Tee Grizzley has opened up about what it was like being interrogated by federal authorities after he was caught robbing a jewelry store in 2015.
In a sit down with Akademiks, the Detroit rapper said the scariest part of the whole ordeal – which led to him being incarcerated for an initial 15-year sentence that got shortened to 18 months – was being interrogated by the feds.
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“I’ve been interrogated by state police and I’ve been interrogated by the feds,” Grizzley recalled. “Bro, listen. I don’t like haunted houses, right? I won’t go to a haunted house. I had an experience when I was younger, don’t matter. I’m not going to a haunted house.”
He continued: “I will go to a haunted house before I sit down and have [the feds] ask me questions. That’s how scary that shit is. That’s the most scariest shit in the world, bro. I ain’t gonna lie, I can’t speak for everybody bro, but I be in that bitch scared.
“I know I’m not gonna say shit, right? That’s why I’m even more scared. I know I ain’t saying nothing so whatever they can do to me, they gonna do it because I ain’t taking no type of deal… so they gonna have to do what they gonna have to do, and that shit’s scary ’cause damn, that was about to happen to me.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Tee Grizzley said the police weren’t even the ones who caught him robbing the jewelry store, but that he got busted by an armed civilian.
“It’s so crazy, though, because the most unexpected shit might happen,” he said. “The way we got caught? A customer pulled a gun out. It wasn’t nobody who worked at the store, it was a fucking customer. He was in there buying some fucking golf clubs … and I saw it in his eyes — he wanted to [shoot his gun] so bad, bro.”
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Akademiks said he would have ratted someone out if he had been in the interrogation room, but Grizzley remained solid.
“They was saying you can go home right now,” Grizzley recalled. “You can go home right now, just tell us who put the plan together … See, I can’t tell because I can’t go back home. A n-gga might see me walking to the store, throw one in my head. All that type of shit come with it.”
In a previous interview with Million Dollaz Worth Of Game, Tee Grizzley said he began hitting the books once he was put behind bars, and that he started studying law to try to shorten his 15-year sentence.
“I didn’t think I was getting out,” the “First Day Out” rapper said. “Man, look, I got n-ggas in there telling me, ‘You better take 10 years if they try to give that to you.’”
He went on to say that he would often ask both his legal team and fellow inmates for advice and that they’d all tell him to avoid going to trial at all costs. But a decade in jail didn’t sit well with Grizzley, so he started hitting the library.
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“They say we armed cause of the sledgehammer right?” he said, referring to the tool he allegedly used to commit the series of robberies at Michigan State University. “So I get in the law book.
“First thing I see I go to that type of shit, and they say, ‘You can only consider something a weapon if they use it to threaten somebody and demand something.’ I ain’t never told nobody I was gonna hit them with the hammer. I ain’t raised nobody or nothing. So they can’t say that that’s a weapon.”
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He continued: “and I told my lawyer that and my lawyer surprised like, ‘No you right.’ I’m like, ‘The fuck you mean I’m right? You knew this before me. I get to tell my co-defendant, ‘Look read the law book. Look at every case,’ and we end up getting up out that motherfucker.”
Tee Grizzley was on parole until October 2016. As a free man, he crafted his hit single “First Day Out” days after it ended. The track’s visual accompaniment, which finds Tee Grizzley donning the same orange jumpsuit he wore in prison, now has over 227 million views.
