Brooklyn’s grim Metropolitan detention center (MDC) is now for the foreseeable future home to Diddy, AKA Sean Combs, one of the most well-known voices in American entertainment whose business empire once seemed to know no bounds.
The MDC is 5 miles (8km) from the public housing projects in Bedford-Stuyvesant where Combs’s biggest Bad Boy Records star, Biggie Smalls, grew up, but more than 20 miles from the middle-class suburb of Mount Vernon, where Combs himself was raised.
Smalls was murdered in Los Angeles in 1997, but Combs went on to amass a fortune and global fame by marrying street attitude to luxury consumer capitalism. But that all crashed and burned last week. On Wednesday a New York judge rejected a $50m bail package for Combs, in part because of witness intimidation allegations, ahead of his trial on three criminal counts, including racketeering conspiracy; sex trafficking by force, fraud or coercion; and transportation to engage in prostitution.
It is a staggering fall from grace, even in a world of US celebrity now littered with them. At his peak, Combs on occasion could be seen driving down Broadway in New York in an open-top Bentley in baby blue flake paint and cream upholstery. It was the era of opulent bling, and he was its king.
“Puffy connected a lot of dots, connected people to a different kind of glamor and aspiration, and brought hip-hop into a different place in the world,” Alan Light, Vibe magazine’s editor, told the Guardian earlier this year. “He saw the connections to the fashion world, to the entertainment world. He wanted to see how large it could be.”
Combs launched a perfume; a successful clothing line, Sean John; and a brand of vodka, Cîroc. He owned a $65m superyacht, Maraya, and a black private jet. He threw famous white parties in the Hamptons and St Tropez, attended by politicians and society arbiters; he was profiled in the pages of Vogue then, and as recently as 2017, promoting a line of “demure” jewelry.
But demure wasn’t in the vocabulary that federal prosecutors’ used to describe Combs’s alleged criminal activity last week.
They allege that from 2009 he had been involved in serious criminal activity that could, if convicted, put him away for decades. He has pleaded not guilty. The charges against Combs appear partly built on civil claims brought by former girlfriend and Me & U singer Cassie Ventura and four others alleging rape and abusive control.
The indictment came out of New York’s southern district, the go-to federal district for complex racketeering investigations, including those of R Kelly and others, such as Jeffrey Epstein, involving allegations of sex trafficking.
US attorney Damian Williams said Combs “used the business empire he controlled to carry out criminal activity, including sex trafficking, forced labour, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice”.
Much attention was paid to Combs alleged days-long, drug-fueled “freak offs” that sound as if they could challenge anything Caligula could summon at Rome’s debauched height.
“Combs abused and exploited women for years,” Williams said, including that Combs “used force, threats of force and coercion to cause victims to engage in extended sexual performance with male commercial ex workers, some of whom he transported or caused to be transported over state lines”, making it a federal case.
Anna Cominsky, director of the criminal defense clinic at New York Law School, cautions against being sidetracked by the salacious nature of the underlying allegations and alleged conduct.
“The main issue for Combs is the racketeering allegation, that this is not just his personal conduct but rather that he had this whole organization that was helping him to facilitate criminal activity. Once you have that racketeering charge it’s an uphill battle for the defense,” she said.
Combs’s lawyers proposed a bail package that included a $50m bond co-signed by his mother and other family members, as well as home detention, surrender of his passport, weekly drug tests and a visitor log that would be submitted to authorities each night.
Marc Agnifilo, Combs’s lawyer, maintained: “There’s no coercion and no crime.”
But that did not fly. After twice denying Combs bail, Judge Andrew L Carter Jr indicated his bigger concern was not flight but “deals with the danger of obstruction of justice and the danger of witness tampering”, after the court heard that Combs had allegedly contacted potential witnesses.
The ruling “did not go our way”, Agnifilo said, adding: “The fight continues.”
The 14-page indictment against Combs may not be the end of government’s criminal allegations. To prove racketeering conspiracy there must be co-conspirators, and none have been charged. Williams said the investigation was “ongoing”.
But according to Cominsky, co-conspirators don’t have to be charged and are in fact often turned into cooperating witnesses – bad news for Combs.
“I think you’re going to see alleged co-conspirators who are now cooperators,” Cominsky said. “And there may be charges against individuals with cooperation agreements, or they’re not charged at all because of their cooperation.”
Striking but unsurprising is how few people have come forward in support of the former music mogul. It was a feature of the Epstein case that the names in his notorious address book later professed not knowing or having only barely met him. The same was true for disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein – now also in a New York jail cell.
Influential radio host Charlamagne Tha God predicted that if Combs is convicted “there will be others involved” who will be “probably going to jail”.
Rapper 50 Cent – Curtis Jackson III – tweeted a photo of him and actor Drew Barrymore captioned, “Here I am keeping good company with [Barrymore] and I don’t have 1,000 bottles of lube at the house,” a reference to the bottles of baby oil and lubricant found during raids on Combs’s homes.
Danity Kane singer Aubrey O’Day, a frequent critic of Combs, said she felt “validated” by his arrest and called it “a win for women all over the world”.
As the criminal case against Combs progresses and prosecutors turn over evidence to his defense that will include testimony from some 300 subpoenas issued to individuals to appear before a grand jury, there will inevitably be a review of how Combs was able to hide his apparent evil in such plan sight.
Writer Simon Reynolds described Combs in 1999 as “a dandy megalomaniac” who presented himself as “the ultimate player, a sort of hip-hop Donald Trump and ‘black Sinatra’ rolled into one”.
Combs was born in Harlem in 1969. His father was murdered when he was three and Combs was raised in the New York suburb of Mount Vernon. In contrast to many of the stars in his music stable, he had a middle-class existence. He was privately educated and studied business at Howard University.
After hustling a job at Uptown Records, signs of trouble soon emerged. In 1991, seven people were killed in a stampede at a celebrity basketball game he’d promoted. Eight years later, an Interscope records executive claimed that Combs and two accomplices had burst into his office and beaten him up.
Combs was arrested – and later exonerated – after a nightclub shooting that injured three. Witnesses said they’d seen Combs with the weapon. His lawyers claimed that Combs would not keep a gun around then girlfriend Jennifer Lopez, who was with him at the time.
Danyel Smith, Vibe magazine’s former editor, recently alleged that a 1997 cover dispute with Combs led to a death threat.
There will inevitably be questions about why Combs’s prosecution took so long to be brought against him. Cominsky points out that racketeering cases can take years to build and unlike the Kelly and Epstein cases, there are no allegations of underage sexual abuse.
“We just don’t know yet about the allegations of abuse,” said Cominsky. “We know so little about this case, so little about the evidence prosecutors have. But based on what the defense attorneys have said, they know more because they were negotiating with prosecutors before this indictment came down.”
In Combs’s former world – where image was everything – that is not a good look.
