The mystery gunman who pumped the nine bullets into 50 Cent that helped make him a rap superstar was a Brooklyn stick-up artist named Darryl "Hommo" Baum, a new book reveals.

New York magazine music editor Ethan Brown's "Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip-Hop Hustler" (AnchorBooks) reports that Baum — whose nickname was short for "Homicide" — was himself fatally gunned down three weeks after he shot 50 in June 2000. While 50 has implied in interviews that his assailant was killed in retaliation for shooting him, Brown reports that Baum, 34, was actually offed because one of his street thug pals had killed a member of Brooklyn's notorious Cash Money Brothers crew.

50 may have cheered the news of Baum's violent demise, but Mike Tyson, a close friend of Baum, was so despondent that he stopped training for his fight against Lou Savarese. Baum's death proved not to be too much of a distraction: Tyson scored a knockout after 12 seconds of the first round.

Among the other highlights of Brown's look at the connection between hip-hop and the criminal underbelly: Jam Master Jay — the legendary Run DMC deejay who was fatally shot in the head in a Queens recording studio in 2002 — turned to dealing drugs when he fell on hard times. "By the mid-'90s, Jay had become so desperate that he began running small amounts of cocaine — two or three kilos at a time — down Interstate 95 from New York to Baltimore to one of the city's most well-connected distributors, according to a source who worked closely with the distributor in Baltimore," Brown writes.

* In his first public statement about the federal investigation into Irv Gotti's Murder Inc. hip-hop empire, Russell Simmons refuses to support his former friend, imprisoned Queens crack kingpin Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff, whose ties to Murder Inc. are at the center of the probe.

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