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New Jersey rapper Fetty Wap is poised to go to prison for five years after pleading guilty to his involvement in a major drug trafficking enterprise in court.
According to reports, Willie Junior Maxwell II aka Fetty Wap pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute and possess controlled substances in a Central Islip, New York courtroom on Monday (August 22nd). The charge carries a mandatory prison sentence of five years, but federal sentencing guidelines have the potential to add another two years to that. The plea was heard by U.S. Magistrate Judge Steven Locke, who had previously revoked the rapper’s $500,000 bond and sent him to jail two weeks beforehand. This resulted from him violating his pretrial release guidelines by threatening to kill a man during a FaceTime call in 2021 after his arrest, according to prosecutors. His lawyers offered no comment after the plea.
Fetty Wap was arrested in October 2021 at the Rolling Loud Festival at Citifield in Queens, New York. His name was previously redacted in the initial indictment, which charged him with conspiring to possess and distribute more than 220 pounds of heroin, fentanyl, and crack cocaine between June 2019 and June 2020. The trafficking reportedly made use of the U.S. Postal Service and cars with hidden compartments to move the substances from the West Coast to Long Island, where they were stored before being distributed throughout Long Island and New Jersey, according to federal prosecutors. Two others named in the indictment have already pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing.
The rapper rose to fame after his debut single, “Trap Queen”, made it to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in May 2015. This latest situation is not the first time that Fetty Wap has run afoul of the law. He was arrested in 2019 for assaulting three employees at The Mirage in Las Vegas, Nevada. He had also been arrested by NYPD officers in 2017 for driving under the influence after he was pulled over for drag racing on the highway.
