Angry, violent, dangerous, unrepentant.
A Manhattan judge called rapper Remy Ma all that today before throwing her in prison for eight years for the senseless, near-fatal shooting of a long-time girlfriend.
“I ain’t playing,” the hip-hop hellion had announced as she leveled her .45-caliber semiautomatic during an argument over $3,000 in missing cash outside a Meatpacking District nightclub last summer.
Remy had coldly rifled through her bleeding victim’s purse before fleeing.
But the rapper was tame as a lamb today- crying like a child, her trademark stilettos replaced by jail-approved flats, as she begged the judge for a second chance. Instead, the anger was delegated to her fiancé, fellow rapper “Papoose.”
“Lock me up! F- – -in’ lock me up!” Papoose taunted court officers in a courthouse hallway after the emotional sentencing, sounding like some profane rapper Romeo desperate to follow his lost love – not to the grave, but to the hoosegow.
“F- – – you!” he railed at officers, after they’d instructed him and a group of friends to exit the hallway. “F- – -in’ put her in jail when she didn’t do s- – -!” he shouted. “This is all about money! Put me in jail, motherf- – -ers!”
Papoose, real name Shamele Mackie, did not get his wish.
It was the second consecutive day that law-enforcement officials had to insist he leave a criminal justice-facility.
On Monday, Papoose had been scheduled to marry Remy in a Rikers Island ceremony. But he was ejected, still single, after correction officers discovered the universal handcuff key he tried to bring into the jail. It will take about seven months in an upstate prison, at the earliest, for Remy to marry Papoose and get her first conjugal visit, state Correction officials estimated.
Today’s sentencing left both Remy and her victim, Makeda Barnes-Joseph, who watched the proceedings from the front row, in tears. Remy’s 8-year-old son also watched, cradled in the arm of a female family member. The boy’s face was stoic. Someone had decorated his cheek, in red, with the words “Remy Ma.”
The child, though never mentioned by name, was seemingly on everyone’s mind.
“I ask that you give her the kind of time that will allow her to reconnect with her son and become a responsible mother,” Barnes-Joseph had said, with noteworthy generosity, in a victim-impact statement.
Remy herself cried to the judge, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Rena Uviller. “It’s not just for me, but for my loved ones, and for my little boy.”