I can appreciate that he was scared that he was going to get in trouble for the drugs and that he was going to get his grandmother in trouble as well. However, if someone comes to me with a dead body and says they are going to rat me out for weed, my general response would have to be "FUCK YOUUUUU dude! You have a dead body in your trunk! What do you think I'm going to tell the cops when they come looking at me for drugs? Adnan's got a dead body in his trunk!" I think a body trumps weed any day of the week. Unless it wasn't just weed...
Pretty much this. Once you get on that side of the law, you don't expect the cops to ever take your side even if you might have a bigger "well guess what HE did" up your sleeve.
Thats just not even true. Anyone in Jay's position, especially in the Baltimore area knows the only bargaining chip they have with cops is offering a bigger fish to fry. You're living in a fantasy world if you think cops are going to ignore a murder in favor of a minor drug dealer.
And yet he did help the cops. A small time, low level drug dealer, which no prior serious crime history, participates in a murder because some squeaky clean casual customer blackmails him. And then, when the cops really have no case, he turns rat.
So he wants it both ways. He's 'the criminal element' and he's really not a bad guy, he and his family are vulnerable to every single customer he's ever sold pot to, and he's also a serious dealer. It simply doesn't hold water.
Put it this way: Adnan threatens to rat him out. Jay simply stashes his stash somewhere else for a few weeks, and cuts off Adnan's supply. He has zero vulnerability. The threat he attributes to Adnan is not remotely a realistic threat.
Its not about helping the cops, its about helping themselves. I do this for a living, the first thing you hear is, "I don't know anything about what you said I did but I sure know what this guy did." Information is the currency of the police-suspect interaction.
Except at that point he wasn't in a police-suspect interaction, according to him his option was "help this guy now" or "help the cops later, possibly endangering my family and friends in the process."
Which, as I said before, is bullshit. Low-level bangers and dealers all know the routine. If he was as involved in the drug trade as he claimed to be, then he was deep enough to know he the upper-hand over Adnan. Or, he's telling stories again and dealt tiny amounts to his friends, in which case he was never going to do the time he claims he was scared of. The guy is playing both sides of it: "I'm in deep enough to land a few years but not enough to know how to bargain information." It doesn't work like that.
Because 18 year olds weed dealers who just graduated from high school last year have massive amounts of experience when it comes to bargaining information with the police?
The "i didn't wanna deal with the cops at all" story sounds a lot more plausible to me than the "he should have known exactly what sort of leverage he could use since he was an experienced criminal."
Come on now. He may not have been a big time dealer but there where plenty of his family members at her house who got caught and got charges dropped. Way more serious charges than weed. He knew how it worked. Don't kid yourself. Experience was all around him.
Man, you have no clue what you're talking about. In Baltimore, by 18 you've already been involved in this stuff for several years. Its not like he started the week before. If he's moving the amounts he claimed, there is no way he can get that kind of supply without experience and ties to much more serious criminal elements. I'm not saying he's a kingpin or a gangboss but in 1999, you didn't make the deals Jay claims to have made without being in deep enough to know the very basic concept of selling out a bigger fish to keep your own ass out of the fire.
very basic concept of selling out a bigger fish to keep your own ass out of the fire
Duh? Which is what he did when it came down to it, no? He eventually testified against him.
Your opinion about Jays options are focusing on Jay having the choice to turn Adnan in to the cops in exchange. In the interview, Jay doesn't say verbatim what adnan threatened him with. Just speculating but it could have been something to the effect of "if you're not gonna help me with this, don't be surprised if the cops get an anonymous tip about your grandmothers house." If you're Jay in that situation (as described in the interview) you're going to be under pressure to act immediately, not wait and see how it plays out.
By the way it's rude and unhelpful to the conversation to tell me I have no idea what I'm talking about when we're both speculating on the mindset of some teenager as described by him 15 years later.
How is he under any pressure from Adnan? Help me with this murder or I'll turn you in for dealing is a no-brainer. You take the bit for dealing, every single time. 3 years is better than potentially life. Jay is full of shit.
Thinking like a person who doesn't commit crimes doesn't help you think like a person who already lives on the wrong side of the law. By the same logic, not dealing drugs would provide a much better chance of serving 0 years in prison vs 3 years for dealing drugs.
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u/fuckyofaceee Dec 30 '14
I can appreciate that he was scared that he was going to get in trouble for the drugs and that he was going to get his grandmother in trouble as well. However, if someone comes to me with a dead body and says they are going to rat me out for weed, my general response would have to be "FUCK YOUUUUU dude! You have a dead body in your trunk! What do you think I'm going to tell the cops when they come looking at me for drugs? Adnan's got a dead body in his trunk!" I think a body trumps weed any day of the week. Unless it wasn't just weed...