And with that heretofore unseen demand came unwanted attention. Nearly exactly nine months after Dedication 2 dropped, Drama’s Atlanta’s studio — 147 Walker Street, where he recorded much of the Gangsta Grillz series, including Dedication 2 — was raided. Working in coordination with the RIAA, officers from the Morrow, Georgia, police department confiscated just about everything that was on the premises: recording gear, vehicles, 81,000 CDs. They also arrested Drama and his business partner Don Cannon, charged them each with a felony violation of Georgia’s RICO law, and held them on $100,000 bond.

“I saw cops jump out, M16s drawn, and they put me directly on the ground,” Drama recalled in 2008. “They were screaming and yelling, causing a ruckus … They brought the dogs in there, basically asking, ’Where are the guns and drugs?’ You tell them a bunch of times, ’Nah.’

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“January 17, ‘07,” Drama says now. “That was a real pivotal moment.”

As The New York Times explained at the time, “The [RIAA] makes no distinction between counterfeit CDs and unlicensed compilations like those that DJ Drama is known for.” Meaning: the RIAA didn’t care that artists were working directly with Drama. Gangsta Grillz releases contained unlicensed material, meaning both the jacked beats and the artist’s own original verses, which were technically proprietary to the record labels with which they were then under contract. They were considered, as a whole, illegal.

RICO is short for the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act; it was created in 1970 to combat the mafia, and gives law enforcement right to seize all your assets. Eventually, Drama’s lawyers negotiated the charges down from a felony to a misdemeanor. What he was actually convicted with was a violation of Georgia’s “true names and addresses” law. (It was a technicality of a law, promoted by the RIAA in many states, to define and fight bootlegging: to be considered legal for sale, a CD had to have an address on it.) Drama was fined $250,000. But he’d already had a bank account seized during the initial investigation, and that bank account was never returned to him. And that account, he said, had “waaaay more than $250,000 in it.”

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After the raid, Drama and Cannon were advised to find separate legal representation. Over the course of the proceedings, things got messy; for a couple of years, the best friends and business partners fell out altogether. At one point, as part of their agreement with the RIAA, they were forced to record an anti-bootlegging PSA for the RIAA. Awkwardly, without really speaking to one another, Drama and Cannon made themselves look in the camera and plead with faceless bootleggers to respect the rights of artists everywhere — the same kind of artists that they’d helped make iconic with Gangsta Grillz. The PSA was never released.

The RIAA had taken a big swing, and it had the desired effect. The sight of Drama and Cannon, in cuffs and county prison jumpsuits, sent a chill through the mixtape circuit.