After obtaining a search warrant, police entered the unit. Inside Austin's apartment, they found seven guns, more than a pound of cocaine, and equipment to weigh, cut and package it.

Walker, then 27, was questioned and released. Like Austin, he had had prior encounters with the law, including convictions for drug possession and aggravated assault.

Investigators working the homicide were told by street sources that both Austin and Walker worked for Alton Coles and that Coles headed Take Down Records.

Inside Walker's Infiniti, investigators found a Take Down Records jacket with his nickname, "Taz," inscribed on it.

With that, a picture of Coles as a player in the drug underworld began to emerge.

Early arrests

A 240-pounder who was known as "Fat Boy" before he took on the "Ace Capone" persona at Take Down Records, Coles says he grew up "rough" - largely abandoned by his parents and raised by an aunt and grandmother.

The oldest of four brothers, he looked out for his siblings. "I was both their father and their big brother," he said.

After getting into trouble for dealing drugs as a youth, Coles said, he graduated from high school in Glen Mills in 1992. Then, having learned to cut hair at an uncle's shop in Darby, he went on to open two barbershops of his own - Outline I in Chester and Outline II in West Philadelphia - before gravitating toward the music business and promotion.

"I like money," Coles said. "If an idea crosses my mind and it makes sense, I go with it. I got self-discipline. I'm just a go-getter."

Lt. Rick Gibney of the Darby Borough Police Department, which had arrested Coles "five or six times," suspected his real business was drug dealing.

"I always thought he was a knucklehead," said Gibney. "But then we started to hear that he had taken over West Chester, that he was the guy."

Gibney said at first he couldn't believe that Coles had attained status in the drug underworld. But then he noticed that defendants and informants, who allegedly were getting their coke from Coles' people, were refusing to talk about "the Fat Boy."

"They wouldn't roll," Gibney said. "They were afraid of what might happen to them."

Gibney said that he'd had several discussions with Philadelphia police and federal narcotics investigators about Coles late in 1999 and early in 2000, but that no one was ready to commit the manpower and resources to focus on his operation.

Like many major investigations, the Coles case emerged from unconnected criminal incidents investigated by different law enforcement agencies.

The murder outside the zoo put Alton "Ace Capone" Coles on the radar screens of Philadelphia homicide and narcotics detectives and of the ATF. As his name continued to pop up in seemingly unrelated cases, those agencies started files on the record company executive and those who appeared to be working for him.

A bust near Tamika's

On Jan. 21, 2003, Philadelphia police narcotics investigator Thomas Liciardello was watching Tamika's Lounge at 58th Street and Elmwood Avenue from an unmarked car, waiting for a drug deal to go down.

The corner is the kind of Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood that would soon appear in Coles' New Jack City and in Cooper's Streets Inc.