A Manhattan judge Friday blasted ex-con rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine for squandering his chance at freedom by violating probation again — and slapped him with another three months behind bars.
The 29-year-old flamboyant musician — who appeared in court with streaks of Christmas red-and-green in his hair and wearing a red fleece and white Crocs — learned his fate after most recently breaching the rules by punching a man who taunted him for snitching on his former gang.
“He keeps blowing it,” federal Judge Paul Engelmayer seethed during the proceeding in Manhattan federal court.
“You believe the rules don’t apply to you,” Engelmayer told the Brooklyn-born rapper, whose real name is Daniel Hernandez.
The convict admitted he violated the terms of his supervised release with the Aug. 8 assault at a Florida mall and by stashing MDMA and cocaine for personal use in his bedroom.
Hernandez was previously sentenced to a lenient two years in prison by the same judge after he infamously testified against members of the Nine Trey Gangsta Blood gang as part of a 2019 plea deal in a racketeering case. He ended up getting sprung early the next year because of COVID.
He was then sentenced to 45 days in jail by Engelmayer in November 2024 for violating probation by failing drug tests and traveling without permission.
The judge said Friday that an additional jail sentence for the rapper on the latest probation breaches was “clearly necessary” because of what he called an “extreme abuse of the court’s trust.”
Hernandez had urged the court to allow him to serve his three-month sentence under house arrest in his Florida mansion that features a separate pool house — but the judge slammed that proposal as a “slap on the wrist.
“With respect, a lot of people would like to be in a house like that,” Engelmayer said, dismissing the idea of allowing Hernandez to spend “three months at the pool house.”
Before his sentence was doled out Friday, Hernandez stood at the defense table and read a lengthy statement outlining a laundry list of assaults and threats he says he’s received since giving his testimony, including when he was viciously beaten by a group of men at an LA Fitness in Florida in 2023.
He claimed that in one incident, someone left a coffin with a “dead animal” in it outside his Florida mansion. In another 2021 episode, someone threw a drink in his face on his way to his VIP seats at an UFC fight, he said. In a 2020 incident, three armed men held up his mother at gunpoint, he claimed.
“I don’t think a prison is going to teach me anything,” Hernandez told the judge.
Engelmayer said Friday that he had originally planned to give the embattled artist more than three months behind bars but that he was moved by his speech and by the progress he says he has made his mental health by seeing a court-ordered therapist.
The judge said he would suggest to the federal Bureau of Prisons that Hernandez serve out his sentence at a Florida lockup rather than at the notorious Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
After Hernandez is released, he’ll be on a fresh 12 months of probation — meaning that he could wind up back before the same judge again if he gets into trouble during that time span.
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