A significant part of Senegalese rapper Akon's career was built on his "ex convict" uber-tough image. Akon tried to make himself pass for a hard-core criminal, who spent three years in jail for allegedly running a car theft ring and chop shop. However, The Smoking Gun just uncovered that the rapper's "criminal past" was mostly fabricated, and that Akon himself only served a few months in a county jail, accused of gun possession. The situation is all the more embarrassing for the rapper as a lot of his most successful songs (including his breakthrough single "Locked Up") were written in such a way as to boast his tough life as a hardened criminal, and his three albums released to date are called "Trouble", "Konvicted" and "Acquitted". It seems that Akon will have to find a different source of inspiration for his songs from now on - a more realistic one, preferably.

"Visitation no longer comes by / Seems like they forgot about me / Commissary is gettin empty Cellmates gettin food without me" - these lyrics are taken from Akon's hit single "Locked Up" released in 2004. Whatever experience he's been relying on to come up with these lyrics, it definitely hasn't been his own. "Police, court, and corrections records reveal that the entertainer has created a fictionalized back story that serves as the narrative anchor for his recorded tales of isolation, violence, woe, and regret. Akon has overdubbed his biography with the kind of grit and menace that he apparently believes music consumers desire from their hip-hop stars," The Smoking Gun reports, adding that "while the performer's rap sheet does include a half-dozen arrests, Akon has only been convicted of one felony, for gun possession".

As for the part where he pretended to run a car theft ring, Akon must have gotten the idea from the one time in 1998 when he was arrested for possession of a single stolen BMW. On that occasion, the singer was held in the DeKalb County jail for several months, but prosecutors eventually cleared him of all charges. So there was no conviction. In any case, the rapper served no prison term between 1999 and 2002, and the claims he made in a videotaped interview about "facing 75 years" were completely false. The sad part is that Akon seems to have invented his own outrageous past purely due to marketing purposes - and his lies were so well thought-out, packaged and sold as "the real deal", that it will be extremely hard for him to gain any credibility in the wake of this revelation. Stay tuned for more news on Akon and his reaction to the exposure of his own background.