FE ATU REas a doctor,” says JimmyBoi, “but every night I saw them rocking out
and living the life.”
As a kid, JimmyBoi watched the movie Scarface constantly and
absorbed its life lessons. By the age of 15, he started selling drugs.
A year later, he was stealing cars, stripping them and selling the
parts. “We stole a car at 2:30 p.m. at the Galleria one day,” he tells
All For The Culture on YouTube. “The dude that got the car stolen,
his brother was a cop. People know each other. So, they ran up on
my house. Long story short, they did a bunch of illegal things. They
made it seem like we were running this big operation and a bunch of
B.S. When they raided my house, they found a gun that linked back
to a shooting.”
He was looking at 30 years in a state penitentiary for the gun’s
connection to attempted murder, organized crime, possession of
Ecstasy, conspiracy and attempt to distribute. He got out on an
appeal bond, but was arrested again on a federal charge.
Just as he saw his father get shot when he was little, his young
daughter had the traumatic experience of seeing him taken into
custody by Feds. She worried that the Feds were hurting him when
they threw him on the floor and on the hood of the car. And then
he disappeared.
Miraculously, his lawyers were able to prove that he had no
knowledge of the gun’s connection to the murder. He ended up
serving only two-and-a-half years in a state prison. When he got out,
he tried to go legit and pursued rapping, recording Southern raps
with titles like “My Grind” and “Down South Boys,” which led to
radio play.
But he wanted to make more money to send his kids to private
school. He knew he could earn more if he returned to crime. “I was
selling dope to support my family,” he says. “I wasn’t doing music
consistently enough because I had to focus on my family. I real-
ized that it was best if I just created a life that was simplified for
my family.”
He admits that he was good at the drug hustle. At one point he
supplied so much Ecstasy to the Houston area that he was known
as “Pill Gates.” A piece in his personal collection was inspired by
his product, Blue Dolphin pills. “The blue dolphin is made out of 10
karat gold,” says JimmyBoi, describing the notorious piece that he
recently bought back from friend and fellow jeweler Ben Baller. “It’s
about 280 grams of gold. And it has over 60 karats in blue diamonds.
I think it has 2,985 diamonds on there.” Nick Ghafoor, the jeweler
who made the blue dolphin, would later play an extremely import-
ant role in JimmyBoi’s ascent in the diamond biz.
Savannah’s mother left and JimmyBoi found himself in the same
situation as his father, being a single dad. “I had no help, no nanny,
no babysitter,” he says. “My parents weren’t helping. I used to drive
around and sell dope with [my daughter] in the car. We used to live
in a trap house together.” And now Savannah’s IG feed chronicles
her past three years, with her freestyling raps to popular songs,
dancing with massive bricks of currency, displaying her diamond
jewelry and posing with Drake, Cardi B and other famous rappers.
If that sounds like Lil Tay, the tween-age girl who gained popular-
ity in 2018 for doing basically the same things as Savannah, keep in
mind that Lil Tay is the fabricated persona of her teenage older half-
brother, Jason Tian, who had his own YouTube rap dreams. It turned
out that Lil Tay’s luxury homes were her real estate agent mother’s
staged properties. The luxury cars were borrowed. Meanwhile, Jim-
myBoi himself supplied Savannah’s drip. JimmyBoi documents her
actual real lifestyle and personality, sets it to a trap soundtrack and
posts it to the ‘Gram.
JimmyBoi’s father thinks that his son has made the best out of
the situation. “He is a good father to his children,” says Phan. “Not
because he’s my son. But he’s a good man. He takes care of his kids.
He takes care of his woman.”
Much of these riches are the fruit of his partnership with Ghafoor,
a Pakistani American immigrant who moved from Dubai to Hous-
ton at the age of 17. Their relationship started when JimmyBoi was
Ghafoor’s client. The two clicked and grew to trust each other. Jim-
myBoi and “Ice Man Nick” founded DoneRight Jewelers in 2015 on
a foundation of mutual love and creative diamond jewelry design.
“He went against all his higher-ups to give me this chance,” Jim-
myBoi says about their decision to become partners. “The crazy
thing is that it was his idea and not mine. If I keep talking about it,
I’ll probably get emotional. If it wasn’t for him, I’d be another drug
dealer, maybe in jail, maybe dead.”
The feeling is mutual. “I’ve been knowing him for so long,” says
Ghafoor over the phone from his Range Rover. “And he’s always
been a man of his word. If he says something ... he’s 100. I don’t
know what words or how to say it. He’s always been like, in his feel-
ings, whether it’s money or other than his money ... he’s always been
like 100 in everything.”
Together, they are planning on taking over the jewelry game,
bringing custom diamond grills, pieces and chains to the main-
stream. JimmyBoi envisions a DoneRight Jewelers in malls from
coast to coast. He’s opening his first flagship store in Houston in
July. The next one will be located in New York. “I’m going to turn
DoneRight Jewelers into a household name, like Kay’s and Gar-
rett’s,” say JimmyBoi. “Every day, I wake up and make sure I’m not
dreaming. I make sure I work like I got nothing. Getting to be suc-
cessful is not the hard part; it’s staying there that’s hard.” CM