MCA countersued, accusing Sugar Hill of grave contractual breaches. Joe knew that this time he was fighting way above his weight division. Frustrated beyond all endurance, hard man Joe began to shake uncontrollably in public places, weep in front of journalists; always he railed against MCA. “They’re the biggest thieves in the world,” he said in one court deposition. “They stole $4 million from me.” The case dragged on and on. The lawyer bills kept coming.

To the bitter end Joe maintained that it had been Levy’s pal Pisello who brought Sugar Hill low, denuding him and Sylvia of their license to print money. It was Pisello who’d served them up to the corporate sharks at MCA. (For their part, Sylvia and Joey junior decline to discuss these matters.) Yet on the witness stand in 1988 during the first of Pisello’s two trials for tax evasion, Robinson somehow failed to access the memories that had so enraged him. Not that his reticence helped Pisello, who was twice convicted, receiving separate sentences of two and four years. Levy had his own brush with justice: among the bits of non-Robinson business he and Pisello had cooked up was a byzantine scam involving several million discounted MCA albums; after this particular rip-off came undone in 1988, Mo pulled down a 10-year racketeering sentence. He died of cancer in 1991, at his home, while awaiting appeal. The only entity in this little web to emerge unscathed was MCA: a federal investigation of the company’s alleged Mob ties came to naught—scuttled, some say, by political interests in Washington.

In 1990 the Robinsons finally gave up their battle and settled with MCA. No money changed hands, but the family at least walked away with the rights to their Sugar Hill catalogue. In 1995 these were sold for a seven-figure sum—after strenuous due diligence—to L.A.’s Rhino Records, the pre-eminent pop-memory clearinghouse, which to this day sells Sugar Hill product in healthy quantities.

Joe and Sylvia Robinson were divorced in 1989, but to everyone’s surprise they stayed together as a couple, even through Joe’s long battle with cancer, which ended with his death in November 2000. When the original Sugar Hill studio burned down after an electrical fire in October 2002, the urn containing Joe’s ashes was recovered, but most of the Robinsons’ master tapes had been destroyed.

The family retains publishing rights on the catalogue it sold to Rhino, so Sylvia and Joey still collect on Sugar Hill songs through sales and radio play. And they enjoy a well-regulated windfall every time a Snoop Dogg or a Diddy samples some Sugar Hill shard in genuflection to old-school credibility. Having learned about copyright the hard way in the 50s and 60s, Sylvia also made sure that her name was among those credited on many Sugar Hill classics, if not, alas, on “Rapper’s Delight.”

But these publishing royalties do not quite compensate, in Sylvia’s mind, for the lack of recompense she received from her pre–Sugar Hill career as a writer/producer/performer. During our interviews, Sylvia’s son Joey junior has stayed in close attendance, interrupting his mother when any potentially controversial topic is raised. When Joey leaves the room, she takes the opportunity to get something off her chest. “I made a lot of people a lot of millions,” says Sylvia. “And I got jerked. I didn’t get nothing. I never got one cent of royalties from any of this. If you’re working with your husband, he thinks you’re working for him.” Asked if she divorced Joe to dissolve their business relationship, Sylvia nods discreetly.

Still, few of hip-hop’s progenitors can claim a pension fund that compares to Sylvia Robinson’s, though Grandmaster Flash commands a hefty fee whenever he spins at high-profile New York clubs or on TV shows such as HBO’s retired Chris Rock Show. Grandwizard Theodore conjures up decent cash in between old-school revival shows by playing Bar Mitzvahs and weddings, or pumping out techno for college kids. Grandmaster Caz, too, converts his legend into gelt, although not as often as he’d like. Kool Herc is respected above all others, especially when he performs in Europe and Japan, although it does chafe him that no CD compilation bears his name—to Herc’s chagrin, many of his signature sides appeared on a Rhino compilation series fronted by relative latecomer Kurtis Blow.

As for the form these men helped create, the beat goes on, louder than ever. And you can be sure that most of the rappers you hear on soundtracks, ads, and sports shows are getting, as they used to say, paid in full. Thanks to all the hard lessons learned when 80s rap was governed by 50s rules, hip-hop has risen from public-park jams to a millionaire’s playground. And so it is that every modern rap star knows that a smooth-talking, hard-assed lawyer is a commodity every bit as necessary as anything by Burberry, Bentley, Cristal, or Gucci.

Steven Daly is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. He is co-author (with V.F.’s David Kamp) of The Rock Snob’s Dictionary (Broadway Books).