy, the case was closed.

Grant was in a recording studio miles away when Lewis was gunned down in Stapleton. Wu-Tang Clan had just come off a four-album run of solo projects, all of which eventually would sell more than one million copies. Ghostface was next, and it was to be Grant’s shot at launching his own music career. “So [RZA and Ghostface] are like you’re going to be featured on the Ghostface tape,” Grant said. “I was going to be featured on Ironman.”

Grant said he arrived at the studio around 5:30 p.m. and claimed that Joseph Brown, an associate of the group, was in the studio with him. Listening to tracks for Ghostface’s upcoming album, Grant got word that Lewis had been killed.

He had other problems. He had the robbery case stemming from the Palladium incident hanging over his head. For Grant, the charge was a violation of his parole. He knew it could send him back to prison. So shortly after the night he spent in the recording studio, Grant fled New York. 

By October 1996, Grant had been on the run for six months and was working at a Wu Wear store in Virginia Beach, Va., one of many stores the group had opened up over the previous year.

Grant learned the police were looking for him, but he figured it was for the Palladium incident. He called back home to ask for counsel and was advised against walking into the station. The projects were buzzing with rumors that the cops wanted Grant for murder of Shdell Lewis because of his ties to Wu-Tang and ties to a rival drug crew. 

The cops arrested Grant in Virginia on October 7, 1997. “A murder,” Grant told me over the phone. “I’ve done a lot of things, but I didn’t do that.”    

Just before the trial was set to start, in the fall of 1997, Sean Davis approached Grant’s attorney, Felix Gilroy. He said he would testify about what he saw that night of Lewis’ murder and agreed to talk about the investigation that followed. Gilroy convinced the judge to hold a special hearing before the trial. There, Davis testified that Grant didn’t shoot Lewis. He knew Grant. The tension between the two was thick. He would have noticed Grant in the projects and would never let Grant “walk straight up on them and catch them from behind.” 

And he made a bombshell revelation. Davis said he had confronted Walsh when the detective came to the Lewis’ family home and told him that Grant was not the killer. 

The prosecutors were floored. They told the court they had never heard of Davis prior to the pre-trial hearing. 

Whether Davis cooperated or not, the precedent established in the U.S. Supreme Court case Brady v. Maryland held that the cops had an obligation to turn over his statements to prosecutors, who in turn had to turn his statements over to Grant’s lawyer. Still, New York has traditionally played fast and loose in complying with Brady. Cops and prosecutors routinely fail to turn over evidence altogether or turn over potentially exculpatory material so close to trial defense attorneys are robbed of the chance to use it effectively. In 2019, state’s legislators stepped in and passed a discovery reform law in 2019 forcing district attorneys to be more proactive in complying with the standards set by the Supreme Court. 

Walsh's investigation relied heavily on witnesses pointing out Grant as the shooter. But here was the person with Lewis at the time of the murder. If Davis were to testify, the case might fall apart. 

Davis left contact information with the court. But he disappeared shortly after the special hearing, and with him, perhaps the best chance to exonerate Grant. The testimony he gave during the special hearing was not allowed at trial. 

According to a motion filed by Gilroy after the trial, Walsh told Shorty Black that Davis planned to testify. Shorty Black allegedly threatened Davis, according to the motion, causing the key witness for the defense to flee New York. When investigators caught up with him 20 years later, Davis said he “just didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.”

Grant’s alibi witness, Brown, showed up to court for a preliminary hearing. According to a sworn affidavit he signed in 2017, he told Gilroy about being with Grant from 5:30 p.m. on the night of Lewis’ murder until 3 a.m. the next morning. Brown was willing to testify. But before the trial he was arrested. During his interrogation Brown told his arresting officers “they had an innocent man in jail.” 

Brown was convicted on a drug charge and sent to prison before Grant’s trial began. And Gilroy couldn’t locate the one man who could place Grant miles away from the murder. 

“You wouldn't even believe my luck,” Grant told me. “Like I don't have no luck.”

Staten Island has long been a conservative stronghold. It was where Giuliani’s promise to use the cops to seize control of the city resonated most. The former federal prosecutor captured large electoral margins in his successful 1993 and 1997 mayoral bids. It is the whitest borough in the city, and home to 1 in 10 NYPD cops. When time came to pick a jury in Grant’s trial, these racial and social dynamics played out as expected. The jurors knew the cops, often intimately; one prospective juror who didn’t get seated told the court he played golf with Walsh.

At the same time, Gilroy claimed the prosecution was weeding out Black jurors.. “I’d like the record to indicate,” Gilroy said to the judge, “that the people [prosecution] have systematically excluded all [Black people].” 

While court records don’t indicate the makeup of the jury in his murder trial, Grant’s attorney filed a Batson challenge, claiming the prosecution was trying to pack the jury with white residents in hopes the move would tilt the case in their favor. A Batson challenge would open up the possibility of overturning the conviction on appeal if Grant were to lose.  

On November 13, 1997, Grant Williams went on trial for murder.

The prosecution’s case was simple: connect Grant to the shooting through the hat found at the scene and the eyewitnesses who claimed to have seen him shoot Lewis. 

Grant’s ties to one of the crews would place in the middle of a beef between rival drug dealers, but those connections were tenuous, and the prosecution admitted early in the trial they did not have a strong motive for the shooting. 

“I may not be able to offer a specific reason as to why Grant wanted Shdell Lewis dead,” Assistant District Attorney Eric Nelson said in his opening remarks. “But I have witnesses who will tell you that they saw Grant Williams shoot Shdell Lewis several times causing his death.”

For nearly two weeks, the prosecution and the defense sparred. McCarthy testified early in the case. But his testimony was contradicted by the description of the shooter he gave over the police radio. Gilroy had requested the audio months earlier. “[The tapes], I believe, have been deliberately held back by the prosecution and, or the police in this case,” Gilroy said during the trial. The Assistant District Attorney acknowledged the police had held back the evidence and made it available only four days before trial. “Detective Walsh in his folder, in his case folder, had them the other day. We discovered them on Sunday when we were talking to Walsh in his office,” Nelson said. 

Gilroy said this delay was “prosecutorial abuse” and grounds for a mistrial. His motion was denied.

The pedestrian Mike Motley also identified Grant as the shooter. He claimed he saw a man wearing a green hat make an about-face after passing Davis and Lewis. “The gentleman that was walking up behind the two gentlemen raised his arm and started firing consecutive shots,” he said. Motley’s brother-in-law Joaquin Galeas, who ducked behind a car when the first shots rang out, testified that he could see the shooter hold the gun horizontal and fire three more shots after the initial one. “His [Lewis’] body jerked back and forth about three or four times,” Galeas testified, noting that he had seen only the arm of the shooter, not his face. Galeas, who was from the projects and recognized many of the residents, never picked out Grant in a lineup, and he expressed doubts as to whether Motley had identified the right suspect. 

Still, the prosecution’s theory that Grant killed Lewis lay mostly with its star witness Robert Walsh. “Detective Robert Walsh, shield number 985,” he said as he began to testify on November 19, 1997.

If Giuliani and his first police commissioner William Bratton could cast the cop they imagined would stop the surge of violent crime in New York City during the 1990s, Walsh fit the bill. He spent most of his career, more than two decades, investigating violent crimes. He had been looking into a series of shootings in Stapleton when Shdell Lewis was shot. “There had been several shooting incidents just prior to him being shot, including a shooting incident, actually two incidents that had taken place. One, I believe it was March 27 and then one on March 28,” Walsh testified. He had heard Shdell Lewis might have something to do with them. 

When time came for Gilroy to cross-examine Walsh, he got right to questioning him about Davis, whose name didn’t appear in the police reports Walsh filed the night of the murder. “Officer, can you explain to this jury, how it is possible that you chose not to put a statement [from] actually one of the victims of a possible assault or a person standing next to the actual victim of a homicide in your report?” Gilroy asked.

Walsh acknowledged he had visited Lewis’ family and spoken with Davis.  Walsh acknowledged that Davis had insisted that Grant was not the shooter, but as the veteran cop pressed Davis for more details, the witness just “walked away.” 

“[Sean Davis] was uncooperative, he didn’t really want to talk to me,” Walsh testified. 

“Are you that kind of bashful…” Gilroy inquired of Walsh.

Walsh had no explanation for why his conversations with Davis were never recorded.  

Gilroy began mounting a defense in week two of the trial, and as his efforts to spare Grant from prison drew close to its conclusion, he called perhaps his best witness: Tyhe Everett, who said he was standing 20 yards from where Lewis was shot and killed. Now 20 years old, Everett had grown up in Stapleton. He knew the players involved in the drug trade — Shorty Black, Shdell Lewis, Marcus Helale, Sean Davis. He also knew Grant Williams and the drug crew run by Grant’s brother. He took the stand on November 24. 

He testified to seeing Davis and Shdell Lewis in front of the building on the day of the murder, and he told the court he saw an unfamiliar face: a “big fat kid.” 

Everett’s attention was briefly pulled away just before the shooter began firing. His eyes scanned the area looking for a friend he was to meet that day. Then the first two shots rang out. “I turned back around to see where the shots were coming from, and I had seen Sean running…and I seen Shdell standing there, and I seen the big fat kid with the gun out,” Everett testified. “Shdell looked like he was in shock because he was just standing there, and the kid had the gun right to him. Then Shdell just turned around and facing the other side of the street and started running cross the street. As he got to the middle of the street, the kid kept shooting him.” 

Everett testified that he had a clear view of the shooter, and he saw the man firing at Lewis all the while the shooter was inching closer to his victim. 

Gilroy asked Everett one last question: “The person who shot Shdell Lewis was not, and I mean not, Grant Williams; isn’t that correct?”

“Yes,” Everett testified.

Everett testified that the shooter wore a green hat and was around 5 feet, 5 inches tall, heavy and dark-skinned, a description that matched the one given by McCarthy over the radio. 

During cross examination, Nelson tried to undermine Everett’s credibility. 

He asked Everett about his criminal record, firing off questions at a dizzying pace. An arrest for felony drug possession on April 11, 1996; a guilty plea for disorderly conduct stemming from that arrest; a failure to show up in court and a bench warrant issued as a result. Everett tried to explain each scenario. And each time Everett finished his answer, Nelson quickly rattled off the witness’ next run-in with the law. 

It was the April 11, 1996, arrest for drug possession that put Everett on Walsh’s radar. During his interrogation, Everett told the cops he saw the murder of Lewis and told them it wasn’t anyone from Stapleton, contradicting Walsh’s entire theory of the case. 

When Walsh was called back to the stand, he testified that he tried to reach out to Everett. He visited his parents’ home, but Everett wasn’t there. Walsh left a business card but never followed up. Walsh testified that he didn’t mention Everett in any of his notes. In post-conviction appeal, Gilroy argued that Walsh’s omission meant there was exculpatory evidence being hidden by the state, but at trial he never asked Walsh why he failed to mention Everett in any report. 

During the defense’s case, more witnesses like Everett, people who had seen the shooting, testified that the killer was not Grant. The prosecution continued its strategy of questioning their credibility based on their prior arrests or ties to Grant and his family. 

The strongest piece of physical evidence in the case was the green hat, the only piece of evidence nearly all the witnesses claimed the shooter was wearing. Gilroy attacked the tenuous connection between Grant and the hat found at the scene. “[If] I wear a Yankee hat, am I a New York Yankee? If I wear a Mets hat, am I a Met?” Gilroy argued. “The mere fact that he worked for Wu-Tang [doesn’t] mean you have to wear a hat … in Stapleton there are thousands.” 

Still, the judge allowed the hat into evidence. There were no hair fibers found on it, and what limited forensic testing was done turned up nothing that would tie Grant to the item.

Jury deliberations began just before Thanksgiving of 1997. The jury was deadlocked, and according to an account from one juror, pressure began to mount as some of the jurors wanted to convict Grant in time to be home by the holiday. The same juror described the environment as “coercive” in a letter to the court. 

Despite the deadlock, the judge sent the jury back into deliberations with an Allen charge, an instruction from the judge to the jurors in the minority to reconsider. The instructions are controversial and referred to as a “dynamite” or “hammer” charge. Twenty-three states have either rejected or limited the use of Allen charges.

Grant sat at the defendant’s table, his life in the balance. He had the murder charge hanging over his head, and the parole violation stemming from the robbery charge in the Palladium case. Considering his prior convictions, Grant was facing a life sentence. “It felt like I came home [from Virginia] for nothing, for a murder that I didn’t commit,” Grant said. “I never understood why this murder was even placed on me.”  

The clerk polled the jury for their vote, and all 12 members said guilty.

Grant cried out. 

The life he imagined for himself, the chance to rap alongside his best friend, Ghostface Killah, to tell the world the story of his life inside Stapleton and use the same story to get his family out of the projects, was gone. The bailiff cuffed Grant and led him out of court. He was heading back to prison.

Grant tried and repeatedly failed in his attempt to win the case on appeal. In 2000, he demanded the hat be tested for DNA. But the NYPD had destroyed it a few weeks after his conviction, which, remarkably, was the standard procedure at the time. His hope began to wane. Some people around Grant suggested he accept his fate.

“I felt like at a time, family members must have been thinking ‘every year you say you’re going get out, and you’re still there,’” Grant said. They began to worry about him. Constantly fighting to be released and failing, some thought, was beginning to break him. “They thought I was in there bugging out,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Wu-Tang was riding the success of its second album. Wu-Tang Forever turned the rap supergroup into pop stars. They embarked on a world tour with Rage Against the Machine and performed in Hawaii, Japan, and Europe. But where RZA’s production held together the first album, the second album had a clear star: Ghostface. On song after song, he delivered devastating lines about triumph and tragedy, about the gains made since their debut Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers, and the losses that continued to pile up. He had sharpened his stream-of-consciousness rap style, and begun a run of successful solo projects unmatched by any other member of the group. 

And he never forgot Grant, mentioning his friend by nickname on songs and interludes. For rap fans, Grant, or “Un” as Ghostface referred to him, was a recurring character in his verses. For Grant it was a reminder of the bond built inside Stapleton. “His career was going in the direction it was supposed to go, and we were always on the phone talking,” Grant said. There was the occasional visit. Grant said Ghostface looked uncomfortable coming into a prison to see him, but Grant knew he had his support. Ghostface sent money to help Grant pay for lawyers to fight his case. “I never lost faith,” Grant said. 

Grant had one last card to play. Attorney Irving Cohen had represented rappers before, including Bronx rapper Just-Ice in a 1986 murder case. He would go on to represent Mobb Deep rapper Prodigy. But perhaps most important to Grant was that Cohen’s legal work revolved around wrongful convictions. In the 1980s, Cohen took the case of a man who spent 12 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, only to be exonerated. The man had plans to return to college and work for Cohen but dropped dead shortly after the civil trial. “Prison killed him,” Cohen said. “It just killed him.” 

Cohen believed Grant had not received adequate representation by his trial attorney. Gilroy didn’t look hard enough for the alibi witness, he thought, or push hard enough on McCarthy’s changing description of the shooter. (Gilroy died in 2015.) Much of the exculpatory evidence, which would have countered the prosecution case, was never presented in court, including eyewitness testimony. At the center of the reexamination was Walsh, who paid little attention to Davis, ignored Helale’s statement that he didn’t recognize the armed man running through the projects, and dismissed the accounts of  other witnesses who would later come forward and say Grant wasn’t the shooter. Motley wrote in an sworn affidavit that he had always had doubts about the identification process. In 2017 Cohen presented this information to the Staten Island District Attorney’s Office, which was willing to reexamine the case.  (The office did not respond to email requesting comment.) 

Since the hat had been destroyed, the probe would take old-school shoe-leather investigating. Witnesses and cops would have to be reinterviewed, memories would need to be jogged for episodes that had faded into the two decades since the incident. Investigators traveled to seven states and interviewed more than 50 witnesses, including a handful in prison. “Nothing like this has ever been done before,” Cohen told me. 

Walsh had retired, and when investigators reached him, he said he had no recollection of the case. I tried to reach Walsh, searching the NYPD police database and social media links to talk to him, but I was not able to locate the retired cop. 

McCarthy's testimony remained the same, and he said he could not recall details of the photo identification lineup. However, more than a dozen witnesses told investigators Grant had not committed the crime. Helale told investigators that the cops found him in jail awaiting trial on a drug charge and threatened him with additional time in prison if he didn’t testify that Grant was the shooter. Helale ultimately decided not to help the cops, noting he didn’t want to “lie” on behalf of the police. Walsh never mentioned Helale’s comments in jail, and the defense never knew he was asked a second time to become a state’s witness. And 20 years after Lewis’ murder, Davis and Everett still insisted Grant Williams was not the shooter. 

In 2019, Grant was up for parole. The Staten Island District Attorney’s Office sent a letter confirming the office was reinvestigating his case and said it would not object to his release. In October 2019, Grant came home from prison on parole. He had won a small victory against a system that had waged a war against him his entire life. “It's like the whole system has this set up, they know how to grab young Black men,” Grant said, “especially those of us with a record.” 

In July 2021, the larger victory came: Grant was exonerated. District Attorney Michael McMahon said: “A reinvestigation of this case by my office’s Conviction Integrity Review Unit uncovered new evidence showing Mr. Grant Williams could not have committed the murder a Staten Island jury convicted him of carrying out in 1997. Given the overwhelming amount of exculpatory evidence presented for the first time in this review, as well as a totality of the investigative circumstances in this case, which in several instances defy what we now accept as best practices, we now believe Mr. Williams to actually be innocent and conclude that our justice system failed him.”

The report went on to say the investigation conducted by Walsh was deeply flawed. Walsh trained his focus on Grant almost immediately to the exclusion of other evidence. “Best practices now tell us that the issues with stranger identifications that are fleeting, cross-racial, under trauma, from a distance, subject to outside influences like the media and police ‘bias confirmation’ may not be trustworthy, especially when lacking independent corroboration,” the office wrote in the report.

In May 2022, Grant won a settlement from the City of New York for his wrongful conviction. He was awarded an additional settlement from the State of New York.

Two months before that, in Staten Island, Grant got back in the car to warm up as the pace of snowfall quickened. 

Lewis was 20 at the time of his murder; Grant was 25. Poverty drove them toward drug dealing. They were seen as menaces and became people the cops needed to remove from the neighborhood. That easy calculus made them marks to be stopped and harassed, or worse. It made the residents of Stapleton vulnerable to the whims of politicians, police commissioners, and detectives.

“That’s why it’s easy to take somebody from my community… and wrongfully convict them,” Grant told me.

Later that day while Grant was giving me a tour of Staten Island, he stopped his car on Broad Street and double-parked on the borough’s main strip. Guys who grew up with him yelled from passing cars. “Big Un,” a man shouted from across the street. Another group of guys came up to Grant to dap him up and hug him. On that day, it seemed like he was the biggest star on Staten Island, a hero of Shaolin. 

“People know me out here,” Grant chuckled.

Grant slipped back inside his SUV and looked back at the buildings. Stapleton looked exactly the same as the night when Hype Williams bathed the projects in flood lights for a video shoot, the same as when Grant and Ghostface scratched out a living selling crack on the benches. But Grant had changed in the two decades in prison. Stapleton was always home, but the nostalgia of the place had worn thin. 

“Looking back, they had us in prison the whole time.”

Grant closed the SUV door and it pulled away. Grant was anxious to get back to work. He had lost enough time.

J. BRIAN CHARLES covers the intersection of race and higher education. Before joining The Chronicle as a senior reporter, he helped relaunch Baltimore Beat, a Black-run newspaper, and served as its deputy news editor. He has also worked as a staff writer for The Trace, covering gun violence in communities of color. And he was a staff writer for Governing magazine, where he covered urban affairs. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Playboy, Slate, Baltimore Magazine, and New York magazine.

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