*The proverbial book was thrown at Remy Ma yesterday when she was sentenced to eight years in prison for shooting an acquaintance over missing money. And adding insult to injury, she began her bid as a single woman.

      The rapper attempted to marry her rapper/fiancé Papoose before beginning her sentence, but Monday's jailhouse ceremony was cancelled after he was discovered holding a handcuff key and thrown in a cell.

       "The key that was found today easily opened handcuffs that we and other law enforcement officials use," a prison official told the New York Daily News. "The visitor was sanctioned by not being able to visit Rikers Island again for six months. He was asked to leave."      

       Papoose, however, says jail officials were already aware of the key, which he describes as a skeleton key that has hung from his keychain without repercussion each time he has visited Remy at Rikers Island. "The handcuff thing was ridiculous," Pap told SOHH.com. "The law states, if I carried a handcuff key into a prison, I would have been arrested." 

       Marlon, one half of Remy's management team, suggested to SOHH that jail officials were simply using Pap's skeleton key as an excuse to cancel the wedding.  

Papoose

       "Pap has not missed one visit while she was at Rikers," Marlon told SOHH. "Every C.O. knows him. The skeleton key thing was bogus. …[Pap] knew something was up when they asked him to come back. He never made it to the chapel. The officers told Remy they had to reschedule. No one told her what happened. She didn't find out until she spoke with Pap."       

       When asked about waiting out the six months and rescheduling the wedding, Pap told reporters that he and Remy were already official anyway.  "We're already married," he said.

       Before sentencing the following day, Smith appealed for leniency by tearfully describing how she was raised in homeless shelters, "surrounded by poverty and drugs and violence and failure."      

       "Remy Ma is not even close to who I really am. I'm not a thug," she said. "I'm not a threat or a menace to society, and I still have so much to offer."      

       But prosecutor Michael McIntosh argued Remy had a habit of traveling with a loaded weapon and said something like this "was bound to happen one day."      

       Judge Rena Uviller ultimately sided with the prosecution, referring to Remy as "an extremely angry young woman whose anger is completely out of control" before handing down the sentence.

       In March, Remy was convicted of assault, weapons possession and attempted coercion. Her lawyer, Ivan Fisher, tried to argue that the shooting in the early hours of July 14, 2007, was accidental, and that the victim, Makeda Barnes-Joseph, was exaggerating the facts to win a large sum in a separate civil suit. Fisher also tried to argue that Barnes-Joseph had taken $3,000 from her and that her gun went off as the pair struggled over her purse.       

       The bullet pierced Barnes-Joseph's colon and hit her rectum and sent her to a hospital for three weeks.