Future’s DJ Esco Details His 56 Days In A Dubai Prison & How He Got There

Future’s tour DJ, DJ Esco, spent the last 56 days in a Dubai jail after weed was found in his possession. Being released without charges just after the New Year, Esco opens up to Fader Magazine about being locked up abroad and how he was arrested for having a small grain of marijuana he had no idea was still left in his bag. I suggest he writes a book about this because it’s a great read. Check it out! 

DJ ESCO: “We had been on the European tour for a month and our last show was supposed to be in Amsterdam. My birthday was around that same time, so I was like, I’ll wait to celebrate my birthday in Amsterdam. I had never been to Amsterdam, so wanted to go to a cafe and the red light district. Just typical tourist shit, you know?

Then we got asked to do an extra show in Abu Dhabi. Once we left from Europe, we were gonna do this one show in Abu Dhabi, then go back to America. At the time, I wasn’t really aware of the whole geographics, where everything was at. We’re at the end of the Europe tour, and it’s my birthday, and we’re in Amsterdam, so we’re gonna celebrate! I got the weed.

But I’m not trying to walk around around with all this weed, you feel me? I was not intentionally trying to bring weed to Abu Dhabi. And if I would have known the rules and laws they got over there, I would have quadruple checked my bag and made sure there wasn’t a piece of weed. I swear I would have.

So we land in Abu Dhabi and I’m just walkin’ through the airport and I got everybody’s bags. Probably, like, 20 or 30 bags. It’s a whole buncha bags that we pushin’. And I didn’t realize at the time that discrimination might be an issue, so I’m just walking around and thinking everything’s normal.

Our cameraman starts filming me walking in the airport, but apparently there’s no cameras allowed in the airport. This is how this whole thing started—now we’re causing a scene. I’m on my way out the door and a police officer stops the cameraman first. They’re real mean. He’s like, “No cameras in the airport! Delete the pictures!” He made our cameraman delete all the pictures right there on the spot. After he did that, I was like, Damn, he’s gonna do something. Like, Shit, man, we got him riled up.

We keep walking, but the officer ran to catch up to us. He stopped me and he’s like, “Who are you?” Because the camera was on me. I tell him I do music and that I just came here to do a show at the Grand Prix. He’s like, Lemme see your passport. Then he wants to see everyone’s, but it’s just me and and my manager. Everyone else had went ahead.

Then he was like, “I wanna check all these bags. Who these bags with? You? I wanna check every single one.” There’s no point of separating them, because now you’re searching six people instead of just one person. So I said, “Yeah, they’re my bags.” But I’m thinking, like, this man really wanna check these? He really wants to hand check 40 bags? He crazy!

So he’s checking the bags so long, his coworkers are coming over like, “Man, would you leave these people alone, because you had this man standing here for an hour and you still haven’t found anything. Why don’t you just wrap it up and let it go.” Meanwhile, it’s like when you in high school and you going to the principal’s office and you trying to think, like, Did I do anything in class? And eventually I’m like, I should be cool, he’s just turnt up.

So, okay. He finally found like, this fairy dust particle of weed in my backpack. They’re trying to get like a magnifying glass and—I’m for real—they’re like, arguing if it’s green or brown. They’re tearing the luggage apart like I got kilos of cocaine or something, ripping the bags apart looking for extra compartments and shit. The officer gets down to the last two bags, and that’s when he finds a bag with some weed in it. It was a good little amount, probably 15 grams or something like that. 

At this point I’m thinking, first of all, What the fuck? I didn’t know the weed was there. And second, I didn’t know what the hell they was gonna do. Cause once they seen some weed they went crazy. You would have thought I had a bomb and there was ten seconds left and the world is about to end if they didn’t get every officer up there. But I’m not scared yet, because I’m still thinking that worst case scenario, they’re just gonna send me back on the plane. Okay, I can’t come. It’s the last show anyways, and I don’t really want to go through all these interrogations. Do what you want to do with the weed, and send me back next flight. So I’m still relaxed at this point. Little did I know, I was gonna be in that motherfucker for 56 days.

They don’t tell you you’re not going home. They’re trying to see if I’ve been to Dubai, to see if I’m trying to sell this. I don’t know nobody in no Dubai. I’m like, “It’s for me! It’s for nobody else. We do music, I didn’t come to Dubai to sell weed.” This is when I’m learning, okay they have zero tolerance for this. Period. They’re really acting like this is the biggest drug in the world. And that’s when I was like, Okay, this might be serious.

They take me to a police station. No English is going down at this point. When they arrest me at the airport, nobody speaks English. Your only hope is this translator, and you don’t know what the hell he’s translating. His ear isn’t even trained to capture my English. So you’re saying shit and he’s repeating it back in Arabic, and the officer is looking at you, and you don’t know what they’re talking about. Then they give you a paper, the paper is in Arabic, nothing in English—I didn’t even know they read from right to left, it took me a long time to figure this out—and they tell you to sign it and then you can go home. But I didn’t know what the paper said! They’re translating what I’m saying—I’m saying I don’t know what’s going on. I never been here, I don’t know nobody here, I came here for a music show—but I don’t know what they’re translating, if he was saying what I was saying. You just don’t know. And it’s discrimination—I had my hair down and I got dreadlocks, I got tattoos.

This is Thursday, November 19. Everybody had gone, because I’d already said I’ll take care of this and see you later. We’re American, so we think you’re gonna get up the next day and get bailed out. But it don’t work like that in Abu Dhabi.

They say, “Grab some extra clothes because you’re gonna be here for a couple of days.” So I was like, “A couple of days? I thought y’all was takin’ me home right now!” Then they take me to the jail cell and I never came back out.

When you first get in there, you don’t know what’s going on. First of all, I’m the only American. It’s Pakistanis, Saudis, Afghans, Kuwaitis, Iranians. And then you got some Africans, like Somalians, Nigerian, Egyptians. All these people was the people in jail. So when I come in, the first thing I’m seeing is like, How am I going to communicate with these people? I don’t know what to do.

One of the guys who could speak a little bit of English, he was saying, “U.S. Embassy, call the U.S. Embassy.” But I don’t know how to get my U.S. Embassy’s number, how to get a calling card to call them, what kind of money they use. I don’t know nothing. I’m just in here. 

The next day you go see a prosecutor. There’s no rights. When they arrest you, they don’t have to say you have a right to this, you have a right to an attorney, you have a right to remain silent. There’s no judge, no jury. They assign you to a prosecutor, and the prosecutor can just do what he wants with you. They don’t have to tell you anything. They don’t even have to explain what the charge is.

You get a piece of paper, and the paper is in Arabic. I still don’t know exactly what it said to this day. But I would go find somebody who could read Arabic and knew a little bit of English. It said something like: You gotta go to court on such and such date and you’ve been charged with drugs. It could’ve been cocaine, it could have been heroin, it could have been marijuana, they treat it all the same over there. So I’m in there with people who had 10, 12, 20 kilos of cocaine from Brazil. There’s an old man in there right now, 67 years old, he stole a box of candy from the airport, and he still in there. He’s still in there right now because his paper just said he stole something and now he’s in the same category as the people who stole 850,000 Dirhams. So there’s an old man in there right now, I can see his face, and he’s going crazy over a chocolate bar!

So they give you this paper that tells you in seven days you gotta go to court, but then you only get to say one word. They ask you, did you bring a drug into this country? You don’t get to explain. You just get to say yes or no, and you have to say yes because if you say no, then there’s a whole ‘nother case going on. So you say yes, and then they give you another paper for 14 days. Then you get thrown in Dubai jail. I don’t care what you did, how minor it was, you can’t do anything for the first 21 days, no matter what.”

Read the rest HERE!