I Want You to Shut the F#ck Up (25 page)

“We don’t know if you’re going to come to court,” the judge said, “so we’re going to have to impose a significant bail before you can be released on your own recognizance.”

I felt my mouth go dry. I didn’t know what she meant by “significant,” but it sure as fuck sounded more expensive than “insignificant.”

“That’ll be ten thousand dollars,” she decided. That meant that I would have to post a one-thousand-dollar bond.

One thousand dollars? That was it
? Shit! At that rate,
everybody
could go home with me. I had just played the gig, so I had all cash on
me. I was ready to make it rain in the courtroom. The judge charged me with a class D felony. Class D is better than Class A, which is for things like murder, but it still came with mandatory jail time.

I left court and got on a Delta Airlines first-class plane all the way to L.A. When I got into L.A., I was still wondering what was going to happen. This could have killed my new series before it even started, so I wasn’t about to leave anything to chance. My business manager knew of a lawyer named Murray Richman. They call him No-worry Murray because he takes on clients and always gets them off. I hired him, just like DMX, Jay-Z, and Ja Rule hired him. That motherfucker knew how to play the game. I paid Murray thirty grand and talked to him on the phone twice. The following week, I returned to New York. We went to court at eight a.m. Murray walked into that court wearing a black-and-white tie that said
O.J. WAS FRAMED
. This was at a time when people were still pissed about the verdict.

The court was packed when we entered, with many cases to be tried that day. Murray talked to the prosecutor and made a compassionate argument on my behalf. The judge
apologized
and told me that I should have never been arrested. By 8:20, the arrest was expunged from my record. Twenty minutes might be way too generous: It might have been even faster than that.

Now imagine that same situation if I didn’t have a good lawyer. I would be going to jail. That’s what “mandatory”
means
: You have no option but to go to jail. Any argument I made that it was a misunderstanding or that they ran the bag before I could say anything would have made me a laughingstock.

Now imagine that same situation if I didn’t have a good lawyer and it was 2012. I’d probably be declared a terrorist.

After we were finished, I saw the lines of poor browns and
blacks waiting for their chance to have their cases heard. If
their
cases were going to take twenty minutes, the outcomes would have been diametrically the opposite of what mine had been.

“Man, only suckers go to jail,” Murray said. “I
told
you that you’re not going to jail. All of them on bonds, that don’t have the money?
Those
guys are going to jail.”

Some people might find his comment offensive. But I don’t understand how anyone can be offended at a statement that perfectly captures the
truth
of the situation. It might be wrong, or it might be fucked up, but at the end of the day, Murray was right.
That’s how the justice system works
, and I had just fucking
witnessed
it work in exactly that way. Lawyers are just like lobbyists: You throw money at the expensive ones, and they make your problems go away because of their connections. It really is as simple as that. What poor youth has access to a wealthy lawyer? This ain’t
Diff’rent Strokes
, this is real life.

But even though things worked out in my favor, the situation still left me with a very ambivalent feeling. I was walking out the door, but those kids were
fucked
. I know people who get fucked by the legal system
all the time
. I had a friend who was my warm-up. He got into an argument with some dude and said, and I quote, “I’m going to kick your ass. Motherfucker, I’m going to kill you! You don’t know who you’re fucking with.” That exact quote is being said by a dude in some bar in America right now. We’ve all heard it, and we all roll our eyes at it. It’s a stupid, ridiculous thing to say. It’s a
cliché
.

My friend got charged with
making terrorist threats
because he publicly threatened to kill someone. This is not some left-wing fear-mongering scenario. This happened to someone I know, and
it’s obviously happening many times to people I
don’t
know.
The anti-terrorist laws are being used for purposes that have nothing to do with terrorism
, even remotely.

My friend called me, scared out of his mind. They had set the bail at $250,000. If he wanted to get out, he would have to put up
$25,000
just for running his big mouth. My wife would have been found guilty of murdering
me
if I tried to put up that money. It was just not going to happen. My friend ended up having to take a public defender to get a plea deal. He didn’t do time, but he got convicted. It was a strike on his record—and he’s one third of the way to getting “three strikes and you’re out,” to getting
life
in prison.

But the three-strikes law isn’t really a deterrent against crime. It’s a deterrent against crime
in California
. In 2007, my twenty-two-year-old nephew was in a store with his white girlfriend, and they were shoplifting. They were putting women’s clothes into the baby carriage that
she
was pushing. Guess who got in trouble when they got caught? The girlfriend never got charged with
anything
. She never even went to jail. My nephew got a public defender and pled out, with this counting as a strike.

Very intelligently, he left California.
That’s
the thing behind the three-strikes law: “We don’t care where you’re going, but you’re getting the fuck out of here.
We want you to leave
.” Is this a government of laws and not men, where everyone is treated fairly wherever they go in this nation? Shrinking budgets are causing the states to turn on one another, and it’s only going to get uglier.

Our justice system is further being used to divide family and friends. People my age remember the horror stories about the Soviet Union and the KGB, how their government had spies among the people so that everyone was always paranoid about who they talked to. It was inhumane and held up as an example of the brutality of
communism. Well, at least the KGB
paid
those motherfuckers! Uncle Sam is drafting us into service for
free
.

Right after 9/11, Congress passed a piggyback law for wiretapping. In a society in which people’s rights are respected, like the right to privacy and the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, the police need a warrant to tap into your phone. Fair enough. But then they changed the law. Now if I’m talking to someone who has a wiretap against them,
his warrant can be piggybacked and applied to me
.

As a result, many cats I know went to jail—and not a single one of them had anything remotely to do with the terrorism used as an excuse to pass this law. After a while, I was like, “Man, don’t call me.
Ever
.”
Everybody
I know has
somebody
in their family that’s shady. You could be talking to them about
anything
. He could be trying to talk you into doing something, and you’re point-blank refusing. It doesn’t matter. They can’t get him, so they want you to tell on him—
to betray your own family member in the name of “building a strong community.”
They’ll arrest
you
for some minor bullshit to
make
you tell on him.

Case in point: Michael Vick went to jail because a dude who was supposed to be his boy told. Foxy Brown went to jail because the motherfuckers who were supposed to be her people told. The government plans it that way. They usually get to their targets right when the working week ends. On a Friday, they’ll arrest a bunch of people. That way, they’ve got the whole weekend to freak. They’ll be told that the first one to get to the DA gets the deal. You’ll see motherfuckers racing in there to tell,
racing
. Who can stand up under that pressure? The people who
can
are the hardened criminals we really need to be worried about anyway!

This is not some political issue that I care about in the abstract.
They almost got my kids. My younger daughter, Tyler, was hanging out with these kids over at somebody else’s house. She was in high school at the time, and she was doing what high school kids do all over the country: going to a party. Everyone at the party was drinking. Toward the end of the night, these two guys were messing around with these girls on tape. They were simply feeling them up. That’s not exactly
classy
, but it’s hardly a porno.

While this was happening in California, I was in New York staying at the Hudson Hotel and gigging at Caroline’s. My wife,
who never listens to me
, called me, freaking out. “The police are here and they want to arrest Tyler!” LaDonna screamed. “
Don’t let them arrest my baby!
”

I didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t know what had happened. But I knew what to do in the situation, regardless of what had led up to it. “You tell the police that Tyler is not there,” I said.

“They’re already in here and they’re talking to her!” LaDonna confessed.

I felt like I was living in a fucking horror movie and “the call was coming from the house.” “See?” I told my wife. “You never listen to me, and this is what happens.” I called my lawyer and my lawyer got on the phone with the police. Then I called back Tyler to try to talk some sense into her and to find out what had happened. She explained what had been going on at the party. It turned out that not only were they trying to get
her
, but e
verybody
who was at the party was getting arrested.

“What the fuck,” I asked my daughter, “possessed you to a) ever answer my door anyway, and b) answer the door for the
police
? What would ever possess you to do that? Don’t you
ever
answer my door anyway, and
especially
to answer it for the police. That’s my
goddamn door. Then, when the police ask you a question, don’t ever tell them shit.
Ever
.”

Here’s another thing about the police. If my neighbor came to my house and asked to borrow a drill or a handsaw or some other tool, I would be glad to lend it to him. Maybe sometime down the road I would need a favor and he could reciprocate. Maybe he’ll never get to pay me back, but it sure doesn’t hurt to be cordial with people you are living in close proximity to.

But if that neighbor said to me, “I can and will use this power tool against you,” I would run into my house as fast as I could, lock the door, and get my gun ready. No one would ever warn you that they mean you harm unless they do, in fact,
mean you harm
. So when the police explicitly tell you that anything you say “can and will be used against you,” why the
fuck
would anyone ever give them those weapons? Has any police officer ever recanted and said, “Nah, forget what you just said. It’s water under the bridge.” Or will they twist the words to make it seem much worse than it is, so that they’re perceived as bringing in a stronger case?

Cooperating with the police is like cooperating with a mugger. Yes, you should do it—but only if the consequences of noncompliance are much worse. The cops are not there to protect someone proactively. They
can’t
. They can retaliate
after
someone fucks with you. But to protect someone before anything happens? Anyone who has ever had to deal with harassment or stalking or anything like that knows what bullshit “to protect” really is.

As I was trying to knock some sense into my daughter’s head, my lawyer was calling the cops. In
minutes
, they left without arresting Tyler. We made a deal with them that she was going to turn herself in that Monday.
All the other dudes at the party went to jail
and stayed there for the whole weekend.

I flew home that Monday to try to clean up the mess. I knew a lieutenant for the LAPD, and he was friends with the person who worked the case. That lieutenant was telling us information—and it wasn’t pretty. The first response was that they wanted Tyler to plead guilty, which would have resulted in her being registered as a sex offender. She was fifteen years old, and for being at a party she was going to be publicly marked as a sex offender for the rest of her life.

It’s no way
in fuck
that I was going to let that happen.

My lawyer took care of everything. It cost me $65,000 to do it, but it went away. The charges were dropped, nothing ever came up, and they didn’t find anything. Thankfully, because Tyler was going to fight it, everybody else’s cases got dropped. All those other kids got out without having their lives ruined over nonsense.

A similar thing happened with my oldest daughter, Ryan. She got a DUI, and we had to get her a lawyer and pay for it. She could have lost her license, but ended up getting it suspended for six months instead. Ryan was in England for an exchange program anyway. We wouldn’t be seeing her for six months, and by the time she got back, it was done.