Pooh Shiesty has been sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to a single firearms conspiracy charge.
The rapper – whose real name is Lontrell Donell Williams Jr. – was charged over his involvement in an October 2020 shooting at a hotel in Bay Harbor Islands in Florida. He is said to have shot a 28-year-old man in the buttocks.
After Williams pleaded guilty to a single firearms conspiracy charge earlier this year, federal prosecutors dropped three additional charges that could have resulted in a lifetime prison sentence. The most serious of these charges alleged that Shiesty fired a gun during the confrontation at the Landon Hotel in Bay Harbor Islands on October 9, 2020.
According to Stereogum, the rapper ultimately took a plea deal with prosecutors. He pleaded guilty to one federal charge of conspiracy to possess a firearm in furtherance of violent and drug-trafficking crimes, in exchange for the three other charges being dropped.
Williams has now been sentenced to 63 months – which is equal to five years and three months – rather than the 97 months he had been facing with the three extra charges taken into account.
“Listen, nobody’s happy to go to prison, but he was happy the judge listened to our argument, and the judge received the argument well. He was satisfied with the outcome,” Shiesty’s defence lawyer Bradford Cohen told Rolling Stone. “We’re happy with the decision of the court.”
According to prosecutors, Williams allegedly drove a rented McLaren to the Landon Hotel on the day of the October 2020 shooting to “purchase a pair of high-end athletic sneakers and marijuana”.
Video surveillance allegedly showed Williams pulling up to the hotel with another man described as his road manager riding in the front and a third man following behind them in a black Mercedes Maybach.
After he accepted a bag of marijuana and examined a pair of sneakers, Williams allegedly pulled out a Draco subcompact weapon and ended up firing, hitting the alleged victim in the buttocks, investigators previously claimed.
As Williams drove off, a Louis Vuitton bag stuffed with $40,912 in cash fell out of the driver’s seat of the McLaren, authorities claimed. Investigators said they linked the cash to the rapper by matching the full serial number on one of the recovered bills to a $100 bill shown on his Instagram account days before the alleged robbery.
In June 2021, Pooh Shiesty was arrested in connection with a Memorial Day weekend shooting at a Miami strip club. The outcome of that case is not yet known.
