Barry Michael Cooper, a journalist who was one of the first to explore the crack epidemic of the 1980s, died on Jan. 21 in Baltimore. He was 66. His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son, Matthew Cooper, who did not cite a cause.
As a screenwriter, Mr. Cooper was perhaps best known for the three films often called his Harlem Trilogy. The first, “New Jack City” (1991), about a ruthless uptown drug lord (Wesley Snipes), presaged a wave of films from Black directors and screenwriters that touched on gang life in the 1990s.
The trilogy also included “Sugar Hill” (1994), another drug-hustling drama starring Mr. Snipes, and “Above the Rim” (1994), a basketball drama starring Tupac Shakur as a dealer, which Mr. Cooper wrote with Benny Medina and the film’s director, Jeff Pollack.
Mr. Cooper blended a rich literary sensibility with a deep knowledge of the language and status symbols of the ghetto. “He was very aware of everything from Hemingway to Dostoyevsky,” said Nelson George, a critic, author, and filmmaker who worked with Mr. Cooper at The Village Voice. “At the same time, he was very, very connected to the slang of the streets.”
Mr. Cooper captured the glitter as well as the bloodshed of a new generation of 1980s and ’90s hustlers who flashed thick gold ropes and hockey-puck-sized rolls of cash while upending communities in pursuit of overnight fortune.
In 1986, he published an early in-depth examination of the crack boom for Spin, the music and culture magazine. “Sinewy arms folded across their chests laden with gold medallions,” he wrote in the article, “a silent roar creasing their lips in the guise of a sneer, the young lions usher their prey in and out of video parlors and misty hallways.”
A year later, he won the award for best magazine feature from the National Association of Black Journalists for his Spin article “In Cold Blood: The Baltimore Teen Murders” about the eruption of gun violence among teenagers.
His 1987 Village Voice cover article “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young” chronicled the exploding drug trade in Detroit, including the young street-level dealers who “were making like $2,000 a day,” Mr. Cooper said in a 1991 interview with Terry Gross of the NPR program “Fresh Air.”
These were new examples of the privileged underclass, so to speak, the ones who carried beepers and cellular phones, and drove Jeeps and went out to the malls in Michigan and spent $10,000 at Gucci’s and Fendi’s. I had never seen that before.
Mr. Cooper was hired to retool a script by the screenwriter Thomas Lee Wright based on the story of Nicky Barnes, the heroin lord of Harlem in the 1960s and ’70s. He updated it for the crack era, focusing on a fictional kingpin, Nino Brown, in what became “New Jack City.” Directed by Mario Van Peebles, the film featured breakout performances by Chris Rock and the rapper-turned-actor Ice-T. It eventually earned nearly $50 million and was released at a pivotal time.
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