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Page 1
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"We had a swell-up of hate" ...
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Page 2
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"I was having fun confronting the fans that had turned on me." ...
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Page 3
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"You had to be a leader to be on Ja Rule's side. The ones that stood up for me, holla back." ...
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Page 4
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"We're innocent, and our innocence will be proven." ...
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With all his musical woes all but subsided, you'd think Ja would be breathing easy. But Rule and the Inc. are facing their toughest adversaries yet, adversaries that can potentially end his career and take away Irv Gotti's freedom: the U.S. government.
In January 2003, Murder Inc.'s office were raided by federal agents as part of an ongoing investigation into whether or not Gotti helped his friend Kenneth "Supreme" McGriff to launder drug money. So far, several people associated with the Inc., including Ja's manager, Ronald "Gutta" Robinson, have been indicted on those charges. Although Gotti has never been officially charged with any crime, the investigation hangs over the label's head like the clouds Rule sang about with Mary J. Blige in "Rainy Dayz."
"What I'll say is that I'm on the inside," Ashanti said. "That's my family. People on the outside reading [newspaper articles] may get a little intimidated, but they don't know the half of it. Obviously, it's gonna effect you. On one side you have your records popping, a whole bunch of artists on your label, [and on the other] you may have drama. With us being close, we have each other and that's what keeps us going. It obviously is a lot to deal with."
"It's f---ing nerve-wracking and it's giving us all big headaches," Rule added. "But it's something we gotta deal with. But we're innocent, so our innocence will be proven."
Still, in spite of the turmoil, Rule has been able to flip the strife into a positive: It's become source material for his music. On R.U.L.E.'s "Passion," he raps:
"How unfortunate, January the sixth/ Federal officers raided our offices/ Making it hard for us to eat, to breathe, to live/ And they swear they got n---as that's informative/
They've been handin' down indictments for about a year/ And they sent nobody to jail yet, we still in the clear."
"You just have to block it out and record," he said about making music in the midst of the many dramas he's endured over the last couple of years. "But you have to go in and sometimes use a bad situation to your advantage. Anything that I go through, I use. If it's bad, I'mma turn that bad into a song."
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Photo: mtv.com
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