Bishop Don Magic Juan

Founded the Players Ball, left the life for the ministry, then made a third career out of performing the first.

Donald Campbell was born in Chicago in November 1950 and began pimping in the city at sixteen, running a record store that doubled as a recruiting front. Accounts of his exit diverge: one record dates it to 1985 and places the founding of his Magic World Christian Kingdom Church in 1989, while Chicago Reader reporting sets the conversion in the early 1990s and records that the South Austin church closed in 1993, after which he worked as a street minister. He was ordained by F.L. Johnson of the Christian Ministers Congress; the title "Bishop" comes from that ministry rather than from an established denomination.

Find his autobiography, From Pimp Stick to Pulpit, on Amazon →
As an Amazon Associate, American Pimp earns from qualifying purchases.

He founded and long presided over the Players Ball, the annual gathering at which pimps conferred honors on one another. The Ball supplied much of the iconography — the furs, the jeweled cups, the suits — that rap music later adopted wholesale. The sequence matters: the Ball came first and was harvested, not the reverse.

That harvesting became the third career. After meeting Snoop Dogg backstage at the Soul Train Music Awards he became the rapper's spiritual advisor and a recurring presence on records and in videos, among them 50 Cent's "P.I.M.P." Screen credits include Friday After Next, Old School and Starsky & Hutch, with television appearances on Flavor of Love and Black-ish. The public persona rests on an unresolved tension: a ministry premised on having left the life, sustained commercially by continuing to perform it.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Donald Campbell

BORN
Chicago, Illinois, 30 November 1950

STATUS
Living

ERA
1960s–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
Chicago, Illinois; later Los Angeles

STANDING
Documented