Why was Pop Smoke arrested at a New York airport?
Despite proving to be such an important figure within hip-hop of the late 2010s, the life and career of Pop Smoke proved to be shockingly short-lived.
In February 2020, not long before the COVID lockdowns really began to set in around much of the world, Pop was brutally murdered in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles. He had only been 20 years old, having already done so much to hone and popularise a new form of drill music, Brooklyn drill.
Pop Smoke had released a couple of influential mixtapes during his lifetime, but he never managed to release a studio album. That dropped only after his murder, with Shoot for the Stars, Aim for the Moon debuting at number one in the charts in the United States that July. Every single one of its tracks entered the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. A second posthumous album, Faith, was released in 2021.
Pop Smoke’s influence seems incredibly outsized, given the short span of his lifetime. That point is made even more apt when considering the challenges he had faced throughout his too-short time on Earth, with problems with the law frequently interfering with the course of his life.
He was expelled from school as a kid, after he brought a firearm onto the premises, and he was later condemned to house arrest for a couple of years for weapon possession. Even as he was in the midst of becoming a famous rapper, he couldn’t ever shake the life of crime he’d become involved with as a kid.
In January 2020, only a month before his murder, Pop Smoke made it into the news for all the wrong reasons. As he was returning to New York from a visit to Paris Fashion Week, he was arrested at John F Kennedy International Airport. He was accused of a serious theft.
Pop was alleged to have stolen Rolls-Royce Wraith, a car worth a phenomenal amount of money, reportedly about $375,000. A person had reported their vehicle stolen, supposedly after Pop had gotten a lend of it to record a music video in California. There had apparently been an agreement that Pop would return the car the following day.
That didn’t happen. Investigators came to believe that Pop Smoke had instead arranged for the Rolls-Royce to be transported by truck to New York. The rapper later posted a photo of himself online, standing in front of what seemed to be this very car, and the vehicle was later recovered at the property of Pop’s mother in Brooklyn.
Following Pop’s arrest, the cops also asked him questions about a shooting that had previously taken place in Brooklyn during the summer of 2019. It was suspected that the rapper may have known something about it, but he apparently wouldn’t help them out.
At the end of it all, Pop was charged with grand theft auto. He posted a $250,000 bond and committed himself to staying away from known members of gangs. He also committed to submitting drug tests. But, within a month, he would be dead, a tragic end to a life that was beginning to show such signs of promise.