Seventeen years ago, The Notorious B.I.G. sent Hip Hop into a frenzy (if that is even the right word) with the release of his debut album Ready To Die. The project boasted smash singles, a strong sense of lyricism, but it ultimately told the story of a young kid from Brooklyn who had just as much paranoia as he did talent. Still, one of the more endearing traits of the LP was the cover. With such an aggressive title, the cover was merely a chubby cheeked baby sitting down in diapoers. Maybe it was a play on a double meaning, but when most think of RTD, the cover often comes to mind.

What may not know is the the toddler on the cover is not a young Biggie. Instead, it is 18-year-old Keithroy Yearwood. And given the fact B.I.G.’s album went on to sell over three million copies, you’d think his bank account would be (or at least would have been) be padded. It’s not. He or his family are not broke, but they only received $150 from the modeling gig back in 1994. Financial gain is the last thing Yearwood is after however.

“I just want people to know that’s me,” Yearwood said. “The truth is finally coming out.”

Fans, who observed the 14th anniversary of the rapper’s death on March 9, have wanted to know the truth for years. Many speculated it was an early photo of B.I.G. (his real name was Christopher Wallace) or one of his kids. Others thought it might be one of Diddy’s kids.

No one was sure – not even the graphic designer of the album, Cey Adams. “That ended up being one of the most-asked questions of all-time,” said Adams, who thought the baby was the son of a hairstylist that worked at the record label.

Butch Belair, who took the famous photo, also thought the baby was related to someone close to the project. “It was a friend of someone’s friends’ kid who had this cool Afro,” the photographer said. “The Afro was as big as he was.”

When RapRadar.com, a popular hip hop website, asked Combs about it last year, he said, “That was a baby we just found ….We did a little casting for somebody that looked like Big.”

Diddy’s record company couldn’t confirm that Yearwood is the cover star saying, “files from then would be hard to find.” They did confirm the baby came from an agency.

Yearwood’s mom Delcenia Burns, 43, took out stacks of baby pictures of her son at their Sussex County, N.J., home to show he’s one and the same – and dug up papers from the child modeling agency Chicky’s Kids to support her son’s claim. The agency, now closed, sent her and her then-infant camera ham to the casting, she told The News.

Burns said it was tough to get her son gigs because of his full head of hair. Some potential jobs even wanted to pose him as a girl, his mom recalled.

This time, the Afro worked in his favor. “We got a call from the agency saying he got the job,” Burns said. “We still didn’t know how big this was going to be.”

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