‘Queen Pin’. That was how the FBI called Jemeker Thompson, a cocaine trading tycoon during the peak of the 1980s crack epidemic in the United States.
“I didn’t play when it came to delivering my drugs and getting my money,” Jemeker said. “I was serious about the game.”
Thompson was eight when her family was evicted from their apartment in South Central Los Angeles with their belongings scattered outside.
That eviction set the stage for who Thompson would become decades later. “I knew then that I wanted money and that I wanted to control everything,” she said in a Netflix documentary about her life.
Immediately after the eviction, Thompson asked that her mother allowed her to go live with her grandmother in Mississippi – a request the mother granted, returning to L.A., six years later at the age of 14.
Thompson met Anthony M. “Daff” Mosley not long after her return from Mississippi and together they established a successful cocaine-trafficking business in L.A.
Mosley was dealing in marijuana when he met Thompson, who became his payments collector.
After several months in the drug game, Thompson and Mosley decided to expand their business by moving to a more in-demand drug, crack-cocaine, according to Biography.
Thompson and Mosley married in 1980 and gave birth to a son in 1982. Mosley was murdered shortly thereafter.
That, however, did not stop Thompson from dealing in the drug business. She expanded the business to the dismay of many, making additional connections to distributors and territories throughout the United States.
“He had a certain charisma about himself. He was a hustler, and I knew he was because I would see him come in my neighborhood and gamble with the guys on the block. So he had a lot of money and seeing him with a lot of money attracted me,” Thompson said of Mosley as reported by CBN.
Hurt by the embarrassment she and her mother suffered when they were evicted from their apartment when she was eight, Thompson held the view that: “Having money made me feel like I was in control. I felt like I can do anything that I wanted to do because I had money and with money came people, with people, came power and I enjoyed that.”
Thompson was so huge a pusher that she began getting her consignment directly from producers in Colombia.
Thompson entered into another relationship with a man known as “Cheese” who would later give her away to the FBI after they had separated.
Thompson subsequently fled L.A. and went into hiding, leaving her son with her mother and used her drug connections to hide from the FBI. For two years, Thompson was on the run, returning in 1993 to attend her son’s 6th-grade graduation ceremony, where law-enforcement officials, suspecting her attendance, were promptly waiting.
She was then arrested, tried and convicted of charges related to drug-trafficking, and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Thompson said: “Out of the love for my son, I came to his graduation, and when I came to his graduation, I was arrested. It was the worst feeling that any mother could feel, for their child to see them get arrested… the worst feeling.
“I thought I had everything under control. But when they put those handcuffs on me, I was in their world, a different world that I’ve never experienced, that I’d never even thought that I would experience.”
Thompson was released from prison in 2005, after serving 13 years in a maximum-security prison alongside the likes of Griselda Blanco and Squeaky Fromme.
While in prison, she developed a stronger faith in God and began serving as a minister to other inmates. “Doors began to open that only God himself could have opened,” she later stated per Biography.
Now serving as an evangelical minister at Second Chance Ministries in South Central, Los Angeles, which she also owns, Thompson in June 2010 published Queen Pin: A Memoir, a novel that she co-wrote with David Ritz.
“You are looking at a miracle. I should be dead, but I’m alive for a reason to tell you that there is hope. My hope came through Jesus. He is alive. I am redeemed. I’m not just a conqueror; I’m more than a conqueror,” she said.
