'Puffy' Visited 'Shyne'

By Stephen M. Silverman

06/15/2001 at 11:00 AM EDT

Rap entrepreneur Sean 'Puffy' Combs visited his jailed protégé, Jamaal "Shyne" Barrow, on April 26, a month after Combs's own acquittal from charges stemming from a 1999 Times Square nightclub shooting, it has just been reported. Barrow, 22, convicted on assault and weapons charges, is serving a 10-year sentence on New York's Rikers Island. (In March, a jury cleared Combs, 31, of having pulled a gun and firing it in the club.) Norman Seabrook, president of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association, drove Combs into Rikers and escorted him through the metal detector, Sandra Smith, a spokeswoman for New York's Department of Correction, told the Chief, a civil service workers' newspaper. "What we did for him was not unusual (for celebrities)," Smith said, explaining that, otherwise, "it causes too much of a stir." The names of other celebrities who have visited Rikers Island were not reported.