The Hack
The never-told story of how two high schoolers hacked an answering machine and hijacked Eazy-E's Ruthless Records
Eazy-E was one of hip-hop’s seminal figures. The diminutive Compton gang member started off selling crack and ended up creating one of the most important labels in music history.
Founded in 1985, Ruthless Records was a juggernaut, popularizing gangsta rap and birthing the careers of N.W.A, Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and Bone Thugs & Harmony.
Ruthless grew to be worth perhaps $30 million, but it all came crashing down in February, 1995 when — seemingly out of nowhere — Eazy was diagnosed HIV+.
The news shocked everyone. His condition was soon downgraded to full-blown AIDS. On his deathbed he married his girlfriend, Tomica Woods, before dying a few days later.
Eazy left no clear chain of succession, and Ruthless Records fell into chaos. Those claiming stakes in the company included:
*Tomica Woods-Wright, Eazy’s widow, a 26-year-old former executive assistant at Motown Records. She and Eazy hadn’t been together very long, but they had a child together, and she was pregnant with their second.
*Jerry Heller, the manager of N.W.A, who was Eazy’s closest confidant before being fired just before Eazy entered the hospital. He claimed Eazy only fired him because Eazy was sick and under duress (and had only married Woods-Wright for those reasons as well).
*Mike Klein, Ruthless’ security director, who’d been brought on to battle Suge Knight when Death Row Records was threatening Eazy and poaching Ruthless’ artists. Klein had a background in “Israeli security forces,” and claimed partial ownership of Ruthless. (Here’s some good background on Klein and Suge Knight.)
These competing claims caused tumult. Klein, attempting to assert control, “fired” Woods-Wright’s lawyer, Ron Sweeney, but when Klein showed up to Ruthless’ office a few days later, a phalanx of security guards barred his entrance.
It all sparked an incredibly-complicated probate case. While the case was being sorted a judge ordered Ruthless shut down and the doors to its Woodland Hills offices locked.
Into this mess waltzed a high school student named Raphael Ghazarian.
Ghazarian was a 19-year-old prankster from Ottawa, Canada, who’d recently served a stint in juvenile detention and was giving high school another shot.
After school, he and his friend Joshua Allen would hang out at Allen’s crash pad, a small apartment that Allen rented using his brother’s ID. They goofed around, smoked weed, and called psychic hotlines. Or, obtaining record labels’ phone numbers from the backs of CDs, they’d call and hack the labels’ answering machine messages.
In those days of landlines and physical machines, it was simple.
“We’d try 1-1, then 1-2, 1-3, etc., until we cracked the code,” Ghazarian says. They changed Hootie and Blowfish's label’s message to something silly, then laughed their asses off until the next day when someone at the label changed it back.
Ruthless Records was their next victim. This was the spring of 1995, only weeks after Eazy’s death, and though they were big N.W.A fans, they had no idea about the chaos engulfing Ruthless.
They changed Ruthless’ message to say that the label had moved — to Ottawa, Canada. Its new address? Their crash pad’s address. Its new number? Their crash pad’s number.
This prank worked better than they could have possibly imagined. Because Ruthless’ operations had been halted by the judge, the altered answering machine message stayed active for months. No one came in to change it, because the labels’ doors were locked.
And so, calls intended for Ruthless started going to Ghazarian and Allen. When they answered they impersonated Ruthless executives, and in the process managed to take control of the label, making a small fortune and triggering an FBI case that remained unsolved for decades.
Until now.
They received dozens of calls per day, Ghazarian says, including from…