BALTIMORE – While the head of the Congressional Black Caucus called on Denver Nuggets forward Carmelo Anthony to condemn a DVD in which the basketball star appeared with men threatening “snitches,” the producer of the video said its message has been blown out of proportion.
Anthony appears in about six minutes of the DVD entitled “Stop Snitching.” Shot in September when Anthony was visiting his old block in Baltimore, “Stop Snitching” shows the basketball star’s friends joking about what they would do to Larry Brown, the coach of the Olympic basketball team who benched Anthony, should Brown visit Baltimore.
“We gon’ lynch his ass if he ever come here,” one guy says.
Later in the video, after some rapper named “Black” disses Anthony in a freestyle rap, the basketball star jokes that he might “put some money on his mother [expletive] brains.”
In other parts of the video, men — some of them brandishing guns — talk openly about the harm they wish would come to Baltimore’s criminals who get arrested and then roll over on others still out on the street.
“We got a lot of rats up here we wanna expose,” said one man speaking from Baltimore’s Park Heights neighborhood. “It ain’t too many of ‘em, cause we deal with them niggas.”
Saturday, U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md. — whose 7th District includes Anthony’s old neighborhood and the neighborhoods where the DVD was shot — in a written statement called on the National Basketball Association star to “take immediate action to formally condemn any association by its players with activities that promote the illegal drug trade,” the Baltimore Sun reported.
But Rodney Bethea, who produced the 108-minute DVD with a man named “Skinny Suge” — who appears in the video — said the police and media have exaggerated the message in “Stop Snitching.”
“It was for entertainment purposes only,” Bethea told BlackAmericaWeb.com Sunday from his “One Love Underground” shop in Southwest Baltimore, where he sells “Stop Snitching” for $10 a piece. “It’s a documentary about what’s going on in the streets of Baltimore,” said Bethea. “It’s no different than a documentary about a serial killer. The police and media have made it far more than what it was intended to be.”
Bethea said the laughter heard at some of the comments shows they were made in jest. At the start of the DVD, Skinny Suge talks about folks who donate money to help find a cure for AIDS and then, as others in the background laugh, says “I need y’all to donate to me information about these bitch-ass niggas … I hope they get hit by a milk truck and get creamed like a mother [expletive].”
In another scene a rapper named Tony O freestyles about a snitch in which he threatens to “destroy your house just like you had a hundred elephants in your crib.”
Moments later, he tells viewers “Don’t pay me no mind, ’cause Tony O just had some [expletive] on his chest.”
Bethea, who also edited “Stop Snitching,” was visibly miffed that none of the media outlets bothered to get his side of the story before printing or airing reports. The few comments he gave, he told BlackAmericaWeb.com, were against the advice of his lawyers, who suggested he not to talk to the media at all. It was only with great reluctance that he sold a BlackAmericaWeb.com correspondent a copy of “Stop Snitching.”
Anthony, in a Baltimore Sun story that ran on Dec. 4, tried to downplay his part in the video.
“I’m just on there,” said Anthony. “I understand that everybody is on there talking about killing and doing this and that, but it’s not like I’m on there with guns. I was back on my block, chillin.’ I was going back to show love to everybody, thinking it was just going to be on the little DVD, that it was just one of my homeboy’s recording.”
Anthony has at least one supporter in Baltimore. Terry Leverette, a basketball coach at Southwestern High School, said Anthony is “a fine young man” faced with some difficult choices.
“What happens in our community,” said Leverette, “is that we have relatives and friends and a lot of times we try to fit in. Carmelo’s really a stand-up guy, a good kid who’s dealing with stardom at an early age and you have the hangers-on and people who he knew and you have to come home sometimes.
“I guess the only way to alleviate a situation like this is to cut your family ties altogether, but who’s going to do that?”
