Photo Credit: Pop Smoke/Facebook
Brooklyn rapper Pop Smoke just got popped (pun intended) for not only stealing a $375,000 Rolls Royce but moving it across the country. It’s actually a fairly rare charge but he managed to move the car from Cali to NYC after changing the tags and tinting the window and left it in front of his mother’s house. Now it’s one thing to steal a car and try to mask it’s identity, but it’s another thing to involve your mother in it. What happened is that he was shooting a music video, borrowed the car for a day and when it was time to return the car, he was nowhere to be found. The problem is the owner was tracking the car through its GPS and first saw it going through Arizona. And of course it didn’t take much to identify the location once it got to his mother’s house.
Dressed in a hoodie with Mona Lisa’s face on it and velour sweatpants, in court, he was released on a $250,000 bond and banned from leaving the country without the government’s permission. His arrest occurred right after returning from Paris Fashion Week and hours before having to go on stage for another show. Smoke, whose real name is Bashar Jackson is said to be a part of the Crips gang. What’s amazing here is that if he truly had some gang connections, someone should have been able to explain a better way of how to steal a car. It’s good that he was able to secure a flatbed to move it across state lines but how is it that no one thought to deactivate the GPS tracker or to get rid of the car’s vin number? Someone in the gang knew of a chop shop somewhere to handle all of that and to at least have the car look nothing like the original. But on top of that, after he stole the car, he took a pic on Instagram and Facebook with it. Of course he tinted the windows but what is the owner going to think? They’re going to know their car when they see it or assume it’s theirs. This was an incredibly stupid crime to commit. He would have done better stealing a car from the street unless he just wanted to get back at the owner some way. It’s still a colossally stupid thing to do.
In a New York Times interview last year he said he was kicked out of the 8th grade for bringing a gun to school so that explains what he’s doing now at 20. Regarding his teen years, he said, “You like nice things, you got to do things to get nice things.” He also said he had a 5 series BMW at 16 so clearly he did something right to get the kind of car he wanted then. So what happened now? Anyway, he’s worked with Travis Scott and Nicki Minaj these days so hopefully he’s making enough to not have to keep this type of stuff up. After all, he’s known as one of New York’s top drill rappers so he needs to focus a little more on that and a little less on the whip stealing.
