Oh, this is sweet. Akon is the hottest R&B singer on the current scene, with an American Music Award, a Teen Choice award and album sales in the millions. The singer has always attributed his success to the four hard years he spent in a Georgia prison after The Man took him down as the kingpin of a nationwide auto theft ring. Akon’s badass criminal past and his time on the inside have been a major inspiration for his music, as you might guess from albums like Trouble, Konvicted, and the upcoming Acquitted and Double Jeopardy. Now the hardworking bloggers at The Smoking Gun have looked into Akon’s criminal record and discovered that he’s mostly guilty of a criminal assault on the truth with intent to blow smoke up your ass.
Akon’s past has its skanky moments, the Smoking Gunslingers learned. He’s been arrested a few times, and in 1998 he pled guilty to illegal handgun possession, a felony that earned him three years’ probation. A few months later he was arrested in Georgia for driving a stolen vehicle, and spent five months in a DeKalb County jail before all charges were dropped. And that’s it: no car-chopping ring, no four years in the Big House, and no risk of “75 years” in prison, as Akon once claimed. Robert McFarlane was an officer who worked on the stolen-vehicle case, and here’s his take on Akon’s story:
McFarlane… laughed out loud when told of Akon’s claims about running a “notorious” auto theft ring, owning chop shops, and being brought down by turncoat underlings. “Ah, this is bullshit. This guy is so phony. He’s an arrogant SOB,” said McFarlane. Asked about Akon, Brewer said, “I don’t think he had any role besides [wanting] to drive a high-dollar vehicle. And I say this because we didn’t link him to any other cars.”
Read the whole thing. It’s very long, and totally worth it. It’s sad that Akon thought a hardcore criminal past would improve his marketability, and even sadder that he was probably correct. This story might well have an impact on both his reputation and his album sales. But his talent for creating a gigantic wad of outrageous bullshit and making it sound plausible for years at a time suggests that Akon still has a bright future in politics.
6 comments
The only thing more stupid in this story than this jackass R&B person (who I’ve never heard of, by the way) are the millions of people who bought his CDs because he was a convicted felon.
Hey kid, you want to be a badass? Go enlist. That might impress me. Stealing other people’s stuff? Right up there with getting caught jerking off in a men’s room.
It’s pathetic what sells these days.
I’m pretty sure this is a leading sign that the four horsemen will be charging across the plains real soon. What’s next - a leading CEO candidate will fabricate their criminal dealings so they will have street-cred in the board room?
Agreed, the social dysfunction here is sad and disturbing, but I thought the meta-failure of having to fake a past as one of the dregs of society was pretty funny. It’s as if we found out Pete Doherty was only pretending to shoot heroin.
If we found that out about Pete Doherty, I would be seriously pissed off.
Well I think this can sometimes be done for comic effect … consider Hunter Thompson for instance, who probably could not have survived some of the drug binges he describes. But most of Thompson’s stuff was veiled satire, even if some people were too dense to “get” it and took him literally.
With these guys, there’s no satire. They want people to believe they are the real deal, and little wannabe thugs gobble it up.
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