Irv Gotti dressed down for his first appearance in court. Gone were the ivory suits and fedora hats that are the uniform of the successful rap entrepreneur.
Instead, the colourful and influential boss of the record label The Inc wore a much more "street" outfit: a hooded parka over a white T-shirt.
Gotti, 34, was not in custody for long, but the case outlined against him has put on the line the reputation of the man behind the success of such artists as Ashanti and Ja Rule.
Having been led in handcuffs from the Manhattan offices of the FBI, he was indicted by a New York court on charges of laundering money for a former gang leader and convicted drug dealer. Charged along with his brother and two other defendants, Gotti was released on $1m (£530,000) bail, having pleaded not guilty.
"They don't call it gangsta rap for nothing," said the New York City police commissioner, Raymond Kelly. "It's pretty clear that the image isn't accidental."
Prosecutors have alleged that Gotti - who changed his name from Irving Lorenzo in honour of the mafia boss John Gotti - laundered money for Kenneth McGriff, a drug dealer from Queens who founded of one of the city's most violent gangs.
A member of the defence team, Gerald Shargel, insisted that the problem was one of perception rather than criminal activity, calling the case part of "a very serious cultural divide".
Gotti denies any wrongdoing. "No way, in any shape or form, have I done anything wrong, except make great music that the people seem to love, and that's all that I'm guilty of," he said.
For him the indictment is the latest stage in a career that has encapsulated hip-hop, "gangsta" rhetoric, business acumen, musical vision and high-profile disputes with other rappers.
He rose to become one of the biggest producers in rap at the head of his own label, a joint venture set up with £1.5m from the label Island Def Jam, which is in turn owned by Vivendi Universal. Neither Universal nor Def Jam is mentioned in the indictment.
However, the basis of many of the charges is a police raid on Universal's headquarters in 2003.
Gotti came to attention in 1996 for his production work on the rapper Jay-Z's debut, Reasonable Doubt. He then produced another successful debut, DMX's It's Dark and Hell is Hot.
But it was through his work with Ja Rule, and later with Ashanti, that Gotti began to gain influence in the rap community.
With the founding of Murder Inc, which has sold more than 15m CDs, Gotti's blending of gangsta imagery and music reached its apogee. He named his Manhattan studio the "Crack House", and the name Murder Inc was enough to cause the label problems, with some cable stations refusing to show the name when airing its videos.
Gotti said the name referred merely to its ability to produce hits, calling it an "ill double meaning".
"When you have a hit record, people say you put out a hit," he said in 2003. "I thought, 'I'm going to call my artists murderers, because they put out hits.' This is the psyche behind it, man. Nothing more."
But after police raided Murder Inc's offices in January 2003, Gotti decided to change the name to The Inc. The raid arose from an investigation into McGriff, who has separately been charged with the murders of three men.
Known as Supreme - or Preme - Jamaican-born McGriff headed the Supreme Team, a Jamaican gang that ran the crack trade in three US cities. In 1995, after serving a jail sentence, McGriff returned to dealing, prosecutors allege, meeting Gotti soon afterwards.
They allege that Gotti laundered drug profits for McGriff, who would deliver bags of cash to Murder Inc's headquarters. Gotti, it is claimed, would in turn write cheques for McGriff totalling £149,000.
It is also alleged that Gotti pressured Def Jam executives to pay McGriff expenses of tens of thousands.
Some £265,000 of drug proceeds, the indictment states, was used to finance a straight-to-video film, Crime Partners, starring Snoop Dogg. But Gotti's defenders say an internal audit carried out for Murder Inc in 2003 accounts for all the company's dealings with McGriff and disproves allegations of money laundering.
Gotti has gone from making light of the accusations to adopting a more sober attitude. His early reaction was to shoot a video in which he mockingly restaged the raid on his offices.
In May 2003 he told MTV: "They can throw the kitchen sink at me. The only way they can stop me is they gotta stop me from going to the studio.
"It's a funny thing, with all this, I resort back to the basics. I'm in the papers every day, I'm on MTV every day, every 15-minute newsbreak. But I don't look at the papers, I don't watch TV.
"I go in the studio and I listen to music. Music calms the savage beast and it makes me so focused."
If convicted on the money laundering charges, each defendant faces a maximum sentence of 20 years.
