American rapper Fetty Wap, known for his hit Trap Queen, was sentenced Wednesday to six years in prison for drug trafficking by a federal court near New York, announced the US justice.
William Junior Maxwell II, 31, was arrested at the end of October 2021 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), at Citi Field, a baseball stadium in the borough of Queens in New York, where he was to perform at a festival. He pleaded guilty in August 2022 and was awaiting sentencing, which was handed down Wednesday by a judge in Central Islip, Long Island, federal court. The rapper was sentenced to six years in prison for distributing cocaine, as part of a larger trafficking for which five other people had been arrested, including a prison guard.
Born in Paterson, New Jersey neighboring New York, Fetty Wap rose to prominence with his hit Trap Queen in 2015, a love story and drug trafficking in which he sings and raps. With this song, he had climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100, a benchmark chart in the United States. Handicapped since childhood by glaucoma, which had caused him to lose the use of one eye, he had displayed his disability on the cover of his album entitled Fetty Wap.
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According to the American justice, the rapper was part of "an organization that distributed more than 100 kilograms of cocaine, heroin, fentanyl and crack across Long Island and New Jersey" between June 2019 and June 2020. The drugs originated on the U.S. West Coast and transited to the East Coast via postal mail or hidden in vehicles, according to a statement from the federal prosecutor's office.
According to prosecutors, the searches recovered about $1.5 million in cash, 16 kilograms of cocaine, two kilograms of heroin, fentanyl pills and firearms. Once she has served her sentence, Fetty Wap will also be subject to a five-year supervised release period.