Editor’s Note—After being found not guilty of murder and attempted murder charges last July, Drakeo the Ruler is once again on trial for his life. In August 2019, the South Central rapper was charged with criminal gang conspiracy and shooting from a motor vehicle. He’s facing 25 years to life in prison. To get an in-depth view of his case and how his lyrics have been used against him in court, Genius has teamed up with reporter Jeff Weiss—who has covered Drakeo for years.
Men’s Central Jail is no longer supposed to exist. About two years ago, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted to demolish the radioactive cinder block Alcatraz that lurks only a few blocks north of the $4,000-a-month lofts that lord over downtown L.A. Upon signing its death warrant, one supervisor described it as “inconsistent with human values and basic decency. It puts both our inmates and our sheriff’s deputies at risk.” Imagine an insane asylum abandoned and condemned to rot in the woods for a half-century, only to be purchased and redeveloped for a subdivision of Hell. Except in this case, Hell is eternally cold.
The plan was to raze the nearly 60-year-old crypt and replace it with a $2.2 billion “Consolidated Correctional Treatment Facility” that would provide care for physically and mentally ill inmates, who reportedly make up 70 percent of the county’s prisoners. But last summer, after spending millions developing a replacement, the supervisors abruptly shredded the contract after pressure from both community activists and the Sheriff’s Department. In the interim, the roughly 4,000 inmates in MCJ exist in sadistic perdition, trapped in what everyone can agree is a squalid dungeon, but no one in power cares enough to take immediate action to remedy the horrors.
Drakeo the Ruler is no longer supposed to be in the jail that no longer should exist. About eight months ago, 12 jurors found the South Central rapper not guilty of a litany of charges that included first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Over the course of the trial held in the Compton Courthouse, prosecutors repeatedly used his own lyrics and videos against him, using racist Reagan-era laws to brand his rap group, The Stinc Team, as a gang.
If this were any other city, any other district attorney, any other defendant, the Cold Devil would likely be a free man by now, speeding down the 105 in a $105,000 luxury coupe, returning to his rightful spot as L.A.’s most original stylist since Snoop. Instead, he continues to fight for his life from the depths of solitary confinement. He’s being held without the option of cash bail—something that somehow still exists despite 2018 legislation signed to ban it.
Jury selection was supposed to begin last Monday, but the Coronavirus forced its postponement. The tentative start date is now late April, but the likelihood of it actually happening then seems increasingly remote. In the wake of the public health crisis, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has reduced its inmate population by 6 percent to prevent a cataclysmic outbreak in its jails. Accordingly, Drakeo’s team petitioned for bail in a special emergency session held last Friday at the Compton Courthouse. With the court reporter frantically typing in a surgical mask, the judge proclaimed that bail was not an option unless Drakeo consented to be sentenced on his lone conviction from last summer’s trial—a minor gun possession charge pertaining to a separate non-violent incident that occurred a full year after the murder in question.
In response to Drakeo’s request, the state unleashed a nakedly racist demonization that made him seem somewhere between Big Meech and Tony Montana. The judge, a former prosecutor herself, showed no mercy, using a juvenile strike against Drakeo (for stealing a bottle of liquor from a Ralph’s supermarket) to threaten him with the maximum six-year sentence. All this for getting caught with a .38 in a smoke shop. Drakeo’s team moved for a continuance of the sentencing until after the retrial. The court session concluded with the judge circling tweets for Drakeo to delete and strengthening the gag order already imposed upon him. Forget giving any more interviews, as of last Friday, he’s no longer even allowed to tweet “Free Drakeo.”
This is not an easy story to explain, which is exactly what the state wants. Drakeo’s last trial featured three co-defendants: himself, his younger brother Devante Caldwell (who raps as Ralfy the Plug), and Stinc Team member Mikell “Kellz” Buchanan. Ostensibly a murder trial, it was really an organized plot to tar black youth and hip-hop culture as inherently criminal, and in the process, vanquish a rap crew forever. Mixed in with the murder charges were allegations of credit card fraud, petty burglary, and gun possession. There were also multiple other attempted killings that the district attorney attempted to pin on Buchanan, one of which was dropped a month into the trial when Buchanan’s attorney revealed that he’d been in state custody at the time of the shooting in question. This revelation reduced one juror, a middle-aged black man, to tears. Soon after, he nicknamed the lead detective on the case “Fuhrman,” prompting his immediate dismissal.
The details of the last trial are so byzantine and inscrutable that it would take hours to begin to properly unpack them. A spiral of tragedies started on the night of Dec. 10, 2016, when a 24-year-old Inglewood Blood named Davion “Red Bull” Gregory was murdered while walking into a “Naughty or Nice Pajama Jam” at a Carson warehouse. The shooting was allegedly committed by Buchanan (a member of the Rollin’ 100s Crips) and Jaiden “AB” Boyd, a 17-year-old hanger-on and member of the Rollin’ 40s Crips who barely knew Drakeo and had only been recently brought around by peripheral members of Drakeo’s Stinc Team.
No one questions the events that transpired earlier that evening. A dozen crew members were hanging out at Drakeo’s apartment near the airport when someone saw the Pajama Jam party flyer on Instagram and convinced everyone to attend. Regular. But things go awry from there. According to the D.A., The Stinc Team only attended the party as part of a conspiracy to shoot RJ, a popular South Central rapper beefing with Drakeo. Yet RJ never actually showed up, nor is there any evidence produced that he ever intended to. Instead, the state claims that Buchanan shot at Gregory from the backseat of Drakeo’s Mercedes GLE. After the first bullets rang out, Boyd allegedly joined in the attack, shooting from a different corner of the parking lot. Gregory was killed and two others were wounded in the gunfire. Everyone at the party fled immediately. The prosecutors argued that since Drakeo led the conspiracy to kill RJ, he was, by default, guilty of all crimes that ensued.
Despite the multiple “Not Guilty” verdicts, the jury hung on two counts pertaining to Drakeo. Both carry 25-to-life sentences. The first is Penal Code Section 26100 ©—shooting from a motor vehicle. If you aren’t familiar with California jurisprudence, it seems absurd that Drakeo would even be tried for this, considering no one ever accused him of being the shooter; nor did the prosecution produce a stitch of evidence indicating that Drakeo wanted the victim dead. In fact, during the last trial, the prosecution’s star witness, Stinc Team member Daveion “Solo” Ervin, insisted that both he and Drakeo had no idea that Buchanan was even armed—let alone that he was about to unleash a clip from the backseat of Drakeo’s parked Mercedes. According to the witness’ testimony, Drakeo ducked down beneath the steering wheel as soon as the shots rang out, afraid that he had come under fire.
But this is California, where the majority of gang legislation was written at the height of the peak homicide years of the ’80s and ’90s, during the Republican administrations of governors George Deukmajian and Pete “Three Strikes” Wilson. To be convicted of Penal Code Section 26100 ©, you merely have to be in the car while someone else is shooting (though it’s contingent on the prosecution to prove that Drakeo knew that the shooter was armed). The car doesn’t even need to be moving for it to be considered a drive-by.
In the last trial, the jurors voted 10-2 in favor of acquittal, which in almost no circumstances would warrant a retrial. But this is Los Angeles during the reign of D.A. Jackie Lacey—whose Death Wish husband greeted Black Lives Matters protesters last week by waving a pistol at them, finger on the trigger, threatening to murder them if they didn’t get off his property. This transpired the day before election day. An LAPD investigation is “moving slowly.”
Drakeo’s second hung jury count centers around a rarely-used piece of fear-mongering legislation that sounds like it was written by a hysterical white supremacist with a deep belief in The Secret. Penal Code Section 182.5 holds that anyone who actively participates in a criminal street gang and “who willfully promotes, furthers, assists or benefits from any felonious criminal conduct by members of that gang” can be found guilty of conspiracy to commit that felony. Allow me to translate the legalese: The D.A. is claiming that The Stinc Team is a gang and therefore Drakeo can be found guilty of murder even if he wasn’t at the scene of the crime or lacked prior knowledge that anything was about to go down. All they need to prove is that Drakeo somehow “benefited” from the crime, which to the state means increased street cred and fame. So yes, if you’re still following the demented logic, the city of Los Angeles is pursuing what is, in essence, a double jeopardy case because Drakeo allegedly got clout from a Crips vs. Bloods gang killing that 12 jurors already absolved him of blame. Your tax dollars at work.
Yet this all somehow only represents a fraction of the district attorney’s office campaign to imprison every member of The Stinc Team. Exploiting steep gang enhancement statutes, they continue to imprison several members (Ketchy the Great, Bambino, Ralfy the Plug) for minor crimes ranging from spray-painting graffiti and toting guns in their music videos to shopping at Neiman Marcus with a stolen credit card (Ralfy’s charge). It’s a hideous test case that reflects the need for national and local criminal justice reform: a vivid illustration of how young black and brown men are systematically persecuted under the guise of antiquated “tough on crime” legal codes. In 1970, there were only eight prisons in California; today, there are 36, staffed by more prison guards than there were total prisoners just a half-century ago.
Maybe you’re thinking that there has to be something more here. Surely, Drakeo did something at some point that would warrant the D.A.’s monomaniacal wrath. But there’s no actual evidence that this amounts to anything more than sheer personal enmity and their seething embarrassment from losing the first case. I’ve spoken to multiple people familiar with the Los Angeles criminal justice system, and all were shocked that the D.A. would refile after Drakeo was acquitted of the murder. What’s more, the two hung jury counts were both weighted in his favor.
If you ask the D.A., they’ll offer tedious sanctimony about how this is all about justice for the victim’s family. But justice has already been dealt: Drakeo’s co-defendant in the first trial, Mikell Buchanan, was convicted of the slaying and will spend most of his remaining life in prison. Meanwhile, the D.A. continues to postpone the trial of the other alleged shooter, Jaiden Boyd, who was a juvenile at the time of the crime. A guilty verdict is inevitable, thanks to an accidental confession procured by a snitch planted in his cell by the dirty cops. Nonetheless, Boyd continues to wait for his day in court, most likely because they’re still pressuring him to turn on Drakeo.
It’s rare that a case so fully crystallizes the dysfunctional core of state-sanctioned malice, racism, and a feckless bureaucracy. Over the last four decades, the L.A. County district attorney’s office and the notoriously corrupt LAPD and Sheriff’s Department have zealously pursued gang injunctions and gang enhancements to criminalize growing up black or brown in South Central, Watts, and Compton. Late last year, an LA Times investigation discovered that the LAPD’s “elite” Metropolitan division stopped African American drivers at a rate more than five times their share of the city’s population. It was described as “stop and frisk’ in a car.” Earlier this year, another major scandal erupted when it was revealed that at least 20 LAPD officers had falsified information to enter innocent non-gang-affiliated citizens into CalGang, the state’s gang database. The California Attorney General has launched an investigation into the matter.
That’s just the beginning. Just last month, the formerly all-powerful county sheriff and semi-professional Skeletor impersonator Lee Baca checked into a federal Texas penitentiary for attempting to obstruct an FBI investigation into the festering county jail system. After an inmate contacted the FBI to report on the excessive force used by sheriff’s deputies, Baca and his goons allegedly hid the inmate and threatened to arrest the FBI agent spearheading the probe. Over a dozen members of the department fell alongside Baca, including his No. 2, Paul Tanaka, allegedly a former member of the Lynwood Vikings, which a federal judge described as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang.”
Dubbed “The Donald Trump of L.A. Law Enforcement,” the new L.A. County sheriff, Alex Villanueva, has been beset by so many scandals that it’s hard to even know where to start. Shortly after Villanueva’s election, he reinstated a crony who had been accused of domestic abuse (a judge later forced Villanueva to fire the deputy). Most recently, his deputies came under fire for sharing photos from the Kobe Bryant helicopter crash. And he’s been engaged in an internecine war with the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, who have frantically attempted to rein in his unrestrained spending and alleged abuses of power. Not to mention a recent lawsuit that alleges that Villanueva is closely protecting another L.A. County sheriff gang called the Banditos. It’s been estimated that 15 to 20 percent of the county sheriffs are active gang members. An FBI investigation is apparently in the works, but no arrests have been made. Maybe the deputies should start rapping.
Two homicide detectives in the Villanueva-run Sheriff’s Department skulk behind the plot to ensnare Drakeo: Francis Hardiman and Richard Biddle. The latter boasts Big Wiggum energy and spent much of his last year launching a criminal probe that targeted the producer of The Hangover—a widely respected criminal justice advocate who dared to attempt to help a juvenile accused of murder. Biddle was the lead investigator in multiple cases involving Suge Knight, including the Tam’s Burger murder that he pled guilty to in 2018. Hardiman looks like Mr. Burns but comes off so curdled and serpentine that he somehow makes Springfield’s most evil billionaire seem like Elon Musk.
About six months before Drakeo’s first trial, Hardiman successfully petitioned the court to confine Drakeo to K-19, a six-cell, ultra-solitary Hades in the basement of Men’s Central Jail. His neighbors were Mexican Mafia capos and cop killers. No visitors allowed. Inside this filthy cage, he was manacled, only allowed a single hour of sunlight a week with severely limited phone privileges. This was his punishment because of a mildly threatening comment that a fan made towards the detective on Drakeo’s Instagram page. Recently, Drakeo won what amounts to a partial victory. The judge ordered him to be switched to the hospital ward of Men’s Central Jail. It’s still technically solitary confinement, but at least he has a slightly bigger cell—one big enough for a shower (even if the water is permanently frigid).
This is where I visited him a few weeks ago, shortly before the judge bound him with a gag order prohibiting public statements on social media and to journalists. This order was at the behest of the district attorney, who was terrified of the case being litigated in the local media, or at least what’s left of it. For the most part, the L.A. County sheriffs who control the jail system and the district attorneys who run roughshod over the law are free to do whatever they please, at least until the FBI starts investigating.
Men’s Central Jail exerts its own doomed gravitational force. The buildings are drab and colorless, ringed by mentally ill homeless people camped out in tents on the sidewalks of concrete arterials. On the corner, a strip of squat bail bonds shops waits patiently. It is a soul-deadening vortex, a place that makes a Soviet labor camp look like Burning Man. To see Drakeo, I’m forced to speak to a litany of deputies each sending me in a different direction. Finally, one smirks, “Oh the rapper?” He finally points me in the right direction.
Inside an empty waiting room, I arrive at a dirty one-way mirror covered in duct tape and handprints, where the cop can see me but I can’t see him. He barks orders to confiscate my keys, phone, wallet, and all remaining vestiges of humanity. I slide them through a little slit and receive no acknowledgment other than a startlingly loud industrial steel gate that slowly opens up for me. Riding up a rattling elevator that hasn’t been inspected since George W. Bush’s second term, I exit on the third floor where I’m forced to wait for over an hour.
There is technically a guard on duty, but he’s deeply committed to watching trashy daytime television and tells me that he doesn’t know where Darrell Caldwell is, nor does he know anything about the appointment that I’ve had confirmed for weeks. He too is hidden behind interrogation-style glass and disappears after a few minutes, leaving me to eavesdrop on the conversation between an elderly dreadlocked black man in a wheelchair and his visitor, who chides him for being “unable to leave the streets.” Garbage lines the floor: surgical gloves, discarded visitor’s wristbands, chewing gum wrappers. The smoke detector has been ripped out and there are wires dangling everywhere. It appears to be exactly what it is: a decrepit Gehenna supposed to have been destroyed years ago, and so no one is willing to take the minimum effort to make it even somewhat livable.
No one notifies me when Drakeo pops up in the small confession booth, where we speak through a thick glass window via a telephone cord. He’s wearing the bright orange L.A. County jail jumpsuit, and boredom has led him to cover nearly every inch of his body in tattoos. For someone who has suffered nearly every sadistic degradation possible at the hands of the criminal justice system, he is almost surrealistically upbeat. Of course, there is the requisite rage and fury at this state-sanctioned torture, but he’s constantly smiling, talking sh*t, and cracking jokes. The visit is only scheduled for half an hour, but since no one is paying attention, it stretches nearly two hours. We talk about everything that’s gone down since his last trial, his thoughts on his impending bout of double jeopardy, and the 150 songs he’s written over the last two years.
After I say goodbye, I return to the main waiting room, but the guard is nowhere to be found. I frantically search for a button to open up the metal gates, but you can’t exit without their permission. I pound on the glass mirror, but no one hears me, and it becomes grimly obvious that I’m trapped inside. If I squint through the mirror, I can decipher guards and medical orderlies wandering past, oblivious to my shouts and yells. It’s hard to tell if they can’t see me or if they can and just don’t care. No regular rules nor notions of civility apply, and within minutes, paranoid thoughts start to escalate. After a half-hour, I manage to holler loud enough to where someone takes pity and the groaning metal gate swings open, and I get out of there as fast as humanly possible.
Interview by Jeff Weiss
We haven’t done a formal interview since the end of the last trial. Let’s just start off by talking about what went through your head the moment you got the verdict?
I actually thought it was over. What else is there after not guilty? I mean, I did think that they were gonna’ do some sh*t just to f*ck with me, but I didn’t think it was going to be like this. Okay, so you’ve charged me with intent to kill and conspiracy to kill, and that didn’t work. Not guilty. All the attempted murders, that didn’t work. And then you’re like, okay, well this crime [Penal Code 182.5], he doesn’t have to have no intent—with this crime he doesn’t have to know nothing. For this crime, he just has to be associated with a gang and he benefits from it. It all backfired on them, and now they’re trying to use this one law because it’s the only one that requires that I don’t have to know anything or be involved to be found guilty.
The jury said that I was not guilty of murder. It should’ve been over right then.
Does it feel like they’re trying to just pursue double jeopardy against you?
This is their second chance. What are they going to say? How did I benefit from this murder? I got a 100,000 Instagram followers? The law doesn’t even say what the benefit is or what amount of benefit it’s supposed to be. It just says “benefit.” So what is the benefit?
They’re obviously going to try to argue that it gave you street credibility.
I’ve been had street credit. I’ve been coming to jail since I was 12. This is nothing new to me. Street credit? [Laughs.] I went to every school in L.A. I know everybody. I’ve had it like that. I’m one of the most successful independent rappers out of L.A. What is street credit to me?
There’s something insanely presumptuous and racist about a bunch of white people with very little knowledge of street life trying to say that you’re gaining street credit from a murder.
It’s a joke. You can get street credit off anything these days. I’m one of the only people with influence out here that’s still independent. How do you define street credit? I can get street credit for having chains on. I have my own luxury car. I was the only n*gga out here with a bust-down Rollie. I had my own apartment. I was walking around with $40,000 in cash.
How did I get street credit from this? From my mom getting fired from her job because the detectives sent letters to her work [at the Los Angeles Unified School District]? From my house getting shot up three days in a row? What is my benefit from this exactly?
They’re also charging you as a gang leader because your name has “the ruler” in it.
I don’t got no say so with this sh*t. They’re telling me that I’m the ruler because my name is Drakeo. This is my persona and my rap name. With rap sh*t, I’m the ruler. But in real life, if I was John Gotti like that, I wouldn’t be sitting in jail. It’s just weird to me because all their witnesses told them that I didn’t have nothing to do with this crime from the jump, but they’re like, “We don’t give a f*ck. He’s the ruler.” And they couldn’t pin a gang on me, so they said my rap group is a gang, and since he has the most followers and the most plays, we can just say he’s the leader because his name is the Ruler.
Let’s be real about this. I’m a threat to them. That’s why they let everybody else out. That’s why they offered deals to everyone else. They can’t let me get away. That’s the only reason I’m going back to trial. It should’ve been over after this. Not guilty. Damn, how many times you gotta hear not guilty in court?
Another thing that struck me about the first trial was the D.A’s constant effort to portray you as racist against Asian people.
They completely racialized it. I’m sitting here on a capital murder charge. The biggest thing that you could ever come to jail for. The death penalty. Life without parole. And you’re talking about burglaries? I don’t have one single burglary on my record.
That’s the only reason why it got hung in the first place, because they racialized the case so much, lying about how I hate Asians. And what do you know, the person who just didn’t want to let it go, the main reason why it got hung, happened to come from the doubts of the one Asian juror. C’mon, bro. This sh*t is crazy.
One of the other most ridiculous things is that they’re trying to claim that The Stinc Team is an all-star gang—as though you’re the Avengers of South Central.
First of all, that’s impossible. Everyone knows that if you’re a gang member, you can’t be a part of two gangs. Second of all, you can’t be a gang if you don’t have any territory. Third of all, you’re saying that I took all these gang members from enemy hoods, put them together to be a part of my gang with no territory, no street signs, no corner, no nothing? We don’t spray paint on walls. We don’t have any enemies. We gangbang on rap songs, but we don’t say our gang. We just say that if you come try to rob us, then we’re going to slam you. How does that make sense?
You’re telling me that I took people from gangs that have been around for over 40 years with their own territories and convinced them to join my gang with no street territory? And we brag about our rivals on social media and we wear Montcler and Fendi and high-end brands? And we do that to lure young kids in? As long as we’ve been doing this, who have we recruited? And you think we’re recruiting them to be in music videos and to wear the clothes? Like what?
They be dead-a*s serious though. [Laughs.] That’s why I be telling people to come to court. They think this sh*t is a game. [Imitating the white D.A.’s voice] “Yeah, he had on his Montcler shirt in the video and if you look right, this sweater that he had on cost $2,000. So basically, Drakeo is saying to get with the winning team. And if you join our gang, you can get these types of clothes and stuff too.” [Laughs.] No, bro. That’s not what the winning team means. It’s really hard to get with the winning team.
As though all you want to do is recruit randoms off social media to join your rap group/“all-star gang.”
Everybody knows that I do not f*ck with people. It’s clear as day. I do not f*ck with people. So you’re saying “join the winning team?” Like, it’s just easy, bro. I don’t f*ck with nobody. I don’t f*ck with these rappers out here. What makes you think that I’m going to f*ck with a random n*gga? Like yeah, [sarcastically] “You know, come, come get with this sh*t man. Join the team man.”
Oh and this is the stupidest sh*t that they said. Not only are they trying to claim that The Stinc Team is a gang, they’re trying to say that it’s a different time now and our territory is social media. [Laughs.] The Internet, huh? That’s my territory, huh? I’m John Gotti of Instagram and Twitter, man. I get my street cred based on how many retweets I get. F*cking clowns. But nah seriously, they be dead-a*s serious. That’s what makes me mad. It seems laughable, but I’m fighting life with his sh*t.
You were never offered a chance for a deal, right? Even though every other person involved was offered one.
Everybody but me got offered a deal. They offered motherf*ckers who were fighting attempted murder just seven years. Even though everyone knew I didn’t do it, I was always the target.
And they leveraged those plea deals so that members of The Stinc Team would admit to being in a gang—just so they could turn around again and prosecute you with the gang conspiracy charge.
Yup, they used the time in between the trial and when they decided to refile to get those pleas. They didn’t tell me or my lawyer whether they were going to refile or not. When they finally did, they were like, “Oh look, we have all these people who pled to these cases under the gang enhancement.”
They only did that because they gave them f*cking deals. They didn’t think nothing about the gang enhancement. All they thought about was, “I can get out in this time? Oh three with halftime? Let’s shoot it.” Now they’re at court saying look at all these people who volunteered to take gang enhancements and we have all these predicate [felonies] now and this is how you know that he’s the leader of this gang. Why did they take those gang enhancements deals? It’s obvious. Because they wanted to f*cking go home.
Do you believe that these gang enhancement laws are just an inherently racist way for the state to lock up black and brown people for life?
I don’t have nothing to do with this, but you don’t see no cases where it’s like, “Oh yeah, you’re a white supremacist, give him a gang enhancement.” Never. Ever. Ever. You can have a gang enhancement just for hanging around somebody. You don’t even have to be a gang member. You can get a gang enhancement from just being in association with somebody in a gang.
Recently, there was a major LAPD scandal about how their elite Metro division was disproportionately pulling over young black men in South Central. How often were you pulled over and harassed before that last arrest?
That’s regular. They pull over people all the time. You got a nice car in the hood, you’re getting pulled over. You gotta hat on in the car, you’re getting pulled over. Oh, you’re black. Pull over. Oh, you’re over here in this neighborhood. Pull over. It doesn’t matter. You’re getting pulled over.
You can have your license and your insurance, everything can be cool. If they feel that you don’t belong in this car, you’re getting pulled over. It doesn’t even matter. Then you’re like, “Bro, why did you put me over? I have my license, I have my insurance. What did I do? Did I run a light or something?”
They’ll be like, “Where’d you get this car from?”
Why the f*ck does that matter? You can be pulled over for anything. It especially happened to me a lot when I was young.
You told me once that the first time they pulled you into the station house, they were rapping your lyrics back at you.
They was playing me and my brother’s sh*t. It was hella weird. They wouldn’t call me by my last name. It was always Drakeo and Ralfy—like they thought they were being funny.
Why do you think the detectives and the D.A.’s office are obsessed with you?
They don’t want it to be me. They don’t want me to be the one that got away. They see the influence I got. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for n*ggas to start copycatting me. I didn’t ask people to start listening to my music. That’s not my fault.
When I first came to jail, it wasn’t like this. Then suddenly I got free [in November 2017] and got all these followers and started getting press and selling out shows, and then suddenly they charge me for an old murder that they had never charged me for and knew I didn’t do. They filed my charges three or four days after the L.A. Times front-page story came out [in March 2018].
Most people don’t realize that the murder investigation had long been wrapped before they let you out of jail the first time.
Suddenly, I was selling all these shows and getting all these streams. Now I’m suddenly a problem to them. We can’t let him go any farther than what he’s doing now. I guess they thought that I was going to be on the wrong track. They thought I was gonna be out doing bullsh*t. They didn’t like that sh*t. If I would’ve gotten out and been doing all types of bullsh*t, it would’ve been fine for them. But they saw me going somewhere and wanted to stop my sh*t. They already were stalking my Instagram and Twitter. They stalked everything.
Solitary confinement is obviously a form of torture. How did it affect you?
It is torture. I was in there for a whole year. I used to sit in there and see shadows and sh()[]t f()[]cked with my eyesight. My cell was so small it f*cked my back up. I got some sh*t that spread from my chest to the side of my head that was weird as f(*)[]ck. The water been freezing cold. I tell them every day, what am I supposed to do? Catch pneumonia? The f*cking AC is blowing on full blast in the winter.
When did you first begin to have the idea that they’d be using your rap lyrics against you?
When they filed the case and said that it was based on a conspiracy to kill RJ and I was like, “Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense.“
Do you feel that they’re manipulating hip-hop culture, which has obviously had battles since its inception?
This sh*t has been going on forever, bro. It’s not the way that people think, where it’s like, “Oh! If he said this in the rap, he’s gonna do it.“ The rap game is not as gangster as people think it is. This sh*t is for entertainment.
There was recently a quote from Billie Eilish, who said, “There’s a difference between lying in a song and writing a story. There’s a lot of that in rap right now from people that I know in rap. It’s like I got my AK-47 and I’m f*cking, and I’m like, what? You don’t have the gun? You don’t have any b*tches.”
[Laughs.] For real. They could be plagiarizing some sh*t that they saw in a movie. C’mon, bro. When I said “RJ was tied up in the back of a car,” was RJ actually tied up in the back of the car?’
They take this sh*t too literally. It’s not that serious. When these n*ggas are shooting up schools and smashing cars, I bet you they’re not listening to rap music when they’re doing that sh*t.
Have you been writing a lot?
149 songs.
What are your wardrobe plans for round two of the trial?
It’s gonna be incredible man. I’ve got a Pink Gucci turtleneck. I can never be one of these bummy jail dudes showing up to court. That’s the thing I think the jury was surprised about. You mean to say he’s this hardcore criminal and mob guy, but he’s wearing a Louis V sweater? Not me. I’m anti-gang. I grew up with gang members. I have gang members as friends, but I didn’t have to do any of that sh*t. And that’s why they’re so mad.
When you get out, what are your plans?
Get my son, throw on all the chains that I’ve bought since I’ve been here, and go to the studio. I’m going to be recording 12 songs a day. I hope [my engineer] Navin’s b*tch a*s is ready. I’m gonna’ keep talking sh*t, regular sh*t though. I hope nobody gets offended, but I really don’t give a f*ck if they do. Just enjoy the ride.
