Soulja Boy Case Examined By ATF

Rapper Soulja Boy was arrested in October 2011 in Temple, GA for marijuana possession and it is being reported that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives considered taking on his case. Three other individuals who were arrested following a police search of the vehicle face a number of charges.

Officers found handguns, thousands of dollars in cash and more than five ounces of marijuana. The other three men, Dontay Lamar Bates, Camron Wagner and James Raymond Smith, were all charged with felony possession of marijuana, possession with intent to distribute and possession of a firearm.

“This office has not charged a defendant named DeAndre Cortez Way, a/k/a Soulja Boy,” Yvette Comer, representative of the U.S. District Attorney’s Office said. “Otherwise, we do not confirm or deny federal investigations in any matters.”

“There were some initial discussions about taking it federal, but it didn’t make any federal guidelines,” said John Murphy, special agent for the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Atlanta Field Division. “As far as the drugs, it was five ounces of marijuana, that wouldn’t even register on a federal level. If you’ve got a rapper that could show legitimate income, that could be contested as being legitimate income, and without a substantial amount of drugs, we didn’t have anything that would rate a federal drug charge on that.”