T.I. has acknowledged that he once turned on his deceased relative to get out of jail.
The Atlanta rapper revealed how, in the early 2000s, before his music career took off, he put a pistol case on his late relative, Toot, in a recently-resurfaced tape from an edition of his expediTIously podcast from August 2020.
T.I. has acknowledged that he once turned on his deceased relative to get out of jail.
The Atlanta rapper revealed how, in the early 2000s, before his music career took off, he put a pistol case on his late relative, Toot, in a recently-resurfaced tape from an edition of his expediTIously podcast from August 2020.
“We at Lennox Mall parking lot, we unload the truck [of stolen clothes], I’m talking to the man while I’m making the play,” he remembered. “This n-gga looking at everything like, ‘Man, y’all got, y’all got?!’ ‘Muthafucka, we done said what you want! Get this shit and go!’
“And right then, mall security [pull up] … We get in the car and we pull off, and then of course, they followed behind us and called the real police. So before we actually get on the expressway, the real police pull us over. I have a gun.”
During the trial, Toot was assassinated. Toot had introduced T.I. to DJ Toomp, the man responsible for such songs as “What You Know,” “24’s,” and “U Don’t Know Me.” Tip escaped jail time by claiming the gun belonged to his cousin at the advice of his attorney and with Toot’s posthumous approval.
“We caught those gun cases, Toot died. My lawyer said, ‘Well, you know, I could make everything go away if it was Toot’s, it was Tremel’s,’” he said. “After he had passed, I had a talk with him. Toot said, ‘I’ll take all the charges you got! If you can walk away free and put it on me, goddamn right! ‘Cause I’ll be damned if they gon’ come and muthafucking extradite me from here!’”
Asked if that’s where the claims that T.I. is a “snitch” come from by gun rights activist Nicki Davis Jr., who was a guest on the podcast, he responded: “Hell nah. Don’t nobody know about that, I just volunteered this information. That’s the only time I done ever said or gave information, because that’s my big cousin. He was dead and he told me that it was OK.”
The line “My cousin used to tell me, ‘Take this shit a day at a time’ / Told me Friday, died Sunday, Wednesday in the ground” comes from T.I.’s 2003 hit song “Rubber Band Man,” which included a reference to Toot. The Hustle Gang leader thought back on the counsel his late cousin gave him during an interview with MTV at the song’s video shoot.
“We was just talking. It was around Christmastime of 2002,” he said. “We was kicking it, he was telling me how I need to slow down. I was real hot-headed. I was just frustrated. I was really the mad rapper. I felt like, ‘I’m better than a lot of n-ggas and I ain’t where I need to be.’
“He was like, ‘Dig this, though — look what you do got. You got a following can’t nobody else match. Can’t nobody who’s at the level you at in your career, selling the amount of records you selling, go shut a mall down. It’s a reason for that. You got strength. Just be thankful for what you do have.’”
T.I. was spared jail time in that specific instance because to Toot, but as his legal issues persisted, he subsequently had to serve time in jail. The King rapper most notoriously served seven months in federal jail in 2009 as a result of a firearms charge two years earlier for which he entered a plea agreement.
When T.I. was caught on drug charges less than a year later, it violated the terms of his probation and landed him back in jail. He was instructed to complete an 11-month term in the Arkansas jail from which he had previously been freed.
