The mirrored doors to the headquarters of Murder Inc. are always locked. The Inc. has a suite of offices on the twenty-ninth floor of the midtown Manhattan building that houses Def Jam -- its parent company -- but there's no buzzer of any sort. To get in, you have to bang on the door. Sometimes you have to bang for a while.

Inside, there's chaos: The walls are painted blood red, and hip-hop is blaring, and signs saying rape and pillage are all over, and everywhere you look there are young black men with expensive classic sports jerseys and do-rags and screw faces so menacing that most white people would cross the street on sight. It's as if you'd stepped through the looking glass from corporate America into a little outpost of the ghetto. It's so loud, so frenetic, so Wild, Wild West in there, it seems impossible to get any work done. But a lot of work is getting done.

Murder Inc. is the home of Irv Gotti, the former DJ and former small-time drug dealer from Queens, New York, who brought DMX and Ja Rule to Def Jam and launched Ashanti. The man who produced Rule's "Always On Time," Jennifer Lopez's "Ain't It Funny" and "I'm Real (Murder Remix)," and Ashanti's "Foolish," all of which have been Number One on Billboard's R&B/Hip-hop singles chart this year. In the first five months of 2002, Gotti had the Number One single for eighteen weeks. I know this because he told me within seconds of our meeting. "Gotti's not the hottest nigga in this building," says Def Jam president Kevin Liles. "Right now, Gotti's the hottest nigga in every building worldwide. Gotti's so hot we had to get an extra air conditioner put in here." He's key to Island Def Jam becoming the top urban record company in America. "It wouldn't have been done without him," says Lyor Cohen, the chairman of Island Def Jam. Success has made Gotti very rich. He says he's worth eight figures and that before the decade is over he could be worth nine. But he remains ghetto, like his office, and that's a big reason for his successes and his failures.

Gotti, 29, has a round face and a healthy belly. He can almost always be found in a plain T-shirt, baggy jeans and basic sneakers: no earring, no necklace, no ice, completely non-bling. "I just wanna come across as a normal guy," he says. He can be thuggish just as easily as he can be affable. "He tries to appear to be hard and mean and gully," Ashanti says, "but between you and me, Irv is a big teddy bear." Everyone around Gotti speaks of his remarkable ability to work with recording artists, people who are often emotionally fragile, which stems from his ability to persuade nearly anyone to believe anything. "If he tells me somethin', I'm gonna believe him over my own judgment," says Charli Baltimore, who appeared on Ja Rule's hit "Down Ass Bitch" and recently became a Murder Inc. artist. "That's how much I trust him. If Gotti says it's cool, I don't care what I think."

Gotti was born Irv Lorenzo, the youngest of eight children, in Hollis, Queens, just ten blocks from where Russell Simmons and his brother Run grew up. When Irv was twelve, his brothers and sisters bought him DJ equipment, and in a few years DJ Irv was one of the hottest DJs in Queens. Then, selling mix tapes to local drug dealers turned into hustling with them out of state. "I got lured into the bullshit," he says. "I don't recommend it." But traveling exposed him to music that wasn't being played at home: "It opened my mind up musically so much."

Back in New York, Irv quit hustling, determined to make it in music. In 1993, he met rapper Mic Geronimo at a talent show, recorded a song with him and got it onto New York radio station Hot 97. TVT Records promptly gave him a job as an A&R man. One day he was asked to DJ a four-week tour of England for a new rapper named Jaz-O. An unsigned MC named Jay-Z went with them, and Irv soon became Jay's DJ. "We did the chitlin circuit," said Damon Dash, the co-CEO of Roc-A-Fella Records, "and we just would talk on every plane, all the time, about how to win in the music business." One day Jay called him Gotti, and the name stuck. "He aspired to be a boss," Dash said.

When Gotti interviewed for an A&R job at Def Jam, Cohen asked, "Where do you want to be in five years?" Gotti told him, "I wanna become you and then destroy you and everyone like you because you can't know hip-hop better than me." Most potential bosses would have called security. Gotti got the job. "I needed a person that had no fear," Cohen says.

As an A&R man, Gotti consistently impressed Cohen with his ears and his ideas; his brazen disdain for company rules was less impressive. "I didn't fuck with nobody," Gotti says. "My bosses -- when I first got hired, I totally disregarded them." When meetings were called, he blew them off. He was nicknamed Snotty Gotti. "There was a movement to get rid of him," Cohen remembers, "because he was a nonpolitical beast who did not accept normal office protocols." Def Jam's Liles compares the Gotti of that time to Kobe Bryant or Allen Iverson -- talented players who have trouble working within a team concept. Gotti concurs: "I was a big asshole." But his talent for finding and developing artists led Cohen to give Gotti special privileges. "I allowed him more latitude and autonomy because I needed a playmaker," says Cohen. Dre and Snoop had shifted hip-hop's center to the West Coast, and Def Jam's glory days -- when the label made stars out of LL Cool J and Public Enemy -- were fading. "I was stagnant," says Cohen, "and I needed someone creating for himself even though it meant internal meshugas [Yiddish for craziness]." The nine-times-platinum success of DMX, a Gotti signing, helped restore Def Jam's fortunes and confirm Cohen's faith in Gotti.

Gotti continues to have an utter disregard for record-company politics. Talking about his remix of Lopez's "Ain't It Funny" in a recent J. Lo cover story in Elle, he said the song was indeed about Puff Daddy (the siren had said it was not) and told the full story of first playing the song for Puff, when he said, "Puff, come listen to the new record I did with your old bitch." His comments set the gossip pages on fire.

When this subject came up recently, Gotti took my tape recorder in hand and put it up to his mouth as if this would transmit the message more directly. "I wanna apologize to J. Lo in the deepest sense," he said. "I truly apologize for the Elle magazine comments. I called her a bitch. This is J. Lo, and I'm referring to her as a bitch! That's harsh. I killed her. I shouldn'ta killed her. She didn't deserve that. I was high when I did the interview."

Gotti recalled that once upon a time, Lopez had believed in him so much that she said the word nigga on "I'm Real (Murder Remix)" at his urging. Though the word is a hip-hop commonplace, J. Lo's use of it caused a minor controversy. "That took a lot of trust that this was what needed to be said in this record," he said. "She had total belief." He pointed out that "I'm Real" helped her career immensely. "The street didn't care about her before she got with the Inc.," he said. "They just hit the mute button and looked at that ass. She was a beautiful chick makin' wack records. Then a beautiful chick makin' hot records." But now she's not talking to him, and it's clearly bothering him. "After Elle magazine, J. Lo ain't speakin' to me, she ain't returnin' no pages -- and she was actually a friend. I got word back that I really hurt her. She loved me as a friend and I really hurt her. It wasn't dishonest. I'm just not interview-savvy. I say what's real."

It's friday night, long past midnight, and Gotti's at the Crackhouse, his recording studio in downtown Manhattan's SoHo. The main room is a wide-open space with stacked keyboards, computers, wires, speakers, monitors and couches -- a plush scientist's lab with a grainy, blown-up picture on the wall of the scientist and six friends bookending J. Lo. The beat from a 1988 EPMD song, "You're a Customer," plays over and again as Gotti and one of his co-producers, Chink Santana, study the beat, looking for just the right way to flip it as they work toward a beat for Toni Braxton.

Generally, Gotti comes up with an idea for a song, a sample or a feel or a concept, and his producers make the song come to life. Most of Gotti's concepts are based around uniting the genders. "You meet a chick in a club, and you're like, 'Let's go to my place,' " he says. "She says, 'Cool.' When you get the chick in your car, what are you gonna play musically to keep the mood and the vibe going? If you play Murder Inc. records, you're gonna win." Thus, most of his big records -- "Always on Time," "Foolish," "Down Ass Bitch" and the current hit "Down 4 U" -- are about intense female loyalty, because men enjoy hearing women professing loyalty toward them, and women enjoy finding love so deep it inspires such loyalty. "You gotta make chick records," he says. "He who has the chicks ridin' with him is gonna win all day. I think Murder Inc.'s biggest accomplishment is, we've made hit records that niggas ain't mad at and women love. Puff's whinin' on 'I Need a Girl.' It's workin' for him, but he's whining. We don't whine."

Often Gotti will feed a story line to an artist, who will write it into a song. "Foolish," he says, is about him and his wife, Debbie Lorenzo. He's been with her for more than a decade. They have two children together and a third, born to Debbie, whom they raise together. But things between them are difficult now. "I'm a bastard," he says, "but she loves me and she stays."

Do you cheat on your wife?

"I can't stop," he says. "It breaks her heart. But she loves me and she can't leave. If she can put up with the bullshit and stick around, hopefully I'll grow old and die with her. But there will be none after her. I will never remarry. Even if Halle Berry sucked my dick."

Once the artist's section is finished, Gotti personally mixes the record, and it's complete. If you're not a good friend, like Jay-Z or Fat Joe, a Gotti song will cost you $250,000.

Gotti had a five-year string of platinum successes with DMX (It's Dark and Hell Is Hot and . . . And Then There Was X), Ja Rule (Venni, Vetti, Vecciand Rule 3:36), Foxy Brown ("Hot Spot") and Jay-Z ("Can I Get a . . .") in which he was responsible or partly responsible for 19 million records being sold, but he saw just $60,000 a year. In 1997 he was given a joint venture that he named Murder Inc., after the infamous Mafia contract killers from the Thirties. Now, when someone such as Ashanti sells, say, 2 million records, thus generating about $20 million for the record company, he gets half of what's left after paying off recording, marketing, distribution and other costs. Maybe $5.5 million. And his bank account will soon fatten. He's producing some tracks for Mariah Carey's next album ("She's a diva," he says, "and I hate divas. I told Ashanti, 'If you ever get a little dog . . .' "). He is in meetings about doing Michael Jackson's next album. "I was at the Neverlands [Jackson's ranch]," he says. "Giraffes and elephants was walkin' by like cats and dogs." Of course, the life of a ridiculously hot, rightfully cocky young black record producer wouldn't be complete without an album by himself. Gotti has plans to release his in 2004. "I wanna think of a word that sums up heaven and hell, 'cause I think that's my life. I'm an angel and a devil at the same fuckin' time. So a word that encompasses both is gonna be the name of my album."

But in the meantime, there are still battles to be fought inside Def Jam. The thing is, not everyone agrees Gotti is the hottest executive in the company. Damon Dash laughed loudly when a reporter suggested Gotti was. "I'm the hottest nigga in the building," said Dash, who recently released Cam'ron's red-hot "Oh Boy." "He took that hip-pop shit to another level, to a mainstream level. Like, rappers singing and shit. He did a good job with that. But, yeah, I'm the hottest nigga in the building."

Not five minutes later, Gotti was in a small studio just outside the Murder Inc. office when the phone rang. "You're pretty hot with Cam'ron," Gotti said placatingly. "Yeah. . . . You'll reiterate that you are the hottest nigga in the building. . . ." He was fighting to get a word in edgewise, as if squabbling with a brother. "I don't give a fuck. . . . I just want the cash. . . . You don't think I could sell 10 million-plus each year?! . . . All right . . . I told Lyor . . . All right, Dame . . . You the hottest nigga in the building." He hung up. "Dame called to tell me he's the hottest nigga in the building." He paused. "He's not the hottest. I am the hottest nigga in the building."