The wizard of telling on people

Sometimes I write these posts, click publish, then realize I didn't get the facts quite right. Take for example my post the other day about weed being semi-legal in New York. As it turns out, possession of up to 25 grams (seven eighths of an ounce) of weed isn't legal in New York per se, it's just not as illegal as having more than that much weed on you. If you get caught with less than 25 grams on you (but not in plain view), you get a ticket. If you get caught with more than that, you go to jail.

My bad, if anyone spent the past few days walking around with damn near an ounce of weed in your picket, thinking that shit was legal.

In my post the other day about the new Ghostface Killah video, for "Stapleton Sex," I speculated that the S&M theme may have been the work of some perv white kid in the Def Jam, maybe one of the same douchebags who get paid more money than I'll ever make to full up my inbox with shit I couldn't use if I wanted to. Then it occurred to me, yesterday afternoon, while conducting some unrelated pr0n research, that "Caruso," credited as the director of "Stapleton Sex," is probably Mike Caruso, the FBI informant who used to manage Cappadonna.

Remember? The Wu had to cut ties with Cappadonna, when they started having a lot of legal problems all of a sudden. That's when he moved to Baltimore and became a cab driver. There was a big story about it in the Village Voice, back when I was in college. I remember I walked past Mike Caruso on the street behind Union Park in Chicago, when I was at the Intonation Music Festival in 2006, and the guy I was with (no homo) pointed out that it was him. I didn't realize Ghostface continued to work with Mike Caruso after it was revealed that he's a snitch. But apparently he did and he still does.

Even that time I saw Mike Caruso in the street was a while still before the Smoking Gun started putting rappers on blast for being cops, fake thugs, snitches and what have you. I had only been here for a few months. Extra long-time readers might remember the post I did on that festival. Not that it was anything particularly special. I would have done a post on the fact that Ghostface had a government informant on his payroll, just like T.I. did, but I didn't realize that was such a big deal. You guys know my connection to the street is tenuous at best. I spend a lot of time reading about this bullshit, because I didn't try hard enough in college, but I haven't actually experienced it first hand.

I wonder, if the Smoking Gun were to turn up the documents where Mike Caruso ratted out the guys he used to deal E pills with, would it rattle the hip-hop community as much as, say, the pictures of Rick Ross stuffed in that polyester cop outfit, or the transcript of Alfamega asking who he needed to tell on to get a few months knocked off of his umpteen year sentence? Or would it be different, since this is a white guy who works behind the scenes, conducting Ghostface's business affairs and directing skeevy uncut videos? Kanye West has mentioned in interviews, on a number of occasions, the team of gay men he travels with, who help him pick out his clothes and what have you, and people don't think he's a turd burglar.

Okay, bad example.

Probably the only way we'll know for certain if this is a big deal, on the level of the T.I. and Rick Ross controversies, is if the Smoking Gun turns up documents on this guy Caruso. Maybe they can get to the bottom of whether or not he was involved in them being investigated for gun trafficking back in the late '90s. Part of the (endless) fun of the Alfamega outing was the speculation that he might be responsible for T.I. being in the joint as we speak. This would be a case where an informant actually did cause legal problems for a rap group.

If the Smoking Gun does manage such a coup, I want credit, even though I haven't done anything other than ramble on about a pr0n video and some shit that happened to me a long time ago. I'm still reeling from having been informed by my people in the psychology department at Cornell that I could have scooped that guy from Slate who revealed that Roxanne Shante isn't really a doctor. I had my suspicions even before I read that story in the New York Daily News. All it would have taken was a few emails. I could have brought an end, once and for all, to these smug would-be media critics on Twitter, who love to point out that these rap magazines keep getting scooped by sites like Slate and the Smoking Gun.