One Label Under Blackmail: PART 1
Diddy And The Epstein Network
In Part I of this series on the overlap between the worlds of Sean “Diddy” Combs and Jeffrey Epstein, we examine Combs’ early years, his mentors and the industry figures who ensured their, as well as Combs’ own, commercial success. Ties to organized crime and intelligence are readily apparent and point toward a truly sinister reason behind this network’s patronage of Combs and his close associates, like Andre Harrell and Russell Simmons.
Beginning in late 2023, a series of startling and unsettling allegations against Sean Combs –– a record executive and rapper known over the years by stage names like “Puff Daddy,” “P. Diddy” and presently “Diddy” –– have emerged. As the allegations and lawsuits facing Combs have snowballed, so, too, has public interest in the case. The sheer amount of accusations suggests that Combs, in addition to being very sexually and physically violent, filmed many assault encounters and orgies that occurred at his now notorious “Freak Off” parties, sometimes with hidden or security cameras. He also now stands accused of “operating an empire of sexual crimes,” with federal agents having alleged that several of Combs’ victims were of “barely legal” or “barely illegal” age at the time of their abuse. Combs’ apparent documentation of these events strongly suggests that he was interested in keeping these records for more than his perverse enjoyment, as either a form of a protection or as a means to control those who appeared in these films, i.e. blackmail.
As a result, speculation has grown about who is allegedly on the “list” of people filmed by Combs in this way, prompting comparisons to the alleged “list” of sex trafficker, pedophile and intelligence asset Jeffrey Epstein. The comparisons between Epstein and Combs have only grown, with even the homeland security agents who raided Combs’ Miami home suggesting that Combs was “as bad as Epstein.”
However, as has long been a theme of Unlimited Hangout’s Epstein-related reporting, including the book One Nation Under Blackmail, the Jeffrey Epstein case has been poorly explored by the federal government, mainstream media outlets, and even many independent media outlets. A deeper examination of the Epstein case makes it clear that Epstein was not the sole mastermind or sole beneficiary of the sex trafficking and blackmail operation in which he engaged. Instead, Epstein served as an operator for a larger, monied network of oligarchs with extensive organized crime connections in addition to significant affiliations with intelligence agencies. He was also more than a sex trafficker for this group, having aided this network extensively in arms trafficking, money laundering and other crimes (many financial) that fall outside of the focus on his sex-related offenses.
It should come as no surprise upon closer examination of Sean Combs that, like Epstein, he was operating on behalf of a larger network that he did not ultimately control. Instead, it arguably controlled him. As this three-part series from Unlimited Hangout will endeavor to show, Combs was acting on behalf of an oligarch network that directly overlaps with that of Epstein. However, Combs used to influence a different industry and a different community for the benefit of these intelligence and organized crime-connected oligarchs.
In Part I of this series, we will examine the often overlooked early years of Combs and his entrance into the music industry. While Combs’ own rise (from birth to the founding of Bad Boy Records in 1993) is certainly chronicled, a major focus of this piece is on the mentors and figures who facilitated his rise into the upper echelons of hip hop celebrity, especially Andre Harrell and Clive Davis, as well as other figures who had a significant influence on Combs’ early career into the music industry, like Russell Simmons. Not only did these figures bring Combs into the music industry, they also stand accused of initiating Combs into the types of activities he is now in prison for, awaiting trial.
Also explored in this piece are the corporations behind the success of Combs’ mentors and later Combs himself, namely the Music Corporation of America (MCA) and Arista Records. When taken together with other claims from the period, namely about efforts to manipulate hip hop for the benefit of the private prison industry in the early to mid-1990s, it appears that this network’s interest in Combs, as well as his mentors, was part of something much larger that sought to target not just the hip hop industry itself, but the African-American community at large.
Subsequent installments of this series will examine Combs’ activities –– in music, in retail and beyond –– and how the same network detailed in Part I also enabled those activities, which notably parallel Combs’ deeper descent into acts of sexual violence and abuse. Another installment will examine how one close associate of Combs also connects very directly with the sex trafficking activities of Jeffrey Epstein, indicating that the overlap between the two cases is more significant than previous reporting and the current cases against Combs have suggested.
Sean Combs was born in Harlem, NY on November 4, 1969 to a schoolteacher and ex-model named Janice Combs (née Smalls) and Melvin Earl Combs, an Air Force serviceman and sometimes associate of American Gangster heroin kingpin Frank Lucas. Melvin Combs helped make ends meet by running a number of legal and less-than-legal operations; including a cab and limousine chauffeuring company, multiple bars Combs owned, and a portion of Harlem drug traffic.i A toddler-aged Combs tagged along with Melvin on visits to Lucas’ home, even playing with his daughter. According to an interview prior to his death, the aged gangster alleged that Combs didn’t share his toys.
A Bad Boy from Birth
“I learned early in life that there’s only two ways out of that [lifestyle]: dead or in jail,” explained Combs in 2013, speaking of his father’s lifestyle. “It made me work even harder… I have his hustler’s mentality.” According to contemporaries, Melvin was an immaculate dresser. While less flashy than Lucas, who once attracted the attention of the feds by sitting ringside at a Muhammad Ali –Joe Frazier bout in a $100,000 fur coat, Melvin still pulled out enough stops to be granted the street nickname “Pretty Melvin.”
When Sean Combs was 3 years old, Melvin Combs was gunned down while sitting in a loitering car near Central Park West. Per Susan Traugh, Melvin was shot in the head, likely at point blank range considering he was seated in his Mercedes-Benz—this manner of a hit is consistent with an enforcer killing.ii According to an interview conducted by author Zack O’Malley-Greenburg, someone in Melvin Combs’ circle believed he was about to inform on a sensitive business deal to law enforcement and that this is what precipitated his murder.iii From this, former associates and law enforcement have speculated that Melvin Combs was a federal informant. If allegations from incarcerated contemporaneous label heads like Suge Knight and former bodyguards are to believed, Sean Combs may have done the same, allegedly informing for the FBI over the course of his career.
A recent article from journalist Legs McNeil lays out the Lucas-Combs criminal enterprise in greater detail than previously reported. It also shows that Melvin Combs, in addition to his dealings with Lucas, had an arguably deeper affiliation with the Gambino crime family near the end of his life. The Gambinos may have even put out his hit. McNeil writes:
Melvin Combs, a small-time hustler, was introduced to selling heroin when Lucas fronted him several kilos from his Golden Triangle connection. He joined the crew of Willie Abraham, the 42-year-old owner of the Harlem Gold Lounge and a convicted heroin dealer who’d already spent five years in jail. Unlike Lucas, Abraham was getting his heroin from the Mafia—specifically, the Gambino crime family.
In 1971, Melvin was arrested for possession of heroin and $45,000 in cash. When Abraham’s heroin‐cutting mill was raided later that year, and Abraham was charged with participating in an extensive conspiracy to distribute $5 million a year in heroin at the wholesale level in Harlem, the Bronx, and Westchester County, Melvin was suspected by Alphonse “Funzi” Sisca, head of the Gambinos’ New Jersey crew, of being a rat.
McNeil also noted that “The New York Times reported that the prosecutor in the Abraham case told the judge that law enforcement believed Melvin’s murder ‘might ultimately be traced to members of the heroin‐distributing conspiracy.’” A newspaper clipping from the Saturday, February 24th, 1973 edition of the New York Daily News reveals that the Gambino-backed Willie Abraham crew had plenty or reason to suspect Combs of informing or at least blamed him for the arrests. The article notes that their relationship to Combs appears to have led directly to Abraham and his collaborators’ convictionson conspiracy charges, including Gambino man Alphonso Sisca of New Jersey:
Willie Abraham […] was found guilty in Manhattan Federal Court yesterday of being a kingpin narcotics wholesaler whose ring flooded the metropolitan area with more than 1,000 pounds of drugs in 2 1/2 years.
A task force of federal, state and local cops smashed the ring in a series of raids in December 1971 as the result of information obtained through the court approved wiretaps on another big time narcotics dealer’s phone. The dealer, Melvin Combs, 31, of 1853 Central Ave., Yonkers, was found shot to death in January 1972 on Manhattan’s West Side.
This evidence of a reported “wiretap” supports the claim that Abraham and his Gambino Family backers had Combs murdered because they blamed him for the arrests, regardless of whether Combs had actually been an informant. Throughout this article, connections to the Gambino crime family, as well as the Genovese crime family, are a recurring theme.
In the earliest years of his life, Sean Combs lived in Esplanade Gardens. His mother Janice recognized the performative, attention-hungry character her son possessed early on. This led to Combs’ first advertising gig at the age of 2, when he starred in a Baskin-Robbins TV commercial. Later, Combs modeled alongside The Wiz actress Stephanie Mills in Essence magazine. Following in his mother’s footsteps, these early modeling jobs presaged Combs’ lifelong relationship with the modeling industry, which in comparable fashion to Jeffrey Epstein, would eventually become the hunting grounds which Combs would scour for victims for his orgiastic sexual blackmail parties and pathological predation.iv
During his middle school years, Combs’ mother Janice relocated the family to Westchester, a middle-class suburb of Mount Vernon. Combs enrolled in the prestigious Mount Saint Michael Academy (MSMA), a Catholic school located in the Bronx, where his popularity eventually soared due to his exploits on the varsity football team, which won a division title during his time there. Combs’ hopes of receiving a scholarship to play D1 in college came crashing down when he broke his leg during his senior year. Yet, it was already too late for his confidence. He was reportedly given the nickname “Puffy” due to the way he strutted around with his chest puffed out.v
Throughout his middle and high school years, Combs also exhibited an entrepreneurial streak, reportedly selling T-shirts and ties at Macy’s while working multiple newspaper routes simultaneously. This early relationship with Macy’s prefigures both his later merchandising deals with the department store, which saw his fragrance line Sean John stock the shelves nationwide, and the recent lawsuit filed by a John Doe from Ohio who alleges that Combs “orally raped” him in the stockroom of the flagship Macy’s in New York in 2008. His accuser alleges that Macy’s even endeavored to cover up the crime in order to preserve their lucrative business relationship. While speculative, there is a possibility that this may have even been the same Macy’s that had employed Combs as a minor.
Notably, while Combs attended the all-boys Mount Saint Michael’s Academy, a major sex abuse case involving minor victims that led to the indictments of two faculty members was brewing at the institution. Marist Brother Timothy Brady –– the principal of MSMA for the entirety of Combs’ high school career — was arrested, charged, and sentenced to prison in 1988 for the abuse of three minor boys at the Catholic Academy in the Bronx over the course of 1987, Combs’ senior year. Following the ‘86/’87 academic year, Br. Brady was quietly removed from his position and shipped off to a Marist retreat in Arizona. Despite his crimes, Brady was reinstated as a hockey moderator at a separate Marist Brothers institution in the 1990s, once again providing him access to minors, and was listed on the Marist Brothers website until 2010. For some inexplicable reason, the court records pertaining to Brady’s conviction and incarceration remain sealed.
Accusations of sexual impropriety appear to have been a constant in MSMA’s history. In 2011, a former assistant principal received a sweetheart no-jail sentence after pleading guilty to possession of child porn on an electronic device at the school. From 2009 to 2012, a lawsuit filed by Brian Elliott sought monetary damages for the routine abuse and rape he alleges he suffered at the hands of an MSMA employee named Br. Galligan between the ages of 8 and 13 over the years of 1977 through 1983. The case wound its way through various Delaware, New York, and appellate courts. If factual, Elliott’s victimization by Galligan would have ended around the time of Combs’ freshman year in high school, meaning Elliott and Combs were close in age.
More recently, multiple cases seeking redress of child sexual abuse suffered at the hands of the MSMA faculty have been filed pursuant to New York’s Child Victims Act and the “look-back window” that has enabled past victims previously barred from filing complaints by the statute of limitations to now pursue them. These include a torts CVA complaint filed on behalf of a John Doe suing the Academy & the Marist Brothers of the Schools for having enabled his abuse at the hands of Principal Brady, who allegedly fondled the plaintiff in the nurse’s office in 1985 when Doe was 16. It appears this unnamed potential victim would have been in the same class as Combs. Quoting from the complaint, “Upon information and belief, at all relevant times, Defendants knew that priests and brothers of the Catholic Church and within the Marist Brothers, under their supervision and control, were grooming and sexually molesting children with whom the priests and brothers would have contact in their ministry and pastoral functions.”
Another lawsuit accusing the Marist Brothers of protecting a pedophile faculty member named Brother Lee advanced in the Supreme Court of Bronx County in 2023, surviving multiple motions for dismissal & summary judgment, seemingly indicating that multiple members of the school’s faculty –– including its principal –– were perpetrating sex crimes against minors during Combs’ high school career. And once again, the complainant alleges that he was abused by Brother Lee between the years of 1984 and 1985, when he was 15-16 years of age, conclusively indicating that he also would have been in Combs’ class of 1987. Taking all of this information into account, it appears that sexual abuse was endemic and widespread at MSMA during Combs’ time there. While impossible to confirm, there is a possibility that Combs was groomed or among the victims or else somehow connected to these aforementioned cases. Certainly, those type of experiences early in life are statistically associated with a person offending in similar ways later in life.
Also, as an aside, the FBI and DA’s office appear to have used the fraught climate at MSMA to initiate a COINTELPRO-inspired smear and lawfare campaign against Fr. Bernard Lynch, the first gay married priest and Fordham-trained Irish psychotherapist, who inspired a “witch-hunt” organized by the Vatican, archdiocese, and the FBI in retaliation to his outspoken advocacy for gay rights. More specifically, Lynch had founded Dignity NY, the first gay ministry in New York City in 1982, bringing him to the attention of Mayor Ed Koch, who drafted him onto his AIDS Task Force.vi
While attending Mount St. Michael’s, a teenage Combs began frequenting several New York nightclubs, which reportedly led to his first encounter with the music industry and famous musicians like Michael Jackson. As detailed in an interview, given in 1994 shortly after launching Bad Boy Records, Combs seemingly claimed he was cast as a background dancer in one of Jackson’s videos as a teen:
“Around the age of 16 or 17, I started dancing, going to the various clubs, and that was during the time when somebody—(if) a big artist like Diana Ross, Fine Young Cannibals, or even Michael Jackson had a video—the directors would come into the clubs and see all the kids that were dancing and pick various dancers to be in the videos. So I got picked to be in some of those videos, and, um, as I was dancing in videos and stuff like that, I would see the behind the scenes. I was about to go to college at Howard University and I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I saw the people behind the scenes, and I was like, ‘that’s maybe something I wanted to do’, so I started like asking questions and getting information on the music industry…”
Combs’ apparent encounter with Michael Jackson, while still only a teenage dancer on the NY club circuit, presages the significant relationship that later emerged between the music mogul and the King of Pop, which lasted for decades until Jackson’s premature and suspicious death. These interlocks between Combs and Jackson are worth mentioning for a few reasons: both artists have grappled with accusations of sexual abuse; both men have spent years surrounded by Zionist powerbrokers (within and outside of the music industry) who ingratiated themselves into their good graces or insinuated their way into their circles; and both Combs and Jackson cultivated close friendships with billionaire Epstein affiliate and Bill Clinton associate, Ron Burkle. For instance, Burkle, who will be a focus of Part II of this series for his ties to Combs, was close to Jackson and later purchased Jackson’s infamous Neverland Ranch estate for $22 million in 2020. Burkle is also reportedly the godfather to Combs’ children. While developing his ties to both Jackson and Combs, Burkle was a frequent flier on Jeffrey Epstein’s infamous private jet –– the “Lolita Express” –– particularly on flights including former President Bill Clinton, who he employed as an advisor to his firm, the Yucaipa Companies around the same period.
PART 2 COMING SOON…