As a child, John Forté was a violin prodigy from a bad part of Brooklyn who earned a scholarship to an exclusive private high school in the Northeast. His life took him from working as an A&R executive at an indie label to out-of-nowhere commercial success with the Fugees and then to disappointment as a solo artist.
Then he was nabbed in a sting as he helped facilitate the transport of $1.4 million worth of liquid cocaine. He was 26 when he was convicted and sent to federal prison for 14 years.
On Monday, Forté was found dead in his home in Chilmark, Mass., on Martha’s Vineyard, the Associated Press reported. A neighbor found him unresponsive in his kitchen a little before 2:30 p.m. and called authorities, according to the MV Times. He was 50.
He was also the recipient of a rare commutation from President George W. Bush, who in 2008 cut off Forté’s sentence after seven years and sent him home to resume his musical career and create the family he had longed for at 23.
The Chilmark police chief, Sean Slavin, told various outlets that there was no “readily apparent cause of death” but also no evidence of foul play. Forté’s death is being investigated by the state medical examiner’s office in Massachusetts, per the Vineyard Gazette.
“This one hurts,” Fugees founding member Wyclef Jean wrote Tuesday on social media with a video of himself and Forté performing an acoustic set. “my brother @john_Forté has joined the Angels legends never Die look at the smile R I P my Refugee brother.”
Born Jan. 30, 1975, in the Brownsville part of Brooklyn, Forté didn’t have a posh upbringing, saying in a May 1998 interview (posted on YouTube in 2016 by the Interview Channel) that his neighborhood had been “declared a war zone” by the NYPD. He reminisced about his mother buying him only generic “plastic” sneakers, then shared some of the discomfort he experienced when he moved into the nicer Brooklyn Heights neighborhood after he had some musical success.
“It’s crazy, when you tell them you went to a good school,” he said, “and they think you meant reform school.”
But Forté was actually “an inquisitive 8-year-old who played the violin in a youth orchestra and even had a recital at the vaunted Brooklyn Academy of Music,” according to GQ. He picked up whatever was playing on the radio at home — jazz, soul, random songs — then decided that rap was his “lifeline” to another world.
Forté also earned a scholarship to the Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire. Ben Taylor, the son of Carly Simon and James Taylor, also attended the private high school, but Ben Taylor and Forté didn’t meet until years later. They all became fast friends when they did meet, and the “You’re So Vain” singer would play a critical role when Forté’s life went sideways.
At 16, he found himself in a studio watching and learning from Gang Starr, with the rapper Guru and producer DJ Premier, as they created their music. Forté earned mention in the liner notes of Gang Starr’s album. “I was like, ‘Oh man, Keith [Elam, a.k.a. Guru] remembered me,” he told GQ. “That gave me the tools that I needed to not just rap, but to also make music.”
After Exeter, he studied the music business at New York University, according to the New York Times, and roomed with rapper Talib Kweli.
Forté connected with the Refugee Camp All Stars in 1993, when he was 18, through mutual friends he knew from working as an A&R executive for indie rap label Rawkus Records. He met Lauryn Hill first — they dated briefly, he said in the 1998 interview — then Wyclef Jean and Pras Michel.
“I submitted beats, we did ‘The Score.’ I was part of the nominations when it came down to the Grammys,” Forté said. “It made me feel really proud to be part of an organization that in fact was a family.”
“The Score” went to No. 1 around the world and has sold around 22 million copies. It was the Fugees’ second and final album.
John Forté performs at a criminal justice reform fundraiser in Washington, D.C., in May 2018.
(Paul Morigi / Associated Press)
After working with the Refugee Camp All Stars and the Fugees, Forté released a solo album in 1998. The record landed like “a brick,” selling only 80,000 copies, he told old friend Kweli on “The People’s Party” in 2021. For Forté, it was maybe the first disappointment in his life, he said.
“Partially abandoning the easily embraceable sound he incorporated on recordings with the Fugees and Wyclef Jean, Forté includes some tracks with morbid story lines on his debut album,” The Times said of “Poly Sci” in 1998. “When creating potential pop tunes, Forté excels with light-hearted subject matter and instrumentation. However, when the Brooklyn native shifts to gritty themes and backdrops, his appeal diminishes rapidly. Fortunately, his softer selections redeem this album.”
After the record failed, Forté told Kweli, “Instead of looking in the mirror and self-examining — what can we do to right this ship? — I didn’t look in the mirror. I didn’t look in the mirror at all.” He said he decided that those around him had failed him, when in fact he had “made that album in a vacuum,” without asking for input from people whose opinions might have helped him.
He expressed his frustrations to his label, Ruffhouse Records, which responded by dropping him.
So Forté figured he could do it on his own, which led to him meeting a man in a club who had “an operation” and said he could jump-start the musician’s recording career. That led to him “becoming a middle man, connecting him to couriers to transport whatever needed transporting.” The man wanted him to find women to carry drugs into the United States.
“With only having my hubris as my guide, what I allowed myself to receive — it didn’t result in the healthiest choices,” he told GQ.
“That house of cards fell,” Forté told Kweli. “It wasn’t me signing up to that, to all of a sudden change professions. … I was compartmentalizing and justifying it, because I was [also] going into the studio.” He had decided the risks were acceptable.
Then one day he did something that he, as a middleman, had never done before, he said: He went to Newark International Airport to pick up two of the couriers. What he didn’t know was the women had been busted at an airport in Houston the day before and were now cooperating with the federal government. He was driving into a sting.
“When they picked me up, they just bagged me. Everything, time stood still that day,” he told Kweli, choking up slightly. “And then everything changed.”
A second album, “I, John,” followed in 2002, with Carly Simon singing on one duet. But by that time, Forté was imprisoned on a 14-year federal sentence — “168 months,” he said — after being convicted of aiding and abetting possession with intent to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine.
Forté told the court he thought he was picking up money in the suitcases, not $1.4 million worth of liquid cocaine, according to documents reviewed in 2008 by ABC News. The sentence fell on the low end of controversial mandatory federal sentencing guidelines.
Simon, his buddy Ben’s mom who posted bail for him, was among the high-profile people who pushed for Forté’s early release, telling ABC News upon his commutation that the 2001 sentence was too harsh for a first-time drug offense. Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah also pushed for Forté’s release from a low-security federal prison in Pennsylvania.
“He’s an extraordinary young man. And he was the first time I met him. He’s even more so now,” Simon told ABC News on Nov. 25, 2008, a day after then-President George W. Bush commuted Forté’s sentence.
Forté spent the first part of his sentence in the law library, trying to figure a legal trick to get out. He also learned to play acoustic guitar with the help of another inmate.
“There’s the realization aspect that some prisons are not physical,” he told the Vineyard Gazette, which would become his local paper, in 2010. “There are many people whom I’ve encountered since returning, some of them feign indifference and others act as if they could have no clue about what it would be like to be in prison, but they’re in an abusive relationship or they’re in a dead-end job or they are suffering with their health. We all have to go through some sort of prison — some are spiritual, some are mental and some are physical.”
After his commutation, Forté went back to New York and resumed his musical career, often playing acoustic guitar. He recorded a cover of Kanye “Ye” West’s “Homecoming” with Kweli and began teaching. In 2009 he released “StyleFree, the EP,” and saw the single “Play My Cards for Me” appear in the 2010 movie “Just Wright,” starring Queen Latifah and Common. The song “Nervous” was used in the 2010 movie “Stomp the Yard 2: Homecoming.”
By 2012, he had written and recorded “Something to Lean On,” which became the inaugural rap theme song for the Brooklyn Nets when the NBA franchise moved from New Jersey to New York and changed its name.
He also appeared in the 2012 movie “The Russian Winter,” about his journey from Brooklyn to Exeter to prison and a trip he took to Russia after his release.
Forté found his way to Martha’s Vineyard by way of some old friends: Simon and Taylor. “After I came home [from prison] and got back on my feet, even though I was living in New York, I would come up to the Vineyard whenever I could. It still had that gravity. And you know, Carly and Ben. They’re family,” he told Martha’s Vineyard Arts and Ideas in 2025.
After moving to the island in 2015, he met Lara Fuller, a freelance photographer who two years later would become his wife and then the mother of his children, son Haile and daughter Wren. The two tied the knot on Martha’s Vineyard, People said.
“I’m 23 but I have baby fever,” he’d said in that video interview from 1998. “I really want to be a dad, you know, I want my little kids in the studio with me, talking about, ‘My dad is cool.’ … I’m serious, man, it would be really nice to have a nice woman and a nice family that you go home to. … But I don’t want to rush things. I’m young and I’m single.”
Forté released his final album, “Vessels, Angels & Ancestors,” in 2021.
He also scored the 2024 documentary “Paint Me a Road Out of Here,” about women imprisoned at New York’s Rikers Island and the 50-year journey of a painting from the jail to the Brooklyn Museum, as well as HBO’s revival of “Eyes on the Prize,” a six-part series about the Black experience in America since the civil rights movement.
As of last year, Forté was still in touch with the Fugees and was performing live, balancing those efforts with his movie soundtrack and scoring work, which also included contributions to “The Other Guys” and “Star Trek: Discovery.” And he said another documentary about his life was in the works. Petter Ringbom and Marquise Stillwell are listed on IMDb Pro as directors of “Settling the Score,” which is in production.
John Forte, center, performs at a lounge during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, in January 2010.
(Katy Winn / AP Images for Gibson Guitar)
“What I found myself doing most recently is honestly just feeling empowered,” Forté told Martha’s Vineyard Arts and Ideas. “I’ve released a bunch of music over the years. But I’ve only officially released four albums. In between I did a bunch of singles and collaborations. In the past, if I wanted to do an album, it was like a public private partnership with the label — ‘Hey, I’m looking for a partner to help me land this plane.’
“Now I’m always writing songs. But there is a moment for me in my process where the songs that I’m working on are clearly connected. ‘Oh, I think I think I’m actually in the middle of an album here.’ … [Y]ou know I’m doing two movies at the moment. And I’m also working on [Texas-based musician] Peter More’s new EP, which we’re finishing up, which is beautiful.”
Family friends told the MV Times that Forté had a seizure last year that required hospitalization and had been taking medicine since then to prevent a grand mal seizure.
Forté is survived by his wife, his 8-year-old daughter and his 5-year-old son. A GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the children had raised more than $66,000 of its $90,000 goal as of Wednesday afternoon.