Dear America, I was only what you made me / Young, black, impoverished, crazy / Then I saved me / I was dying inside, then I opened my eyes / Liberated myself, opened my mind, awoke the divine.
So go the lyrics to a decades-later rewrite of a late ’90s track from Belizian rapper-turned-politico Moses Michael Levi “Shyne” Barrow, delivered with pitch-perfect poise and years of anger at a rigged system. He stands on a rooftop, looking at Brooklyn, where he spent his adolescent years, and rapping about his future as a political leader in the cold open of the new Hulu documentary, The Honorable Shyne.
The current Belizian opposition leader was sent from a meager life in the Central American country’s capital into the streets of Brooklyn, where he climbed to the top of the rap world and then crashed down suddenly into the depths of the U.S. prison system.
The circuitous paths taken by Barrow are detailed in the documentary by director Marcus A. Clarke, which features a mix of archival footage, interviews and artful reenactments.
As a young rapper, Barrow, going by just “Shyne,” made it into the inner circle of Sean “Diddy” Combs, then going by Puff Daddy, and will forever be associated with the now embattled, imprisoned mogul, who faces federal racketeering and sex-trafficking charges and numerous sexual assault lawsuits. (Combs has vehemently denied all of the charges and accusations against him; he is being held in a federal jail in New York while awaiting trial.)
Barrow was part of Diddy’s entourage during an infamous 1999 club shooting and ended up taking the rap for firing a weapon in a crowded bar room. He refused to speak up about what he says happened that night and what evidence seemed to indicate: His gun did not fire the bullets in the club that night. Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sent to prison for nearly a decade as Combs and his bodyguard walked. Barrow emerged from prison only to be deported back to Belize and take time to figure out how to start his life over.
“People have been offering me a documentary deal for over 20 years,” Barrow tells THR, dressed in a perfectly tailored suit and speaking with the clarity of a politician with 30 years in the rap game. “I went from what I didn’t want to do to what I wanted to do: Tell a story of the indomitable souls of human beings that, no matter what we face, no matter how difficult life could be, that we all have within us the ability to persevere, the ability to thrive.”
A narrative that will forever be off the table, he says, is the one in which he’s the pitiable victim. It can nevertheless be argued that he got a raw deal from his mentor and the justice system. Shell casings found after the chaos at the Club New York shooting on Dec. 27, 1999, didn’t match the bullets from Barrow’s 9mm. The trial, which ended in June 2001 with a conviction on two counts of assault and reckless endangerment, plus criminal possession of an illegal weapon, also saw Diddy and his bodyguard, Anthony “Wolf” Jones, acquitted of all charges related to the incident. Hairstylist Natania Reuben, who was shot in the face that night while caught in the crossfire, has always maintained it was Combs who fired the weapon. What was going to be a united front in their defense, he says, ended with him becoming the mogul’s scapegoat in the courtroom.
“[Diddy] did things to me and to my family that destroyed my life,” Barrow says. “I’m living a different life now. So I would not agree with anyone saying, ‘Hey, let’s tell the Diddy story’ and I’ll tell you about how I was victimized. I wanted to tell the Shyne story.
“Yeah, I forgave him,” Barrow says, closing out the topic. “I have forgiven everyone that has hurt me. But that doesn’t mean that I’m a part of their lives. Or you continue in a direction where you expose yourself to be hurt again.”
An email sent by The Hollywood Reporter to representatives for Combs seeking comment on the 1999 shooting was not immediately returned.
For all his aversion to self-pity, Barrow does not brush off his obstacles on the treacherous road that took him from deep Brooklyn to the halls of the National Assembly of Belize. His journey there had several stops of varying lengths at Dannemora, in Paris and then Jerusalem.
Violence hovered over much of his youth in Brooklyn. At 15, he was shot in the shoulder during a fight with another teen. But it was two years before that, he said, that spirituality meaningfully entered his life.
“I needed divine intervention at that stage of my life because all my friends were dying, I saw friends get killed right next to me. And these were some of the toughest guys I knew,” he recalled.
People start praying when their lives are on the line, but not him. At 13, he began to study Judaism, when he learned that his Jewish maternal grandmother had emigrated from Ethiopia to Belize. He began reading the Old Testament and Torah; he believes the journey of discovering the divine relationship is “responsible for every single thing in my life.”
“That’s how I got into music. That’s how I survived, how I was able to stay alive in Brooklyn,” he said. “I beat the odds. I beat the statistical odds by becoming a millionaire by the time I was 18 after dodging death.”
A scrappy, clever kid, Barrow would spend hours chasing record labels’ vehicles across New York on his bike and drop rhymes when they’d finally hear him out. Then came the record label bidding wars, the wild times with Diddy and his Bad Boy Records, recording his first album — and the abrupt end to the baller lifestyle.
During his time in prison, he maintained his rap career, releasing the Billboard No. 3 album Godfather Buried Alive in 2004 and signing a $3 million deal with Def Jam. His later years of incarceration were defined by a deeper movement toward Judaism after his youthful interest. He is not silent about the toll doing hard time takes on a man. In an interview after his release, Shyne said of life in prison that “the entire process was devastating. 10 hours of incarceration is 10 hours too much.”
Upon his release in 2009, Shyne became embroiled in a customs battle culminating in his deportation back to Belize, where he was now political royalty. He reconnected with his estranged father, Dean Barrow, who made history as the country’s first Black prime minister. In 2010, Shyne was appointed as Belize’s Music and Goodwill Ambassador, and he brought major rap stars to the country. He moved to Jerusalem that same year and released his religion-and-politics-themed Gangland mixtape in 2012, which flopped. He also spent some time bouncing around major cities, moving to Paris for a period and reconnecting with his former lifestyle.
“I found myself in this routine of praying mikvah, going to restaurants, going to clubs, going to lounges, entertainment people, fashion people and just repeating the cycle,” he recalled. “But I need meaning. We’re supposed to take action. So we’re supposed to have a life with an agenda. With a purpose.”
In 2013, seeking that meaning, he returned to Belize. It was a close friend, he explains, who got him thinking about giving back and, ultimately, told him the brutal truth: the “Shyne” gig was up and he needed to pivot his career.
Barrow’s current chapter began that year as he started to work for Belize’s greater good. Moving into the community where he was born and raised and where he used to take the waste bucket to and from the meager home he shared with his mother. Then, he opened a resource center and woke every day to help his people.
Soon enough, he was elected as the vice chairman of his local constituency. He used his own resources to help residents open an office and get Apple laptops. His friends in academia or entrepreneurs would speak to the young people there “to give them the information and to liberate them so that they can unlock their potential.”
Years passed and he followed his father’s path into the Belize government. In November 2020, he won the House seat for Mesopotamia on a platform that promised lower-interest student loans and a crackdown on crime. He was then appointed the Belize House of Representatives Opposition Leader for the center-right Belize United Democratic Party.
“The work that I do is helping people. If you go back to my rap that started off the documentary, the way that I was able to remake it is the epitome of my life now because as 18-year-old Shyne, I was crying out to the system to save me. That’s what I said, ‘Dear America / I’m only what you made me / Please save me.’ I didn’t want to sell drugs. I didn’t want to kill people.”
The “Dear America” track he wrote in his youth was a cry for help asking the powerful to change things so he “could be a normal functioning member of society,” he said.
“Now, as a legislator and as, hopefully, the next prime minister of Belize, I can create that system that I rapped about and I asked for the change,” he says. “Now I’m the change agent. Nothing inspires me more than that.”
The Honorable Shyne will start streaming on Hulu on Monday, Nov. 18.
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