Craig Mack Was Bad Boy’s First Star. What Led Him to a Doomsday Community?
A few months before his death, Craig Mack was finally ready to talk.
On the outskirts of Walterboro, South Carolina, where he had been living since 2007, the former rapper made himself comfortable in an armchair inside a well-lit hotel room. Prepping for his first interview in years, he stashed some Vaseline behind a vase, took sips of cranberry juice, and absent-mindedly fiddled with a gold-handled cane.
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Mack was sick, although he did his best to hide it. A chunky knit sweater added bulk to his diminishing frame. An ornate cane that might’ve been a distinguished prop for a rapper in the Nineties was used as a crutch. While Mack was still able to command a room, rattling off stories and cracking jokes, deep wrinkles had set in, making him look far older than his 47 years. The interview, with a documentary crew he had invited to capture his story in his own words, would be his last.
“It’s hard to watch,” his daughter Amanda tells Rolling Stone of viewing the footage. “I could tell something was very wrong.”
This subdued Mack was far from the loud and rambunctious 24-year-old who radiated confidence in the summer of 1994. Back then, “Flava in Ya Ear,” Mack’s first and biggest hit, dominated New York City’s airwaves, clubs, and block parties. The single’s smash success was propelled by a monster-size remix featuring the Notorious B.I.G., LL Cool J, Busta Rhymes, and Rampage. Mack, with his neatly cropped Afro and signature “Ha!” ad-lib, was a defining voice of hip-hop in the 1990s and helped pave the way for the immediate success of Bad Boy Records and its founder, Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Despite being one of the label’s first stars, Mack’s contribution is often glossed over in favor of labelmate Biggie Smalls. He was the first artist of many who limped away from Combs demoralized, destitute, and feeling duped. Some left the music industry altogether. A few, like Shyne, Loon, and Mase, turned to politics or religion. For Mack, his departure from Bad Boy was the first in a series of painful events that would lead him on a perplexing path. Not long after, he shunned the “wickedness” of his past and devoted his life to a fire-and-brimstone, self-proclaimed “last-day prophet” who believed barcodes bore the mark of the beast and warned about an imminent third world war. Mack died in March 2018 — the words “Praise the Lord!” are inscribed on his headstone.
This summer marks the 30th anniversary of “Flava in Ya Ear,” a milestone that Mack’s family, loved ones, and former collaborators will commemorate without him. Speaking with Rolling Stone, they are opening up for the first time about Mack and his life — sharing pieces of the story that Mack was eager to tell before his death. “His legacy is the most important thing I want to get across,” Amanda, 28, says. “From the beginning of his life, he was doing what he loved: music.”
But they also have questions that may never be fully answered about what compelled Mack to flee New York with his two young children, bringing them to what family members, former members, and experts have called an extremist doomsday cult. “That transition was just so abrupt,” Amanda says. “Something had to have happened.”
Craig Mack Talks Sacrifice in Final Interview
IN LATE 1993, a group of men gathered in the basement of Combs’ newly purchased Scarsdale, New York, mansion for a pivotal listening session. Uptown Records had fired the 23-year-old A&R executive a few months before, and Combs was determined to claw his way back to the top.
Backed by a reported $10 million from new parent label Arista Records, Combs needed certifiable hits for Bad Boy. He brought in Mack and the rapper’s team to review potential sounds for Mack’s debut album, Project Funk Da World. As they shuffled through beats from the in-demand producer Easy Mo Bee, the now iconic two-note melody that would anchor “Flava” began to play, reverberating through the speakers. The room erupted.
“Everybody was going crazy. We were like, ‘Oh, my God!’” says Jean Nelson, Mack’s first co-manager and early hype man. They knew the beat was a pathway to a hit. But on the hourlong ride back to Long Island, where he lived, Mack gruffly told Nelson and his crew, “I didn’t like that beat, really.”
Nelson laughs thinking back on that moment. Going from grade-school friends with Mack in Brentwood, New York, to touring the world together, Nelson was more than familiar with Mack’s quirks. “Craig’s always the guy if everybody goes right, he’s gonna go left,” he explains. “It’s one of the things that I love him for, but it’s one of the things that also bothered me, because it got in the way of business and his well-being.”
Mack relented, and Easy Mo Bee’s beat, combined with the rapper’s skittering, off-kilter flow, made “Flava in Ya Ear” an irresistible “earworm,” says Tracy Cloherty, radio station Hot 97’s music director at the time. “From the minute the beat dropped, it was danceable.” Hot 97 put the song into power rotation. The Source featured a verse in its massively influential Hip-Hop Quotables section. The song stayed a then-record 14 weeks at the No. 1 slot on Billboard’s Hot Rap Songs and went certified-platinum after four months. The remix and accompanying music video only furthered Mack’s popularity — Rolling Stone put it on The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time — coupled with additional hits “Get Down” and “Making Moves With Puff.”
In those early years, “[Mack] absolutely was the gas in the tank” for Combs and Bad Boy, former Arista senior vice president Lionel Ridenour tells Rolling Stone.
A spokesperson for Bad Boy acknowledged that Mack “played an essential role in the foundation of the label” and that “Flava in Ya Ear” “not only gave Bad Boy its first hit but also set the tone for the label’s future.”
“The track was the anthem that put Bad Boy on the map,” the rep adds, “and showcased Combs’ hands-on approach in all aspects, including production, styling, and creative direction, which would become a hallmark of the label’s success.”
But as Combs and Bad Boy’s stock rose, Mack faltered behind his peers before dropping out of the industry altogether. “I just knew how talented this kid was and how much further he could go,” Nelson says. “But he got in his own way because of the way he thinks.”
“All his experiences at Bad Boy [were] a creative [and] financial struggle,” says Easy Mo Bee. “I think that’s what tailspun him into all of the other different events that he ended up in. This quest for survival. You enter [the industry] with this love for music, and then when you get there in the music business, you find all these other elements takes you on a whirlwind.”
BY THE EARLY 2000s, Mack’s glory days with Bad Boy were over and he was stinging from a failed second project. An early marriage had ended abruptly and, in his early thirties, he moved into his mother’s home with his two young children. He mainly supported his family through royalties that trickled in from “Flava in Ya Ear.” Mack also began billing himself as a producer to drum up more cash while working on a third project, The Mack World Sessions. “I’m down here in hell with a story to tell, praying to God that my new shit sell,” Mack raps on a track titled “Please Listen to My Demo.” “I’m still confused. Still feel like I got used.”
It was as if the past decade had never happened and Mack was at a breaking point. One night, he was sitting alone in a car, gun in hand, when he began pleading with God. Mack claims to the documentary team that he had made a deal with a man who was threatening his life because Mack “owed” him an album he’d fronted cash for. “Lord, I don’t want to do this,” Mack says he prayed. “But if it comes to getting ugly where somebody is going to be trying to kill me, I’m going to have to do something first to prevent that from happening.”
It wasn’t unusual for Mack to pray. His Christian faith was a constant throughout his life. Mack would frequently quote scripture and have debates on “rights and wrongs,” like lecturing his former hype man Malcolm Johns about blowing cash at the strip club instead of going home to his kids. He wasn’t a partier and turned down booze commercials, not wanting to promote drinking, his former attorney and onetime manager Paul Insinna says. He put the track “When God Comes” on his first album, asking the hip-hop community “how would they answer to God when the Rapture occurs and when Jesus comes back,” Easy Mo Bee says. “I never met anybody musically in hip-hop like that to dedicate a song to God.”
Mack didn’t have a particularly religious upbringing, but Amanda recalls her father sharing a pivotal moment from his childhood. “He claimed when he was a baby in Harlem, a hand reached out to him and said, ‘You’re one of my children,’” she says. “Maybe that was a profound moment in the back of his head this whole time.”
Behind the wheel of that car, Mack says he begged God for guidance. It was in his “heart to kill” the unnamed man who was after him, he said. Flipping through the radio to distract himself, gospel music broke though the silence and an impassioned voice began preaching. “I knew that it was God talking to me,” Mack explained. In the same way he’d clung to a divine message from his infancy, Mack would embrace this preacher, looking to him as a newfound guiding force.
MACK NEVER NAMED the mysterious person who was demanding music and pushing him to his brink, though his loved ones have their suspicions and theories. Was it a Long Island Wolf of Wall Street-type power broker who someone says had lent Mack money for an album? Was it related to Mack’s unsuccessful attempt to regroup with Bad Boy around that time? Prone to keeping secrets, could Mack have been mixed up with someone no one knew? Did the person even exist? Several are dubious if Mack’s come-to-Jesus moment in the car happened at all.
Growing up, Mack was prone to embellishment, innocently padding out his stories to make himself a little more interesting, says a source close to the young rapper. During Mack’s time at Bad Boy, he seemed to grow out of it. “He didn’t have to lie anymore,” the source says. But “did it come back?” they wonder. “When times were hard, did he turn into the person who was telling stories again?”
“You never know with Craig,” Nelson says of Mack constantly changing his motivation and beliefs. “He was so unpredictable in life.”
No one was more aware of Mack’s slippery nature than his first wife, Roxanne Alexis Hill-Johnson. It’s been 25 years since their split, but she still wells up with emotion and bristles in anger detailing their turbulent relationship.
This is not an interview Hill-Johnson is eager to be giving. She requests to speak face-to-face from the comfort of her cozy Chicago home, intermittently padding out to the deck in well-worn pink kitty slippers for a cigarette break. Comforted by her two cats — who are also tattooed on her arm, hugging — two guinea pigs, and two chinchillas, plus an attorney and a longtime friend, Hill-Johnson begins to reopen old wounds and lay bare some of Mack’s faults and missteps. She knows she is also opening herself up to judgment, admitting her relationship with Amanda and Asah, her two adult children from her marriage with Mack, is strained at best.
But Hill-Johnson has also been waiting for the right moment to share Mack’s story, in search of answers herself. “This man was my everything,” she tells Rolling Stone at the close of seven hours. “I loved the ground Craig walked on.”
Mack was instantly likable — vibrant, passionate, witty, and charismatic, Hill-Johnson and several others say. “He could have been the mayor of the city,” Johns says. Mack was adopted, growing up in the suburbs of Brentwood after his parents moved their family out of Harlem. Mack’s neighborhood pals included hip-hop peers Biz Markie and EPMD’s Erick Sermon and Parrish Smith. As he grew older, Mack leaned more into his creative tendencies, dropping out of high school, releasing a single under the pseudonym MC EZ, and becoming a roadie for EPMD.
Despite growing up together, Mack’s younger brother Andrew is his polar opposite, logical where Mack was impulsive, although both shared a love of music. Throughout a two-hour phone conversation, Andrew seems to have made peace with some of Mack’s more curious decisions, equal parts confused and resigned. “Craig was very smart,” Andrew says. “Honestly, I think he was a little bit too smart for his own good.” Mack was hell-bent on pursuing music, scribbling down his thoughts and rhymes in a composition notebook and teaching himself to play the drums. He also was an impressive drawer. (His creativity is something that his children Amanda and Asah would inherit. Much like her father, Amanda is a talented visual artist, and Asah delivers his raps with the same hard-hitting force as Mack.)
As clever and energetic as Mack was — Easy Mo Bee recalls the rapper “screaming and running across the room” when he liked a track — he had his faults. Mack was stubborn and could be a somewhat unreliable narrator, several say. As a husband, he was a serial cheater, Hill-Johnson claims, recalling a funny-in-hindsight bust-up when she showed up to his hotel room with the help of a famous rocker to catch Mack in the act with another woman. But his Achilles heel was making sudden, inexplicable choices. “A lot of bad decisions in his life,” Insinna says. “He was his own worst enemy.”
Hill-Johnson was privy to several mystifying actions, like when Mack brought home a runaway horse and tried to persuade her to keep it. Most telling would be how Mack suddenly went no-contact with Hill-Johnson during the throes of a whirlwind romance before proposing to her on a whim in Las Vegas in May 1995.
The proposal came with a massive caveat: If anyone knocked on their door or called their room within an hour, Mack said, it was a sign from God that they shouldn’t get married. “I was praying in my head, like, ‘[A] motherfucker better not knock on this door, fuck my shit up,’” Hill-Johnson says. “I want to marry this man.’” When the hour was up with no interruption, they headed to the local courthouse in casual clothes and got hitched.
At the time, Hill-Johnson viewed Mack’s behavior as spontaneous. Now she sees how the rapper fluctuated between extremes. “I didn’t see that [side to him] until we got married,” Hill-Johnson says.
IF THERE WAS A MOMENT when things turned perilous for Mack, it seems to have been his decision to leave Bad Boy. “Craig got blackballed for not listening to Diddy,” Johns says. “For not following that madman’s path.”
Combs and Mack clashed creatively and personality-wise. Combs would fire ideas at Mack, pressuring him to change his wardrobe and lyrical content, which Mack scoffed at — unlike Biggie, who adhered to Combs’ suggestions. (There was also animosity between Mack and Biggie, who publicly said he didn’t “fuck with” Mack and took a dig at him on “Big Poppa,” rapping “I got more mack than Craig.”) A main source of contention, a source close to Mack claims, was that Mack didn’t like that Combs set his sights on being an artist, too. “Puff was not in the seat that [Craig thought] he was supposed to be in,” the source says.
“Things started to go wrong early on,” Mack’s former co-manager Antar Le Gendre explained in the 2017 documentary Crazy Like That Glue. “Puff had on a three-piece suit … in his office. When we walk in, Craig bust[s] out laughing.” Mack began to rib Combs, who wasn’t amused. “The look on Puff’s face,” Le Gendre said. “I was like, ‘He don’t like this.’ That was the beginning of [when] we start to see things turn.”
Mack was a headache for Combs, allegedly showing up to Bad Boy’s offices to complain about money, a lack of studio time, and Combs jumping into his music videos, among other frustrations. “He spoke to Puffy directly about shit he didn’t like,” Insinna explains. “Puffy took that as a slight because … you always got the impression [Combs’] attitude was, ‘You should be glad to be in the same room as me, let alone getting paid.’ Craig didn’t fall for that shit … and that put him in a bad position.”
Married and with a baby on the way, Mack was in a rocky financial situation. The album’s hype was slowing down, money from touring was drying up, and Mack’s $25,000 advance was long gone. Hired cars were swapped for subway rides where Mack worried people would recognize him. Things became so dire that Mack once asked Combs for cash at an event. The flashy music executive allegedly pulled a thick wad of bills from his pocket and with a “smug, nasty” look, Hill-Johnson says, handed Mack a lone $100 bill.
Mack was essentially shelved, Nelson says, until he bent to Combs’ will, but a stubborn Mack refused. In April 1996, he filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to escape the Bad Boy contract he argued was financially impairing him. The label dangled a “crazy” lucrative offer to keep him, according to Insinna, but Mack was adamant that no deal would beat the price of his freedom.
Secretly, Mack had already hatched his own contingency plan. Despite Insinna’s warnings, Mack was holding meetings with Death Row boss Suge Knight. Under bankruptcy law, “if they say you are only filing because you want to get a better deal somewhere else, that’s fraud,” Insinna explains. Still, the lure of defecting was tantalizing — the ultimate fuck-you to Combs and a massive point scored for the West Coast in their escalating feud with the East Coast. Knight was scheming on opening an East Coast division of Death Row and wanted Mack as his first artist. He heavily courted the rapper, flying him out to Los Angeles, flashing wads of cash, and reportedly offering him a $200,000 advance and a recording budget of $1.25 million. (Knight did not reply to a request to speak for this article.)
But word got back to Bad Boy, who “had us by the short hairs,” Insinna says. Eventually, the parties came to an agreement where Mack was able to leave the label but had to withdraw the bankruptcy filing and owed Bad Boy a cut of his new deal.
Mack’s Death Row plans were abandoned, though, after Tupac Shakur was murdered in September 1996 and tensions reached a fever pitch between the warring camps. “He was scared,” Hill-Johnson says. “Puff was pissed [Mack was] leaving Bad Boy and the fact that he was going to go with Suge. From what I understand, Puff was enraged.” Mack’s music career would take a nosedive. “Puffy became a vindictive bastard and really stuck it to him for doing that,” Insinna says.
The Bad Boy spokesperson declined to answer a detailed list of questions from Rolling Stone concerning Combs and Mack, but said in a statement that “Mack had his own vision for his career. While Mr. Combs brought him many opportunities and encouraged him, their creative differences led them to part ways. Craig chose to leave Bad Boy to pursue his own interests and was free to sign with any label, which he did with his second album. We wished him nothing but the best, and he was unrestricted in pursuing all opportunities. Up until his untimely passing, Mr. Combs remained supportive of him, and any other narrative is simply false.”
“I’ll never know what the truth is. So much is a mystery”
Amanda Mack
ANDREW MACK WOULD COME to recognize — with trepidation and concern — the frenzied, high-pitched voice ranting on the radio every time he stopped by his older brother’s home in the 2000s. The man that Mack had first heard in the car was always playing in the background at the house, feverishly warning about the wrath of God. He called himself a “last-day prophet” and beseeched his listeners to repent and prepare for the end times. The most ardent believers could physically join him in the safe haven he had created in South Carolina and take a vow of poverty, selling their homes and cars and donating the proceeds to him.
Mack’s friend Wendy Washington says she “absolutely thought it was bonkers” when the rapper once asked for her thoughts on the sermons that were playing on a computer in his garage. “We didn’t take [Mack] seriously,” Andrew says of his brother’s interest in this faraway doomsday preacher. “We probably should have taken him a lot more seriously.”
Mack was flailing at this point in his life. “There was a point [when] he was always sick,” Andrew says. Mack claims to have gotten shot in New Jersey, Hill-Johnson says, and he rapped on “Please Listen to My Demo” that he was “shot on Monroe, y’all ain’t know that, though.” A then-seven-year-old Amanda recalls Mack saying he’d been shot while in a club, with scar tissue forming from where the bullet was pulled from his back.
His marriage to Hill-Johnson had ended in 1999 when Amanda and Asah were toddlers. “He told me, ‘Don’t come back here. There’s nothing here for you,’” Hill-Johnson recalls, still bewildered by how abrupt the conversation was. In a daze, she stayed in Chicago “having a breakdown,” she says. Mack barely mentioned Hill-Johnson to the kids, saying she “abandoned” them. Amanda once remembers crying that she missed her mom. “[Mack] got really pissed,” Amanda says, “And said, ‘You wouldn’t recognize her if she walked across the street.’”
Mack moved into his mother’s home and became a full-time caretaker. Money was tight, and the dynamic was odd, with two other women joining the household. A woman by the name of Yoko, who dated Mack, became the children’s nanny. Basic details about Yoko’s background — including her last name — are scarce, but Mack seemingly met her on tour in Japan in 1995. Baaqiah Muhammad, who Mack hired to help with his production business, also moved in. If there were any romantic labels put on the situation, it was unknown to outsiders.
All the while, the voice on the radio was morphing from a mild fixation for Mack into an all-consuming cacophony. The noise spewing from the radio began permeating the lives of everyone in the house, including the children.
Amanda and Asah were tweens when Mack called a family meeting that would upend their lives. “Things are going to change,” he told them. He was in search of answers when the plan for his future crystallized: living off the grid in Mississippi. “Me and my brother were really excited about this because we thought it’d be an adventure,” Amanda says. “Looking back, we did not know the velocity of how intense this was going to get.”
Until that talk, Mack had been a playful if slightly untraditional dad, launching into random tickle fights, taking the kids to the Bronx Zoo, and waking them up at 2 a.m. to go see Kill Bill. “I see so many other dads on the outside,” Amanda says, “and I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, my dad was way cooler than y’all.’” But within a few months of that family sit-down, Mack had thrown out the kids’ stuffed animals and restricted TV time. They spent Saturdays listening to sermons. Public education went from a key part of their development to blasphemous heresy. “Science was the devil’s work, and he tried to pull us out of science class,” Amanda says. “Eventually, I just got pulled out of middle school.”
Mack began shutting people out of his life, too. Johns arrived at Mack’s house only to be turned away. “He opens up the door and says, ‘You’re the devil … You guys are all going to hell.’ And he closed the door in my face,” Johns says. It was the last time he saw Mack.
Andrew and Washington had multiple conversations with Mack to try to dissuade him from moving with the children, but Mack was resolute. He brought large dumpsters to the house to chuck anything they weren’t taking with them. Then, in the spring of 2007, Mack, his two children, Yoko, and Muhammad loaded up the car with the family dog and started their pilgrimage.
Whether Mack ever actually intended to make it to Mississippi is unclear, because he never got farther than 800 miles south. In tiny Walterboro, South Carolina, Mack turned the car onto a gravelly road where a sign that read “Maranatha” — “Our Lord is coming” in Aramaic — greeted visitors. They had arrived at the Overcomer Ministry, the home of Brother Ralph Gordon Stair, the doomsday “prophet” that Mack had first heard while contemplating murder.
Muhammad would later frame Mack and his family’s journey as a Sodom and Gomorrah-esque scene where angels warned a faithful servant to leave the wicked city and not look back before God unleashed his wrath. (The church provided an audio recording to Rolling Stone of a testimony Muhammad gave to Overcomer members last October but declined to make Muhammad available for an interview.) “I felt like New York was gonna burn as we were looking through the rearview [mirror],” she said. “It just felt like that intensity. He was like, ‘We gotta go. We gotta go.’”
Brother Stair Prays Over Craig Mack Inside Overcomer Tabernacle
IT WAS DEAFENING INSIDE the Overcomer Ministry tabernacle during a fervent prayer service in September 2017. Footage from the church shows congregation members speaking in tongues and shouting “bless you, Lord” and “glory,” as some stretch their hands toward the front of the paneled room. There, Brother Stair, a skinny and agile man in his eighties, crouches over a seated Mack, rubbing Mack’s legs as three other men place hands on the rapper. Mack’s booming voice breaks through the wails of others as he shouts, “Hallelujah!” They were praying for healing.
In the grainy video, Mack is unrecognizable from the robust, eager adherent who’d first driven past that Maranatha sign a decade before. Stair gingerly takes Mack’s hands and helps him to his feet, supporting him as he attempts to walk. The onetime boisterous rapper’s signature Afro had lost its shape and even under a baggy hoodie, he looks gaunt. Still, he is by his prophet’s side, worshiping. “Glory to God,” he says.
“[He] was getting his soul right to meet God,” says Chris Jennings, who met Mack in South Carolina and ended up living with his family for several years after becoming a part of the Overcomer Ministry.
By the point the church video was taken, in 2017, Mack was a devout member of Overcomer. Both friends and fans were concerned in May 2012 when a YouTube video circulated of him jumping up and down while decrying the “wickedness” of his past and his newfound path of “righteousness.”
It was the first time Mack had been seen publicly in years. Apart from immediate family, no one really knew where Mack was. Johns says he stopped by Mack’s empty Brentwood house a few times, learning from a neighbor that he had been gone for months. Hill-Johnson, who had since remarried, says she got back in touch with Mack around 2007 to demand custodial rights for Amanda and Asah, only for him to disappear. Even Andrew says he was in the dark for a few months about where Mack and the children had ended up, believing they were somewhere in Mississippi.
Instead, Mack and his children became part of the dozens of men, women, and families — or as Stair called them, “saints” — who journeyed to South Carolina from around the world to follow Stair’s extremist biblical teachings. Stair had purchased a motel and a 130-acre plot of farmland in 1978 after God instructed him to “get out of the cities” and began broadcasting his sermons globally over shortwave radio, at one point spending $100,000 a month on radio time.
“It was all hell,” Amanda says of her seven years at Overcomer. “But the first three years were the worst.”
The family bounced around motels for months after their arrival, eventually settling in to a trailer on the outskirts of the farm compound. “I won’t call it poverty, but two steps up,” Andrew says of Mack’s living conditions. They were required to prove themselves to Stair, a process that would take three years, before they were fully integrated into the community. Mack worked at a local high school assisting special-needs students, and Muhammad and Yoko worked on the farm. The family attended sabbath services, prayer meetings, and group dinners where Stair would go on hours-long diatribes.
“It’s brainwashing, it’s so intense,” says Staci Yates, a former Overcomer member who fled after seven years. “You’re constantly hearing his preaching. He has loudspeakers, [and] you’re listening to him basically, almost 24/7. It was hearing nothing but his voice and dogma all the time.”
While Brother Stair promised a harmonious community, several minors and women allege he was physically and sexually abusing them in the name of God. He pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors of assault and battery in 2004 after two women accused him of rape. He was arrested in December 2017 on similar charges when former members went to police after seeing Stair grope a 12-year-old in front of his congregation on YouTube. (Stair died in April 2021 before he was ever tried in court.)
Mack was fully aware of the allegations, Amanda says, instructing Brother Stair to stay away from her and Asah. “My dad has voiced plenty of times that he would kill somebody if we got touched,” Amanda says. “My dad was there for the Lord. So, if that meant you have to listen at the hands of this prophet who’s also an idiot, a dumbass, and a pervert, so be it. But you won’t touch my kids.”
Life in Overcomer was suffocating, Amanda says. For years, Amanda and Asah were not allowed to leave the house unless they were attending the church’s unaccredited school. Members were discouraged from having contact with people back home, and access to technology was limited if not banned outright. When Amanda graduated from the church’s school, she became an unpaid teacher there.
Disillusioned and unhappy, Amanda started skipping church services and seized the first opportunity to leave. She married a fellow member of the church against Brother Stair’s wishes two days after her 18th birthday in the summer of 2014 and moved in with her new husband off church grounds. A 16-year-old Asah would eventually leave too.
They were largely on their own. On the outside, with access to social media, Amanda began to reconnect with family members she remembered from her childhood in Long Island.
Meanwhile, Andrew had settled down in Vermont and started his own family. He knew Mack had joined Overcomer, privately agreeing with his wife that the church seemed like a cult, but there was little he could do. Mack had told everyone that his family was safe and happy. Following publication of this article, James Rice, Overcomer’s current pastor, said in a statement that Overcomer is “a Christian community … I am a Christian, born again and Holy Ghost-filled. I am also a preacher and I am not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Some, especially [non-believers], would say that I have been brainwashed. Christians are called out of the world. One must be born of the Spirit of God to understand the things of God … God changed Craig’s life.”
Word made its way to Andrew that Amanda had left the church. His stomach dropped when he realized the extent of what she and Asah had been through. “As soon as we touched base with them, we scooped them up,” Andrew says, describing how he raced down to South Carolina with his wife. “It wasn’t even a matter of thinking — we just wanted to get them out of [that situation].”
Freedom was bittersweet. Although Amanda and Asah had pleaded with Mack to leave South Carolina with them, Mack refused. He seemed hurt that his children were choosing to leave both him and the church, but he acknowledged they were responsible for their own decisions. There was no fight, only resignation on both sides. His children were leaving, and Mack was staying put with Muhammad and Yoko.
Andrew brought Asah back to Vermont to live with him, while Amanda visited Hill-Johnson. It would be their first time meeting since Amanda was a toddler. (Amanda would later join Asah and her uncle and live in Vermont.)
It was a reunion, Hill-Johnson says, she had been longing for since watching in horror the 2012 YouTube video of Mack. She says she tried to fight for custody rights with officials in South Carolina after that to no avail, resigning herself to waiting for her children to come to her.
The phone eventually rang.
“‘Hi Mommy,’” Hill-Johnson remembers Amanda saying on that first call. “I almost passed out.”
Craig Mack Testifies in Front of the Overcomer Ministry Congregation
MACK WAS STEADFAST in his decision to stay with Overcomer. “Craig Mack is where he’s supposed to be,” he rapped to fellow congregation members in May 2016. The lyrics served as his testimony, as well as a callback to his song “When God Comes.” “If I stayed in New York, just another tragedy.”
Mack’s health was beginning to deteriorate; he was frequently catching intense colds and had begun using a cane. Andrew Carn, who struck up a friendship with Mack after meeting him at a grocery store near Walterboro, says he urged the rapper to seek medical treatment as his weight dropped drastically, he struggled to walk, and his skin turned darker.
Around late 2014, Mack was telling people he’d been diagnosed with congestive heart failure. While there were moments Mack believed he was going to die — going so far as to say his goodbyes to his kids — his health would improve. Although Amanda says “doctors were out of the question” — Brother Stair taught that seeking medical care was a sign of “not putting faith in God’s ability” to heal — Mack would sometimes risk being shamed to obtain medicine. Jennings recalls Mack once being hospitalized and that he briefly took some medication before refusing to take anything else.
Mack knew he was gravely ill. That’s when he called up his old friend, the late Long Island music producer Alvin Toney, seeking to be the narrator of his own story. He got a haircut, dug out a heavy sweater that masked his weight loss, and put on a diamond-encrusted ring to regale Toney’s documentary crew with stories of being the first Bad Boy artist. He chuckled and demurred when asked about “bitches” he met on tour, saying he had since married Yoko, and waved off Brother Stair’s arrest for sexual assault. “Jesus was hated, too,” Mack noted. “They killed him, and then they hung him on a cross.”
By March 2018, there came a point when Mack couldn’t pretend any longer. His walking cane was barely enough to support him, and he became bedridden. Muhammad made a call to Mack’s children in Vermont — it was time to say goodbye. Andrew, Amanda, and Asah drove through the night, returning to the trailer the kids had fled from a few years earlier. They all had been kept in the dark about the gravity of Mack’s illness and were speechless when they saw him. “I’ve truly, honestly never seen a human being in that condition before,” Andrew says. “He was catatonic.”
There was little to be done. Mack wanted to be in his home with no medical intervention, and his family abided by his wishes. The children and Andrew stayed with Mack for several days. Amanda never left his deathbed. They eventually said their goodbyes — knowing it would be their last — and headed home.
Before arriving back in Vermont, they received a call from Muhammad that Mack had died. He was 47. There were no extravagant funeral plans — Mack wished for no fuss and to be buried on the Overcomer compound. The day after his death, church members lowered his plain gray coffin into a grave they dug, as Yoko and Muhammad stood solemnly nearby. “Brother J. Craig Mack” his headstone reads to this day. (Yoko and Muhammad both still live near or on the farm. Rolling Stone’s requests to interview Yoko were denied.)
While Mack’s family honored his wishes and repeated his assertion that he had congestive heart failure, Mack’s cause of death was HIV/AIDS, according to his death certificate, and he had refused to seek treatment.
Both Hill-Johnson and Andrew believe that Mack learned of his diagnosis in New York and took off for Overcomer Ministry, using the church as a shield to ward off the shadows of his past. Whatever mistakes he made, this was his penitence.
“I believe he was very much in denial, but that’s him living his truth to the end,” Andrew says. “I know that sounds really crazy, but you have to know him to understand that. As much as that bothers me, I understand why he did what he did. He lived his truth.”
It’s been six years since Mack’s death, and the documentary that Toney started is in limbo. Hill-Johnson hopes to revive the project to offer an honest portrayal of what happened to Bad Boy’s first breakout artist. She’s been working with filmmaker and photojournalist Andrew Theodorakis on rounding out the film with interviews with Mack’s family members and friends.
“I’m hoping this documentary can get out there,” Hill-Johnson says, adding that she has been contemplating bringing Mack’s body back to New York. Although Stair died, the church continues to operate and restricts who can come to the compound, declining Rolling Stone’s visit. Hill-Johnson wants to ensure her children can properly mourn their father without returning to the place that holds so much pain. “Craig loved Harlem,” Roxanne says. “He should be buried in Harlem [where] his other family members were buried.”
Mack’s family is still putting together the pieces of his life. His death led to confusion and a trove of questions for loved ones: When did he learn of his diagnosis? Could he have survived if he’d sought treatment? Was his escape to Overcomer a bid to outrun someone else, or simply his own past? Whatever mistakes he made, was Overcomer his form of repentance? Would this church lead him to salvation?
Several have their doubts that Mack bought into Brother Stair fully. Overcomer members are expected to commit to a vow of poverty and donate their assets to the church, yet Carn says Mack seemed comfortably padded with cash. When he died, Mack’s coffers were close to $1 million, Hill-Johnson says, even though he always seemed to be scraping together cash while in New York. Unlike other devotees, Mack never lived on the farm and never fully cut himself off from the outside world. While Stair decried doctors and hospitals, Mack intermittently received medical care and took medicine. And despite publicly shrugging off Stair’s sexual-assault accusations, Mack acknowledged some sort of danger when he gave Stair a stern warning to steer clear of his children.
Adding to loved ones’ confusion, Mack was veering on paranoia before his death. He kept several guns in the house, though Mack later told the church he sold them. Carn says Mack moved trailers after Combs called Mack to ask him to be part of the Bad Boy reunion tour in 2016. In one conversation, Carn says Mack cryptically remarked “evil is real” and alluded to the entertainment industry being “poisonous.” He couldn’t let the past go, Amanda agrees, still hung up on Combs and the trajectory of his music career, although she declines to get into any specifics of Mack’s frustrations. “Some things I’m not going to share,” she demurs.
There were so many miscalculated decisions in Mack’s life, but to Roxanne, his sad trajectory begins with Combs, who first allegedly iced him out of a promising music career in the mid-1990s. “I do feel like Puff’s the trigger — he fucked my family up,” she says. “Puff kicked it off; he was the catalyst.”
A source close to Mack isn’t so sure. Even without Bad Boy or Mack’s time in the music industry, “the same thing would have happened — just maybe slower,” they say.
“I’ll never know what the truth is,” Amanda says of what prompted Mack’s decision to join Overcomer. “So much is a mystery.” But, she adds, “I forgive him. I do believe his intentions were good for trying to find the Lord, but it’s just a bad situation.”
About three weeks before Mack died, Jennings recalls bumping into him at the local Walmart. Though he could barely walk, Mack had driven himself to pick up medication, and Jennings had helped him inside. “He was fading,” Jennings says. Upon parting, Jennings says, Mack gave him a message to pass along. “The last thing he said was, ‘Chris, if anybody ever asks you, you tell them that this was a man [whose] life was dedicated to God.’”
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