The Color of a Crime

Rap music is the quintessential African American genre, often featuring boastful declarations about the rapper’s prowess as a criminal mastermind. To the extent there’s any coherent message contained in a rap song anymore, this remains one of the signature themes.

The problem with boasting about crimes you’ve actually committed is that now you’re on record admitting to a series of crimes. This can turn into a legal issue sooner rather than later. For example, two gentlemen known as Nuke Bizzle and Fat Wizza who managed to siphon large sums from California’s Employment Development Department, which administered unemployment relief funds from the CARES Act.

According to a federal indictment, Mr. Nuke managed to defraud the agency of 1.2 million dollars by filing false claims. I covered their legal predicament for Identity Dixie when the story broke five years ago during the COVID nightmare. Rapping about being criminal masterminds brought attention to their crimes. This resulted in an immediate legal predicament.

Here are some choice lyrics:

You gotta sell cocaine, I can just file a claim… I’m doin’ shit that you cain’t… nigga I’m smart and you ain’t

While it’s certainly a lighthearted video, the situation didn’t work out for these gentlemen. The thing is though, if you’re not smart enough to avoid making a video about a string of felonies you’ve recently committed, the overwhelming likelihood is that these felonies didn’t require much brains to commit.

The reality of defrauding the government during COVID is that it didn’t require much greater intellect than traditional African American crimes such as robbing convenience stores at gunpoint. Still, these stick-up operations often involve the perpetrators getting away.

It’s impossible to get away with most of this COVID fraud done in the perpetrator’s own name if anyone from the government spent 15 minutes looking into the claims. It’s just that the government was dispensing money according to what African Americans put down on the forms without performing due diligence five years ago. However, it’s finally getting around to doing it now.

So, sure it’s very easy to put down that you have a business with a hundred employees and past revenues in the millions of dollars to get free money, but it’s also very easy to verify that these statements are false with information available to the government. The ease of it all doesn’t make the consequences less severe for the string of felonies entailed.

PPP Loans… How is it that people are posting videos like this, getting arrested and sentence to come, but all the SCHIFF that DOGE is supposedly popping and no ARRESTS? America I think we're still getting played. Until Hillary and Obama and Biden are in cuffs its all just BS. pic.twitter.com/imLVYa7AH5

— Imagine (@ArtArt39702737) February 17, 2025

In other words, filling out forms in your own name telling the government that you have hundreds of employees that don’t exist in order to get millions of dollars to buy a Rolls Royce and diamond rings is an incredibly stupid crime. Here’s an Atlanta prosecutor who pulled off this exact maneuver:

I’ve never defrauded the government. However, if I felt an inclination to such an enterprise, I’d be cognizant from the outset that success would hinge on not using my actual identity to fill out the forms. This is so basic that I simply can’t fathom the depths of the stupidity it would require to do so.

I also know that since I serve as one of my county’s deputy dogcatchers, driving around in a Rolls Royce would raise a big red flag about potential corruption on my part. So, sure there’d be some jet skis stored discreetly on my property, but they’d get used someplace far away. Even a crooked public servant would have to have an ethos. Right?

Otherwise, why in the fuck would one expect to get away with anything? This brings us to a peculiar phenomenon inherent to the lack of future time orientation in African Americans. They’re never worried but they’re always shocked when they get busted.

It’s almost as if all of the worry they didn’t experience between the commission of the crime and the moment of being apprehended by the authorities for this crime is applied as shock at that fateful moment. It must be very disconcerting sensation for them to experience.

At a certain point someone in acceptable media is going to notice that most of these people getting busted for COVID fraud five years later are African Americans. I’m not sure what happens after this becomes part of the mainstream discourse.