A Miami man, Harrison Garcia, 27, believed to have supplied painkiller-spiked soda drinks to Lil’ Wayne, Chris Brown and other Hip Hop artists has been sentenced to 30 years in prison.
A federal judge sentenced Garcia, also known as Cuban Harry, to prison after jurors convicted him of armed drug trafficking in April.
U.S. Judge Patricia Seitz said Garcia’s crimes were serious against the backdrop of a national drug epidemic that “dehumanizes and enslaves” addicts. She said: “It is the kind of conduct that is very much a scourge on our community”. Garcia was sentenced on Friday in a federal court. After Garcia was sentenced, he said.
“I want to briefly apologize to my parents and your honor”. “Hopefully, I learn from this.”
Garcia was believed by the feds to have supplied South Florida’s hip-hop scene with the potent drink known as “lean” while jet setting around the world with singer Chris Brown and shooting rap videos with Lil’ Wayne. Federal agents say Garcia was a big supplier of “lean,” or “sizzurp,” a powerful brew of soda and prescription-strength syrup of promethazine with codeine.
Different types of the “lean” drink have been popular in the hip-hop industry and songs over the past decade, with rappers such as Lil’ Wayne, Young Thug and Future dropping odes to the concoction.
They are also always seen sipping from white styrofoam cups or others types of cups while they shoot their music videos, travel, perform on stage or just walk on the streets. Garcia’s Instagram page – which has over 30,000 followers – showed off a rap-video lifestyle; he proudly showed off gold chains and wads of cash, jewel-encrusted teeth and many tattoos, including one of the fictional drug kingpin Scarface wielding an assault rifle. He was never subtle about his love of lean. He called himself “Muhammad_a_Lean” and the “CEO of Purple Drank,”.
He has a diamond-encrusted pendant of a styrofoam cup and posted many photos of soda and cough syrup on IG page. Garcia insisted he was nothing more than a junkie, not a dealer, who tried to play the part of dope peddler on social media to build street cred for his hip-hop career.
“I had an image to portray, to boost up my followers,” Garcia testified at a pre-trial hearing in January. “I guess it’s just the music industry.”
