"Check out the story Busta Rhymes doesn't want you to read...."

[Elano]

EDITOR'S NOTE: In light of comments made by Busta Rhymes in a recent YouTube interview (see below), VIBE is posting this feature from our March 2008 issue detailing Busta's career and troubles with the law. VIBE made several attempts to contact Busta Rhymes through various channels but was met with a consistent reply of "No comment."

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/ksTXC2U81lw" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/ksTXC2U81lw</a>

Busta Rhymes’ explosive performance skills have kept him close the center of hip hop for almost two decades. From Leaders of the New School to The Native Tongues to Diddy and Bad Boy to Dr. Dre to remix collabos with Lil Wayne, his sound and image have changed with the times—and some say his personality has changed, too. Since seeing his bodyguard gunned down two years ago, Busta has faced so much police pressure and so many criminal charges, that close friends are voicing concerns. Laura Checkoway traces troubles and triumphs of a dope MC.

February 5, 2006. Super Bowl Sunday. The Pittsburgh Steelers vs. the Seattle Seahawks.

But the biggest party in Brooklyn, N.Y., had nothing to do with football. Everybody who was anybody was headed to the video set for Busta Rhymes’ “Touch It (Remix),” a Swizz Beatz production with an all-star lineup that was one of that year’s hottest collabos.

Mary J. Blige, DMX, Missy Elliott, Papoose, Rah Digga, Sean Paul, and Lloyd Banks were all featured in the Benny Boom-directed clip. According to some estimates, another 500 people were in and around Kiss The Cactus studios that day. So it seems someone likely that someone must have seen Busta Rhymes’ longtime friend and bodyguard Israel “Izzy” Ramirez, a 29-year-old father of three, get gunned down during the video shoot.

According to New York Police Department Commissioner Raymond Kelly, there were at least 25 witnesses. But no one wanted to talk.

“I find it quite disturbing,” said the commissioner at a February 15 news conference.

Busta, who was reportedly standing right next to Izzy as the fatal shots were fired, refused to speak with police. G Unit’s Tony Yayo refused also, though before the incident he was reportedly overheard arguing with rivals from Swizz Beatz’s camp, and later apologized to Busta for the disruption.

Yayo’s lawyer, Scott Leemon, sent a letter to the NYPD stating that his client had nothing to do with the murder and would not cooperate with their investigation.

In the weeks following the crime, Busta tried to focus on his upcoming album The Big Bang (Aftermath, 2006) amid of a flurry of negative publicity. And though it became the first No. 1 Billboard debut of his career, it had to be hard to enjoy the success.

A New York Daily News article quoted Amelin Fernandez, the widow of the deceased, saying that Busta told her the gunman yelled at her husband, “It has nothing to do with you, just get out of the way!” before firing. Another anonymous eyewitness theorized that the gunman was trying to kill Busta.

“The media is trying to make me look like a real shitbag!” Busta said from the stage at the “Birthday Bash” concert for New York’s WPWR Power 105.1FM on March 5, 2006, exactly one month after the murder.  “They got a nigga looking real crazy.”
But long before the shooting at the video set, Busta already seemed to be going through changes.

On the 2003 mixtape track “You’re A Memory,” he picked a beef with Jay-Z, who had merely called Busta “animated” on “What More Can I Say?” from The Black Album (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam, 2003). “The problem was, the average dude in the ’hood might not have a clear understanding of what the word animated means,” DJ Kay Slay explains. “Busta Rhymes is animated, but he was like, ‘Yo man, Jay went subliminal at me, what should I do?’” Busta lashed back at Jay: “If you ain’t know, I keep it in the stash of the wagon,” he rapped, “the wrath of the dragon is felt when I’m cocking the cannon.”

After signing with Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Entertainment in 2004—this after selling more than four million records during a 10-year run at Elektra and a brief stint with J Records—Busta shed his dreads, shaving them in a ceremonious video clip.

“It was time to get fresh and new,” he said at the time. But when he lost his hair, he lost something else, too— his vibrant, playful persona. He was also bulking up, prompting speculation that he might be on steroids. Busta was going gangsta, at least according to his lyrics and the headlines.

Ramirez’s murder seemed to complete Busta’s transformation. Even the threat of a grand jury subpoena couldn’t get him to talk. He was defiant, but the cops stayed on his case, and he seemed to be cracking under the stress.

In March 2006, Busta reportedly screamed at a fan who tapped him on his shoulder in a Miami Beach diner, “Get the fuck away from me!”

Later that month, Busta reportedly busted a champagne bottle over The Source founder Dave Mays’ head during a party for Miami’s Winter Music Conference, sending him to the hospital for stitches in the back of his head. Mays acknowledged he was hit with something, but denied it was a bottle.

He never filed a report. In August of that year, 19-year-old Roberto Lebron claimed the rapper beat and kicked him in the head after he accidentally spit on Busta’s Maybach while crossing the street in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood (police also found a machete in Busta’s vehicle).

That November, Rhymes was pulled over and ticketed for talking on his cell phone while driving. Then two days after Christmas, he was accused of beating and cutting the face of his driver Eddie Hatchett outside his NYC office when Hatchett asked for back pay.

“I’m just an average Joe trying to support my family,” Hatchett told the New York Post.

The new year brought more drama. In February, Busta was pulled over and accused of driving with a suspended license in lower Manhattan. Then in March, he was deemed a “public safety” threat by the NYPD and barred from the Manhattan set of Order of Redemption, a film in which Busta plays a gang leader and drug dealer.

“This is tremendously unfair to Busta, who has been nothing but professional during this project,” director Jeff  Celentano said. (Busta is still in the film, which is due to arrive in theaters later this year.) Two months later, Busta was arrested again for driving under the influence.

“He’s always been ’hood,” says his cousin and member of Busta’s Flipmode Squad Rampage, whose uncle has a cassette of them freestyling when Bus was 12 and Rampage was 8. “Everybody needs to get off his back. Of course he has problems, but don’t put him out there like that.”

The series of misadventures struck during Busta’s mid-30s, a time when many veteran rappers are contemplating their next move. Some seek a career producing or managing other artists. Others branch out into film or fashion design, converting fleeting MC fame into more durable assets. Busta had tried all these things, but one thing that never let him down was his lyrical gift. The man could—and can—still rap his ass off, but what had become of the seemingly fun-loving Busta Buss who stormed onstage with Leaders of the New School on 1991’s A Future Without A Past (Elektra) and 1993’s T.I.M.E. (Elektra)? What happened to the Five Percenter who warned his fans that Armageddon was around the corner on four platinum solo albums leading up to the new millennium—The Coming (1996), When Disaster Strikes (1997), Extinction Level Event (The e Final World Front) (1998), and Anarchy (2000)? Where was the futuristic Busta-droid who promised Janet Jackson he’d “make your body whine, the pleasure is all mine” on their slinky ’99 duet “What’s It Gonna Be”? Or the Flipmode General who told us to put our hands where his eyes could see or to just “Pass the Courvoisier”? What about the emotive actor who stole the screen in each of his scenes in Higher Learning (Columbia, 1995), Shaft  (Paramount, 2000), Finding Forrester (Columbia, 2000), and Narc (Paramount, 2002)? Next thing you knew, he was firing a rocket launcher at Gabrielle Union in the video for 2006’s “I Love My Bitch.” Natty dread, crazy bald-head, accomplished actor, dope MC—will the real Busta Rhymes please stand up?

In 1987, Public Enemy’s Chuck D anointed Trevor Taheim Smith, a teenage rapper who was then known as Chill-O-Ski, with his new name. At the time Busta was living in Uniondale, Long Island, where his family had relocated from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, when he was 12. Chuck named him after Oklahoma University All- American wide receiver George “Buster” Rhymes.  Busta’s oldest friends say he’s always had one foot in the streets.

Chuck D remembers young Busta adjusting from life in Brooklyn to the suburbs of Long Island. “Busta always had an attraction for the rough-and-tumble Brooklyn life. Maybe he just needed people around him who were telling him, ‘Hey, you’re gonna be alright no matter what, just think for yourself, and you have nothing to prove.’ But Busta doesn’t have anything to prove, and he shouldn’t bend and stoop down,” Chuck says. “I think Busta was tired of people treating him like a joke, or like he wasn’t an official rapper.

We’re living in a youth culture that strays a lot of people away from maturing gracefully. Busta has been dope for the long term,” Chuck notes. “But you can taint your long term by making short moves.”

Charlie Brown, who met Busta at Turtlehook Middle School before they formed Leaders of the New School with Dinco D. and Cut Monitor Milo, remembers Bus taking a company rental car to “do dirt in Brooklyn” when L.O.N.S. were first trying to get a deal with Elektra.  “He was always a street cat, so him getting into trouble is nothing new,” says Brown.

“I’ve been around him when he had firearms. He just wanted to be a bad boy,” Brown explains. Even though Brown says he “loves and misses” Busta, there have been persistent rumors since 1993, when the group fought on Yo! MTV Raps, that he harbors bitter feelings toward his old partner. “He’s that [guy] from back in the days who has blown up,” says Brown, “and now his recklessness has caught up with him.”

“Busta’s a good dude, he got a good heart,” says Kay Slay, who helped make Busta the hottest thing on the mixtape circuit by breaking the Ja Rule diss “Hail Mary” featuring 50 Cent and Eminem. The e two went on to manage the upstart Brooklyn MC Papoose together until last fall, an arrangement that ended because, according to Slay, Busta wasn’t holding up his end of the deal.

“Sometimes you got the wrong people in your ear and you get confused and find yourself getting into dumb shit that ain’t even you,” says Slay. “You’re just lost to the universe.” Queens, N.Y.–born Baby Sham agrees. At age 17, he was taken under Busta’s wing as the youngest member of Flipmode. “I’m not feeling the new Busta Rhymes, I’m really not,” says Sham, who’s now working on a new album. “People in the streets are always asking me, ‘Yo, why your man completely switched over and went that route?’ Maybe it has something to do with Aftermath, or maybe 50 Cent came out and changed his whole perspective about the look and the type of rhymes.  Or maybe he was just tired of being the Busta Rhymes that everybody knew him to be. When I was with Bus, he was around Puff y, around Wyclef. Hittin’ the clubs hard, having people dancing, bugging out, and having fun. Now it’s like, I’ll bash your face in, I’ll stomp your chest in. That’s not the Busta I know.”

“It’s not a good look when you change your character,” says his former L.O.N.S. groupmate Dinco D. Dinco, who has recorded a diss track about Busta called “Fuck Touch It.” Dinco says he’s tried to call Busta many times over the past 10 years. Busta, for his side in it, included all the L.O.N.S on a reunion cut on his first solo album. “Busta’s always been that loud, obnoxious dude. I stayed in touch with Busta until about three years ago, and his character really seemed out of place,” Dinco says. “He seems a little confused right now.”

“I talked to Busta about how his whole personality shifted,” says Rah Digga, the former First Lady of Flipmode, who says she speaks with Busta every month or so, and expressed her disappointment at the way he handled business with the Squad. “He felt he needed a whole reinvention for himself. He just got tired of being the guy who everybody assumed they could get over on. He’s always been temperamental, but it was better masked before because he was so colorful and vibrant.

"Once he cut his dreads off and changed up his image, a lot of things transpired.”

Though Busta reportedly covered Izzy’s funeral expenses and is helping support his longtime bodyguard’s widow, other members of the Ramirez family feel Busta hasn’t done enough. “We really don’t want anything to do with that man,” Ramirez’s sister Sonia Rodriguez told the Daily News, saying that Busta lied to her, promising he’d cooperate with the police. “He could stop breathing tomorrow, and I wouldn’t care.”

In the past, Busta has expressed frustration over the criticism he’s received around the Ramirez murder. “Fuck what I got to say!” he has said. “It don’t matter what I say. I don’t gotta say shit. My man died! It was never about what I say. It was about what was done. And we cannot lose sight of what it is.” After repeated requests to interview Busta for this piece, VIBE received the following response from his label, Interscope Records: “No comment across the board.”
“I don’t think that was the right approach, pushing up on Busta like that,” says former NYPD detective turned author Derrick Parker, an occasional bodyguard who also worked with Ramirez.

Even though he doesn’t agree with Busta’s silence, he understands it. “There were so many people who were mad at Busta after Izzy got killed because they felt that Busta should’ve come forward and said something,” he says. “But I understood Busta’s position. Busta can’t come forward and say these guys are criminals because then his career is finished. He’s done, he’s through.  Busta’s situation was only made stickier by the fact that G Unit rapper Marvin Bernard, aka Tony Yayo—in whose car the gunman allegedly fl ed—is Busta’s labelmate at Aftermath. He is also managed by the same company, Violator Management. And the men now also share a lawyer, Scott Leemon, whom Busta has been keeping very busy.  Leemon, who has also defended Young Buck, Lloyd Banks, and Young Jeezy, has become quite familiar with the so-called “hip hop cops,” a specialized task force within the NYPD Intelligence Unit founded by Det. Parker in 1999.

“From the beginning, it was always the same group of people,” Leemon says of the hip hop police, though, when reached for comment, the NYPD continues to deny the unit’s existence. “Are they targeting some of my clients?” Leemon asks.  “Absolutely. Do I think they cross the line sometimes? Absolutely.”

An old friend of Busta agrees, “Those last few things that happened to him were egged on by the police just because of the unfortunate incident that happened with his bodyguard,” says former A Tribe Called Quest frontman Q-Tip, who’s continued to collaborate with Busta since the classic 1991 posse cut “Scenario,” making two appearances on The Big Bang.

“They think he witnessed it, so the police try to make life difficult for him when he’s in New York.” Though they are currently on the outs, Kay Slay also stands up for Busta. “Ninety-nine percent of the incidents where they said he did this, that, and the third, didn’t happen like that,” Slay insists.

“The situation where they locked him up for driving with no license? They knew he had a driver. They knew his license was suspended. His car was parked in front of his house and had to be moved to the other side of the street at 6:00 a.m. or it’ll get towed. I guess they were staking his crib and his driver went home, so Busta came down to move the car and they locked him
up for driving without a license.”

Last May, Busta and Kay Slay were leaving the SIRIUS Satellite Radio station in Manhattan just after midnight. “I got in my truck, he got in his truck and pulled off. Five minutes later, I pull straight across 49th Street and made a left on Ninth Avenue. I see Busta pissing between a tree and the car,” Kay Slay
recalls.

“The next morning when I wake up, I see Busta rhymes arrested for drunk driving and that it happened at 12:20 a.m. I said, There’s no way! When I finally talked to him, he said, ‘Slay, right where you seen me at? I went in the store and ordered a sandwich. Came out, got into the passenger seat, and they swooped in on me. I didn’t have nothing, so they said I was drinking and locked me up.’”

Even former officer Parker is disturbed by the way the NYPD has targeted Busta: “The police department
handled it wrong,” he says.  “I would not have gone out and followed him, harassed him, or arrested him to get him to talk. There were other people there and other ways of handling the case than through him, just because he’s the most visible and valuable target.”

New York. October 4, 2007, 8:00 p.m. The red carpet is lined with luminaries for VH1’s Hip Hop Honors — Diddy, Doug E.  Fresh, Chuck D, Ice-T, LL Cool J, Snoop Dogg, Nelly, Missy Elliott, T.I., Pharrell, Ciara, Ne-Yo, Keyshia Cole, Teddy Riley, Chris Rock — and of course, Busta Rhymes is there. He’s got an uncanny knack for staying close to whatever is popping the most.  Reporters swarm and Busta smiles wide, bling glimmering in the flash- bulbs.

His longtime best friend/hype man Spliff Starr, who
grew up with Busta in East Flatbush, patiently chills in the background.  That evening, during an all-star tribute to A Tribe Called Quest, Common and Pharrell breeze through Q-Tip’s lines on “Scenario” until the time comes for Busta’s infamous verse. And then who should emerge to pay tribute to Busta but...Busta himself. “Powerful impact—BOOM!  From the cannon!” he barks, wearing a neon pink and green hat and jacket straight out of the L.O.N.S era.

The crowd explodes like it’s 1991 and The Low
End Theory has just changed their lives. “Rowl Rowl!” he growls as an enthusiastic fan in the balcony takes off  his T-shirt and screams, “Best moment of the night!”

Three months later, Busta stands before Manhattan Criminal Court on the morning of January 23 in a black suit, quietly joking with an officer while paperwork is sorted and defense attorneys consult with Judge Larry Stephen. It’s his third time in court for these four charges (two assault charges, a DUI, and driving with a suspended license).

Jury selection for the trial was set to begin, but instead, Buagain while on probation, he will automatically land in jail for one year. The prosecution says Busta deserves a year in jail now—but the deal is done. Outside the courtroom, a crowd gathers. An adolescent
girl holds out a dollar bill for Busta to autograph and a handful of reporters gather around, scribbling in their notepads while Busta makes his statement. “I’m very grateful to the system,” Busta says. “I believe in the system. It hasn’t failed me personally yet.

This has caused my family a lot of stress, and I’m just glad all of this stuff is behind me so I can get back to doing what I do best, making great music and films and being a people person.”

“Busta, will we be seeing you back here again?” a reporter asks before he’s whisked away. “Absolutely not!” he says, although he’s been ordered to return in March for final sentencing. For the next three years, Busta will have to play the good guy, or at least keep the bad boy better masked.

“Busta Rhymes has gotta learn to be content with himself,” Chuck D says. “He’s a grown man—he’s a grown older man now. Busta’s a hip hop icon and he needs to realize that.”

[Mackin]

thanks!

[Lord Funk]

Thanks. That's an interesting - and pretty sad - read.

[QuietTruth]

Well it's sad media can't put another man's personal incindent aside. How long ago did this happen?

I like the video though. I liked the vid.

[Okka]

Thanks. That's an interesting - and pretty sad - read.

[da_notorious_mack]

i think busta knows in order to be a hip hop legend you have to go out in a blaze of glory and is planning to get killed.he has carefully placed numerous references throughout his career to an early death,so after his death scrawny fourteen year olds will concoct elaborate conspiracies to scare their selves in the mirror with


this is confirmed by the fact if you play i luve my chick backwards he almost says hed love to die....subliminal messages wooooooo..you scared??....you should be