The Kingston Kid

Around this time, little Sean chanced upon hip-hop producer Lil John outside a Miami nightclub. "He saw Lil Jon and walked right up to him and gave him his demo, all excited," Turner recalls during an interview at her new Sunrise home. "Lil Jon shook his hand and said he'd listen to it. Then, when Kisean turned his back, he threw it right on the ground. He thought it was funny. But Kisean saw him.... He came home so upset, like, 'Ma, I'm gon' be better than Lil Jon one day.'

Kingston was honing his skills, but few people were paying him much attention. He probably seemed like a big kid with big talk. And then, one day in 2005, MySpace changed everything.

Kingston posted his first songs there when he was 14. He e-mailed every producer he could find online — Dr. Dre, Swizz Beatz, Polow Da Don — begging them to listen. None replied. Then he hit up Jonathan J.R. Rotem. In Los Angeles, the South African-born Rotem is known as a superproducer who's worked with A-list artists such as Rihanna, 50 Cent, and even Britney Spears, with whom he was briefly rumored to be romantically involved.

"I basically hit him up eight times a day for, like, three weeks and was like, 'Listen to my music, listen to my music,'" Kingston recalls. "I wasn't taking no for an answer....

"When J.R. finally listened to my music, he was ready to work. He gave me his number. I called him, we chopped it up, and he flew me out to L.A."

Rotem remembers it a bit differently. "I don't actually manage my own MySpace," he says by phone from California. "It was actually my younger brother Tommy that was doing it. Tommy was the one going back and forth working with him and sending him tracks and giving him a chance to show what he's got. I'm in the studio working with the who's who of the music industry. I don't have time to do MySpace. It takes a lot for someone to be able to make me shift my focus from working with established artists to helping a developing artist ... but Sean had it."

At the time, Rotem was launching his Beluga Heights label and seeking artists to sign. "We weren't looking for anything specific," he says. "It just needed to be something that was very, very different. In Sean's case, he was young, had amazing presence, there was a Jamaican influence ... he was just the essence of raw talent."

Rotem's success depends in part on his being a tastemaker, someone who can anticipate or even create trends. Pop music with Caribbean flair is all over the charts right now, thanks to the success of Kingston, Rihanna, Kat De Luna, and others, but its appeal wasn't as obvious three years ago, when producers like Rotem bet on it.

Kingston thought he was on the verge of hip-hop stardom. "He was concentrating more on rapping when we first met him," Rotem says, "but he was also singing his own hooks. We didn't just want a rapper that could spit 16 bars but someone who could write his own hooks, had melodic sensibility, crossover appeal, and with the Jamaican vibe. We knew Sean was the one."

Kingston was 15 years old. He got on a plane to L.A. Just a few months before, he'd been briefly homeless, sleeping in cars or on any couch he could find among friends in Miami, unsure where his next meal would come from. Federal agents had kept Turner under surveillance for some time, culminating in her arrest. Kingston's sister Kanema Morris was charged for conspiracy in connection with her mother's crimes. Kingston was too young to have had full knowledge of his mother's criminal activities, Turner says, but it was still a pivotal time for him.

Turner spent two and a half years in a low-security federal prison in Tallahassee, having been sent away just before Kingston's 15th birthday. "We lost everything," she says. "We lost our home, my cars, businesses ... the federal government took everything. Sean went to stay with family members, but he was so unruly that he left and went off on his own."

It was hard, Kingston says. "I was angry at the whole situation, and it was just a crazy time.... On one hand, it made me more focused, but it also felt like everything was falling apart."

Meanwhile, Kingston's sister Kanema, who was originally sentenced to probation, was cited for failing to answer her phone while she was under court-ordered monitoring and was jailed for four months in a low-security federal prison in Tallahassee.

By the time Rotem's organization was e-mailing him beats to work with, Kingston knew this was his chance to save his family, maybe the only one he'd get. He already had an older brother, Kurt Morris, on the West Coast, taking classes in Los Angeles. Relocating there made sense. And there was Rotem, who became a mentor.