The short rise and hard fall of an Anchorage gangsta rapper
Pictured: Joker & Lil Wayne
I smoked blunts with Joker the Bailbondsman. Hell, I
smoked a
lot of blunts with Joker the Bailbondsman. I smoked so many blunts
with
Joker one time at his bullet-pocked crib in Mountain View that I
convinced
myself he was going to shoot me. Part of my problem was classic
stoner
paranoia. Part of it was that I was wearing a San Bernardino
County Sheriff‟s
Deputy uniform in a roomful of poseur gang bangers. The
rest was that Joker
had just pulled a pistol and half-jokingly threatened
to bust a cap in my ass.His
exact words were, “You put any of that shit I
just said in my article and I will most
definitely bust a cap in your
peckerwood ass.”Before I explain the sheriff‟s
uniform allow me to break
down the context and meaning of the above
statement.“My article” as Joker
put it, was a cover story about him later published
in the December 7-13,
2000 edition of the Anchorage Press, a feature length
character sketch of
an aspiring hip-hop mogul who rapped about shootouts on
Boniface and
selling drugs to “clients in Deadhorse.” Technically it was my
article,
not his, since I was the one reporting and writing it. But I don‟t
quibble
over semantics when there‟s a gun in my face, so I let it
slide.“That shit I just
said” referred to a 20-minute long, rambling,
heavy-lidded soliloquy in which
Joker detailed his purported
masterminding of a multi-city narcotics trafficking
operation along with
his designs to become “the kingpin of coke in Anchorage,
A-K.”Mind you,
this was during an interview with a journalist whose
microcassette
recorder was positioned amidst marijuana stems, a half-full
40-ounce bottle of
Olde English and three hollow-point bullets on a side
table not six inches from
Joker‟s elbow.Homeboy was on the record,
bragging about dealing drugs. And I
was sitting there in my cop suit. I‟d
purchased it and put it on at Value Village on
my way to interview Joker,
thinking it‟d make a sweet Burning Man costume. And
it does. But for
interviewing the self-designated godfather of Anchorage gangster
rap it
was less than idealWhich brings us back to my peckerwood ass.I‟m
pretty
sure the Society of Professional Journalists has a rule or two
against smoking
blunts with interview subjects, which is one of many
reasons I don‟t belong to the
Society of Professional Journalists. Yet by
all but the most conservative ethical
standards of journalism I could
have virtuously quoted every single word Joker
said about slinging this
and chopping up that.Instead, I wussed out. I didn‟t print
a word of that
shit he said. I just hinted at his criminality.Joker has
fashioned
himself into [a] Dr. Dre for the 49th state. He owns his own
record label, his own
recording studio… He drives a white Mustang packed
with boxes of CDs and
posters and stickers and fliers and T-shirts [Uzis
on the front, name on the
back]…If you‟re wondering where the money for
all this paraphernalia is coming
from, well, don‟t even go there. —“Joker
the Bailbondsman: The Blunt Truth,”
December 2000.I didn‟t go there,
simply because I didn‟t think bringing the heat
Pictured: Cal Worthington (Appeared in a Joker The Bailbondsman video)
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down on Joker would be
such a triumph of investigative journalism that it justified
the risk,
having already learned the hard way that antagonizing wannabe
gangster
rappers is a risky business. But that‟s another story. Not long after
I
finished my story on Joker I moved out of the state and more or less
forgot about
him, except for a few occasions over the years when I
channel-hopped past one
of his videos on BET (the best of them depicts
Joker and his posse cruising with
Cal Worthington in the driver‟s seat of
a Lincoln Continental). Then came April 14
of this year, when I was
alerted by several friends to a news brief in the
Anchorage Daily News
headlined “Local rapper gets 10 years for dealing drugs.”
It reported
that 33-year-old local rap artist Sean Sullivan had been sentenced to
a
decade in federal prison after being convicted of two counts of
distributing
crack cocaine and one count of attempting to distribute
crack cocaine. The final
sentence read: “Prosecutors say Sullivan also is
known by his recording name
„Joker the Bailbondsman‟ and has recorded
songs and videos including „Money
in a Ziploc Bag‟ and „Sex Money Murder
Drugs.‟”Subtlety has never been one of
Joker‟s strong points. A few weeks
before I interviewed him in 2000, he called
the station line at KFAT and
threatened to “bring the pain” if KFAT didn‟t start
playing his tracks.
Later that year he showed up for a photo shoot carrying five
handguns,
which he insisted on posing with for images to accompany “his”
story.He
wanted to be known as a gun-toting badass, a ghetto superstar, a
hood
from the hood. But he wasn‟t from the hood. Not even close. Before
he
transformed into Joker the Bailbondsman, Sean Sullivan was a
privileged kid
growing up in a safe neighborhood. He didn‟t have to deal
drugs to survive.
When he went to Wendler Junior High in 1990 he sported
a high-top fade, like
Kid from Kid „n‟ Play. That‟s not gangster. Earlier
this month I spoke by phone
with Brandi Alfaro, who grew up in Anchorage
but now lives in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania. She was friends with Joker
throughout his adolescence and dated
him for about a year when they were
both in their early teens. She told me that
he used to hang out at
Skateland, always carrying an album he‟d recorded,
showing off the
picture of himself on the cover, talking about how he was going to
be a
big hip-hop star when he grew up. That‟s not gangster
either.Somewhere
along the line from Skateland to Mountain View, Sullivan
invented, and then
became, Joker. And by inhabiting his own hype, he
engineered his own
downfall.Joker was born and raised in Anchorage, but
he‟s a product of the urban
jungles in his mind, described to him in
bedtime stories by Tupac and Biggy and
Ice-Cube, et. al. He was 10 years
old when Straight Outta Compton went
platinum. Now he emulates. —“The
Blunt Truth”Given our history together, I
wasn‟t exactly shocked to learn
that Joker was going to prison for dealing crack.
But I was curious to
find out just how close he‟d come to achieving kingpin
status. So I
looked up the indictment, pre-sentencing memos, Anchorage
Police
Department reports, FBI interview transcripts and various other
court and law
enforcement documents related to United States of America
vs. Sean A.
Sullivan.From them I drew four conclusions:1) Joker never
rose to higher than a
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mid-level dealer.2) Joker should have spent
less money on rap videos and more
on lawyers.3) Joker is no snitch.4)
Joker is one of the unluckiest crack dealers
ever to sling a rock.The
last of these findings I based solely on the outlandish
story of how
Joker got busted. It begins on the morning of January 29, 2004,
when a
man named Allen Busey showed up at Tyson Elementary School to
confront
several children about a fight they‟d recently picked with
Busey‟s
children. The school administrators called the cops. Busey, who
was wearing a
dark hooded sweatshirt, fled the scene. The responding APD
officer at first
decided to locate Busey and issue him a trespass
warning. But then APD
dispatch advised that Busey was the subject of an
outstanding arrest warrant for
assault and trespassing, information which
turned out to be inaccurate. Planning
to arrest Busey, Officer Luis Soto
rendezvoused with a second officer outside an
apartment complex on Price
Street in Mountain View where Busey lived. They
were about to go in when
they received an emergency call and started returning
to their patrol
cars.Right then Joker exited the building wearing a gray
hooded
sweatshirt.He was 26 years old, 5‟11” and weighed 190 pounds.
Busey was 45
years old, 5‟9” and weighed 191 pounds. Beyond the color of
their skin, and their
heights and weights, the two men shared little
resemblance.Even so, Officer Soto
approached Joker yelling “Allen,
Allen!”Despite all the time and money Joker had
spent trying to get
famous, he was about to get popped because a police officer
couldn‟t tell
one black guy in a hoodie from another.It‟s his life and he‟s starring
in
it. The props are all here…even the bullet hole in the wall over his
head. There‟s
another in the kitchen and two more in the bedroom. Someone
shot the hell out
of Joker‟s place, firing through the windows from the
street below…Joker says
the list of suspects is long. “The higher you
climb, the more people you leave
behind, and the more jealous they get.”
—“The Blunt Truth”According to
police reports and court documents, this
is what happened next:Ignoring Officer
Soto, Joker hopped in his car,
which was parked on the street. Soto drew his
service revolver. Joker
raised his hands but did not comply with Soto‟s orders to
step out of the
vehicle. Soto then used his nightstick to break the window. Joker
took
his foot off the brake and began to pull away. Officer Soto opened
fire,
shooting five bullets into the car. Somehow Joker wasn‟t hit. But
he got the
message. He killed the engine and stepped out with his hands
up.If Joker had
just said, “I‟m not Allen” and produced identification to
prove it, or even if he‟d just
gotten out of the car the first time Soto
ordered him to, he might still be smoking
blunts in his recording studio.
But his split-second decisions that fateful day were
guided by the
unsettling fact that he was in possession of 50 grams of crack
cocaine
and 80 grams of powdered cocaine, which the police were about
to
find.Joker‟s lawyer tied up the case for a year and a half by
challenging the
legality of the search. Then in June 2005, according to a
sentencing
memorandum, “the defendant indicated he wanted to cooperate
with the United
States.”In other words, Joker offered to become a
confidential informant working
for the federal government. “During a
debriefing, the defendant provided the
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names of numerous
individuals in the Anchorage drug world, including names of
individuals
then under investigation,” the sentencing memo reveals. “However,
the
defendant stated that because these individuals knew that he had
been
charged in federal court, they were hesitant to deal with him.”To
provide Joker
with the cover he needed to get back in the dope game, the
feds dismissed the
charges against him on evidentiary grounds. “Once the
defendant‟s case was
dismissed, he stated that he needed a „cooling off‟
period so that drug traffickers
would trust him again.”One year later,
Joker had still provided no useful
information, despite having appeared
in rap videos with drug traffickers targeted
by the federal government.
Then in October 2006, the FBI cultivated a different
informant who
admitted to buying half-ounces and ounces of crack from Joker on
more
than 50 occasions since Joker had agreed to become a snitch.Joker
was
trying to play the feds. That‟s not smart. But it is gangster.“I know
if I‟m going to
make it in this game, I need to have both a business
persona and a street
persona. I‟m a capitalist…I just want to be young
and rich. That‟s my whole thing
in this.” —“The Blunt Truth”Last November
16 a squadron of federal agents
raided Joker‟s house. By that time, he‟d
moved from Mountain View to a cookie
cutter two-story duplex on
Mountainman Loop, just off Dowling Road near the
New Seward Highway. They
busted down the door with a battering ram and
caught Joker as he ran out
of the first floor bathroom. Agents found a wet plastic
bag on the floor
of the bathroom next to the toilet. It tested positive for
cocaine
residue.Next the agents searched the garage, which had been
converted into a
recording studio. They found and catalogued six cell
phones, two pagers,
“suspected marijuana,” boxes of video film, stacks of
Joker the Bailbondsman
CDs, a box of .38 special blank rounds, two
12-gauge shotgun slugs and a
Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic assault rifle,
fully loaded.In the downstairs TV
room, agents found two more cell phones
and $4,062.55 in cash stuffed in a
pants pocket. In Joker‟s desk they
discovered “possible marijuana blunts,” rolling
papers, a digital scale,
and “Western Union receipts with the defendant‟s name.”
Elsewhere they
came up with yet another cell phone, another baggie with
cocaine residue
and a box of .45 caliber ammunition.According to an FBI report,
“After
being arrested, the defendant ominously asked agents if the
charges
against him would be dismissed if the informant who had made the
purchases
was „unwilling or unavailable to testify.‟”But there would be
no testimony or trial,
because Joker pleaded guilty early this year. Then
he kept quiet about his
looming incarceration except for a single oblique
reference in a February 27 post
to his MySpace page: “Did you know that
the U.S. government is lockin up
niggas like they is crazy??? If you in
HIPHOP you can make a difference. We
have to make our voices be heard. We
have to change the laws!!! We ain‟t
powerless. We have to let Congress
know we mean business. I‟m tired of
selective drug enforcement in this
nation.”And the federal government was tired
of Joker the Bailbondsman
selling drugs and rapping about it.Assistant U.S.
Attorney Frank V.
Russo, the lead prosecutor in the case against Joker,
says
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Anchorage Press
Joker “was on my radar screen” as soon as Russo arrived
in Alaska in 2002.
“We knew he was a pretty significant street-level
dealer,” says Russo. “We didn‟t
target Sean Sullivan because he was Joker
the Bailbondsman. We targeted him
because of his associates and the
amount of drugs he was dealing,” says Russo.
“But once we entered the
sentencing phase, his music and his persona became
a relevant concern.
Just as a criminal defense attorney will bring up a
defendant‟s good
deeds before the sentencing judge, I brought up the fact that in
this
case the defendant had been espousing drug propaganda to
the
community.”One week before Joker was sentenced, Russo submitted a
blistering
pre-sentencing memorandum. “The defendant‟s stable family
history offers no
excuse or explanation for his criminal behavior,” he
wrote. “Moreover, the
defendant had an opportunity rarely afforded to
defendants charged in federal
court… He had the connections and the
personality to be a successful
cooperator, and work off or down the
charges against him. Instead he chose to
sell drugs in order to support
his music career, favoring the drug traffickers that
appeared in his
music videos over his own family. “Ironically, in these videos,
the
defendant glorifies drug trafficking with provocative lyrics
proclaiming its
profitability and bragging about carrying firearms.” When
the judge gave him ten
years at the sentencing hearing, Joker freaked out
and had to be subdued by two
Deputy United States Marshals.“Ten years
came as a shock to him,” says Russo.
“The hearing finished with him
pinned down on the floor. On his way out of the
courtroom he called me a
chump. He said, „Are you happy now, chump?‟ I‟d
already told him it was
nothing personal.”It‟s hard to understand how Joker
couldn‟t have known
he was looking at ten in the pen considering one of the
videos he
produced and circulated on the internet in 2006, when he was
supposed to
be a federal informant. Titled “Product,” it shows Joker cooking
and
sorting crack cocaine while foretelling his own bleak future.“When
it‟s time for
sentencing, you know the judge won‟t bend,” he raps.
“You‟re caught with crack
and guns, a mandatory minimum
ten.”Word.
CREDIT: David Holthouse
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Does two more Up in Smoke tours w/Xibit.
Can’t walk at all on his own anymore, begins using a wheelchair. Loses his own place, and hasta move in with an ex-gf who he doesn’t get along with but was the only place he could go. They barely get along, the scene is usually tense. Meanwhile, his X & molly abuse continues, and without ever drinking water (their nightly ritual is to x-out before they fuck and crash-out). He continues to ride-out the pain (“Blood, I’ma soldier”) while flippin his pain meds for cash.
