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A
rapper who bragged about defrauding the government’s unemployment
program in a music video has been arrested on federal charges of
carrying out the exact scheme he mentioned in his video, according to
the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Fontrell
Antonio Baines, 31, who goes by the stage name “Nuke Bizzle” was
arrested after applying for more than $1.2 million in jobless benefits
and using stolen identities in a scheme to fraudulently obtain
unemployment insurance benefits under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and
Economic Security (CARES) Act.
Baines,
originally from Memphis Tennessee but who now resides in the Hollywood
Hills in California, was allegedly exploiting the Pandemic Unemployment
Assistance (PUA) provision of the CARES Act which the DOJ says is
designed to expand access to unemployment benefits to self-employed
workers, independent contractors, and others who would not otherwise be
eligible.
“Baines possessed and used debit cards pre-loaded with
unemployment benefits administered by the California Employment
Development Department (EDD),” the DOJ said in a statement announcing
Baines’ arrest. “The debit cards were issued in the names of
third-parties, including identity theft victims. The applications for
these debit cards listed addresses to which Baines had access in Beverly
Hills and Koreatown.”
The
DOJ says that during their investigation they discovered at least 92
debit cards that had more than $1.2 million in fraudulently obtained
benefits and that he had accessed more than $704,000 of those benefits
through cash withdrawal as well purchasing merchandise and other
services with them.
To make matters worse, Baines openly bragged about the fraudulent activity in one of his music videos.
Said
the DOJ: “Baines bragged about his ability to defraud the EDD in a
music video posted on YouTube and in postings to his Instagram account,
under the handles “nukebizzle1” and “nukebizzle23.” For example, Baines
appears in a music video called “EDD” in which he boasts about doing “my
swagger for EDD” and, holding up a stack of envelopes from EDD, getting
rich by “go[ing] to the bank with a stack of these” – presumably a
reference to the debit cards that come in the mail. A second rapper in
the video intones, “You gotta sell cocaine, I just file a claim.”
Baines
was subsequently arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada, on Sept. 23 and was
found with eight debit cards, seven of which were in the names of other
persons, according to the DOJ.
Baines
now faces three federal charges in the case -- access device fraud,
aggravated identity theft, and interstate transportation of stolen
property.
If convicted of all of these charges, Baines would face a statutory maximum sentence of 22 years in federal prison.
Malcolm X allegedly met with the KKK in 1961 according to the new book, ‘The Dead are Rising: The Life of Malcolm X’
This week, a shocking new revelation was made that in 1961 Malcolm X discussed
an unlikely truce with the Ku Klux Klan which proposed the white
supremacist hate group helping to carve out a “separate state” for Black
Americans.
According to The Times,
an account of the meeting is detailed in the new book ‘The Dead Are
Arising: The Life of Malcolm X’, which claims the civil rights leader
met with the Klansmen at a secret summit in Atlanta where they discussed
their shared opposition to racial integration.
circa
1962: American political activist and radical civil rights leader,
Malcolm X (1925 – 1965) standing at a podium during a rally of
African-American Muslims held in a Washington, DC arena. He is wearing a
formal jacket and a white bow-tie. (Photo by Richard Saunders/Hulton
Archive/Getty Images)
Details of the unlikely alliance emerged in a never-before-published interview with Jeremiah Shabazz,
a Nation of Islam minister who hosted the gathering at his
home. Although working at two extreme ends of the fight for racial
equality, the KKK reportedly invited the Nation of Islam to join forces
because they recognized both organizations were staunchly opposed to
school desegregation, which was gathering pace after the Supreme Court’s
decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
The narrative also suggests the Klan proposed an alliance with the Nation of Islam to assassinate Martin Luther King Jr.
who was leading the charge against the “evil” of segregation. Malcolm X
rejected King’s doctrine of nonviolence and instead argued for racial
separatism.
Malcolm X met with KKK leaders to discuss the creation of a black state, new book claims https://t.co/caDp8DlYiL
The
iconic civil rights activist joined the Nation of Islam while serving a
prison term in Massachusetts and in 1961 was sent to “meet with them
devils” at Shabazz’s home to speak to the KKK in the meeting which was
first approved by the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad.
One
member of the Klan was to have tried to “break the ice” by berating the
Jews, whom he thought to be another common enemy. After this, Malcolm X
proposed “complete separation of the races” in which the KKK would
assist the Nation of Islam to acquire land for Black people to live in a
“separate state” as a form of reparations.
Allegedly, the Klan
also suggested that Nation members wear “purple robes” as a nod to the
KKK’s infamous white costumes. But ultimately, the meeting was
infiltrated by an FBI agent working undercover in the Klan.
Above:
Devon Kitzo-Creed stands in front of a shipping container in the
parking lot of her apartment complex in Wilmington, Delaware, on Oct. 9,
2020. Credit: Meredith Edlow for HuffPost
Devon
Kitzo-Creed, a 28-year-old African American woman, always planned on
leaving the United States to live abroad. Definitely before she had
children, but probably not until she was in her 30s.
2020 pushed up her timeline.
Now she and her husband, who live in Wilmington, Delaware, are planningon relocating to Ecuador right after the election.She’ll continue her work as a doula and childbirth educator. He can work remotely as a video editor and animator.
Why the rush? “The
way things have gone this year, the political climate of our country,
and just the way that I do not feel valued at all in this country,”
Kitzo-Creed explained.
The day before Kitzo-Creed
spoke to HuffPost, a Kentucky grand jury declined to indict police
officers for murder after they shot and killed Breonna Taylor, a
26-year-old Black woman, inside her Louisville, Kentucky, apartment.
That
no one would face justice for the death of an innocent woman sent a
familiar message to Kitzo-Creed: This country doesn’t care about Black
people.
Kitzo-Creed
is part of a group of African American professionals looking to leave,
or who have already left, the United States. HuffPost spoke to several
who said they were fed up with the daily drumbeat of racism,
discrimination at work, the hostility of police officers, the fear of
doing even the most mundane tasks.
Kitzo-Creed
recalled how just this summer, she was getting followed around the
grocery store. Another man recounted how a police car followed him at
night just recently, sending his heart racing. A woman recalled asking a
repairman at her home to put on a mask because of the pandemic. He told
her, “We won’t need to do this after Trump wins the election.”
Almost
every Black professional HuffPost spoke with had a story about a tense
encounter with the police. Several said that the killings of Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery (shot while jogging), and George Floyd (killed by a police officer who kept a knee on his neck for eight minutes) were crystallizing moments.
While
there is no hard data on the number of African Americans who live
abroad or intend to move, anecdotally, discussions about whether to
stick around in the U.S. are increasing — particularly among college-educated, relatively well-off Black Americans. USA Today and Condé Nast Traveler noted the trend in August. And after the presidential debate last month, Google saw an increase in searches for how to move to Canada.
It
isn’t just politics and police violence, though. Everyone talked about
the pandemic. “The shift really came this year with the pandemic,” said
Sienna Brown, a 28-year-old African American woman who moved to Spain
six years ago and now runs an online community for women who are
interested in moving abroad. She said that initially, she mostly heard
from women looking to travel internationally. Now it’s women who want to
leave.
This year was the final turning point for me. There’s something about this country that feels like a weight on me.45-year-old Black professional
Life in the U.S. has always been far more deadly for Black people, who have a lower life expectancy and higher mortality rate.
And COVID-19 brought that long-term trend into full relief. Death rates
for Black people from the virus are disproportionately high.
But
death rates for African Americans were already higher going into the
pandemic. Incredibly, even if no one in the Black community had died
from the coronavirus, their mortality rate would still be higher than
for white Americans in the middle of the pandemic, demographer Elizabeth Wrigley-Field recently explained in Slate. “Racism gave Black people pandemic-level mortality long before COVID,” she writes.
Economically, it’s well-known
that African Americans start out way behind white Americans. The
pandemic amplified the issue. Right now, the Black unemployment rate is about twice that of white workers — a ratio that has held since the U.S. first started measuring the data.
A
few people mentioned that life abroad would be less expensive, enabling
them to retire earlier or afford the kind of housing and lifestyle that
is out of reach in the United States. And the need to quarantine has led to increased feelings of isolation and a lack of community.
But
the desire to leave the U.S. is not simply about economic opportunity
or even mortality rates; it is about a search for self. African
Americans spoke of having to leave the U.S. to truly find themselves,
free from the weight and stress of living with racism.
“For
me, as a Black man, and I tell this to everybody I speak to, I feel
more safe in other countries. Every other country I’ve been to, more
than my own,” said Terry Williams, a 32-year-old teacher who’s lived
abroad, traveling through 26 countries, since 2016. He’s able to teach
classes online. “Being abroad is the first time I have felt some kind of
privilege, if that makes sense. I’m not looked at as a Black person.”
“Just
between the racism and everything that happened as a result of the
pandemic, I really don’t want to be here anymore,” a 45-year-old Black
professional who lives in Washington, D.C. told HuffPost. She declined
to be identified because her employer doesn’t know yet.
“This year was the final turning point for me,” she said. “There’s something about this country that feels like a weight on me.”
She
plans on moving to Cape Verde, an island nation off the west coast of
Africa, where she’s looking to build a home and live in semi-retirement.
She has a friend already set up there.
Her feelings of
unease in the U.S. started in 2008 with the election of the nation’s
first Black president. It was a moment to celebrate for the African
American community, but it also unleashed virulent racism.
The
neo-Nazi website Stormfront saw traffic increase six times its previous
rates after Barack Obama’s election, as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out in The Atlantic.
Coates draws a line from the racist backlash directly to Donald Trump.
Famously, the racist lie of birtherism helped launch Trump’s political
career. His time in office has been spent unraveling Obama’s policies,
even when that’s at cross-purposes with the success of his
administration.
After Obama’s victory, this Washington, D.C.,
woman noticed white acquaintances of hers, people she’d gone to high
school with in Michigan, being openly racist on Facebook. They shared
memes about the First Family that were offensive: pictures of monkeys
and other abhorrent slurs she thought were a relic of the past. “It’s
unsettling when you realize people have these beliefs,” she said.
Of
course, she was conscious of racism before that. She was her high
school’s valedictorian but had been told by a white guidance counselor
that her test scores wouldn’t be good enough for her to get into a top
school — “like Michelle Obama,” she recalled. (A guidance counselor also
told the future U.S. first lady that she wasn’t “Ivy League material.” She applied and was admitted to Princeton anyway.)
This
was different. “It’s like people had just hidden their true feelings
for a long time, so there were reasons for them to let them loose,” she
said. “It was very scary.”
In 2016, after spending a year
traveling to Brazil, India and South Africa, a light bulb went on. “I
didn’t miss the U.S.,” she said. “I’ve seen there are better ways to
live in other places.” She acknowledged that there’s racism in these
places, too, but nothing as bad as in the United States.
Being abroad is the first time I have felt some kind of privilege, if that makes sense. I’m not looked at as a Black person.Terry Williams, 32
This
woman and several others mentioned to HuffPost that when they’re
traveling abroad, they’re viewed as Americans in a way that doesn’t
happen at home. They feel a sense of privilege denied to them at home
because of their skin color.
“I felt seen as a person
for the first time,” Chrishan Wright, a 46-year Black woman from New
Jersey, said of a solo trip she took to New Zealand three years ago. She
recounted how she was speeding while driving in the country and got
pulled over. “They were so gracious.”
During the
pandemic, Wright was laid off from a well-paying marketing job in the
pharmaceutical industry. She talked about her time working in the
corporate world and feeling like a “unicorn,” as one of the few Black
women in whatever company she was working in.
“In
the corporate world, it can be very isolating; you are not seeing faces
that reflect yours,” she said. “If you do something minor, it becomes
major. Whereas your [white] counterpart does the same things and it’s
not even spoken of. You see the double standard.”
In June, Wright started a Facebook page called Blaxit Global
devoted to African Americans who are considering leaving the country.
She’d like to be gone in about three years, when her daughter finishes
high school.
Blaxit is a term that some are using now
to talk about leaving the U.S. It’s also the name of a podcast Wright
started up in which she interviews folks who have left or are leaving
the country. (It should not be confused with “Blexit,” a term used by conservative commentator Candace Owens to try and get African Americans to leave the Democratic Party.)
“Blaxit
doesn’t necessarily mean that you are expected to leave the U.S. and go
to the continent of Africa,” said Wright. “It’s to show that members of
the African diaspora, our spores, are sprinkled all over this world and
we have the opportunity to create an existence that’s unapologetic and
unbothered.”
There’s really nothing new about African
Americans seeking to leave the United States to escape the confines of
racism and live more freely. A long list of brilliant
African American artists and writers have gone abroad to freely pursue
their work: Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Nina Simone,
Paul Robeson.
“I left this country for one reason
only. One reason. I didn’t care where I went. I might’ve gone to Hong
Kong, I might’ve gone to Timbuktu, I ended up in Paris, on the streets
of Paris, with $40 in my pocket on the theory that nothing worse could
happen to me there than had already happened to me here,” Baldwin said
on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1969. (Watch the clip below at around 10:15)
More than 200 years ago, Haiti, the first free Black republic in the world, opened its doors
to enslaved Africans in the United States. President Abraham Lincoln
supported efforts toward creating new “colonies” for formerly enslaved
people.
But even then, those efforts were met with
resistance. Prominent African Americans like Sojourner Truth and
Frederick Douglass believed that the United States was their country,
too, as Georges E. Fouron, a professor of Education and Social Sciences
at State University of New York at Stony Brook, recounts in a recent piece published by the Migration Policy Institute.
“The
United States was their country, they said, and they had no intention
of leaving it,” Fouron writes. “Instead, they demanded the immediate
abolition of slavery and full and equal rights for all in the United
States.”
The fight for equal rights and the realization of true freedom continues.
“Black
people, African Americans, are always going to be searching for another
kind of freedom. A bigger kind of freedom,” said Morgan Jerkins, a
senior editor at Zora, a Medium publication for women of color, and the author of “Wandering in Strange Lands: a daughter of the great migration reclaims her roots.”
African
Americans are communal. Jerkins points to Black churches, “packed in
regular times.” She notes the block parties in her neighborhood in
Harlem.
The pandemic has destabilized all of that. “When you don’t have that community, that does something to you.”
I am proud to be an African American, and I fight for other African Americans. They are the reason I stay.Morgan Jerkins, senior editor at Zora
Jerkins
said she understood the impetus to leave but is among the countless
African Americans who aren’t going anywhere. “I stay for so many
reasons. So much of my work is based in African American culture,” she
said. While you can do that work anywhere, it wouldn’t have the same
urgency.
Plus, Jerkins points out that not all African Americans can just leave. That it’s a privilege only some can assert.
“I am proud to be an African American, and I fight for other African Americans,” she said. “They are the reason I stay.”
Kitzo-Creed,
from Delaware, said she respects that some will stay and fight, but
adds there is also strength in leaving and taking care of yourself.
“My
grandparents were civil rights activists; just because they fought for
my freedom doesn’t mean I have to stay here,” she said, adding she is
grateful that because of their activism, she has that choice.
Kitzo-Creed
said that her grandfather, a Baptist minister, actually preached with
Martin Luther King Jr. when the icon came out to Los Angeles. And her
grandparents together moved from Cleveland to the Watts neighborhood of
LA, where they were during the civil unrest in that neighborhood in
1965. “I remember my stories of my grandmother driving past buildings on
fire. They lived through all of that.”
She said her grandparents,
who died five days apart three years ago, always knew she wanted to
travel. “I think they would tell me to do it,” she said.
Kitzo-Creed
and her husband Aaron stand in the middle of Brandywine Creek at the
First State National Historic Park in Wilmington, Delaware, on Oct. 9,
2020. The park is one of the few places they feel comfortable visiting
as political tensions and rates of COVID-19 rise in the United States.
(Photo: Meredith Edlow for HuffPost)
“I
want my family, my wife, to be happy and successful and free to pursue
education and wealth and opportunities for any children we may have,” he
said. “I want the American dream and I have to leave to get it.”
He added
that before he met his wife, he was absolutely aware of racism and knew
Black people faced microaggressions. But he didn’t really understand
its daily psychological impact. “It wasn’t real,” he said.
The
first time the lightbulb went on, he said, was in his hometown in Maine
one summer three years ago. He was excited to take Kitzo-Creed, then
his girlfriend, to a local ice cream stand. He used to go there as a kid
and even briefly worked there. “It was a childhood paradise,” he said.
He
knew the woman behind the counter the day they walked up, and he was
disgusted by the way she treated his now-wife when she went to pay for
their ice-cream cones — vanilla soft-serve with rainbow sprinkles.
Kitzo-Creed pulled out her debit card, which wasn’t signed. This is not
uncommon. (Right now, in this white reporter’s wallet, there are two
well-used, unsigned debit and credit cards.)
The woman behind the counter insisted Kitzo-Creed
show an ID. Her partner fought her, pointing out that the woman wasn’t
checking anyone else’s identification to buy ice cream. Kitzo-Creed said that without him there, she probably would’ve left empty-handed since she hadn’t brought her identification that day.
When she finally got her cone, there was a hole in the bottom. The woman fought her again when she spoke up.
Aaron
Kitzo-Creed was floored. He remembered customer service being
absolutely a priority at this place. It was just so clear that something
else was happening.
“I don’t think I could survive the bullshit that Black Americans walk through daily and succeed,” he says now, looking back.
In a survey of 1,500 professionals
by the women’s advocacy group Catalyst, more than 58% of women and men
of color reported being often or always on guard against racism. This
emotional tax wears away at human beings and leads many professionals to
leave the workplace, so it’s not surprising some would take the more
extreme leap.
“This experience of having to
constantly prepare yourself for the potential of dealing with
discrimination, bias, unfair treatment from the moment you leave the
house until you come home,” is how Catalyst researcher Dnika Travis
explained the phenomenon to HuffPost in an interview this summer.
She’s
worked on these types of studies since 2016, and over the next few
years. “At the time we thought there was safety within the home, but
with Breonna Taylor...” she drifted off.
Many Black
women were heartened this week to see Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) take
on Vice President Mike Pence in the vice presidential debate.
“It was a historic moment,” writes HuffPost’s Erin Evans. “To see a woman of color speaking truth to power at another pivotal moment in our nation’s history.”
But
the prospect of seeing Harris elected the country’s first Black and
Asian American vice president wasn’t enough to persuade Kitzo-Creed to
stick around.
“I think it would be amazing.
Definitely a huge milestone,” she said. Still, she thinks the sight of a
Black woman in such a position of power would set off racists again.
“It’s adding fuel to the fire.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
