Ja Rule is opening up about serving time in federal prison for tax evasion.
The rapper spoke on Earn Your Leisure this month about the financial situation that led to him serving two years in prison in 2011.
“I did my state time for the gun charge, and then as soon as I got released, the feds came and got me for failure to file taxes," he said near the one-hour, five-minute mark in the video below. “I was doing some crazy shit. I didn’t understand money at the time.”
Ja continued to explain that his way of receiving payments for shows led to him not reporting money to the IRS.
“I would do shit like, ‘Yo, you’re giving me $250,000 for the show. Bet. Give me $50,000 in cash and send the other $200,000 to the shit,’” he recalled.
“In my mind, that 50 is free cash. I don’t know why I thought that. I just thought if you gave it to me in cash, it ain’t on the books. And so I did that to the tune of $3 million fucking dollars,” Rule continued.
When asked about how he was discovered, Ja wasn’t certain. But he has his theories.
“I think when the federal case and all that shit happened, they started poking around,” he said, which he believes made the authorities think, “What else can we get this guy for. This guy made all of this money, but he didn’t report this money. What’s going on over here?”
Though that period of life was dark for him, Ja has been having a great time in recent years. Earlier this year, he celebrated his 50th birthday by dancing on a bar in Las Vegas while dancing to Pretty Ricky’s “On the Hotline.”
