When Shyne phones, behind him you can hear the noise and bustle of the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York. There he's serving the fourth year of a ten-year sentence for reckless endangerment, assault and weapons possession stemming from a 1999 shooting at Club New York that involved Sean "Puffy" Combs, who'd signed Shyne to his Bad Boy label, and Combs' then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez. The conviction is currently being appealed by Shyne's new lawyers, including Harvard professors Alan Dershowitz and Charles Ogletree. If the appeal is successful, Shyne, born Jamal Barrow, now inmate number 0183886, may be released as early as next January. If not, the twenty-five-year-old could be held until 2009. "This is hell," he says. "You just dealin' with a bunch of killers and people that just don't have nothing to live for. I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy."
But, Shyne says, "me comin' here was the greatest thing that ever happened to me." Prison has made Shyne's stature grow and has allowed him to re-emerge as a serious MC. When his debut came out on Bad Boy four years ago, he was stigmatized for sounding like his beloved late labelmate Biggie Smalls. "Yeah, I got a baritone like one of the greatest rappers ever," he says, "but motherfuckers got over it, and I don't think motherfuckers would've got over it as quickly if I wasn't goin' through this, if they ain't watch me how I carried myself through this. So I got a respect that don't have nothing to do with my music, really. It has to do with who I be." In hip-hop, jail time equals integrity, and just as Tupac's incarceration had a transformative impact on his career, Shyne, too, has gained credibility while inside. Shyne's new album, Godfather Buried Alive, a collection of songs made while he was on trial more than three years ago, featuring production by Kanye West and Just Blaze, debuted at Number Three.
While in prison, Shyne has arranged a record deal with Island Def Jam that establishes a joint venture with his own label, Gangland Records, which allows him to own his master recordings. Island Def Jam is reported to have paid him more than $10 million, but he says none of that money is going to help ease his sentence. "I'm not here to live good," says the man who fasts regularly, doesn't watch TV and doesn't let his mother visit. "I'm here to suffer. That's why I don't let my mom come see me. That's why I don't have [conjugal] visits. I'm here to make music and to train." Shyne has no recording apparatus available to him now, but while he's been in jail, he says he's written ten albums as well as a marketing plan for each one. "I'm just goin' through it like my comrade locked next to me that got natural life," he says. "I need to feel that pain. Through that pain I got ten albums. My voice is bulletproof now."
Shyne is awakened at 5:30 a.m. each day and locked in his cell at 8:30 p.m. He spends much of his days talking to lawyers, working out in the yard and doing menial chores. "I sweep and mop because ain't no special privileges in here," he says. He has read Jack Welch's Jack: Straight From the Gut, Craig Unger's House of Bush, House of Saud, Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack and Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species. And he has tried hard not to get mixed up in prison politics. "Dudes get slashed, they pop off all the time, but me, I'm under the radar," he says. "I mind my business. I might have to regulate something every now and then, but dudes don't even look at me like a rap dude. They look at me as that dude that blazed his ratchet, kept his mouth shut, and we love you for that."
He did a year in solitary confinement but says that was preferable to his trial, during which Shyne sometimes found himself fighting to maintain his composure and restrain himself while, he says, Combs betrayed him. "I knew solitary couldn't be no worse than sittin' up in court watchin' these motherfuckers lie, man," he says. "Couldn't be no worse than you got your co-defendant telling on you, and you wanna pop his head off, but you know if you touch him they gonna revoke your bail."
He says Combs manipulated the trial so that Shyne would take the fall. "My co-defendant was payin' for my lawyer, so they had a dual loyalty. So they wasn't workin' for me. They was workin' for him. And they was workin' to get him off. Somebody had to go down, 'cause it was three people shot, and that somebody was me." Combs has refused to comment. One of Shyne's attorneys from the 2001 trial, Murray Richman, says Shyne's claims are simply not true. Ian Niles, the other member of Shyne's former legal team, says, "At no time did I have any allegiance to Combs. I represented Shyne the whole time."
The first few years in prison, Shyne was filled with anger. "I went through the whys," he says. "Why the fuck this happen? Why you got these motherfuckers, they always win, they always come up, and you got somebody like me who carried himself honorable, I got to go down?" His faith carried him through. Shyne was born Jewish (he says his great-grandmother was an Ethiopian Jew), and now he takes his faith more seriously than ever: "I prayed more than any nigga I know prayed. I pray five times a day. I went through that, then I understood it's about loyalty. The same loyalty I expected from my co-defendant is the same loyalty the maker of the universe expect from me. When he took me from Flatbush [in Brooklyn], all the way to Park Avenue and drivin' Bentleys, I was happy then. Thankin' God, then. What now? Now I'm-a curse God 'cause the shit ain't go down the way I like? I was tight, but I kept prayin', and shit just turned around."
He says today that he refuses to blame Combs for his predicament. "It's like Jesus and Judas, man," he says. "I understand that he did what he was supposed to do. The most high can't just be responsible for the good, but man is responsible for the bad. I can't give a man that much credit like he did this to me. The most high did this for me."
