Note: I am not an investigative journalist, and this is not a journalistic investigation. I’m just a woman who sees Americans’ civil liberties being eroded by laws with questionable intentions based on their real life uses and effects. When I see that most of those affected are BIPOC and other marginalized groups, I want to take a closer look.
As an advocate for the decriminalization and de-stigmatization of sex work, I’ve been interested in the Sean “Diddy” Combs case. He’s been charged in a three count Indictment with racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking, and transportation to engage in prostitution between 2008 and the present.
Mr. Combs has been accused of some horrible crimes against sex workers, but my interest is not so much about his guilt or innocence, as it is in how and why he was investigated by the FBI and Homeland Security in the first place. If his “criminal enterprise” began in 2008 and was widely known within the music industry, why are the Feds after him now, and how are they able to investigate him legally?
I’ll dive deeper into that in a minute, but I got sidetracked by another high profile Federal Indictment of a prominent Black man in Manhattan – our mayor Eric Adams. The federal investigations into the Adams administration first emerged publicly on November 2, 2023, when FBI agents conducted an early morning raid on the Brooklyn home of Adams' chief fundraiser, Brianna Suggs.
Both cases involved unannounced raids by the FBI, but to understand the question of “how” these investigations were carried out legally, we have to look back. Way back. Cue the prelude scene.
It’s been twenty three years since al-Qaida terrorists, most of whom were Saudi nationals, hijacked and crashed four planes in the United States. I was in New York City on September 11, 2001 and watched on TV as the World Trade Centers collapsed after being hit by two of those hijacked planes.
Forty five days later The Patriot Act was signed into law in the name of national security and was the first of many changes to surveillance laws in the United States. Suddenly, several law enforcement agencies had the authority to monitor American citizen’s phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track activity on the Internet.
Sneak and peek warrants, a major change to Fourth Amendment rights to privacy, allow law enforcement to conduct secret searches of Americans’ homes and offices without notice. According to Congressional Research Service Reports,
“In the years since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, sneak and peek search warrants have been executed fairly often, but rarely challenged. Although occasionally used in terrorism investigations, they are most often sought in more traditional law enforcement cases.”
Back in the present, on the same day that the Mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, was indicted on bribery and fraud charges, a former NYC mayor, Rudy Giuliani, was disbarred in Washington, DC as part of the 2020 election lies fallout. Giuliani had already been disbarred in New York, and has been a part of several federal investigations, including one in 2007 involving his former police chief, Bernard Kerik, who pled guilty to eight felony charges including failure to pay taxes.
While Rudy Giuliani has been investigated for years, most notably for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, he wasn’t indicted until May 2024 in Arizona (on his 80th birthday). Meanwhile, a sitting mayor, Eric Adams, has been under investigation for less than a year and he’s already under indictment. Do the wheels of justice turn faster in New York than Arizona?
It’s unclear when the Feds began investigating Mr. Combs, but it probably isn’t a coincidence that he recently settled a lawsuit with a former girlfriend for a reported $30 million dollars. Abuse victims in New York City are able to lift the statute of limitations under the Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law (GMVPL), a temporary “lookback” period set to end in March 2025.
Cassie, whose real name is Casandra Ventura, stated that not long after she and Mr. Combs became a couple in 2007 (she was 19 and he was 37), he began a pattern of control and abuse that included giving her drugs, beating her, and forcing her to have sex with male prostitutes while he filmed them.
Federal officials had access to court papers in the civil suit which stated that surveillance video existed of Mr. Combs beating Cassie in a hotel corridor, but that the footage was in Mr. Comb’s possession (he’s said to have paid the hotel $50,000 for it).
It seems likely Cassie’s testimony about the tape would be enough for the FBI to obtain sneak and peek warrants for Mr. Comb’s homes in Miami and Los Angeles. That might also explain why Mr. Combs is being tried in New York when evidence was found in two other states.
Mr. Combs’ homes were raided on March 25, 2024, and in May 2024 CNN leaked a 2016 surveillance video showing Sean "Diddy" Combs violently dragging and kicking Cassie Ventura during an altercation in a hotel in California.
It’s important to note that the FBI alleges that Mr. Combs’s crimes were ongoing and part of a larger criminal enterprise so they can charge him under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. RICO is a US federal law that provides for extended criminal penalties and a civil cause of action for acts performed as part of an ongoing criminal organization.
Two Federal investigations into the alleged crimes of two prominent Black men in New York City, both indicted with evidence gathered by means of a law, hastily passed 23 years ago, and meant to protect America from terrorists is hardly a pattern.
I dug a little deeper and found, “The FBI's Long, Alarming History of Investigating Black Musicians” published in Pacific Standard on November 22, 2017, and written by Jack Denton. Music and politics merged from the mid 1950s to early 1970s,
The agency’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which led to the surveillance of several of the most important black jazz musicians of the mid-20th century. FBI documents describe the operation as seeking to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize subversive political groups.
The FBI has investigated many rappers, including Tupac, Eazy-E, and the Notorious B.I.G. One extensive rap related surveillance operation was of the hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan, which the FBI has given a 281F classification, (meaning that it’s seen as a major criminal enterprise).
Statistically speaking, I don’t know if one particular group is investigated by the FBI more than another. I also don’t know if investigations move faster in one part of the country or another.
However, I do know that Donald Trump was granted bail in his fraud case, while Mr. Combs was denied bail twice. He’s being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, an infamous facility where Ghislaine Maxwell and R Kelly were once held.
While it is true that Mr. Combs’s alleged crimes are violent in nature, his attorneys said the rapper would wear a monitoring device and pay for his own armed guards to make sure he didn’t leave his apartment. Still not good enough, and so, one more Black man sits in a prison cell waiting for his day in court.
Feds Find A Fuckload Of "Freak Off" Party Lube In Diddy Raids, But No Terrorists