Pimp Snooky

Not a Memphis rapper: a Milwaukee pimp made famous by two documentaries, then convicted federally after claiming it was all an act.

The name "Pimp Snooky" was given to this archive as a Memphis rapper. The research found no such artist. The Pimp Snooky documented by newspapers, an investigative newsroom and two films is Derrick Avery of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a pimp whose visibility in the late 1990s came from television, not records. Avery appeared in Brent Owens's HBO documentary Pimps Up, Ho's Down, broadcast in the America Undercover strand, where, as the Las Vegas Sun reported in August 2009, he declared, "Let me pimp, or let me die." Wisconsin Watch, the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, reported in 2011 that he had been named Pimp of the Year at the 1998 Players Ball. In 2000, British director Clive Gordon made a television documentary titled Pimp Snooky that followed him in Milwaukee. Milwaukee Magazine's Matt Hrodey, writing in 2016, described the film as showing Avery demean, threaten and on more than one occasion assault a young woman he was "training for his stable." He also appeared on the Jerry Springer Show.

The prosecutions came later. The Las Vegas Sun reported that in 2005 he was arrested in Wisconsin on seven outstanding warrants, with four women who had prostitution histories in his company. In June 2007 North Las Vegas police found five women at a house associated with him, and in July 2007 he was arrested in an undercover operation at the Mandalay Bay casino after trying to recruit a woman; he was carrying $3,340, three phones, and a tattoo reading "International Pimp." He was charged in Clark County with attempted pandering. His defence, reported by the Sun on August 1, 2009 under the headline "The pimp: Was it a role or was it a reality?", was that the persona had been a character performed for the cameras.

Federal prosecutors answered that a week later. A 26-page complaint filed in Nevada, described by the Sun on August 8, 2009, drew on seven confidential witnesses and alleged that Avery beat women and transported minors across state lines for prostitution, with victim testimony reaching back more than a decade. Wisconsin Watch's Julie Strupp reported in August 2011 that he faced six sex-trafficking counts, two involving children, and eight prostitution-related counts, alongside co-defendant Shamika Evans, then 28. The allegations described beatings with pots, pool cues, belts and shoes, a punishment in which rubbing alcohol was poured on a woman and lit, and threats against victims' families, including an offer of $2,800 to have a woman's father shot. Milwaukee Magazine reported that he was subsequently sentenced to twenty years in federal prison; Milwaukee's TMJ4 News carried the sentencing under the headline "'Pimp Snooky' to spend decades in prison."

Avery's case matters to the archive because it is the sharpest test on record of the persona defence. The documentaries that made him a minor celebrity were introduced as evidence of exactly the conduct he said they dramatised. The women in those films, some of whom the federal complaint identifies as minors at the time, were not performers. Their accounts, given to investigators and summarised in the Sun and by Wisconsin Watch, are the only version of this story that did not come from Avery. A son, performing as RichKid Avery, has discussed his father in interviews, but no music by Derrick Avery himself has been located.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Derrick Avery

BORN
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, c. 1969 (age 42 in 2011 reporting)

STATUS
Living

ERA
c. 1998–2012

ASSOCIATED WITH
Milwaukee; Chicago; Las Vegas; the Players Ball; HBO's Pimps Up, Ho's Down; the 2000 film Pimp Snooky

STANDING
Documented