Caffeinated Clint
Snipes sentenced to Jail for 3 years
The other big news of the day – if you haven’t yet read somewhere that Guillermo Del Toro has officially signed on to direct the two “Hobbit” movies, you’re, er, obviously still on Dial-Up and are waiting for the graphics-heavy CNN website to still load – is that Blade has been sent to the Slammer.
Poor Wesley Snipes. What the fuck has happened there!? Such a talent. “New Jack City”, “White Men Can’t Jump”, “Jungle Fever”, “Blade”…. He was near ready to bury Denzel there for a while. For the next four years, he’ll be signing autographs for the inmates at the slammer, where he’s been sentenced to spend 3 years for Tax Evasion.
The kick in the nads? Wes was apparently on the way back. He had just completed shooting the sequel to “The Art of War”, which has the potential to be decent, and Spike Lee was interested in working with him again – sometime. But you can’t run from your Ghosts – as Tony Goldwyn will attest to. Those little black fucks with the squeaky voices emerge from the sidewalk and snatch you just when you least expect it.
Though Snipes asked for leniency (Snipes even tried to make a down payment on his taxes before sentencing; his legal team offered the Judge three checks totaling $5 million) he was hit pretty severely – imagine Dominic Purcell’s Blade villain pounding the bloodsucker from my behind with a bat, and you near get the picture. The case was the most prominent tax prosecution since the billionaire hotelier Leona Helmsley was convicted of tax fraud in 1989.
In addition to jail time, Snipes must pay up to $17 million in back taxes plus penalties and interest.
In a prepared statement, Mr. Snipes said: “I’m very sorry for my mistakes. I acknowledge that I have failed myself and others.”
For the record, Snipes did not apologize for either “The Contractor” or “The Marskman”.
On a serious note, maybe Snipes can use the next 3 years to brush the dirt off his orange overalls, hit the weights, and re-emerge bigger – both physically and literally – bigger than ever, much the same way Robert Downey Jr did.
