Christopher “BG” Dorsey, a once-famous teen rapper seeking to revive his career after prison, wants to rhyme about snitches and murders, or whatever else comes to mind while he remains on supervised release. And on Tuesday, the rapper stood before a federal judge in New Orleans to make his case.
“I just feel like Christopher Dorsey and ‘BG’ are two different people,” said Dorsey, 43, who went by “Baby Gangsta” as a member of the Cash Money Records supergroup Hot Boys.
“It’s basically like telling Robert DeNiro he can’t make any mob movies,” added Dorsey, wearing a black suit and silver cross, in an appeal to U.S. District Judge Susie Morgan. “I just did a hard 12 ½ years...In no way am I glorifying. I’m just being creative, from coming up in a messed-up environment. I’m just rapping about what I know.”
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Maurice Landrieu, who helped send Dorsey to prison on gun and obstruction-of-justice charges, urged Morgan to apply clamps on Dorsey's lyrical output while she can, before he's cleared from supervised release in a year.
“At some point in time, we have to try to stop this cycle,” Landrieu argued. “We’ve become numb to it, and that really doesn’t say much for any of us.”
Dorsey landed in Morgan’s courtroom after running afoul of federal probation officials soon after he left a halfway house in Nevada, his new home, on Feb. 1. They said he’d failed to report performances with Torence “Lil’ Boosie” Hatch Jr. and others as self-employment, and that he’d associated with convicted felons.
In March, Morgan signed a warrant for Dorsey’s arrest. She later ordered him to turn over his newer lyrics, published and unpublished, under seal.
Dorsey’s attorneys and prosecutors said Tuesday that they’ve worked out a partial deal that doesn’t include revoking his probation. Instead, Dorsey has agreed to modified conditions that include handing over his lyrics, and rules that clarify when he needs to report work as a rapper and interactions with felons.
Still hotly at issue, however, was a request by prosecutors that Dorsey “refrain from promoting and glamorizing gun violence and murder,” as well as obstruction of justice, in his music.
Dorsey pleaded guilty in 2011 to a pair of federal gun charges and a conspiracy to obstruct justice, receiving a 14-year sentence. He and two other men were caught in a stolen car with three guns in 2009. Federal agents later found that Dorsey and a co-defendant pressured the third man to claim the guns were his.
“I want to tell you how real this is,” said Landrieu, brother of former U.S. Senator Mary Landrieu and former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu.
He argued that Dorsey’s lyrics have carried leaden weight on New Orleans streets, pointing to murder cases that have echoed with his lyrics about the perils of snitching.
Landrieu noted that as they debated Dorsey's fate, prosecutors in a different courtroom were trying a defendant in a 2014 mass shooting in the Lower 9th Ward that killed two and wounded five others. That trial featured testimony Tuesday from admitted accomplice seeking leniency.
Landrieu also noted an old video in which Dorsey name-checked murderous Central City gangster Telly Hankton, as hitman Walter “Urkel” Porter sat in the background. Dorsey and Porter were associates.
“I don’t think it’s too much to ask for a limited period for him to stop saying certain things,” Landrieu argued. “I don’t think Mr. Dorsey should be revoked. I like Mr. Dorsey, personally. I just want him to use that talent to lift us.”
But David Chesnoff, one of Dorsey’s attorneys, called that a slippery slope, questioning whether a prosecutor or a judge should be the arbiter of Dorsey’s artistic output.
“Mr. Dorsey is an accomplished poet,” Chesnoff said. “It would be unfair to someone of his talent to be told what they can say. It becomes somewhat paternalistic, your honor.”
He described Dorsey as “dying to start working again and expressing himself.”
Dorsey expressed gratitude in court for the chance to work again, and his attorneys have noted a number of prospects on the horizon.
Among them are a possible July 5 date at the upcoming Essence Fest in New Orleans, as well as at Lil Wayne’s Lil Weezy Ana Festival on Nov. 2 and a series of dates with rapper Juvenile, his lawyers say.
Morgan, an appointee of President Barack Obama, acknowledged it was an unusual case. Prosecutors commonly use rap lyrics and videos to help convince juries to convict, but Morgan said she couldn’t easily find a case in which a judge has limited them as a condition of release.
Morgan did not immediately rule on the matter after Tuesday's hearing.
