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Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images, Scott Dudelson/Getty Images
It’s been almost nine months since Prakazrel “Pras” Michel, the founding member of ’90s hip-hop supergroup the Fugees, was convicted by a Washington, D.C., jury on ten counts of various financial and political crimes which — if you’re inclined to believe the government — make him the greatest agent of Chinese subterfuge in American history.
As he awaited sentencing, Michel spent the summer focused on two priorities. First he hired new lawyers to go after his first lawyer, and then he went on tour. The tour was originally planned as a 25th-anniversary celebration of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (the first hip-hop record to win the Grammy for Album of the Year). But after Michel and Wyclef Jean joined her at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia in June, Hill’s solo tour evolved into the biggest reunion in nearly 20 years for the band that Bono once called “the Beatles of hip-hop.” Michel and his Grammy-heavy bandmates lived out of their suitcases in fall 2023 as they performed all their old singalong hits to sold-out arenas nationwide — plus one show in Vancouver that Michel had to skip because the Feds are sitting on his passport. (The tour is currently on hold in 2024 as Lauryn Hill recovers from vocal strain and doctors’ orders.)
This Wednesday, Michel heads back to court for an unusual and potentially explosive two-day evidentiary hearing that could force a retrial, or even an acquittal, due to the alleged misdeeds of both government prosecutors as well as his prior attorney, David Kenner. The courtroom drama also gets a new star this week: Michel’s revamped legal team will be joined by former Alabama senator Doug Jones, a well-liked figure on Capitol Hill and a veteran civil-rights advocate with deep ties to the Biden White House.
Jones is best known for his work as the federal prosecutor who in 2001 and 2002 convicted the two aging Klansmen behind the church bombing that killed four young Black girls in Birmingham in 1963. In 2021, after losing his seat to MAGA avatar and former college-football coach Tommy Tuberville (the only seat the GOP gained that year), Jones emerged as a favorite with the incoming Biden administration. He made the president’s shortlist for attorney general and was later tapped as Biden’s “sherpa” for his first Supreme Court nominee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom Jones guided through Senate confirmation to become the first Black woman on the high court.
“Doug Jones has nothing but credibility,” said Paul Pelletier, a former federal prosecutor who ran the criminal Fraud Section at the Justice Department during the Bush and Obama administrations and has been following Michel’s case. “You’re not going to get him to join a case that doesn’t have real substance.”
Still, with Michel, Jones takes on a sprawling and increasingly messy case that, statistically speaking, he is unlikely to win (in Washington, the Justice Department enjoys a significant home-field advantage), but is also so idiosyncratically bizarre that the usual rules may not apply.
This week’s hearing will focus largely on David Kenner, Michel’s prior attorney and the former Death Row Records lead counsel who helped Snoop Dogg beat murder charges in 1996. The 82-year-old Kenner led Michel’s defense last year from a wheelchair, and Michel’s new team has alleged that his performance was so ineffective and compromised by conflicts of interest that it deprived Michel of his constitutional right to be represented by competent counsel.
“Upon reviewing the record of Mr. Michel’s previous trial, questions have emerged about the consistency and fairness of the legal process,” said Michel’s publicist, Erica Dumas.
In what will resemble a trial within a trial, Kenner is expected to take the stand this week to defend his performance and answer to allegations that he used experimental AI software to write the closing statement at trial last spring.
With his sentencing hanging in the balance, Pras is planning to resume touring in March. The Fab Fugees, after decades of tension between them, have finally come together. And while no one said it publicly, people close to the group told me that Hill and Jean agreed to reunite to support Michel, the one who introduced them, as he faces metastasizing debts and the very real possibility of decades in prison. Last summer in Philly after the Roots Picnic, Hill explained it simply. “These are my brothers,” she said.
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