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genocidecutter
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So what about his music? Oh wait....
StillFaggyAF
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Pollard's name was the first name to appear atop the indictment. He was, literally, the headliner. At the news conference, a deputy chief of the N.Y.P.D. called the lyrics of Bobby Shmurda's songs "almost like a real-life document of what they were doing on the street." (From "Hot Nigga": Everybody catching bullet holes / Niggas got me on my bully, yo / I'm a run up, put that gun on 'em / I'm a run up, go dumb on 'em.) And from the very first court hearing, prosecutors strove to characterize Pollard as a kind of crime boss. "There is no question that Ackquille Pollard is the driving force behind the GS9 gang and the organizing figure within this conspiracy," a prosecutor said at the arraignment. Pollard's lawyer, Alex Spiro, would only say, "The truth will come out in the trial."
The charges against Pollard included two counts of illegally possessing a firearm and a misdemeanor count of reckless endangerment. This last charge had to do with a fight Pollard got into with his brother outside a barbershop not far from where the "Hot Nigga" video was shot. Pollard allegedly grabbed a gun stashed somewhere on that familiar GS9 hangout corner and, in a rage, fired it off. But the most serious accusations were a range of so-called acts of conspiracy—to commit murder, sell narcotics, possess firearms, and commit assault.
Two of Pollard's friends stood accused of murder in the second degree. On February 8, 2013, prosecutors said, Rashid "Rasha" Derissant and Alex "A-Rod" Crandon charged into a bodega in East Flatbush and opened fire on members of a rival gang called BMW—an abbreviation, according to police, for "Brooklyn's Most Wanted"—killing one of their targets, a 19-year-old named Bryan Antoine. Tried separately from the rest of the GS9 defendants, and first, Crandon and Derissant were found guilty this April of all the major counts levied against them and sentenced in May to long prison terms: 98⅓ years to life for Derissant and 53⅓ years to life for Crandon.
For its case against GS9, and Pollard in particular, the prosecution was relying in large part on a series of recorded phone conversations. One of the GS9 crew, Devon Rodney, whom everyone called Slice, was doing a stint on Rikers Island. Once investigators grew interested in GS9, they went back and listened to Slice's calls from prison to his friends back home in the neighborhood. The slang-laden conversations, snippets of which were transcribed and included in the indictment, seemed to depict a group of kids preoccupied with armed conflict with their enemies, encounters with cops, and, apparently, dealing drugs, although the quantities in question are not made clear by the prosecution. To law enforcement, the slang was an elaborate "code" worked out by the "gang" specifically to camouflage its nefarious dealings. To "suntan" was to shoot at someone. To "scoom" was to shoot at someone. A "tone" was a gun. A "CD" was a gun. "Twork" was drugs. "Crills" were drugs. Lined up chronologically in numbered paragraphs in the 74-page indictment, the 120 snippets of dialogue—the "overt acts" purporting to show a group of people conspiring together—formed a highly compelling prosecutorial narrative.
StillFaggyAF
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July 17, 2014, a couple of weeks after Sha Money first watched the "Hot Nigga" video, Ackquille Pollard showcased his talents in front of a host of Epic executives at the Sony Entertainment headquarters building in Midtown Manhattan, leaping onto a boardroom table and performing for the assembled suits. Epic faced serious competition from Rick Ross, the rapper and chief of MMG records. (The previous night, Pollard and Rowdy Rebel had dined with Ross at Philippe Chow on the Upper East Side, where they smoked blunts in a private room whose walls were racks of wine.) Which is why Sha Money and Epic chief L.A. Reid wouldn't let Shmurda leave until he signed with their label—or so hip-hop legend now has it.
About a week earlier, Pollard had attended a very different kind of meeting. This one took place in the backyard of a brick apartment building at East 51st Street and Clarkson Avenue, in the heart of East Flatbush. It was convened by Pollard's new management team, led by his uncle Christopher "Debo" Wilson, who ran a small local hip-hop record label based in Miami, called HardTymes. Pollard and his mother, Leslie, had sought out Wilson a month or so earlier, when "Hot Nigga" was exploding on the Internet. Wilson, who was married to Leslie's sister, had arranged for a pair of shows in Miami, first with the Philadelphia rapper Meek Mill on the Fourth of July and then with the Brooklyn rapper Fabolous two days later. "That's when the industry took him serious," Wilson tells me.
Soon after the shows, Rihanna posted an Instagram video of herself doing the Shmoney Dance in a bikini on a yacht. Beyoncé did the Shmoney onstage. So did Jay Z, Justin Bieber, Chris Brown, and Taylor Swift. Bobby Shmurda was famous.
Before Wilson stepped in, Pollard told me, the young rapper had used several older acquaintances from his neighborhood to be his "managers," to help him set up local gigs as he tried to promote his mixtape. But, he said, they knew nothing about the music business. They were just "some cats from our neighborhood; they used to hustle. So they had, like, Porsches and Maseratis and stuff like that. They had money."
"Where did they get their money?"
Pollard smiled and opened his eyes wide and laughed.
"That's not my business!" he said. "That was not my business."
And so Wilson called for the meeting, a kind of street powwow. Wilson wanted to articulate to Pollard's neighborhood cronies that the pros were taking over. Wilson expected maybe four or five of Pollard's friends to show up. Instead, he says, as many as two dozen boys and young men arrived. Some were older, in their 20s or early 30s. "I told them: 'Hey, you got to stay away. You all can't be running around screaming "GS9!" and getting in trouble.' "
Wilson had brought two of his underlings at HardTymes, one of whom was an aspiring Miami rapper named Troy Mclean, nicknamed Ball Reckless, or Ball. Ball recalls that Wilson and some of Pollard's friends "exchanged words" at the meeting: "That shit was crazy. I'm glad to be here, put it like that." In the end, though, Wilson and Pollard himself appeared to convince the group that they had to back off.
In an effort to put separation between Pollard and the East Flatbush crowd, a condo was rented in Fort Lauderdale, and Wilson allowed his nephew to bunk with a half dozen of his closest friends there, too. For most of July and August 2014, Pollard was on the road, playing shows in Philadelphia, D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Dallas, Phoenix. He was playing as many as five shows a week, and money was coming in: $20,000 per gig, as much as $15,000 just to appear at a club. He got onstage with Drake at an arena in New Jersey. He played both Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon. He made a cameo appearance in an episode of Kevin Hart's show, Real Husbands of Hollywood.
He played gigs in New York, as well, at Starlet's and Perfections, two raucous strip clubs in Queens. And at many of Pollard's outings in the city, cops were there. He does not recall exactly when he began noticing the faces of police officers that he recognized from his home precinct, the 67th. There they were at a nail salon in Manhattan where Pollard and his friends—now fully inhabiting their role as celebrity entourage—were getting manicures. There they were outside Rockefeller Center after his performance on Jimmy Fallon./quote]
StillFaggyAF
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Another time, Wilson and others were with Pollard outside another venue when a group of N.Y.P.D. officers confronted them. They were pulled from their cars and thrown to the ground. Ball, who had fallen asleep on the ride to the venue, says, "I woke up to the barrel of a gun in my face." According to Wilson, an officer asked him how much money Pollard was making.
At the same time, all through the summer and fall, some of Pollard's friends were getting in trouble—a shooting in East Flatbush in July; another outside the Barclays Center in downtown Brooklyn, also in July; and two more in Miami in October. Always, police allege, it was GS9 members trying to kill rival gang enemies. (Pollard is not alleged to have been present at any of these incidents.)
Meanwhile, Pollard needed to start recording his debut album. Sha Money tried to persuade him to stay in Los Angeles and get down to business in a studio there. But Pollard didn't like L.A. He arrived late to sessions, Sha Money says: "He didn't work, so it was almost like a waste. When he went to New York, he worked. So I had to go back to New York to record with him there. But I kept telling him: 'Yo, you need to get out the city. Change it up.' And he fought me."
Pollard also abandoned the condo in Florida, returning to Brooklyn and his East Flatbush crew. "Bobby was like, 'I don't understand why you won't let me hang out with my friends,' " recalls Flores. "It was a constant battle. Constant."
As Pollard began missing show dates and procrastinating on his recording sessions, and as it became clear that the N.Y.P.D. had a keen interest in GS9, Wilson says he grew ever more frustrated. At one point in early September, after the scene with police outside the venue in Queens, Wilson flew back to Florida. He'd had enough. He says he gave Pollard an ultimatum: Come "home" to Miami, get away from the East Flatbush crowd once and for all, and I'll stay on. But Pollard never came./quote]
StillFaggyAF
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East Flatbush and Brownsville today, many people believe, or want to believe, that Pollard et al. are being railroaded. There's a widely held belief that Bobby Shmurda was targeted because of his music, which contains the occasional anti-police lyric, and because that music was suddenly being heard around the world.
There were the circumstances, for example, surrounding one of Pollard's two illegal-gun-possession charges. On the afternoon of June 3, 2014—just as the "Hot Nigga" video was starting to blow up—Pollard was hanging out at his girlfriend's place with a couple of friends. Per the police version of events, two officers, executing a search warrant with possible drug use as the probable cause, found the door open. They could see Pollard inside, a firearm in one hand and a joint in the other. The police then took all four people in the apartment into custody. According to prosecutors, Pollard tried to explain that the gun was just a prop for a music video. "At the time, the officers did not know of Mr. Pollard's budding fame," Nigel Farinha, one of the assistant district attorneys prosecuting Shmurda's case, said at a hearing earlier this year, "and had no idea what he was talking about."
Pollard's version differs. He says the cops came in and lined everyone up against a wall. They then searched the apartment, found a gun, and told Pollard they'd be charging him with illegally possessing it. The four kids were put into the back of a paddy wagon and held there, Pollard says, "for, like, eight hours" before arriving at the precinct for booking. Pollard says none of his DNA was found on the gun. And, according to court documents, Pollard's lawyer plans to argue that the search warrant was issued under false pretenses.
There were other oddities. For a case against a purported drug gang, there was a curious lack of drugs. No undercover sting had interrupted a GS9 drug transaction. No illicit profits had been sought in forfeiture proceedings. The press release that accompanied the arrest in December 2014 mentioned "proceeds" and "narcotics packaging." And yet, defense lawyers say, nothing—no narcotics inventory, no packaging, no cash—has yet been shared by prosecutors during pre-trial discovery. (The government must share with the defense any evidence it will present. The prosecution declined to comment on specifics, citing the ongoing trial.) So far, the main evidence of drug sales appears to be the recorded phone calls and the snippets of dialogue about dealing "crills" and "twork."
And so the very involvement of the Office of the Special Narcotics Prosecutor in the case was unusual. The SNP does have a Narcotics Gang Unit, established in 2002 and presided over for many years by Farinha and Susan Lanzatella, the other assistant district attorney assigned to the Shmurda case. The two Gang Unit co-chiefs are "very hands-on" and tend to handle the investigation, prosecution, and trial of their cases from start to finish, according to a person familiar with the SNP's inner workings. In recent years, the cases brought by the SNP have targeted sophisticated drug operations with millions of dollars in revenue and kilos of inventory.*
At a court hearing in January, Farinha said, "This case is not about [Pollard's] fame, or his race, or his rap lyrics, or that aspect of his life." But of course, in anything but the most literal legal sense, almost the exact opposite is true. It is about all those things in fevered combination.
StillFaggyAF
New member
Wilson recalls several cryptic comments Pollard made during that summer, about why he couldn't just cut out his Brooklyn friends: "It's deeper than rap." And: "It goes deeper than what you know." One source close to Pollard has a theory: The dozens of young men who showed up for that backyard meeting in July were all members of the G-Stone Crips, the very gang that prosecutors maintain is synonymous with GS9. In a sense, if you grew up on those blocks, you were a G-Stone Crip. On the other hand, GS9 was this smaller, closer-knit group of friends who were focused on hip-hop. But because they'd grown up in GSC-land, they were citizens of it—and it was a citizenship, the source suggests, that could not be renounced: "I think a lot of those kids were forced to be gangbangers. 'Forced' as in: You're a Crip, or you're against us." And if you're a GSC citizen, and you become a hip-hop star, you may be subject to a tax.
Wilson tried one last gambit to extract Pollard from New York. In early September 2014, he tasked Ball with going up to the city and persuading Pollard to come back to Miami. "They sent me there like a Navy SEAL," Ball says. "My mission was to get Bobby out."
Ball says he found Pollard holed up at the Times Square Holiday Inn, and he was not alone. "It was like he was kidnapped by Crips," Ball says. "Blue shit everywhere. And everybody was looking at me like: Who the fuck is you?" He pauses. "Don't get me wrong: It looked like that to me. I mean, that was his squad. But it was a whole bunch of new dudes. People I'd never seen." Ball recalls having to pull Pollard, who was clearly exhausted and ill and "coughing up some green shit," into the bathroom. He turned on the water faucet so they could talk without the others hearing. "I was like, 'Bro, you gotta come home.' " Pollard assured him that he would come to Florida soon. He just needed to take care of some things first[./quote]
StillFaggyAF
New member
For one thing, New York was never like Los Angeles, birthplace of the Bloods and the Crips, or Chicago, birthplace of the Vice Lords and the Gangster Disciples. Its "gangs" were always fractured, fluid, forming and dissolving and re-forming.
David Kennedy, a researcher at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and the founder of a national violence-prevention program called Operation Ceasefire, tells me, "People think gangs are organized, purposeful, have a leadership, that they use violence to promote their illegal economic interests. In most places most of the time, none of those things are right."
But there is an institution that does often treat groups of young black males in poor neighborhoods as organized crime: law enforcement. One former N.Y.C. prosecutor who's recently entered private practice describes what he calls a "newer trend" in the city's criminal-justice system, whereby groups of kids, all friends, are lumped together and charged with conspiracy based on individual crimes—drug possession, gun possession, attempted robbery, say—that some in the group have gotten busted for. Now, he says, under conspiracy law, "you put them together as a gang and they're all responsible for all their criminal activities."
The danger, of course, is the possibility of tarring someone with guilt by association, of prosecutorial overreach. "The fact is, the law in this kind of thing is a very blunt instrument," Kennedy tells me. "Even among people who are really serious law-enforcement folks, people say we're casting too wide a net."
To compound the problem, groups identified as criminal gangs by the cops often include aspiring rappers. Social media today—not just Instagram and YouTube, but dozens of local message boards dedicated to hip-hop—is filled with homemade videos that feature the performance of what law enforcement might call "gang activity." The N.Y.P.D. monitors social media just for this.
There are rap groups that spin off from gangs, gangs that morph into rap groups, and rap groups that—as a marketing ploy, to gain the coveted street cred—pose as gangs.
It is the organizing cliché of rap: the authentic street hustler who exploits his authenticity to create hit songs, find an audience, become rich and famous. The demand for street cred is intense, and the history of the genre is filled with rappers who have felt its lack. The classic case was Tupac Shakur, the sensitive boy who played violin at a prestigious Baltimore art school. Even after he'd made it big, he aggressively sought to build street cred by surrounding himself with real hustlers—until he was shot to death on the Las Vegas Strip, his pursuit of authenticity was his downfall.
Shmurda is Shakur's inverse, in a sense. During the summer of Shmurda, as he strove to launch a career in hip-hop and, behind the scenes, struggled to break away from his old crowd, Pollard worked hard in interviews to accentuate his street cred, aware that authenticity is what would sell. He bragged that he'd dealt drugs as early as the fifth grade, that East Flatbush was like "growing up in the jungle. Gotta be hard. If you ain't hard, you ain't gonna stand, you gonna fall."
Now, though, he is in the peculiar position, for a rapper, of having to draw a bright line between his art and his life. "Everything I rap about, it's just entertainment," he told me. His ability to market himself "makes people think every word I say is true."
genocidecutter
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Bruh this wall of text for a one hit wonder?
StillFaggyAF
New member
genocidecutter;9036368 said:Bruh this wall of text for a one hit wonder?
Oh we got a secret fan in here
lordstanley
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Seems like they really ain't got much of a case on him tho..he could win at trial or come back and appeal
BangEm_Bart
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Brownsville, Brooklyn???!!
I knew Schmurders face looked familiar. He was a stick up kid when he was young. I remember almost knocking him out when I was young cause his GS9 niggas approached me at 275 JHS in Rockaway ave in the park and said I hit him. It was only me and my boy playing ball but like 12 of them. I had at least 7 years in the kid and my paps came through and saved me at the last minute coming through by accident.
I respect him as a brother but this story has some truth to it. Anyone that grew up in Brownsville knows the GS9 niggas no good.
I knew Schmurders face looked familiar. He was a stick up kid when he was young. I remember almost knocking him out when I was young cause his GS9 niggas approached me at 275 JHS in Rockaway ave in the park and said I hit him. It was only me and my boy playing ball but like 12 of them. I had at least 7 years in the kid and my paps came through and saved me at the last minute coming through by accident.
I respect him as a brother but this story has some truth to it. Anyone that grew up in Brownsville knows the GS9 niggas no good.
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Elzo69Renaissance
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too much effort thats why I just drooped the GQ link last night
