I avoid as much crime news as I can, but it’s relevant to business, so here you go.

Lil’ Kim goes to trial in late February for her alleged involvement in a shootout for which her manager has pled guilty as one of the shooters.

Though The Game is doing great on the charts, he and some crew members are being investigated in a beatdown of a dj allegedly because he made a comment about The Game’s manager’s cell-phone headset (if this is true, WTF?!?). The Game’s Black Wall Street label responded to this and other violent incidents clustering around The Game.

Regarding Irv Gotti’s current legal difficulties, 50 Cent said that,
“After establishing himself in the music business, he tried to become something he never had the heart to be in his neighborhood. That’s where “Gotti” came from. He was DJ Irv ahead of that. Anybody in the street is trying to get out. You can’t blame anyone but Irv.”

Over at NPR, you can hear a Morning Edition report on the investigation of Irv Gotti and associates.

Ja Rule and employees are wanted for questioning in a late Dec. shooting supposedly caught on a security cam (in which case they would be getting arrested rather than questioned, right?). Maybe the cam actually caught a short black man with some taller black men with guns. I can see how that would become, “hey, Ja Rule’s short and black and likes guns, let’s question him.”

I guess I just don’t understand the whole criminal game in hip hop. At some point, once you’ve broken in, shouldn’t you just allude to past crimes and focus on making money? I mean, just because you take terminology from white gangsters doesn’t mean you can’t emulate white collar crime instead of blue collar crime, like the bad boys of Enron. Then you’d just be labeled as aberrant rather than indicative of hip hop and, until you’re busted, you can talk abusively to the press and they’ll just fall in line. Think about it. Corporate crime is where it’s at. And, if you get away with it, you’ll be labeled a great historical figure.