Lord Infamous, a founding member of Three 6 Mafia, died on Friday evening. He was 40. The artist, whose birth name was Ricky Dunigan, passed away during a visit at his mother’s house in Memphis.
“He passed away in his sleep from a heart attack,” his half-brother, Three 6 Mafia’s DJ Paul, told The Hollywood Reporter by phone. “He said he was tired, he wanted to sleep. He sat down at the kitchen table, put his head in his arms to lay down…to get some sleep.”
His mother had left the house for several hours, and when she returned she found the rapper dead at the table. Paul learned the news after calls Saturday morning from the rapper’s mother and girlfriend.
“He’ll be remembered as a legend, everybody knew him as a legend, an icon,” Paul told THR. “This year was going to make our twenty-fourth year rapping together. His music, our music that we made together, was truly before its time.”
Three 6 Mafia recorded albums such as Mystic Stylez (1995) and When the Smoke Clears: Sixty 6, Sixty 1 (2000). In 2006, DJ Paul, along with Juicy J (Jordan Houston), won an Oscar for best original song for the Hustle & Flow soundtrack title “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp.”
The original members of the group reformed for a reunion project, Da Mafia 6ix, that resulted in the album 6ix Commandments. The group was getting ready for a show next week outside Memphis. “He got a chance to see the group back together like he wanted to and be back in the studio with everybody and be back making music like he always liked to do,” Paul recounted.
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