Rapper is latest to test jails’ celeb treatment

March 2, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By JENNIFER PELTZ

NEW YORK — Lil Wayne may be a self-professed gangsta with the gunshot wound to prove it, but he’s made plenty clear how he feels about doing time behind bars.

“I’d rather be pushin’ flowers,” he raps in 2008’s “A Milli,” “than to be in the pen sharin’ showers.”

He might have to get used to it. At the apex of a career that has made him one of music’s biggest sellers, the Grammy-winning artist is expected to start a yearlong jail term today after pleading guilty in a New York City gun case.

It would make him the latest in a string of rappers to go to jail after rising to fame — and the latest celebrity inmate to test law- enforcement officials’ ability to draw the line between providing special treatment and recognizing potential risks to high-profile convicts.

“It’s a challenge,” said Martin Horn, a former head of the New York City jails, where Lil Wayne’s plea agreement calls for him to serve his sentence.

“It’s not about setting [a celebrity] on a bed of roses, but it is about an obligation to every inmate to keep him safe.”

For now, jail officials say only that they will assess the multiplatinum-selling Lil Wayne as they do every other new arrival and find an appropriate place for him among the city’s roughly 13,000 inmates.

He might follow the path of rapper Foxy Brown, who spent about eight months in 2007 and 2008 in city jails on a probation violation after pleading guilty to assault in a fracas at a nail salon. Because of threats against her, she was held largely in protective custody in a cell of her own, with access to a day room, said Horn.

Defense lawyer Stacey Richman said she intends to ask for protective custody for Lil Wayne, as well as for attention to dental problems that postponed his sentencing by two weeks. “If Wayne had his druthers, he would not be asking for anything for himself,” Richman said, but she said she was concerned for his health and safety.

Some jail officials prefer to hold even famous convicts in circumstances as ordinary as possible — a desire the inmates sometimes share.

Prison consultant Herbert J. Hoelter, whose clients have included epic fraudster Bernard Madoff and NFL quarterback Michael Vick, generally tells clients not to request anything special.

Otherwise, “you’ll be viewed by other inmates and the prison system as thinking that you’re ‘more deserving,’” he says.

Madoff is serving a 150-year federal prison sentence. He spends his nights in the lower bunk of a cell he shares with a drug offender, eats pizza cooked by a child molester and takes nighttime strolls around a prison track for fun, according to a lawsuit filed by an investors’ attorney who interviewed Madoff in prison in July. Madoff’s lawyer didn’t immediately return a call.

Prison officials have good reasons to try to treat famous inmates like any others, lest they face criticism for catering to celebrities.

But if celebrities shouldn’t get coddled, they also face particular risks behind bars, prison experts and defense lawyers say. Fellow prisoners may want to make a name for themselves by challenging famous inmates — or cozying up to them in hopes of sharing in their fame after release.