Talking Torture at Torrisi with Ja Rule
Eric Adams, unspeakable violence, and lemon ices.
Last December, I invited Ja Rule to dinner at Torrisi in SoHo. He agreed to a wide-ranging interview for a Buzzfeed News feature on his NFT business. Over several courses, we covered his politicking with New York mayor Eric Adams and Newark mayor Ras Baraka, the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried, the return of Fyre Festival has-been Billy McFarland, his close call with bankrupt real estate developer Nile Niami, the rapper’s high profile former cellmates, the George Bell trial… and the revelation of a shocking violent crime perpetrated by Ja Rule’s politically connected business partner, a topic I was sure would end our interview before the lemon ices arrived, but instead resulted in high fives all around.
What follows is a collection of scenes from my draft, which suffered its own premature death when Buzzfeed News was killed last April.
1.
Last November 10th, New York mayor Eric Adams appeared on The Block, an old school hip-hop radio show, number one for throwbacks, on WXBK-FM 94.7. Host Shelley Wade tackled local news with Adams, Governor Kathy Hochul’s recent reelection, and the rat crisis – ”everyone who knows me knows I hate rats,” Adams responded – before she quizzed the mayor on his Mount Rushmore of MCs.
Adams name dropped MC Lyte, Kurtis Blow, and “the whole crew that did the whole ‘Fight the Power,” but he foremost praised Hollis, Queens native Jeffrey Atkins.
“I love Ja Rule. If I talk like Ja Rule, man, I'll be the man,” Adams told Wade.
This wasn’t lip service. Less than two weeks later, on the Monday before Thanksgiving, Adams slipped into the basement of Sony Hall in Times Square where Ja Rule’s production company, ICONN, presented the latest show in its Vibes Concert Series.
Another rap legend, Rakim, of Eric B & Rakim fame, held court on stage seated on a gilded velvet throne, owing to a broken foot, holding a mic in one hand and a cane – shaped like a revolver with a barrel that extended to the floor - in his other. He performed his seminal 1987 album, Paid in Full, while backed by a live band, and bookended by a pair of swaying corseted showgirls, and a tireless hype man who held up a copy of Rakim’s 2019 biography Sweat the Technique for more than an hour. This commitment alone was worth the price of admission.
Adams sat stage left in a makeshift VIP section, elevated above the crowd. Three members of his plainclothes security detail, in suits and earpieces, guarded Adams and his +1; Zhan “Johnny” Petrosyants, the former federal prisoner turned restaurateur behind nearby La Baia Osteria, one of the mayor’s preferred hangouts, stood at his side. Below them, French tourists rose up from their tables and danced, champagne flutes in hand, older folks loudly cheered Ja Rule for honoring the culture, and a haze of weed, now legal in New York, clouded the floor by the time Ja Rule took the stage to “shout out to my brother the Mayor of New York City Eric Adams” for his love and support.
Adams and Ja Rule have loved and supported each other for a while now. Longtime New Jerseyan Ja Rule endorsed low key New Jerseyan Adams, in the 2020 mayoral race, and headlined a free community concert at Roy Wilkins Park, in Jamaica, Queens one year earlier, at Adams’ behest.
It pains me to say it, but Ja Rule’s political connects were a flex; he was giving King of New York vibes. If you’ve never seen Abel Ferrara’s 1990 crime noir King of New York, Christopher Walken plays Frank White, a “drug kingpin rebuilding his criminal empire after his release from prison, while also attempting to go legitimate.”
The movie was panned as being unrealistic, but consider there’s a scene where White crashes a performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones at the Lunt-Fontaine Theater to get some face time with a Bronx councilman. Meanwhile, the Lunt-Fontaine is just down the block from where Sony Hall is now, and Ja Rule didn’t come to Eric Adams, the mayor came to the rapper.
Roger Ebert described King of New York as the story of “a man supremely confident of his ability to succeed in an arena where most people end up dead;” I couldn’t think of a more apt description for Ja Rule’s career arc.
“I hit him maybe a few days prior, like “Eric if you’re in town come through, I’d love to have you,” and he was like, immediately, “Ja, I’m coming,” so I made sure he was set up right,” Ja told me over dinner at Torrisi.
“I was happy he stayed for the whole show; that means he enjoyed it.”
Such camaraderie between a mayor and a rapper was unthinkable during the administrations of Rudy Giuliani, Michael Bloomberg, and Bill de Blasio, when Gang Intelligence and Special Enterprise Units, dubbed “hip-hop cops,” surveilled and targeted high profile rappers, and tabloid headlines publicized arrests of Jay-Z, and Sean “Diddy” Combs and Jennfier Lopez, in 1999, and in July 2007, when police arrested Lil Wayne and Ja Rule following separate traffic stops on the same night.
On the night of July 23, 2007, Ja Rule’s Maybach sedan was pulled over for speeding down West End Avenue with expired tags, and a gun with a defaced serial number was found inside the car. Ja Rule eventually pleaded guilty, in 2010, to attempted possession of a weapon, and was sentenced to two years in state prison, before serving an additional six months in federal prison for failure to pay income taxes. New York’s gun laws were a wakeup call for Ja Rule. In the aftermath of his conviction, he said he made it his mission to get a handle on local politics.
Fast forward to November 2021, and Ja was celebrating Adams’ election night victory down the block from Torrisi, at private members club Zero Bond. And supporting the mayor has its perks.
Ja Rule explained:
“I realize that having that kind of relationship is a lot different than music relationships or film relationships, a different kind of power dynamic. I can’t ask Lyor Cohen for a permit to shoot something in New York City, but I can ask Eric [Adams.]
If I’m buying property in Newark, New Jersey, I can ask [Newark Mayor] Ras Baraka how, if there’s another property across the street I want to get my hands on, but its contaminated, maybe the city can help me with the purchase of that.”
2.
You may now be wondering why Ja Rule was being so candid with me.
Ja Rule had a side hustle, he co-owned an NFT company called Flipkick of New York, with two business partners, James Cropcho and Robert Testagrossa.
I spent two years of my life investigating Logan Paul and his con man business partner Eddie Ibanez, who launched CryptoZoo, a messy NFT rug pull, in June 2021. What you didn’t know, CryptoZoo wasn’t Ibanez’s first attempt at a celebrity-facing NFT con. Ibanez only went all in on CryptoZoo with Logan Paul a few weeks after failing to swindle Ja Rule and his team with an even more brazen plot.
Throughout March and April 2021, Flipkick of New York made headlines auctioning NFTs of Fyre Festival ephemera.
Days after their second auction went viral, an NFT of the infamous Fyre Festival cheese sandwich, Flipkick received a voicemail from an Ibanez associate who claimed he was interested in “auctioning the most expensive private residence in the United States” on behalf of Nile Niami, the ostentatious Los Angeles real estate developer known for the megamansions he sold to Floyd Mayweather and the Winklevoss Twins. Niami’s latest investment property, “The One Bel Air,” a 105,000 sqft luxury hilltop citadel, was once valued at $500MM but had already received a default notice and was on the brink of foreclosure.
Cropcho and Testagrossa took the call after they received a link to a private YouTube video showing Niami walking Ibanez through “The One.” The video description read “Nile Niami having a discussion with technology pioneer Eddie Ibanez about NFTs and saving his ass.”
Niami introduced the video, addressing the camera, “NFT get ready, because one person in the world is going to be able to buy the digital rights.” It was immediately obvious Niami had no idea what he was saying. Cropcho alerted his partners.
“I’ve seen these kinds of guys before,” Ja Rule later recalled. “If everybody talks like it’s too good to be true, then I don’t give a fuck, and my red flag goes up immediately. These con people are amazing, they make you believe. It’s easier to con a person than to tell a person they’ve been conned.”
For one thing, The One was under foreclosure, and Flipkick wasn’t about to mint several hundred million dollars of NFTs without clarification from Niami himself. Meanwhile, Ibanez offered no evidence he represented Niami’s estate beyond that video.
On April 26, 2021, after a tense back and forth, Ibanez finally signed a contract affirming he had the legal authority to represent Niami’s property, but it was obvious to Flipkick that Ibanez was out of his depth. When Cropcho asked Ibanez to identify the artist of a gold plated life sized giraffe on the lawn of The One, Ibanez floated the idea Flipkick credit him.
Unlike the many billionaires and celebrities Ibanez had conned before and since, Cropcho and Testagrossa did their due diligence. Less than two weeks after Ibanez returned the signed contract to Ja Rule’s team, he finalized his divorce from Fox News anchor Jackie Ibanez, then departed for Miami where he partied with Maria Buccellati, the CEO and co-owner of the fashion label Faith Connexion, and Faith Connexion publicist and Purple PR executive VP Andrew Lister.
Ibanez never bothered with Flipkick again. Three weeks later, Purple PR hosted its CryptoZoo launch party the night before Logan Paul’s fight with Floyd Mayweather; they invited me down to Miami to interview Ibanez and Paul, and the rest is history.
When I eventually discovered Ja Rule, Cropcho, and Testagrossa were the smartest guys in the room, I had to interview them, and when they found they out I thought they were the smartest guys in the room, they agreed. Cropcho took me to lunch at the Cornell Club and turned over every voicemail, email, text, and contract related to Ibanez’s failed Nile Niami fraud. Then finally, I met with Ja Rule for the first time, albeit briefly, at Rakim’s soundcheck.
The Rakim show was the latest installment of Ja Rule’s Vibes Concert Series, which had already broadcast performances by legendary rappers including Wu-Tang Clan’s Raekwon and Ghostface Killah, Big Daddy Kane, and Ja Rule himself, on his “live streaming entertainment marketplace” ICONN, a hip-hop Twitch where content creators can build fanbases while live-streaming for tips.
After four years of effort, ICONN had recently launched in the AppleTV app store for $4.99 a month, thanks in part to its Chief Technology Officer, MDavid Low, who served as Fyre’s creative director and got his fifteen minutes of fame when the Fyre festival documentaries were released; viewers demanded to know how to pronounce his first name.
The Rakim show was their biggest production to date. I watched as Ja Rule signed off on everything from placement of the DJ booth and the showgirls who flanked Rakim’s throne, to which premium tequila to offer VIP guests like Lil Cease and Eric Adams.
“I’m a Clase Azul guy, but it’s also very expensive, so I may have to cut corners there a little, but when you start something, and it’s your baby and it’s new, you do whatever it takes,” Ja Rule told me. “I walked six blocks to get bottles of champagne for the VIP; there’s no job too small for me.”
3.
ICONN and Vibes were separate business ventures from Flipkick, but questions about either of them always led back to the Fyre Festival. The ICONN app was eerily similar to the Fyre app, which the Fyre Festival was conceived to promote, while Flipkick was mostly auctioning Fyre swag to cut through the noise of a crowded NFT marketplace.
ICONN was Ja Rule’s long game for redemption following the failure of Billy McFarland’s Fyre Festival in April 2017. The aborted music festival saw deep-pocketed concertgoers ridiculed on social media while they suffered standed on a windblown and rain-battered construction site adjacent to a Sandals resort on the Bahamian island of Great Exuma. McFarland over-promised and under-delivered on everything from luxury accommodations to headliners including by Pusha T and Blank 182, which for months prior had been promoted by models including Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner, an island population of feral pigs, and Ja Rule himself.
McFarland was sentenced to federal prison for actions he took to fund the Fyre festival, while Ja Rule was never charged, nor implicated in any civil suits. However, every time Ja Rule attempted to pursue a new project, the scandal is reignited. It happened in 2019, when Fyre documentaries appeared on Netflix and Hulu, then again in September last year when McFarland was released from a Brooklyn boarding house.
McFarland had been making the rounds offering to reimburse victims by fighting Ja Rule. In a statement, McFarland wrote to me, “I’m not going to comment on any past relationships. All I can say is that I’m willing to settle our differences in the ring and give 100% of the proceeds to people owed.”
By that standard, Ja Rule should again have looked like one of the more serious guys in the room when seeking investment for projects like ICONN, even with the complicated reputation that preceded him.
When he finally sat down with me to dinner at Torrisi, parting the primetime scene two hours late for our reservation in a khaki Helmut Lang coverall that resembled a prison jumpsuit, he effortlessly charmed the reading glasses from our server’s face so he could scan the menu. But eyeglasses aren’t an A-round, and Ja Rule believed it was race not reputation that was holding him back.
Our dinner was the same night Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas for his role in an alleged multi billion-dollar fraud scheme involving his crypto exchange, FTX, and Ja Rule noted the similarity between Bankman-Fried and McFarland.
“I hate to say it, but I didn’t see Billy [McFarland] coming, and there was a gang of smart people fucking with him and they didn’t see it either, and it’s a blow to their ego and pride. Do you know how people feel about getting scammed by SBF? This young kid with this crazy fucking hair?” Ja Rule wished more victims would feel comfortable saying so when they’ve been conned, but at the same time he also couldn’t help being envious of SBF’s access.
“I’d never be able to get away with that shit. And I hate that it has to be a black-white thing but it fucking is, it is what it is, man. I know for a fact if I was a white guy with ICONN, I’d have 40-50 million dollars right now to run my company for the next five years, but it’s cool, sometimes you just gotta build it and prove people wrong, and if I’m wrong along the way so be it.”
Ja Rule had no desire to return to prison, and while he knew how hard it was to make an honest dollar in crypto, he was still determined to try. That sentiment led to Ja Rule and Testagrossa partnering on Flipkick.
4.
My interviews with Cropcho had already prepped me on everything I wanted to ask about Ibanez, but now that I was hours away from interviewing Ja Rule, I suddenly feared I knew nothing about Testagrossa. I didn’t want to arrive unprepared. I had some time to kill, enough for a quick Google search, but nothing turned up. After another few minutes, I decided if I was sure of anything, I was sure Testagrossa had terrible SEO. Every story I read was about some violent psycho, not the CEO of an NFT company.
Then it all made sense. The timing. Testagrossa and Ja Rule met in prison.
In October 2006, Testagrossa, then 25, was arrested and charged with robbery, unlawful imprisonment, assault, disfigurement, kidnapping, and criminal impersonation.
At this point I was thinking what you’re probably thinking right now. This would make a great episode of Law & Order. And it did. Testagrossa’s crime was “ripped from the headlines” and served as the jumping off point for “Branded” a 2010 episode of Law & Order SVU.
Again from the New York Post:
Testagrossa pleaded guilty to assault in 2008, and served five years in prison at Midstate Correctional Facility, in Marcy, NY. Ja Rule joined him there in 2010, following his own sentencing for gun possession, but as Ja Rule understood it, Testagrossa was the maligned hero of his story.
“The only part I heard is his girlfriend got raped, they caught the guy, they fucking beat him up, tortured him a little bit, and he got busted,” Ja Rule said. He praised Testagrossa for doing the honorable thing, both in avenging his girlfriend’s false claim of rape, then serving his sentence like a man. Ja Rule’s publicist, rather than stop the interview, readily agreed, saying if she had a boyfriend she’d want him to commit a similarly heinous act, before high-fiving Ja Rule across the table.
Because Ja Rule was a celebrity, and Testagrossa was the son of two prosecutors, they both served their time in protective custody away from the prison’s general population.
“I met some amazing people in prison,” Ja Rule told me. He listed former New York State comptroller Alan Hevesi – “Alan was my man, we played basketball together;” former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski; and the disgraced art dealer Lawrence Salander. Still, Ja Rule believed Testagrossa was the smartest man in the locked room.
“It’s not hard to figure who's smart, and in [protective custody] you get a play by play of who this guy and that guy is,” Ja Rule explained, “and Tess was smart. He would sit in the day room reading the dictionary; we’d watch Jeopardy and he’d know all the answers.”
They talked about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies on the inside, planning for the future while resisting any bad behavior that could extend their time behind bars.
“They sent me to facilities where I could get in trouble, and possibly do more time,” Ja Rule said, recalling the demoralizing impact incarceration had on him. “I guarantee you Billy [McFarland] didn’t do that kind of time.”
McFarland was initially sentenced to six years in federal prison for wire fraud, and in October 2018, he was sent to a minimum security correctional facility in Otisville, NY. In September 2019, he was caught in possession of an illegal recording device while writing his memoir behind bars, and he was subsequently transferred to a low security facility in Elkton, Ohio.
Testagrossa shared a similar take on his time at Midstate. “They try to dehumanize you; they treat you like a piece of shit, so in those circumstances, under that duress, a camaraderie is formed. I imagine it’s similar to what men in combat feel. You’re all in the shit together and it creates a bond.”
His bond with Ja Rule was one of entrepreneurial spirit. “Prison is an incubator for entrepreneurship, believe it or not. You have nothing but time, and you want to build a life again, and being a felon, you’re resumé doesn’t matter. Entrepreneurship is the only way forward for you, and everybody on the inside knows that.”
They wrote a business plan for a project Ja Rule conceived, called Votus, which would have provided users with an “easily digestible understanding of candidate positions.” Votus was partly inspired by Ja Rule’s experience learning about New York’s gun laws only after he was on trial for possessing an illegal firearm. “I was shell shocked to find out the laws were that hard in the courtroom, if I had known that earlier, I wouldn’t have voted for that guy.”
“But try building a web app in prison,” Testagrossa lamented. “There’s only so much you can put on paper.”
While Testagrossa was released before Ja Rule, he lacked the skills to take on the project himself, but the pair remained in touch. When Ja Rule was transferred to federal prison for failure to pay income taxes, he added Testagrossa to his call list, and once he was released, they grew their friendship over the next eight years before finally launching Flipkick.
5.
Ja Rule was buying NFTs for months before he fully understood their function.
He was a longtime sports card collector, and during Covid he pivoted to amassing NBA Top Shot NFTs. One day, a friend pointed out to him that these digital trading cards, unique video highlights licensed by the NBA and bought and sold on the blockchain, were in fact NFTs.
When Ja Rule finally went all in on NFTs, he picked a hell of a week to do it.
On March 11, 2021, Robert Testagrossa’s father, the notorious Nassau Country prosecutor Charles Testagrossa, resigned in disgrace.
Per the Queens Daily Eagle, a report by the Queens DA’s new Conviction Integrity Unit exposed how Testagrossa’s office withheld evidence that led to three innocent men spending nearly 25 years in prison, wrongfully convicted for the December 1996 murder of a police officer. (One of the victims, George Bell, received a $17.5MM settlement from the city just last month.)
Five days later, Flipkick went live. No publications covering its launch, Axios, The Art Newspaper, Business Insider, Forbes, bothered to elaborate on the team behind the project – Ja Rule grabbed all the headlines – but in the end it didn’t matter. Flipkick failed all on its own.
On March 16, 2021, Flipkick announced it was auctioning its first NFT, a 48” x 60” oil painting of the Fyre Media logo by the artist Tripp Derrick Barnes, which Ja originally commissioned for Fyre’s New York office, then later stored in his home.
Flipkick sold Barnes’ Fyre painting at auction for $122,000.
Despite their initial success, Cropcho lamented how those who reached out to him failed to understand Flipkick was premised in promoting artist's rights, prioritizing authenticity, and accountability in ownership.
“We were getting maybe two dozen cold calls a week,” Cropcho said, recalling how inquires came from people like Ibanez, those thinking they could offload unwanted merchandise by pairing them with NFTs, and “one guy who thought if someone will pay $60MM for a Beeple, then they would surely want a more famous painting by a museum-caliber artist in NFT form.”
Flipkick’s second major sale was the viral tweet of a cheese sandwich by Trevor DeHaas, a photographer who attended the Fyre Festival. The auction was covered on Good Morning America, where DeHaas explained how he was inspired to sell his photo as an NFT after Twitter founder Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet for over $2MM.
It wasn’t an easy sell.
Ja Rule didn’t want Flipkick to become a clearinghouse for Fyre memorabilia and during our dinner he continued to challenge the authenticity of the “false fucking cheese sandwich picture,” which TMZ partially debunked as a Fyre Festival “staff meal” not specifically served to stranded guests.
However, Ja came around when DeHaas disclosed he was suffering from end-stage renal disease and only had 10% kidney functionality. Prior to the sale, a November 2020 GoFundMe campaign raised less than $4000 for DeHaas’s continued medical treatment.
“I immediately told [DeHaas] to get the fuck out of here, but the guy comes back and tells Tess, “I’m only coming to you guys because you sold Ja’s painting and I need money,” so I bought the fucking photo so he can get a new kidney. I saved that man’s life–the man who tried to fucking kill me. I saved his life.”
In fact, Flipkick bought DeHaas’ photo, for approximately $30,000, according to Testagrossa, and DeHaas received a new kidney earlier this year.
The cheese sandwich NFT is now one of Flipkick’s key assets, though it hasn’t raked in royalties like they hoped. When The New York Times profiled McFarland a year later, they devoted a paragraph to the photo. But instead of licensing the image, they linked out to a 2017 Business Insider story that credited the picture to a Reddit thread.
Flipkick got nothing. Since then, the company has wound down operations. Ja Rule and Testagrossa had seen each other at their lowest during their incarceration, and they knew there were lines neither man would cross again to get rich quick.
Instead they took their lumps trying to make an honest dollar in a corrupt industry.
“I got into NFTs because I thought it was a cool technology, then the whole industry became this sleazy get-rich-quick garbage and it drove me out,” Testagrossa texted me. “It gets ruined by the people it attracts.”
+++
I’ve decided to keep my Substack free to get these stories out of my head and into the world. If you like what you read, and want to support my reporting, you can Venmo @Adam-Robb-1 whatever you think it’s worth.