Why Fat Joe turned himself in to New York police in 2002
New York police officers had a striking visitor in July 2002. Those cops familiar with the era’s singles charts would have known exactly who’d just arrived to turn himself in: the ‘What’s Luv?’ rapper Fat Joe.
‘What’s Luv?’ was the second single from Joe’s fourth album Jealous Ones Still Envy (JOSE), and, following its release in February 2002, it became a big hit. Featuring Ashanti and Ja Rule, the song climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in April, becoming the best-performing single of Joe’s career.
The track remained in the charts for 20 long weeks following its release, meaning Fat Joe was in the cultural ether for much of 2002. That must have made it quite shocking, then, when he walked into a police station in New York that summer, willingly handing himself over.
A couple of months before this moment, in May, Joe and some of his crew had allegedly gotten into a brawl at a venue in Times Square. On the other side was a man called Steve Garib, who, by the time it was over, had come out worse for wear.
Reports from 2002 claimed that Garib’s jaw had been fractured, while he was also left with a multitude of bruises and cuts; things, clearly, had gotten very nasty.
A police deposition went further into the grizzly details, stating that, after being “pushed from behind”, Garib had then been set upon by “at least six people” who duly “began to beat him”. He was “punched and kicked repeatedly by this group even after he fell to the ground”.
While Fat Joe was suspected of involvement in this incident, he maintained that he was innocent. His lawyer insisted to the Associated Press that eyewitnesses could back Joe’s claim that he was “nowhere near the incident”, while he also claimed a specific witness had told him that “he never saw Joe lay a hand on the individual at all”.
As it happened, the law fell onto Joe’s side of things in this particular instance. By early 2003, the charges against him had been dropped, with the Manhattan District Attorney stating that there hadn’t been enough evidence against him.
This had come at a great time for Joe, who, around that same point, had received a Grammy nomination for ‘What’s Luv?’ “I went from GN, Grammy nominated, to NG, not guilty,” Joe joked about the situation, according to MTV.