Thursday, March 11, 2010
Hip-hop artists are on their way to prison
Kant Stop Records fostered a multistate drug ring, prosecutors said.
Courtesy Myspace.com
Derrick Evans, aka Dechee Dan, led both the Kant Stop Records hip-hop label and a three-state crack cocaine ring.
Related
Artists' Myspace.com music pages*
- Kant Stop Records
- Fam 1st
- Huff Da Author
- Ovious McFly
- ZIG-LAH
- *Editor's note: Artists' MySpace pages might contain language, lyrics or images that some users might deem offensive or explicit.
Full indictment
Federal prosecutors hailed the sprawling Kant Stop Records crack cocaine investigation that convicted four dozen people as a successful collaboration between far-flung agencies, while some who knew those imprisoned mourned the wasted musical talent.
Kant Stop was a Tennessee hip-hop record label that fostered a crack ring that spread to Virginia and North Carolina. Three of the label's albums remained for sale Wednesday as investigators recited a different set of numbers at an awards ceremony in Abingdon: 51 defendants, 49 convictions, eight life sentences.
Tim Heaphy, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said in a statement that the probe "had a range and scope beyond almost any we've seen in this or any other district for years."
Tim Carden, the region's ranking Drug Enforcement Administration agent, called the case "staggering." It brought together local and federal agencies to uproot crack peddling and left the 41 defendants who didn't draw life sentences an average of more than nine years each.
Yomi Belson, a music promoter and marketer from Atlanta who had worked with some of the Kant Stop musicians, saw them differently.
"They LOVED music, all of them," Belson wrote in an e-mail. It was "the only passion, only dream they had left."
Sandra Jelovsek, an attorney from Johnson City, Tenn., who defended Derrick Lamont Evans -- known as Dechee Dan on his hip-hop releases and portrayed by prosecutors as one of the ring's top crack dealers -- said the musician had legitimate business hopes.
"He was serious about it," Jelovsek said. "I think the original intent was to have a good recording company."
Evans, who had a history both with hip-hop and drugs, founded Kant Stop Records in 2003. He moved from Burlington, N.C., to Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia state line, bringing hip-hop with Fam1st, Kant Stop's leading act, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Zach Lee, the lead prosecutor.
Evans and his associates brought cocaine from Atlanta, cooked it into crack and recruited distributors, according to prosecutors. By 2007, local, state and federal agencies formulated "a comprehensive view of the conspiracy, from the top dogs to the street-level dealers," Heaphy said in Wednesday's statement.
Evans is appealing his life sentence, saying prosecutors exaggerated the drug sales.
"The court trial painted them as some hardened thugs who were 'faking' the music thing, which is totally false," Belson wrote in an e-mail.
Fam1st's 2005 album, "For The Fam," was profanity-free. Australian entertainment magazine "The Buzz" gave the album a four-star review, calling it a new spin on modern hip-hop for denouncing "violence, hatred and other evils."
"The saddest part of the story is the cycle of children that are growing up, and they know far more than a kid is supposed to know at that stage in life: 'My dad is in prison for selling drugs,' " Belson said.
Mike.Gangloff@roanoke.com 981-3336
Tad.Dickens@roanoke.com 777-6474
