Rapper Lil Wayne traded gold bling for stainless- steel cuffs as he turned himself in to begin a year long stint behind bars for the gun cops seized from his pot-smoke-in fused tour bus.
With good behavior, he’ll serve just eight months in protective custody at Rikers Island.
It was a sendoff fit for rap royalty.
The Grammy winner — who has made upwards of $50 million a tour — was mobbed on his way into Manhattan Supreme Court by hundreds of reporters and cellphone-waving fans, and serenaded up the con crete steps by shouts of, “Weezy! We love you!”
“Yo, keep your head up, Weezy!” one fan shouted from a back row of the courtroom as the cuffs went on.
Lil Wayne — nickname “Weezy,” real name Dwayne Carter, age 27 — will continue making music in jail, said his law yer, Stacey Richman.
“He’s an unstoppable musician and creator,” she said.
Lil Wayne’s surrender date had been postponed three times over the past month — once by major dental surgery, and twice after a fire in the court house basement.
Meanwhile, he provided fans with a seemingly end less, farewell-filled multi media soundtrack to his stop-and-go journey to jail.
He said goodbye to fans on Twitter, in print interviews and in YouTube videos, only to see the surrender date come and go, each time necessitating renewed goodbyes.
“Law is mind without reason . . . I’ll return,” he wrote on his Twitter page yesterday morning.
But once in court yesterday, he said nothing.
Asked by Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon if he wanted to speak before sentencing, the rapper shook his head.
“Nothing at all?” repeated the judge. The rapper shook his head again.
Richman has complained that the gun belonged an uncharged associate of the rapper who was on the bus two years ago after a concert at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side.
But prosecutors took a hard line — insisting that “possession,” under the strict legal sense of the word, means having control or “dominion” over the gun, and doesn’t necessarily mean outright ownership.
Cops who boarded Lil Wayne’s tour bus said they saw him toss the .40-caliber Springfield Armory semiautomatic handgun into a Louis Vuitton knapsack. There was no question the knapsack was his, cops said — it had his stuff in it, including a prescription bearing the name Dwayne Carter.