I don't know why people like to defend ignorant rappers and their behaviour. Who give's a f*** if you're the greatest rapper alive or not, u commit crimes u must go to jail, period. As for John Forte, read here and make up your mind.
A native of the roughneck Brownsville, Brooklyn, Forte has always been something of a hip-hop anomaly. He won a full scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy, a top-flight -- and quite white -- boarding school in New Hampshire, where he studied violin. After graduating in 1993, Forte spent a brief time at New York University, then dropped out to work A&R at Rawkus Entertainment. Along the way, Forte met Lauryn Hill, joined the Refugee Camp crew, and contributed songs and production work to The Score, the Fugees' 1996 blockbuster. Forte's solo debut, Poly Sci, appeared in 1998.
After the success of the Fugees, Forte lived large in the clubs of New York, Los Angeles, London and Paris, where he was known for dressing sharp and drinking Guinness. "That was where John felt comfortable," a friend recalls. "Having fun, making his connections, living it up." Spying a lady who interested him, Forte would dispatch a member of his posse to inform the lucky lady that John Forte wanted to buy her a drink. "One night John would be having a mellow dinner in the corner of Bowery Bar, another night you'd see him at Cheetah, which is more rough-and-tumble," says Forte's friend, the DJ Mark Ronson. "But you'd never see him dancing on a table and flossing. He was low-key."
Forte had high hopes for Poly Sci, but the record's project manager quit Sony a week before the album was released, and Epic put little cash behind its promotional tour. "We were playing these really ghetto clubs, with bad sound systems," says Jeni Fujita, who sang on the record. Poly Sci sold 79,000 copies. Columbia dropped him. Friends say Forte was crushed and lost faith in his talent. The timing couldn't have been worse. Club life had bled Forte of cash; he couldn't make the $1,350 monthly rent on his two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, and his car was impounded. A proud man, Forte kept friends in the dark. "I had no idea he was short of cash," says Ronson. "He never asked me for money."
Through pals at Exeter, Forte met and befriended Ben Taylor, Carly Simon's son with James Taylor. Forte lived at Simon's Martha's Vineyard estate for six weeks in 1999, staying for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
To make ends meet, Forte spun one night a week at the Manhattan nightclub Veruka, as a celebrity DJ. It was there, one Thursday in 2000, that Forte met a bald-headed thirty-five-year-old drug dealer named Chris Thompson. A native of Jamaica, Thompson needed some new, reliable couriers, preferably female, to handle what he called "stuff." John Forte knew many females.
Alerted by a tipster at a local hotel, police in Harlingen, Texas, stopped two of those young women on July 12th, 2000, as they made their way back to New York. Drug Enforcement Administration agents in Houston opened their suitcases and discovered thirty eight-by-ten freezer packs filled with a bluish-green liquid -- liquid cocaine, a form of the drug favored in the trade because it is difficult for both dogs and X-ray machines to detect.
The DEA made a deal with the couriers, who called Forte in New York. "Put the ice cream in the tub," he said, and told them to fly to Newark International Airport. Cell-phone records show twenty-two calls between Thompson and Forte that day. Agents arrested Forte the next morning at Newark, after he dropped the "ice cream"-filled cases into the trunk of a taxi.
Since then, Forte has maintained that he was only helping Thompson move what he thought were large sums of cash, and that the "cream" he was talking about was merely hip-hop slang for cash. As he said to me, "Some people use the bank, and some people don't."
Simon put $250,000 toward his $650,000 bail. While on supervised release, living at his mother's house in South Brunswick, New Jersey, Forte recorded his second, and best, album to date. I, John waves a permanent goodbye to the club life and imagines a time when hip-hop breaks from gangsta traditions. As Forte would later testify, "I always felt that it was a cop-out to exploit women with the misogynist lyrics. There's a way that you can entice a woman or be suave without calling them a bitch or a ho or degrading them, and I was very much against that, and I was against the gun toting. . . . I saw these kids looking up to these artists and knowing how to recite eight of their songs without knowing how to do their math homework, and that hurt me in my heart."
