Gilbert Arenas was pulled over, handcuffed and placed under arrest early Thursday morning in Los Angeles, with police reportedly booking the former NBA All-Star for speeding without a license in a pickup truck full of illegal fireworks. (That's an amalgamation of the three things the ex-Washington Wizards guard was reportedly doing, not the official charge ... although it would be pretty amazing if that was a specific law you could break.)
News of Arenas' run-in with the law, and the video proof up above, come from the all-seeing eyes of TMZ, which reported that the California Highway Patrol stopped Arenas, 31, for speeding at around 2:30 a.m. PT on Thursday morning and found many, many boxes of fireworks in plain sight in Agent Zero's Ford truck. (Apparently, Gil was also operating without a license.)
You can see law enforcement officials removing said boxes of boomsticks from Arenas' ride and into their own custody; I'm not an expert, but that seems like an awful lot of fireworks — enough, apparently, to warrant an appearance by the Los Angeles Police Department's bomb squad — which may present a bit of a problem for Arenas, according to Roger Simmons of the Orlando Sentinel:
According to the California-based Shouse Law Group, "most violations of California's fireworks laws are misdemeanors, subjecting you to a maximum $1,000 fine and up to one year in a county jail. However, if you possess large quantities of dangerous fireworks, prosecutors could charge you with a felony, punishable by up to three years in the California state prison and fines as high as $50,000."
TMZ reports that Arenas was "released without bail" just before 10 a.m. PT Thursday, about seven hours after his arrest.
This, of course, isn't the first time Arenas has come into contact with the law. While a member of the Wizards, he plead guilty in January 2010 to a felony charge of carrying a pistol without a license in violation of Washington, D.C., gun control laws as part of an investigation into his locker-room confrontation with then-teammate Javaris Crittenton, a card-game-sparked standoff in which firearms were brandished. The incident resulted in both Arenas and Crittenton being suspended for the remainder of the 2009-10 NBA season.
Crittenton never played in the NBA again, and was indicted in April on charges connected with the 2011 death of a 22-year-old woman and the attempted murder of another young man. The Wizards traded Arenas to the Orlando Magic for Rashard Lewis in December 2010; after 49 unremarkable games off the Magic bench, Orlando jettisoned Arenas' now-outsized maximum contract using the collective bargaining agreement's amnesty provision.
The Los Angeles native last played in the NBA with the Memphis Grizzlies, who signed him as a free agent late in the 2011-12 season, and played professionally last season for the Shanghai Sharks of the Chinese Basketball Association.
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