A career crook’s hankering for a Slim Jim landed him in federal prison for three years, after he snapped into the smoked meat snack and pulled a gun on a Brooklyn store clerk.
Dewayne Tripp was visibly drunk when he sauntered into a gas station convenience store at the corner of Utica and Atlantic Aves., grabbed a Slim Jim, and started chomping away, according to court filings.
When a worker at the Crown Heights store tried to bar him from leaving, Tripp flipped, screaming, “Don’t f–k with me! Do you know who I am?”
He then reached into a black plastic bag, pulled out a gun, racked it, and kept yelling, “Don’t f–k with me!” as he left. Store workers called 911, and he still had the gun, a Ruger LCP .380 caliber semiautomatic pistol, when cops arrested him later in the day, the feds said in a recent sentencing memo.
On Thursday, Brooklyn Federal Court Chief Judge Margo Brodie sentenced him to three years in prison for the March 24, 2022 episode.
Tripp was initially charged with federal firearm and Hobbs Act robbery charges. He pleaded guilty to robbery in March 2023.
Federal prosecutors were asking for a meatier sentence, five to six-and-a-half years, pointing out that while he was out on $100,000 bond, he violated the terms of his release by repeatedly testing positive for drugs and by visiting an illegal gambling den.
He was also charged in two domestic-violence incidents, first in May 2023 when he was accused of hitting and choking his girlfriend. That led to a bond revocation hearing, which he didn’t show up for. He was busted again in June on charges he violated a restraining order.
Though the two cases were dismissed for lack of evidence, a federal judge ordered him locked up in July as he awaited sentencing.
Tripp also has a lengthy criminal history dating back to his teenage years, the feds said. He was sentenced to a one- to three-year prison term for a 2008 burglary, and he’s had several arrests and convictions since, including for grand larceny and gun possession.
His lawyer, Karume James of the Federal Defenders, asked for leniency, arguing that his 10 months in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center —which is notorious for its harsh conditions — was sentencing enough.
Tripp suffers from alcoholism, James wrote in an April 19 memo to the judge, and fell in with a rough crowd as a teenager, putting him on a spiraling path through the criminal justice system.
Tripp spent a year in an upstate N.Y. juvenile facility at age 14, and that “early incarceration would have ripple effects for the rest of his life,” James wrote.
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