Hip Hop Uncensored Podcast

His hard-bitten lyrics and bruising diss tracks have earned gangsta rapper AR-Ab a dedicated following in his native Philadelphia over the last decade, and the respect of hip-hop heavyweights ranging from Drake to producer Swizz Beatz. Drawn by his tales of street justice and boasts of his dominance in the drug-world, viewers have flocked by the millions to his self-released YouTube music video But on Tuesday, federal jurors decided that AR-Ab’s tough-talking kingpin persona was more than just bombast to burnish his music cred. It was, they concluded, a reflection of a real-life criminal career. Jurors found the rapper — whose legal name is Abdul West — and three members of his entourage guilty of turning their record label, Original Block Hustlaz (OBH), into a large-scale North Philly drug trafficking operation implicated in at least two killings. Although federal prosecutors did not charge them in connection with those deaths, they left little doubt as to whom they believed to be responsible. “Every on