Shortly after 10:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 22, 2007, a blue Maybach was pulled over for speeding on New York’s Upper West Side. Three men, including a millions-selling rap star, were inside. Also inside, police discovered a .40-caliber pistol. Arrested for criminal possession of a weapon, the rap star decided to call Stacey Richman.

On that same night, about an hour later, also in New York City, police pulled over another vehicle. This one, a tour bus, also contained a millions-selling rap star. It was also searched. A .40-caliber pistol was also found. The rap star inside was also arrested for criminal possession of a weapon. He also called Stacey Richman.

Being summoned twice in as many hours—to represent Ja Rule and Lil Wayne, respectively—made for a frantic evening for the Bronx-bred criminal defense lawyer. But it was nothing she couldn’t handle. “The next day was more hectic, because we were working to get them out,” she says some three and a half years later, sitting in a window seat at Vino restaurant on the Upper East Side. “We ended up in night court, and by 5 the next day, both Ja—there were two other people [arrested with him] as well—I got all three of them, plus Wayne, out.”

An unlikely hip-hop heroine, the 44-year-old White, Jewish Richman has earned herself a reputation as a stout defender of rappers in legal trouble. During the past decade, working for the firm of her father, Murray “No Worry Murray” Richman—whom The Village Voice named “Best Lawyer to Call When the D.A. Indicts You” last year—she has represented Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, Ja Rule, Kid Cudi and Freekey Zekey, among other notables. And she’s won accolades for her hard work and down-to-earth compassion.

“She’s an angel,” says Freekey, who retained Richman for a 2003 drug case that eventually resulted in a three-year prison bid. “I wish we came from the same bloodline. She took care of me as if I was her fam. I will salute her, because she didn’t make me feel like she was a lawyer who got paid to do a job.”

Richman checks her BlackBerry frequently. Just a few hours before arriving at the restaurant, she was retained to represent model Theodora Richards, the daughter of rock-’n’-roll legend Keith Richards, who had had her picture posted all over TMZ and other tabloids after being arrested on graffiti charges in March. Despite her famous clientele, though, Richman avoids the label of “celebrity lawyer.”

“It’s great that there are celebrities and hip-hop personalities that have faith in me. I want to maintain that,” she says. Still, “I don’t consider myself a celebrity lawyer; I don’t consider myself a hip-hop lawyer. I’d like to be considered an excellent lawyer. That’s my goal... I couldn’t care less if you are a ditchdigger or the president of the United States. I’m gonna work my ass off.”

Born in the South Bronx, the locale widely credited as hip-hop’s birthplace, Richman is the product of a distinctively American melting pot. Her paternal grandparents were from Russia, or the Ukraine (“depending on where the border was that week,” she says). Her maternal grandfather was from Spain, and her stepmother, Puerto Rico. She grew up idolizing her father, who represented so many accused criminals in the 1970s and 1980s that it was said he had his own personal courtrooms in Manhattan and the Bronx.

“Growing up was very interesting, because we had an insight into a world that I gather most people find very exciting, but to us it was quite normal,” she recalls. “I remember one time, my father had gotten somebody out of jail—it was a younger kid—and the judge is like, ‘I’m not going to release him.’ And my father said, ‘You know what, release him into my custody.’ The judge was like, ‘All right, he’s yours.’ His passion for what he does really stems from that he always perceived [himself] as the person on the outside looking in.”

That passion rubbed off on the older of Murray’s two daughters, who seemed destined to become a defense attorney from an early age. “I was always getting my friends out of trouble,” Richman remembers. “It seemed like a natural flow.”

After attending Ramapo Senior High School, in New York’s Rockland County, Richman headed to Brandeis University, located just outside of Boston, where she studied political science, legal studies and philosophy. Upon graduation, she returned to New York City and enrolled at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. After wrapping up there, she took and passed the bar in New York and New Jersey, but also in California, and ended up heading out to Los Angeles to start her career.

Her work there, though, mostly in civil suits involving the rich and famous, left her unsatisfied. “I felt that criminal law was ultimately far more meaningful,” she says.

So Richman moved back to New York, to be closer to family and to pursue a new side of the law. Soon the up-and-comer began working with her dad while trying to establish her own name—a process kick-started on her very first felony case.

It lasted a year and a half and ended in just 45 minutes. Saddled with a lengthy rap sheet and new drug charges, and facing life in prison if found guilty, her client, a man named Wayne Faciglia, had been incarcerated during the entire year-plus process. But after closing arguments, it took the jury under an hour to acquit. “The man walked out the door with me,” she says with a smile. “And that was a wonderful day.”

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In April 2001, the firm was hired to defend Jay-Z, who had been arrested on a gun-possession charge—one of two charges the rapper faced as he recorded The Blueprint (the other being the more infamous stabbing of Lance “Un” Rivera). That was a less wonderful day, as Richman remembers. “It was bad, ’cause I had just put conditioner on my hair,” she says with a laugh. “I had to run out of my house, and my hair was all slicked back… I had to run to the precinct, and I was like, Uggggh!

While her father represented Jay in the stabbing case, which would end in a guilty plea and a sentence of three years’ probation, she took the gun case and got the charges dropped. Her stock was rising.

Two years later, in late 2003, she was hired to defend the Dipset rapper Freekey Zekey, who’d been charged with drug trafficking in North Carolina. There was a time during the case when the two were stranded overnight in the Charlotte airport as they tried to make it back home. “She wasn’t like, ‘I’m the lawyer, you gotta pay for me and my hotel, and I have to be this and that,’ ” Freekey says. “She was like, ‘Oh, we stuck? Well, take your jacket, ball it up.’ That’s my pillow. ‘We gonna lay right here in this airport until we get it right.’ She would not only speak to me, she would call my moms. She would make sure my family was all right.”
Freekey says things were going well until Richman was moved off the case, due to a conflicting murder trial she had in New York. “Once I got the other lawyer,” he says, “it lasted a week, and they gave me three years.”

He’s confident that, had his counsel remained constant, he would have remained a free man. “I love Stacey. I would push her out the way and take a bullet,” he says. “She made me feel like she was my sister, and I was in trouble. There was no limit she would stop at to make sure her brother was fine.”

This jibes with Richman’s own description of her work ethic. “If you’re coming to me, it’s as if I’m representing my brother, my sister, my mother,” she says. “You’re the most important person in the world to me.”

Last June, another call came in from another rapper. Busted for acting up outside of a woman’s apartment in Chelsea, Kid Cudi had been brought up on charges of cocaine possession. Less than half a year later, despite an initial statement by the Manhattan district attorney’s office claiming that Cudi had entered a guilty plea, the case was adjourned in contemplation of dismissal.

Richman calls Cudi “brilliant” and says that, besides representing him legally, she’s a fan of his music. “I listen to my clients,” she says. “I don’t like to listen to them while I’m working on their cases, because I’m so concerned about them that it’s distracting. So for the whole period that I was working on Wayne and Ja, I didn’t listen to Wayne and Ja music, which was painful, ’cause I really enjoy it. And I’m back onto Cudi now, ’cause I’m all done [with his case].”

That fateful summer night in 2007 led to guilty pleas and time behind bars for both of Richman’s millions-selling rapper clients. Ja began his two-year prison sentence in Rikers Island in early June, after a judge denied arguments that the gun the police found should have been deemed ineligible as evidence; he will ultimately reside in a New York detention facility yet to be determined. “I think that Ja’s gun should have been suppressed, but the courts ruled otherwise,” Richman says. “I thought the search was a bad search. That was my opinion, and I think that—there was a lot of testimony with regard to this issue, and the court did not agree.”

Wayne served eight months at Rikers Island last year before getting out in November. Richman believes he could have beaten the charges in court. New York gun laws are in contradiction with those in other states, she says—a disconnect that can create confusion and, potentially, reasonable doubt.

“I thought that Wayne’s case was a very good case to try, and he chose otherwise,” she says. “He had a license to carry in Florida that had reciprocity with many states. I don’t believe that he was guilty of what they were trying to prove through the charges he was accused of.” That said, she respects his decision. “You need to give [clients] all of the options for them so that they can make the choices for their lives.”

It’s Richman’s passion, and her compassion, that makes her so good at her job. She very clearly views each of her clients as an individual, and as a real person, no matter the level of fame or notoriety—a person facing real problems, who needs to avail him- or herself of every bit of protection the judicial system provides.

“I really believe very passionately in what I do. I really believe very passionately in our Constitution. And I love what I do. I think one thing that’s really important is that you want to represent somebody the way you would want to be represented. You want every stone turned. You want every lead investigated. You want every aspect considered.”

When she speaks this way about her work, it’s easy to see why she has become the go-to choice for the rap-world elite. At her core, she’s very hip-hop. “This entire profession is real life,” she says. “What we do is real life at its most raw and most exciting and its most tragic and its most awesome.” —Adam Fleischer

**COP THE JULY/AUGUST 2011 ISSUE OF XXL, ON STANDS NOW**

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