Ask most casual hip-hop fans about Ruff Ryders Entertainment, and they’ll probably tell you that it’s the “House that DMX Built”.

But there likely wouldn’t have been the Earl “DMX” Simmons we know and love – a multi-platinum multi-hyphenate – without Joaquin “Waah” Dean, who founded Ruff Ryders in the late 1980s along with his sister Chivon Dean and brother Darrin “Dee” Dean.