John Jolly, a homeless guy, was wounded with a steak knife by the hip-hop artist, whose music career ended in the late 1980s.
After stabbing a homeless man in New York City, Kidd Creole, a member of the legendary hip-hop group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, was sentenced to 16 years in prison for manslaughter.
Last month, the rapper, real name Nathaniel Glover, was found guilty of the crime. Prosecutors say Glover killed John Jolly, 55, with a steak knife after the two got into an argument; Glover’s defence is that he was scared by Jolly, who allegedly asked him “what’s up?” in a threatening manner.
Glover’s counsel claimed that Jolly’s homelessness made him feel threatened, but judge Michele S Rodney ruled that the death was not “way justifiable because the victim is homeless… “A life is a life, and a life is a life.”
Glover told Rodney that he had expected to be found not guilty of the crime and that he had been painted as someone “without sorrow or empathy.”
When he attacked Jolly, the former rapper was on his way to work at a copy shop. Glover’s music career had been dormant for some time at the time of the murder, but as a member of the Furious Five, he made a vital contribution to early hip-hop history.
He founded the Three MCs with his brother Melvin Glover, AKA Melle Mel, and Keef Cowboy, with Grandmaster Flash on production, as Kidd Creole (not to be confused with the funk-pop star Kid Creole). Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five was renamed after the addition of two additional MCs, Scorpio and Rahiem.
They were one of the first hip-hop groups to break into the US charts, and while Kidd Creole doesn’t appear on the classic Melle Mel-delivered The Message, he did contribute to a number of other tracks, and after a 1984 schism in the group, he also appears on albums credited solely to Grandmaster Flash. In 1987, the original group reassembled for one final record before disbanding completely.
