“Lawyer,” I told them. “I ain’t got nothing to say. Look, I’m tired. I need to go to sleep.”
That was all I needed to say. I think maybe they couldn’t question me after I said that because then anything I said would be under duress or something. I don’t know. But I really was tired. It was the middle of the night and the experience of getting ambushed again like that had drained me. It was a shot of adrenaline when it happened but now I was crashing. I was taken to another room where I sat down on the floor and fell asleep.
When I woke up I was told there was a warrant out on me for an aggravated assault charge out of Fulton County back home. But why would the feds come down to Miami to serve a state warrant out of Georgia? Then I remembered all their questions about BMF.
As for this aggravated assault warrant, I wasn’t sure what they were talking about. But when one of the agents mentioned a pool stick I realized.
This nigga who worked in promotions at the label had been booking shows in my name and pocketing the money. After I caught wind of this me and my boys found him at Big Cat’s studio, and you can guess what happened. Allegedly a pool stick was involved.
I was to be extradited back to Georgia. I was crushed. Cat and Jacob had shown up to the office and I couldn’t even look them in the eye. I stood there, my head hung, as the agents put me in cuffs.
Damn. This shit fucked up.
“Hey!” Cat shouted as they walked me out. “Put your motherfucking head up.”
I was taken to a local Miami PD precinct, where I was booked before being transferred to another jail. Two days later I was on a bus to Georgia.
I sat on that bus for two days as it stopped at damn near every correctional facility between Miami and Atlanta. It was the worst discomfort I’d ever felt. My wrists were in handcuffs and my ankles were shackled in leg irons. I couldn’t move a muscle. The metal dug into my limbs and my whole body was cramping up. There I sat, captive, for miles on end. I got to use the bathroom once. Getting sleep was out of the question. It was crazy to me that you could do this to a person who hadn’t even been convicted of a crime.
But Cat telling me to keep my head up stuck with me. I knew if I could just get through this temporary pain that tomorrow could bring a better day. That mentality would serve me in the years that followed.
?
I haven’t exactly tested out every jail in the country, but I can tell you there ain’t too many places like Fulton County. That place has got to be one of the most fucked-up correctional facilities in the United States.
Fulton County Jail was not like DeKalb County, where I’d just spent a week before making bond on my murder charge and done my sixty-seven days back in 2002. DeKalb was heavily policed, with a bunch of old, white, racist good ol’ boy COs running the show. They love fucking with niggas in there.
Fulton County is the city jail, policed by young black COs, many of whom came up in the same areas as the inmates. It is very easy to get a job there. Fulton County is not a place people aspire to work.
It was extremely overcrowded. Built in the eighties, the facility was designed to hold 1,332 inmates. When I got to Rice Street in ’05, there were about three thousand of us in there. Cells meant to hold two bunks had three. Even that wasn’t enough. There were mattresses strewn across the dayroom floor.
Bringing in some extra bunks and mattresses was easy, but they weren’t adding showers and toilets to accommodate the overpopulation. The strain on the utilities resulted in system failures. Electric. Plumbing. HVAC. All fucked up. The overworked and understaffed maintenance workers couldn’t keep up. It made for horrifying conditions.
Pipes were leaking. Toilets were overflowing. Sinks were clogged. Power outages were commonplace. The laundry machines didn’t work, so inmates would wash their clothes in the shower, hanging them out to dry on the railings of the dayroom. The wet clothing only worsened the already unsanitary climate inside the pods, which were terribly hot and humid from the busted ventilation systems and crowded bodies. Mold was everywhere. And the smells. As if the food itself wasn’t hard enough to put down, those fucking smells made it nearly impossible.
The inmates ran the show here and the place was rampant with gangs, drugs, weapons, and corruption. The rule of law in Fulton County was simple. Anything goes.
?
I hadn’t been there a month before I nearly caught a second murder charge.
I was still on and off with Danielle and she came by to see me a few weeks after I got locked up. I was on my way to visitation when I was blindsided. I don’t know what the guy hit me with—maybe it was a lock?—but whatever it was, I was hit hard.
My ears were ringing. My vision was blurry. I was barely conscious. As I slowly came to, I was able to grab ahold of whatever it was he’d hit me with and we began to struggle over the metal object. We both had one hand on it and with our free hands we were blasting away at each other. A couple of punches later and this nigga was knocked the fuck out.
I’d gotten my wits about me by this point and was now fully enraged. Even though he was asleep I stayed swinging. I grabbed his legs and dragged him to the nearby stairwell. I was readying to throw him down the steps and break his neck. But then somebody saved my life and his.
“Don’t throw him down those steps, man. You already won the fight.”
I turned around to find an older inmate standing there who had seen the whole thing. This all happened right by visitation, so there were witnesses.
“Look, you’re going to beat that murder charge,” he told me. “Don’t get another one. Just let him go.”
So I did. With one tooth knocked out and blood pouring out my mouth, I walked down the same steps that I was about to throw my attacker down and extended my arms for the COs to put me in handcuffs. I was immediately brought to solitary confinement.
In the hole they had me three doors down from Brian Nichols. I couldn’t believe it.
Earlier that year he’d been in all the papers. This guy was on trial for rape and before his appearance in court he’d beaten a sheriff’s deputy damn near to death and taken her gun. Then he went into the courtroom, where he shot and killed a judge and a court stenographer. Outside he shot and killed another sheriff’s deputy. He carjacked someone and a manhunt ensued. This was on America’s Most Wanted and everything. While on the run, he killed a federal agent too. Eventually this lady he’d taken hostage convinced him to turn himself in.