Terror Squad founder and ‘Lean Back’ legend Fat Joe is a Bronx icon and was one of the first Latino MCs to break into the mainstream during the early-2000s. However, as a grown adult, he now sees some of the mistakes he made as a youngster.
Before snitching on multiple members of Brooklyn’s Nine Trey Gangster Bloods, Fat Joe mentored Tekashi 6ix9ine and educated the ‘Billy’ musician about his rise to fame and the mistakes he made along the way to prevent Tekashi (real name Daniel Hernandez) from repeating them.
During an appearance on the My Expert Opinion podcast with Matth Hoffa, Fat Joe (real name Jose Cartagena) explained how, in his youth, he used to move with a massive entourage of gangsters that led him down a bad path mentally and financially.
During the conversation, Cartagena recalled a time when he was in the Bronx and was close to getting a brand deal with the Jamaican beer company Red Stripe but lost the $2million contract because his clique refused to let the head of marketing talk to him.
Retelling the story told to him by the head of marketing, Cartagena explained, “[The man] said, ‘I went to a place called Jimmy’s Bronx Cafe. When I got up there, there was about 100 gangsters standing in front of you, you was sitting in the chair.’ He said, ‘I went past the first ten, somebody grabbed me in my chest and told me yo you can’t talk to the Don.’ He said, ‘As I finessed my way around the next 10, somebody grabbed me in the chest, ‘Yo get the fuck up out of here!”
Fat Joe admitted that the Red Stripe representative was about to offer him $2million. Joe explained, “He said, ‘I had a check for $2million in my pocket, and I was looking at you, and I couldn’t get to you.'”
The ‘What’s Luv’ musician revealed to Hoffa that he told this story to Tekashi 6ix9ine and warned him that if you surround yourself with too many people, they can sometimes make decisions that deprive you of opportunities, disclosing, “I told that story to Tekashi. I said, ‘Listen, when you got 100 n*ggas with you, you think this is keeping it real, but you scaring the money. When you doing all that, you scaring the money.'”
You can listen to Fat Joe speaking about losing his brand deal in the video below.
