While discussing the West Coast-East Coast beef of the ’90s on the latest episode of the podcast Joe and Jada, Fat Joe recalled the time Ruff Ryders Entertainment saved his life during a visit to Los Angeles.
“Shout out to [Darrin Dean aka Dee ‘The General’] and Icepick Jay,” Joe remarked around the 6:50 point of the podcast to his co-host Jadakiss, as seen above. “They saved my life. Icepick Jay, he saved my life one time. They was going to get me, and you know, I had a lot of beef with the West Coast. I’m probably, and we’re not stirring nothing up, but I’m probably the only rapper from New York that had physical beef with the West Coast. Like, real physical war. It went down.”
He further explained that the incident occurred in Los Angeles when he and Big Pun attended the Grammys one year. “There’s a million cop cars in the street, and you know, it was like gang beef,” he continued. Despite all the police presence, authorities seemingly didn’t notice a guy Joe described as wearing a puffer jacket and sporting jheri curls walking around with a machine gun.
“We don’t rat, but I’m looking like, ‘Jesus Christ, don’t nobody see?'” he said. “He looked at me like he could not go back to the hood without clapping Fat Joe. Not clapping, killing me. He had a machine gun. And so, it’s a million cops out there. I fucked up, ‘cause we at the mansion. We knew whatever was going to happen, you know, don’t go over there. And we still like dummies, [and] went out.”
He recalled noticing this guy and being with a “girl from New York” at the time, who turned to him and said, “I’m sorry this is happening to you.” He added, “She could probably see, like, death in my face.” Joe said that the guy was “trying to figure out how to shoot me and get away” from all the cops around. “He looked like a dog in rage,” he said. “Then out of nowhere, the door opens and Dee comes out. He’s like, ‘Yo Crack, what’s up?’ I looked at him [and] I said, ‘Yo.'”
He said that Dee, one of the co-founders of Ruff Ryders Entertainment, quickly realized what was going on. “He said, ‘That’s for you, Crack?'” Joe said. “He said, ‘Yo, Icepick is going to turn this corner in a white van, y’all better just get in there. Get out of here.’ So the van pull up, Icepick ain’t even know he was saving us he was coming around to get Dee. … God was with us, it was like six or seven of us. We got in that bitch and left in the van. That guy was so confused, he ain’t know where the fuck we went ‘cause it was too crowded.”
When he got into the van, he profusely thanked Icepick for saving his life, but he appeared confused. “I said, ‘Yo, they had the machine gun, they ready to clap us,'” he said. “We went to the Grammys with guns on us. Me and Big Pun. That picture you see [of] us looking like superheroes, we actually had hammers on us in the Grammys, because that was too much.”
During the same episode of the podcast, Joe shared the story of when he bailed Justin Bieber out of jail in Miami in 2014 and confronted the pop star about his behavior. Check out the full episode up top.
