About a month ago, pioneering Houston rap star Willie D. (nee Willie Dennis) was arrested by the Feds at Intercontinental Airport and charged with wire fraud for his alleged involvement in an international iPhone scam.
When last we updated the story, on May 20, the rapper was still behind bars, but apparently he bonded out at about the same time our posting hit the 'net.
Hair Balls obtained a copy of the terms of that bond late last week. In standard bond conditions, Dennis was also ordered to surrender his passport and was forbidden to travel beyond Harris and surrounding counties. He is also being monitored with an active GPS system, and has been forbidden from using the Internet. (The alleged iPhone scam was primarily Internet-based.)
Last week, Dennis's attorney Stanley Schneider -- a named partner in the renowned local criminal defense firm Schneider & McKinney -- filed a motion requesting that the rapper be able to travel and use the Internet, both of which he contended were necessary elements in Dennis's employment as a rapper. (He was already a no-show at a scheduled Cleveland gig, according to court papers.) Schneider withdrew the motion the next day. "We have a lot of work to do on that," he tells Hair Balls. "There are a lot of details to be worked out."
Schneider has sprung two men from Texas's Death Row and has something of a cottage industry in defending local rappers. He has defended Willie D. at least once before. In 1993, Dennis was charged with assaulting a topless dancer at Foxxy's Cabaret. Dennis was eventually convicted in that case and sentenced to four months in prison, despite friendly testimony from both the dancer herself and former state representative Ron Wilson. Schneider also defended Cloverland rapper Lil' Flip two years ago when the rapper was charged with buying a $670 plane ticket to Baltimore on someone else's credit card. A grand jury declined to indict the erstwhile Leprechaun-loving MC in that case.