Has T.I. been telling on people?

I raised this issue in a post here a minute ago, but I wasn't really in a position to say one way or another whether or not T.I. had read off a list of names to the police as part of the deal where he only ended up having to do a mere matter of months in jail for getting caught with all of those guns - this despite the fact that he's got a rap sheet longer than... well, I'll spare you the analogy.

Of course the official story was that T.I. had gotten all dressed up in his Sunday best and took a bunch of pictures outside a church on Easter Sunday, flanked on all sides by his baby mama, Tiny from Xscape, and his umpteen weird-looking children. (They got if from they mama.) Then judge then saw said pictures, realized what an asset T.I. could be to his community, and drastically reduced T.I.'s sentence, provided he goes and gives talks to school children about how it's not cool to break the law, mmkay?

Which of course struck me as bullshit. If this guy used to deal drugs, and was building a tiny arsenal of army guns in his bedroom closet, and was involved in high speed highway shootouts with secret cabals of angry Mexicans out in Ohio, why in the fuck would anyone want him near their school-age children? I wasn't surprised in the least bit when I read that T.I. could hardly even find any school kids to talk to, because these school districts found out who he was and were like, "Fuck that shit!"

However, one person who would know if there were any shenanigans involved in T.I.'s sentencing is Fiddy Cent. The guy's obviously had his share of run-ins with the law going back to when he was in high school, let alone now that he gets to be constantly hounded by the infamous hip-hop police. And if there was any question as to whether or not he's got the best lawyers that Vitamin Water money can buy, I'd say the recent settlement in his child support case with his baby's mother ought to have put an end to that.

In a song called "You So Tough," off G-Unit's forthcoming Terminate on Sight, Fiddy suggests there's no way T.I. could have gotten the deal he got without telling on people. Here's the operative bit, which I've copied and pasted from Miss Info's blog. She recently attended a listening session for the album, hosted by Fiddy weed carriers Lloyd Banks and Tony Yayo. Fiddy himself couldn't be in attendance, because he was off somewhere pursuing his acting career.

“Nowaways this rap shit aint adding up. How n—-s get caught with 10 machine guns, only get 12 months?

Oo-weee, don’t talk to me. If you talking to him, you talking to them…

I got the best lawyers that money can buy….they say at best they woulda got me 10 or maybe 9.

I said, how do you explain how the homie breezed? They said, you keep your mouth shut or you eat the cheese.”

Aww dang!

Now, I should note that obviously the main idea here is to drum up controversy, similar to how Fiddy has done in advance of all of his other albums - whether it's been kicking people out of G-Unit, or having Tony Yayo slap that kid (allegedly). Even the house his baby's mother had been living in burning to the ground seems like convenient timing, though I'm still convinced she did that shit herself, out of spite for him. I'm not saying Fiddy definitely didn't act out of a genuine concern for his colleagues in the hip-hop community. It'd be foolish to think his motivation here is 100% altruistic.

Regardless, I'd say it's definitely gonna be interesting to see how this plays out. I mean, T.I,'s gonna have to mount some sort of response, no? It was one thing when it was just random mofos on the Internets such as myself saying T.I. might have run his mouth, but I don't have the reach of a Fiddy Cent just yet. Nullus. And T.I.'s been having a hard enough year PR-wise already, what with this guy Shawty Lo proving he isn't even from the part of Atlanta he says he's from. That page out of T.I.'s high school yearbook someone came up with damn near looked like some shit out of my high school yearbook, if a bit less Jew-y. The last thing he needs is everyone thinking he's a snitch.