(NB – Stack was murdered outside his home in June 2007. There are a lot of really good tracks with the two of them on, and Bundles is on a couple of beats with Max on Max’s Public Domain series of mixtapes, including Million Dollar Baby Radio. Really though, the strongest part of ByrdGang was the chemistry between Max and Stack Bundles. To begin with, though, there was some really strong output – the MOB mixtapes in particular. Initially intended to be an extension of the Dipset/Diplomats brand, the label eventually fell apart as tensions between Cam’ron and Jones grew. Seizing upon his own much-grown profile and Max’s prolific workrate, Jones signed Max to his ByrdGang label and paired him up with Stack Bundles, another loose Dipset affiliate. At the time, Cam’ron was embroiled in a public beef with Jay-Z, and Max ended up on the dis track. Through his affiliation with Jones, Max had been writing hooks for Dipset tracks and, by some accounts, ghost-writing a lot of Jones’s verses. Though they later disintegrated acrimoniously, at this point Dipset were moving strong. The arrangement didn’t last long – Conway was back in North Carolina within a couple of months and Max was still in the studio. While Max was working on the first of his many, many mixtapes, Conway was working in a local strip club. She’d been living with a man there for almost ten years but within a month she was in New York, living with Max in Harlem. But Jones was there with Max, and that’s who Conway found herself with. Living in North Carolina, Conway had ended up backstage at a Diplomats booking – though key members of Dipset, Cam’ron and Juelz Santana, had no-showed. It’s through Jones, however indirectly, that Gina Conway met Max. He’s all over the album, in fact – guesting on three of tracks, songwriting credits on others. Guesting on the lead single “Baby Girl” from Jones’s second album, Harlem: Diary Of A Summer, Max was on a radio hit and shouting Dipset on the chorus. Within months, he was working with another Harlem local, Jim Jones of The Diplomats/Dipset fame. In January 2005, Max was released from his first incarceration. To the police, the connections to Max stacked up quickly. Conway was Max’s ex-girlfriend and Leerdam his stepbrother. He’d been in prison from 1997 on a robbery charge, first degree. It wasn’t the first time Max had been arrested. Within a week, they had been arrested, as had a third man – Charly Wingate, aka rapper Max B. Plowden, having struggled free, alerted the front desk to the murder. Conway later stated that Leerdam shot him, just once, and he and Conway fled the scene. Within a matter of minutes, Taylor was dead. They got Plowden to call Taylor to the room. Plowden, taped up and at gunpoint, had told the two that he wasn’t holding the money – his partner was. Witnesses later said that Plowden and Taylor had been seen in Harlem a few days before the robbery: brand new cars, money everywhere. Plowden was staying at the hotel with his business partner David Taylor, who had a room further down the hall. There were two people in the room besides Plowden – Gina Conway and Kelvin Leerdam. The room was rented out to Allen Plowden, who was at that moment duct-taped to a chair. It was September 2006 when it happened, in a Holiday Inn in New Jersey.
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