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ValTown, an account on
By Jon Caramanica
Beginning in the late 2010s, Brian Valmond began shedding light on stories tinged with secrecy, exaggeration, self-protection, and self-glorification.
His subject matter is, by and large, the world of Black gangs and drug kingpins of the 1980s and ’90s — topics that have also long driven the aesthetics and narratives of hip-hop. Since 2017, Valmond, 25, has been using his @_ValTown_ account on Twitter, now known as X, to unravel these tales bit by bit in threads that become mini events. His stories are tantalizing and sometimes surprising, especially when he highlights the links between the criminal underworld and the realm of celebrity, underscoring the blurred lines between those two milieus.
“The Italian mafia is in the media, they’re glamorous and they have their underworld legends, while the black underworld are very nasty as predators,” Valmond said in an October interview at a Brooklyn park. “So I searched for ‘Show, not glorify, but to say that we also have our legends of the underworld. ‘
On his accounts — he’s accumulated more than 180,000 followers on X, and over 100,000 on Instagram — Valmond has examined drug lords and gangsters from all over the country: well-known figures like Harlem’s Rich Porter and Azie Faison (whose stories shaped the film “Paid in Full,” starring Cam’ron); or Atlanta’s Black Mafia Family, crucial in the early career of Jeezy; or the original 50 Cent, from whom the rapper got his name. After he wrote about Freeway Rick Ross, the Los Angeles cocaine kingpin, Ross invited Valmond to spend time with him in California.
Valmond also probes the places where crime and music have collided, detailing the sometimes unsavory pasts of well-known hip-hop executives like Suge Knight and Big U, or the story of Peter Shue, the club promoter, drug dealer and reported paramour of Madonna. He’s posted a detailed history of Sean Combs’s father, Melvin Combs, a purported associate of the 1970s Harlem crime boss Nicky Barnes. And sometimes, he simply unearths unexpected behind-the-scenes factoids, like a recent thread about the tough-guy exploits of the pioneering pop rapper MC Hammer.
Some of Valmond’s work, specifically about the intersection between hip-hop stars and life on the street, addresses “the kinds of things that other people were talking about quietly but never made it into the print media, because they weren’t stories that could just come in a believable way, but they weren’t unusual wisdom for the other people in the scene,” journalist Noah Callahan-Bever said. Valmond’s children, he says, “gave those stories the folklore, the grandeur they deserved. “
Crucial to Valmond’s approach are old photographs, which he tracks down from various online sources, and sometimes from family members or associates of the figures he’s spotlighting. The photos are not simply nostalgia — they are also historical references of style and attitude presentations that have trickled out into the mainstream via hip-hop, which took those street reference points and made them into culture. The photos, which capture fleeting poses of chest-puffing celebration (think fresh-off-the-lot sports cars, ostentatiously large gold chains, ritzy nightclubs, spotless designer clothes) are often the most solid documentation of a moment that only tenuously documented itself.
“Those days are almost extinct, right?” And it keeps it alive so other people can say, ‘Don’t you forget a time when it was like that?’Other than that, you’re going to erase an entire culture or a generation.
But through their excess, these images reflect a complex and tragic reality. “When you look at those old photographs, you get a glimpse of life. You see survival mode,” Hartwell said. And some other people don’t know because they’re not in that mode.
“Most of the people in those photographs are serving life sentences,” he added, “or have died. “
For Valmond, there is a fine line between glorifying life on the streets and confronting reality. “Someone might watch a movie like ‘Snowfall’ and say, ‘Oh wow, I need to be a drug dealer,'” she said. But it’s like it’s not history. Yes, maybe it would be good now, but it will end up pretty bad.
Valmond is a humble and unassuming chronicler of a deeply chaotic time. Dressed quietly in a black tracksuit, he asked as many questions as he answered, with his studious and focused air.
He was raised by strict Caribbean parents (his mother is from Haiti and his father is from Dominica) and spent his early years in Far Rockaway, Queens, and then moved with his circle of relatives to Delaware, where he still resides. He returned to New York the summer and stayed close to his friends who were drawn to street life.
At the suggestion of a prominent English teacher at the school, Valmond began exploring screenwriting, but he also saw the stories unfolding right in front of him.
“In my neighborhood, if you didn’t play basketball or weren’t an artistic kid, you’d be promoting drugs,” he said.
In 2017, he spent an unsuccessful summer between his first two years of school calling the phone numbers of the Hollywood studios he discovered online to submit a script, to no avail.
“I tried to put it in this fictional world, but those things happen in my real life,” he explained. “My friends die, my friends go to prison, and things become very real the moment I write. So I thought, Maybe that’s a broader goal. Perhaps let me begin to tell the stories of other people who have experienced this in real life.
Later that year, he saw a thread on Twitter that spoke to him and had him create his own. Before long, he was publishing prolifically.
“I was going to school,” he recalled, “but I wasn’t going to class. I was checking into the library and I would stay there all day researching, getting pictures, putting threads together.”
His first two threads tackled the Queens drug kingpin Lorenzo (Fat Cat) Nichols and the Los Angeles gangster Freeway Rick Ross. He soon posted about Robert Sandifer, who was murdered at 11 years old by members of his own gang, a gruesome and vivid crime that led to a Time magazine cover story in 1994.
In the 2000s, street magazines such as F. E. D. S. emerged. and Don Diva to document underworld figures, in their own words. Some YouTube channels take old war stories to the streets. And in the early stages of the internet, discussion forums and blogs also addressed those issues.
Though Valmond begins with news reports and other published information, some facts are impossible to independently verify. Memories can be hazy, and reputations are sometimes built on bluster. His threads can sometimes land closer to apocrypha than unassailable truth. (There are a handful of other Twitter and Instagram accounts that stake out similar content, but Valmond’s have been the most in-depth and consistent.)
The internet is both infinite and shortsighted — stories can be forever archived, and also forever forgotten. Many of these tales were known in their time, but lost to history. Valmond thrills in resurfacing them, and in the connectivity that social media allows: Not only researching and relaying these stories, but sometimes using them to connect with people involved, and unearthing even more information.
Luc (Spoon) Stephen, a film producer and onetime associate of Fat Cat Nichols, took notice of Valmond’s 2017 thread on the drug dealer. Like Valmond, Stephen is from Queens, and of Haitian descent. He admired Valmond’s curiosity and dedication to the truth, and began sharing stories with him and making introductions.
“A lot of the younger people don’t listen, but he soaks it up and he has to evaluate from there, he has to check it again,” Stephen said in an interview. “I could take a key and I can turn it in the lock and open the lock and then walk away, but now he has to open the door and explore.”
In 2018, as Callahan-Bever was running for executive vice president of logo and content strategy at Def Jam Records, he hired Valmond as an intern, once he discovered how young he was: “I kind of assumed he was an older guy. Depending on the subject and the intensity of your knowledge, but you are still in college.
Valmond said the experience was eye-opening. “That was the first time for me that I’d seen that my skill set could put me in an environment beyond the neighborhood,” he said.
Valmond’s work-in-progress reflects the turning of norms around public debate about street tales. In recent years, a handful of films and television systems have tackled those eras, adding the documentary series “Hip Hop Uncovered” and “American Gangster,” the film “Paid in Full,” and the television series “BMF” and “Power,” both produced by 50 Cent.
Today, many online hip-hop outlets and celebrity sites focus heavily on the criminal affiliations of musicians or their relatives, an almost unthinkable turn from two decades ago, when criminal records were nowhere to be found. They were easily spread, and when artists may have incorporated street stories into their songs, but on the other hand, their goal was largely to keep their non-musical life private. Some media outlets also question whether musicians involved in criminal cases have cooperated with authorities, in an effort to make distinctions between artists with other degrees of street credibility.
For Valmond, these are irrelevant questions: “I’m posting to everybody, whether they’ve cooperated, whether they’ve been, quote-unquote, standing. This puts everything on a game point. To let people know that he doesn’t decide on the sides.
In recent months, Valmond has also expanded into longer video content, including “Rich in the Hood,” a podcast interview series and a six-part documentary series on YouTube more extensively covering some of the subjects of Valmond’s threads — “making it cinematic,” Valmond said — and “Blood Currency,” a show on his Patreon that looks at criminal enterprises from around the globe.
“I still get criticism from my community, where other people tell me, ‘You’re glorifying drug dealers. ‘Or, “How can you post those other people who are poisoning the neighborhood?Valmond said. It’s because they’re so used to seeing him glorified on TV and in movies. It’s like, no, I’m not going to do that. Just take the time, read it, and see for yourself what I’m trying to convey.
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic for The Times and host of the podcast “Popcast. “He also writes the men’s column Critical Shopper for Styles. In the past he worked for Vibe magazine and has written for Village Voice, Spin, XXL and more. . Learn More about Jon Caramanica
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