#FreeMeekMill: Rolling Stones Exclusive Interview With Meek Mill From Prison (Very Long Read)

Nighthawk

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BK The Great said:
Last August, Meek went to New York to tape a spot on The Tonight Show. He was riding in a Rolls uptown when a crowd of kids on dirt bikes pulled up at a red light beside him. "Meek asked one of the dudes, 'Yo, could I get a ride?' and of course the kid lent him his bike," says Howard, who was driving. Meek rode with the pack, tossing wheelies; his cameraman filmed it all and posted a clip to Instagram Live. The next day, leaving a basketball tourney, he was stopped by the NYPD. "It was the most bogus bust I've ever seen," says Joe Tacopina, one of Meek's team of powerhouse lawyers. "I talked to a squad commander who said, 'This isn't my bag of shyt. It came from way above me, that's all I know.' "

The felony count – reckless endangerment – was dropped to a misdemeanor and later dismissed, but Meek was ordered back to Philly and charged with breaking probation. Not by the district attorney or the probation department, but by Brinkley. Both the Philly DA and Meek's probation officer opposed jail time; Brinkley ignored them and gave her ruling. "I have been trying to help you since 2009," said the judge who, per Meek's management, has cost the rapper an estimated $30 million, but "you have no respect for this court." She ordered him back to prison for two to four years, adding, "I don't have to deal with you ever again."


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Rapper Meek Mill attends MMG Weekend's The #BIGGEST Pool Party on July 3, 2016 in Fayetteville, Georgia. Prince Williams/Getty
Eleven years ago, a drug cop named Reggie Graham claimed he saw Meek Mill, then 19 years old, sell crack to a confidential informant. Graham was attached to a squad called the Narcotics Field Unit, a purportedly elite group of plainclothes cops who target major dealers of crack and heroin. Or so they've been tasked: What they've often done, instead, is embroil themselves in epic – if unpunished – misconduct. "You can practically- set your watch to it – every five years, there's a major NFU scandal," says Brad Bridge, a senior public defender who's locally famous for reversing wrongful convictions. Bridge ballparks the number at about 1,300 reversals; many of those were NFU-related.

In 2009, a squad of NFU cops was busted for brazenly robbing bodegas in North Philly. Though they were caught in the act on a security camera, the detectives involved walked away clean; the one narc who got fired was reinstated. Philly taxpayers picked up the tab for them: Almost $2 million in claims was paid to the victims. Five years later, a different NFU squad was charged and tried for robbing drug dealers. "We stole millions of dollars" from them, says Jeffrey Walker, the only officer convicted of those crimes. (The other six were acquitted in 2015.) "From 2002 on, we were basically stickup guys," says Walker. "We'd lie about probable cause, get an ADA to write it, and knock down the door of a known supplier." Walker served three years in prison, then got out and gave testimony – for the plaintiffs. A class of civil lawsuits had been brought against the department on behalf of people locked up by his squad. The city fought those suits till Walker testified last year. The account Walker gave of his squad's alleged tactics – writing false warrants to search a suspect's house, beating up suspects to extract information, and planting drugs on them to make arrests – seemed to sap the city's resolve. Its solicitor settled hundreds of cases, paying millions in damages (and more cases continue to pour in). "In my mind, Jeff's a hero. He put his life in danger going against other cops," says Michael Pileggi, a lawyer with multiple plaintiffs in the case.

NFU cops work in teams, and Walker partnered on and off with Reggie Graham for almost a decade. Graham requested a warrant to search the house Meek was living in part-time, which was owned by Meek's cousin Rasson Parker, who'd bought it with an inheritance his father left him. That house in South Philly, on a well-kept block of strivers, was the hang spot for Meek and his older cousins. "I was 18 and not paying my share, so they made me the errand boy," Meek recalls. "Whatever they needed – toilet paper, blunts – I would run out and get." They smoked and dealt weed there and played their music loud, but all say they were no menace to the public. "Yeah, I did weed, sold some too," says Meek. "But sell crack? fukk, no. I had an aunt on that shyt – she wound up dying behind it."

Meek Mill's cousins discuss what happened on that night in 2008.


Graham claimed he watched Meek sell crack to an informant at 4:45 the afternoon of January 23rd, 2007. According to Meek and three of his cousins, however, he was nowhere near the corner of 22nd and Jackson, where Graham said the deal went down. They say he was three miles away, in a Center City courtroom, from 10 a.m. till 5 p.m. that day. "Our cousin Thelonious was on trial and at least 20 of us were there" to support him from the gallery, says Ikeem Parker, another of Meek's cousins and then-housemates. "With rush hour, Meek couldn't have got home till 6 p.m."
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:usure: Really nikka
 
Leasy

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Let's add some Alizarin Crimson & Van Dyke Brown
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That’s Philly man. Y’all have to research the history this racist ass city to understand the predicament. Y’all laugh at the hoods in Philly and clown that shyt but don’t understand that it is by design and has been that way wayyy before Dubois made that research paper in the 1900s.
 
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