The streets of New York City have spawned countless hustlers, pimps and drug dealers, but one of the most feared, revered and dominant criminals to go from rags to riches in the Big Apple in recent decades is actually a son of Birmingham.

Lorenzo "Fat Cat" Nichols went from humble Alabamian roots to the top of the drug game in hardscrabble 1980s New York, running a massive drug-dealing empire based in one of the still-rough Southeast Queens neighborhoods that spawned rappers like influential 50 Cent, Nicki Minaj and Canibus.

"[Nichols was t]he most feared and powerful hustler in southeast Queens," according to "Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler," author Ethan Brown's definitive book on drugs, gangs and hip-hop in the Queens borough of New York City. "The Nichols organization not only netted millions from the sale of crack, cocaine, and heroin but also supplied competing crews such as the Supreme Team with drugs."

Born in Birmingham on Christmas Day 1958, Nichols spent his early years with his grandmother in Bessemer, but moved to Queens to be with his mother when he was ten, living in the borough for the remainder of his free life. He dropped out of school before ever beginning high school and was in and out of jail before being put away for decades in the early nineties.

Nichols is currently imprisoned at the maximum-security Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, but his influence has spanned decades, continuing to inspire rappers and criminals alike with his strong persona and dominance of the drug game.

Perhaps the best rapper to come out of Queens - and definitely the illest to emerge from the Queensbridge housing projects overlooking New York's East River - is Nasir Jones. Better known as Nas, the wordsmith now stars in a major documentary and has taught college classes. But his breakthrough 1994 debut album "Illmatic" includes admiring lyrics about Nichols, as do so many songs from rappers who were aware of the street scene in Queens in the eighties and nineties.

"I hung around the older crews while they sling smack to dingbats / They spoke of Fat Cat, that n----'s name made bells ring," he rhymes on his classic "Memory Lane (Sittin' in Da Park)," harkening back to the days of Nichols and his chokehold on the Queens drug business.

Nichols, who was the child of a nurse's aide mother and plumber father, came up before Nas and 50 Cent. He started out as an armed robber, but eventually got into drugs, rising to the level of true drug kingpin, earning the respect of numerous New York rappers along the way.

"I swear to God I think I had the same vision that Cat had / Woke up sayin' 'we gon' turn them corners to Baghdad,'" 50 Cent, a native of the Southeast Queens neighborhood of South Jamaica, rapped on his song "Financial Freedom." The "Cat" in the bar refers to Nichols, who used violence and intimidation to maintain control of his network of lucrative drug corners.

It make senses that 50 - aka the one-time crack dealer Curtis Jackson - would rep Nichols in his rhymes, as "Sabrina, 50's mother, was a crack dealer and crack addict who worked in the shadows of a drug organization run by Lorenzo 'Fat Cat' Nichols on 150th Street and Sutphin Boulevard in the South Jamaica section of southeast Queens." Brown wrote.

The first place Nichols lived in Queens was the Ozone Park neighborhood, which made him something of an outsider when he showed up on the cutthroat streets of South Jamaica. But Fat Cat - whose nickname is a nod to his "linebacker-thick neck, a head so big it nearly blocked out his friends' faces in snapshots, and his rangy beard" - "had the brawn to back up his ballsy entree into the southeast Queens street scene, administering brutal beatings with an icy, almost clinical precision," according to Brown.

"Barely fifteen, copped my first triple beam / Tryna get wit Fat Cat and Pappy to do my thing," Harlem's Fat Joe (aka Bronx-born Joseph Antonio Cartagena) rapped on "My Conscience." The term "triple beam" is a colloquial name for a common type of non-electronic scale often used to weigh drugs and "Pappy" is a nod to Howard Pappy Mason, a lieutenant in Fat Cat's drug organization and easily the more well-known of the two on the national level.

Mason's greater infamy was solidified on Dec. 11, 1989, when he was convicted on federal charges in connection with his ordering the killing of police officer Edward Byrne while Mason was behind bars serving a sentence stemming from gun charges. Mason is still serving the life sentence at the ADX Florence "supermax" prison he began in 1994.

Within a few years of his arrival in South Jamaica, Fat Cat established a drug empire that at one time netted $20 million a year, according to Vanity Fair, selling heroin and cocaine that Nichols first got through a connection to the Italian Mafia that still ran much of the New York underworld in the 1980s. He ran the drug trade in his neighborhood with an iron fist for the better part of a decade, relying on muscle and intimidation to keep his organization in control.

"Fat Cat ran his organization from a familiar business model. Like the heroin hustlers of the seventies, Fat Cat's small army of drug dealers were 'grindin'' (street slang for making dozens of small transactions worth $10 to $25 at a time) in poor neighborhoods like South Jamaica," Brown wrote. "Profits were sizable, but hand-to-hand dealers often had to work fifteen-hour days."

But NYPD officers nabbed Fat Cat while he was at the top of his game, relying on a series of operations that eventually culminated in Nichols being put away for decades.

"The wiretaps were just one part of the case McGuinness and Queens Narcotics were building against Fat Cat's empire," Brown wrote. "Cops also had confidential informants (C.I.s) on the inside, feeding them information about nearly every aspect of Fat Cat's crew, from the enforcers to the baggers."

Over the years, Fat Cat was arrested, locked up and released multiple times on various charges. But he ended up making a series of mistakes between 1985 and 1987, being arrested in a raid that found him in possession of heroin, cocaine, guns and a large stash of cash. While in jail he ordered several people to assault his parole officer, but the man, Brian Rooney, was shot dead in summer 1987, something Nichols said he did not intend to have happen but still resulted in him being charged with second-degree murder for the killing.

In 1992, Nichols was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for the Rooney murder, in addition to 40 years for federal murder, drug and racketeering charges. He remains behind bars to this day.