Hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons got caught up in the fast life of crime years before he founded Def Jam and became embroiled in scandal, RadarOnline.com can report. The record executive admitted that during his teenage years, he nearly killed a man who had ripped him off two weeks earlier. For Simmons, that memory still lived on and he wrote about the shocking incident in the pages of his 2001 autobiography, Life and Def: Sex, Drugs, Money and God. “Everything slowed down for me,” he wrote in his book. “I held up my .45, aimed at Red’s back and fired. But my bullet sailed over his head, and the …