Beanie Sigel won't be rocking the mic anytime soon--more like cooling his heels.
The husky hip-hopster's bid for bail was denied on Monday by a Philadelphia judge who declared the rapper a "danger to the community" and ordered him held in jail while awaiting trial on a federal weapons charge.
The ruling by U.S. Magistrate Judge M. Faith Angel means that Sigel will be sidelined from the remaining dates on Jay-Z and 50 Cent's heavily hyped Roc the Mic tour. The tour, featuring many of Beanie's Roc-A-Fella label mates, has 20 more shows scheduled before wrapping August 5 in Atlanta.
But that's just fine with Angel, who found that Sigel's ever-growing rap sheet--eight previous busts, four of which stemmed from alleged assaults and five involving drug-related charges--was good enough reason to warrant incarceration.
"I'm looking at the totality of the circumstances," Angel said, according to the Philadelphia Daily News.
This despite Jay-Z turning up as a character witness for his protégé. The rapper testified in support of his friend getting out on bond. But Jay-Z's good words failed to sway the judge, who got Jay-Z to admit there was no way he could "supervise" Beanie's behavior on the road.
Beanie's mother, Michelle Brown, burst into tears upon hearing the judge's decision, which came after the 5-foot-9, 260-pound 26-year-old rapper (whose real name is Dwight Grant) was charged with violating a federal law prohibiting felons from carrying firearms.
The incident occurred during a traffic stop on April 20 when Beanie pulled over his 2002 Cadillac Escalade and led police on a foot chase through the streets of his native South Philly. While fleeing, he allegedly dumped a loaded semi-automatic handgun.
When officers finally bagged Beanie, they found a pharmacy's worth of drugs and an empty holster.
He wasn't arrested on the weapons charge, however, until last Wednesday, when agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms took him into custody at the end of a separate hearing, in which Sigel is facing an assault charge for allegedly slugging a 53-year-old man in the face and breaking his left eye socket.
Sigel supposedly went gangsta on one Wendell Mathis after Mathis reproached the rapper for calling a woman a whore outside a Chinese restaurant in North Philly.
Local authorities tipped off the feds to Beanie's purported bad behavior because several previous cases have stalled after victims and witnesses refused to testify for fear of retribution.
Prosecutors were also unhappy days earlier. A state judge granted Beanie bail after he was charged with attempted murder for allegedly shooting a 26-year-old man at a Philadelphia nightclub on July 2.
Authorities say that victim, Terrence Speller, had been arguing with two women outside the Pony Tail Bar when Sigel pulled up in his Escalade and fired five or six shots at Speller, hitting him in the foot and stomach. Speller was hospitalized in critical condition but is now expected to recover.
Jay-Z, who discovered Beanie and helped launch his career by featuring him on Vol. 2: Hard Knock Life, blames Beanie's own hard-knock life for his legal woes.
"Whenever you're trying to transition and make everything right, it gets harder," Jay-Z told MTV.com by phone Friday from the Roc the Mic stop in Akron, Ohio. "You're at a disadvantage because you're not of that no more. It's just real difficult to make that transition. It's like God's test. Once [he passes] that test, he's gonna be all right."
At the conclusion of Monday's bail hearing, U.S. marshals escorted a handcuffed Beanie to the federal detention center in downtown Philly, where's he has been held since last Wednesday.
Despite the legal entanglements, Sigel's attorney, Fortunato Perri Jr., proclaimed his client's innocence outside the courtroom and told a reporter that he plans to appeal the bail decision and "defend against all allegations."
For those playing the Beanie home game, the troubled rapper also had a preliminary hearing on the attempted murder charge on Monday. As for the Mathis assault case, he caught a break when the judge in that case reduced the charge from felony assault to two misdemeanor counts and scheduled trial for August.
Now that he's stuck behind bars, Beanie won't be able to hype his upcoming albums, which will probably be released long before he will. The rapper, whose two albums, 1999's The Truth!!! and 2001's The Reason, both went gold, has his third solo disc, The B-Coming, slated to drop in September. Meanwhile, his next album with the State Property collective, State Property Presents: The Chain Gang, Vol. II, is due out August 5.