45°
Harris 36, pleaded guilty to narcotics conspiracy in Albany last month admitting that he participated in an operation that between 2005 and 2012 shipped $2.5 million worth of heroin and cocaine to the Rochester area.
Free on $600,000 bail — and facing 8 to 10 years in a federal pen — Harris was married yesterday to hip-hop producer Yandy Smith, who three months ago gave birth to the couple’s second child.
Yandy Smith in Superior Court in Hackensack (CLIFFVIEW PILOT file photo)
Smith among those in the Hackensack courtroom who leapt to their feet and stomped, clapped, shouted and sobbed, raising arms skyward, as not-guilty verdicts were read against Harris in February 2013. READ MORE…
The couple spoke with DesignTrend.com: http://www.designntrend.com/articles/52203/20150526/yandy-smith-mendeecees-talk-upcoming-prison-sentence-feel-bad-around.htm
“The best case scenario is that he won’t have to go anywhere and everything is up in the air with God,” Smith said. “In my head, and this is honestly how we run our house and run our lives, [Mendeecees] is not going anywhere. He’s not.”
“I feel bad all around the board,” Harris said. “Especially for my children. They need me, I need them. Nobody wants to go away but there is nothing I can do about it. I just got to put God first and stay positive.”
Harris, who’s been characterized in unconfirmed media accounts as a former police informant, already has a drug conviction on his record that led to federal prison time and probation following a 2001 arrest.
Mendeecees Harris (FILE PHOTO: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia)
Harris insisted during testimony in Hackensack that he “never had a relationship” with the woman, who testified in the trial that he told her she was “better than [her] mother” after coercing her into oral sex by revealing his knowledge of a dark secret from her past.
“He told me he knew I had been raped when I was 8 years old,” she said, “and he found out from my mother.
“ ‘Your mom doesn’t want you here’,” the woman said Harris told her before exposing himself.
She said she complied with his desire for a series of sexual favors in exchange fo money out of spite “to get back at my mom.”
* * * * * *
CLICK HERE for related stories about: Mendeecees Harris teen-sex trial
* * * * * *
Harris was charged with seven counts of child abuse and with promoting prostitution. If convicted, he would have faced up to 20 years in prison.
Harris and his girlfriend were living in Lodi with her two pre-teen boys and a baby son of his from another woman when the woman moved up from North Carolina in the summer of 2009.
Some of the incidents occurred while she was still 15, the teen said, and others after her 16th birthday, when Harris was more than four years older – the standard in New Jersey for statutory rape.
During cross-examination, defense attorney Brian Neary pressed the woman about her statements to detectives, her grand jury testimony and the times she claimed that Harris coerced her into sex – pointing out inconsistencies in where and when she said the incidents allegedly occurred.
The defense attorney also challenged her decision not to return South to her father’s home, as well as her failure to disclose what she said happened to “your counselor, your minister grandmother.”
Neary emphasized that Harris took the stand voluntarily and pleaded “not guilty wrapped in the presumption of innocence.”
“He took the witness stand to speak the truth, to look you in the eye,” the defense attorney told the jury during his closing argument yesterday.
“I told him: Don’t worry, Mendeecees,” Neary said. “This is a jury that comes not just from one section of Bergen County, not just from one experience.
“The beauty of a jury is you just don’t look at someone through the view of one simple perspective. It’s the collection of your perspective.”
Neary emphasized the fact that the woman couldn’t remember dates or specific incidents, part of what he called “contradiction upon contradiction” and “inconsistencies.”
Their Lodi home didn’t have locks, he said, and the woman’s brothers were around, running in and out of the house — making the sexual encounters she described implausible.
Neary also took issue with Maurice’s attempt to untangle Harris’ relationships with three different women.
“How dare the prosecutor suggest that because he had a different lifestyle – that because he had different girlfriends – sometimes at the same time?” he asked. “And that he’s a reality TV star who gets $4,000 an episode… How dare she?
“Not one question contradicted his belief, his strong feeling, and the truth that he had nothing to do with this girl, nothing to do with these sexual allegations,” Neary said. “He broke down and said, ‘I didn’t do this,’ on the verge of tears.”
Click here to follow Daily Voice Hackensack and receive free news updates.
