Nuke Bizzle, the rapper who posted a brazen YouTube video singing about how he stole pandemic unemployment benefits, is finally free after nearly six years in prison.
Bizzle — real name Fontrell Baines — completed his sentence May 22, bringing to a close an iconic case that came to epitomize the excesses of the COVID era, when the government rushed to shovel money into needy Americans’ hands and ended up lining the pockets of gangs, cartels, foreign adversaries and everyday grifters.
Versions of the rap video, titled “EDD” after the name of California’s unemployment agency, are still available on YouTube.
They show Baines proclaiming, “I did my swagger with EDD, go to the bank with a stack of these,” as he fanned out a pile of envelopes containing correspondence with the state agency. The kicker, authorities said, was that the names on the envelopes were actual identity theft victims Baines had scammed. Actual evidence of fraud that Baines posted for everyone to see.
“He, to me, epitomized the insanity of what was going on. At that point, you had these states denying that there was a problem, suspending common sense tools,” said Haywood Talcove, CEO of government at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, who helped point federal investigators to Baines back in 2020.
“He was kind of like the phenom that started getting attention, particularly with some of the media outlets. He’s just being so blatant about it.”
Baines was a small, but very visible part of a large iceberg.
Authorities said he filed for more than a million dollars in bogus benefits and walked away with $704,760.
Official government statistics put the total of pandemic fraud at between $100 billion and $135 billion, and experts such as Mr. Talcove say the real rate could be double that.
At the heart of the fraud is what’s known as the pay-and-chase model of services. That means the government accepts applications based on an applicant’s say-so and quickly pays out money. Reports of fraud are met with ex post facto investigations, prosecutions and attempts to recapture the money.
And it’s proved to be apocalyptically abysmal.
As of March, Congress reported that just $6 billion of the unemployment money lost to fraud had been recovered.
“Organized transnational criminal groups were responsible for stealing billions, but so were small-time criminals like Nuke Bizzle, who figured out how easy it was to game the system,” said Linda Miller, president of the Program Integrity Alliance.
She recalled stories of suburban parents standing on the sidelines of kids’ soccer games and plotting to steal pandemic unemployment.
“The benefits were so generous and the controls so lax that it became an almost irresistible target to criminals of all stripes. What surprises me most, six years later, is how much this has receded from the memories of the public and government leaders,” said Ms. Miller, who got a look at the fraud from her former perch as executive director of the government’s Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.
She pointed to the new flurry of activity from the Trump administration, which just announced a new round of prosecutions in Minnesota for Medicaid fraud, but said it’s not enough. The government, she said, needs to get away from pay-and-chase.
“For all the talk about the ‘war on fraud,’ I’m not seeing sustained attention to or investment in moving away from the trust-based system we have built to deliver government benefits,” she said.
Baines’ own story is one of troubling failures.
As he told the judge in his federal case, his family life was a mess. He’d never had a birthday party or sat for a normal family dinner when growing up.
His mother was in prison for most of his young life and his father — well, what little he knew of the man suggested he, too, was in prison. He was raised in Memphis, Tennessee, by a cocaine-addicted aunt whose boyfriend, he told the court, beat him.
He was involved in gangs, earning a gunshot to his leg in 2008 and helping fuel an opiate addiction. He would flee out west, seeking an escape from his own criminal history. And, as he tells it, his rap career was starting to show signs of promise.
And then the pandemic struck, and nobody was looking for a rapper to do in-person appearances. He felt he had to find a new source of income, and Uncle Sam’s giveaway was too good to pass up.
His rap, EDD, goes hard with trenchant truths.
“You got to sell cocaine, I can just file a claim,” Baines’ partner on the rap, Fat Wizza, intoned.
Baines claimed in court that he was part of a larger scam network, and a relatively small part at that. He largely acted as a mail pickup for the real fraudsters, he said, and kept a few benefit cards as his share of the payment.
That they chose to scam California is not surprising. The state’s antiquated systems were notoriously easy to penetrate, and that fact is likely to become an issue in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s expected run for president in 2028.
On Sept. 22, 2020, Tucker Carlson featured Baines’s rap on his Fox News program.
A day later, Baines would be pulled over in a traffic stop in Las Vegas, where police found fraudulent benefit cards.
Less than a month later, he faced federal charges, including for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
He would plead guilty to both fraud and gun charges and was slapped with a 77-month sentence. His release on May 22 from the U.S. Penitentiary Atwater in California still leaves him facing several years of probation.
During sentencing in 2022, he promised the judge he’d learned his lesson.
“Everyday that I think about what I did I regret my actions and the impact my crime had on others. I truly wish that I could go back in time and make different choices, but I can’t, all I can do is focus on what I can and will do better moving forward with my life,” Baines wrote to the judge.
There were, however, reasons to be skeptical of his promises.
In 2017, while on supervision for a previous offense of being a felon in possession of a gun, his probation officer reported that he was hanging with felons, was spotted on social media smoking marijuana and holding guns, and despite being unemployed, was flush with cash. He also had repeated visitors at his halfway house who dropped off money, including an exotic dancer who went by the name “Black Barbie.”
He also tried to fool the mandatory drug testing, one time by pouring a condom filled with urine into the cup. He ended up spilling it and got caught. Nine days later, he was back, this time with a clear tube of urine concealed in his hand.
There is no indication in public records that Baines’ partner in the video, fellow rapper Fat Wizza, was ever charged.
That left a bad taste in the mouths of some of the commenters to the YouTube video.
An email sent to an account for Fat Wizza’s business went unreturned.
An email to Baines’ booking account for his rap business also went unanswered.
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