Aspiring rapper questions arrest

Daniel Bastine is an aspiring rapper from San Diego. He’s a graduate of a private high school in posh La Jolla, Calif. He moved to Las Vegas four years ago to try to make it big in the local music industry.

He can’t help but think he’s getting a bad rap from undercover police officers — the bum’s rush.

He was arrested a few weeks ago on the Strip on a charge he unlawfully reproduced somebody else’s music, then tried to pawn it off as his own in the form of a CD, accepting donations from tourists in return.

It’s a common practice on the boulevard among some of the rappers, what with the constant stream of foot traffic.

The 28-year-old was first detained, then taken into custody along with his buddy and musical promoter, Michael Patrick, 32, as the two called it a day and started to walk into the Starbucks across from Treasure Island in the late afternoon of May 18.

Hundreds of their CDs — “their livelihood,” as they say — were confiscated along with Bastine’s wallet, his cellphone with its “important” spreadsheet information, and $230 in cash.

Nearly three weeks have passed since they spent the night in the Clark County jail on allegations of violating a copyright infringement law, a federal offense. And Bastine, who denies the charge, is still trying to get his personal property back from police — with a court date now set in mid-July in Las Vegas Justice Court.

“I don’t get it,” he said from his music studio in a non­descript strip mall a few weeks ago. “There are all sorts of bad people doing bad things out on the Strip. There’s hookers, there’s drug addicts, there’s all sorts of creeps, and they decide to go after us? Why?”

Worse yet is that the undercover cops, part of the Metropolitan Police Department’s tourism safety unit, allegedly told Bastine they actually liked his band, Team Dollas, after listening to a few cuts in some back room in the Palazzo, including “Get it on the Strip” and “Flying Gone.”

“They were even joking around while I was in handcuffs, saying that I only had 300 views on YouTube,” says Bastine, whose stage name is Stretch. “Then they slap me with a felony, saying it’s not mine?”

More confusing, he adds, is that the FBI never entered the picture.

If he was violating a federal law, then where is the FBI? If the federal authorities were to question him, Bastine said he would tell them that copying somebody else’s music “ain’t my style.”

“I worked too long and hard to start giving away somebody else’s music,” he says. “I’m legit.”

Bastine and Patrick aren’t the first to be arrested on the Strip, and they probably won’t be the last.

Instead, their experience was part of random enforcement on the part of police to clean up the Strip and protect tourists, police spokesman Lawrence Hadfield said.

Think of their arrest, he said, as the equivalent of placing a few squad cars at one of the busiest intersections in the city and waiting for speeders — only in this case it was on the Strip and it happened to involve musicians, or, more specifically, rappers.

“The Strip is the city’s cash base,” Hadfield said. “Of course these guys are going to tell you something else, but we all know they were doing something wrong. I don’t think the officers would have taken them into custody without some sort of justification or reason.

“I don’t know what their version of the story was.”

The musicians’ version is that they weren’t hassling tourists, which is common among people promoting their music on the Strip, police say.

Often, such musicians will block the path of tourists on the bridges, foist a CD into their hands, then follow them for a while, asking for donations, asking them “to show a little love.”

By law, if someone wants that CD for free, then that CD is theirs for the taking and they don’t have to fork over a donation.

That’s the theory, anyway.

In some cases, the CDs don’t even contain music. In other cases, they might contain music, but it won’t be the promoter’s own recordings, which is where the federal offense comes in.

And in many cases, there’s a form of subtle coercion involved.

“They strong-arm you,” said Christopher Lalli, an assistant district attorney over the criminal division in Clark County. “I took my nephew out on the Strip 18 months ago, and some guy started asking him for money right in front of the Bellagio.

“The concern is the tourists. What’s going on with them when they’re being approached by people like this? We need to protect them. But we also want the Strip to be fun, and we don’t want to violate anybody’s rights. It’s a fine line that we walk.”

And Lalli walks it.

Sometimes, he even does drive-alongs with police to see some of the problems upfront. That’s just how dedicated the district attorney’s office is in prosecuting the seedier crowd on the Strip, he said.

Two months ago, he even started combing through the statutes, looking for stricter felony charges that the district attorney’s office could use in their fight to keep the Strip safe. One of those laws was the unlawful reproduction of music.

If convicted, the perpetrator can serve up to a year in prison.

“There’s no infringement, if it’s your own work, and you’re giving it away,” Lalli pointed out. “But you can’t impede the thoroughfare in any way.”

Meanwhile, Bastine is trying to get his musical act together. He’s also doing a little investigating of his own.

He is looking into the possibility of biting the bullet and getting a business license so he can sell his music. He used to make as much as $500 daily through donations, but those days, at least for now, seem to have ended.

“Maybe that’s the only thing I can do to protect myself,” Bastine said.

Lalli said once business licenses are secured, then Stretch will have the right to sell his CDs.

Contact reporter Tom Ragan at tragan@reviewjournal.com or 702-224-551