50 Cent 1994 Premium Cotton T-Shirt
Mugshot Story
On June 29 1994, 19-year-old Curtis James Jackson III was caught in a Queens sting selling four vials of crack-cocaine to an undercover cop. Three weeks later police raided his grandmother’s house, seizing heroin, ten ounces of crack and a starter’s pistol.
Facing multiple felonies, Jackson took a plea that sent him to New York’s military-style Shock Incarceration program. He was processed on 23 August 1994 at Monterey Shock Facility, where intake officers snapped the now-iconic booking photo: slate number “94 R 6378” under the header “N.Y.S. D.O.C.S.”—and the date “8-23-94.”
Although the sentence read three-to-nine years, Jackson completed just six months, earned his GED, and emerged with a new alias—“50 Cent,” a metaphor for self-made change.
The stark black-and-white mugshot that once documented a low point became the origin image of the man who would sell 30 million records with Get Rich or Die Tryin’ only nine years later.
