“I laid the record the beginning of November,” Ross said of his bubbling “Hustlin’.” “Two weeks later I went to [DJ] Khaled. Khaled went hard with it, and a month later the bidding war was on.”

Ross said it didn’t take Jay-Z too long to come up with the right offer.

“I sat down with a lot of people and ultimately [Def Jam] came with the best situation,” the husky, gravely voiced MC explained. “I feel comfortable with their system. It’s obvious they know what they’re doing. We wanna win big. They wanna win big. So we knocked it out.

“It was love,” he added about his meeting with Jay. “I can’t even front. We sat down, chopped it up. He knew what time it was. He knew what I needed, I knew what they needed. It was easy.”

Ross said his Def Jam debut LP, Career Criminal, is coming this summer with a guest appearance from Jay.

Double R has been making records on the Miami underground for years and hustling in the streets even longer than that while waiting for his big shot, which has finally come. “I kept it gangsta and I hit my number,” he said. “I made it out [of the ‘hood] alive. I didn’t get indicted, so I won. A n—a is focusing on the future.”