9 January 18-24, 2024 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | Contents | Letters | news | night+Day | CuLture | Cafe | MusiC | legitimate dealmaker in the glittery groves of show biz. “The easiest scam to pull off,” he explained to New Times’ Terrence McCoy in 2013, “is to tell someone something they already wanted to believe.” Yet he also had a gift for conning himself. Several of his splashier impersonations seemed to be more about craving the spotlight than getting away with a score. In many cases, the law quickly caught up with Sabatino. But landing back behind bars did little to deter him. In 1998, unhappy with prison conditions in Great Britain, where he had been arrested for multiple unpaid hotel bills, he made a series of phone calls to the FBI and the Secret Service, threatening to kill Pres- ident Bill Clinton and blow up a courthouse. As he hoped, the threats got him extra- dited. They also got him more charges, send- ing him to federal prison for four years. In 2002, operating out of a jail cell in New York, Sabatino made several phone calls to Nextel Communications (a wireless company later absorbed by Sprint), claiming to be a Sony Pictures mogul in need of cell phones for a humongous flick. He managed to per- suade Nextel to ship more than a thousand phones to his “office,” a FedEx outlet, ready for pickup by Jimmy’s friends, who resold them on the street. Prosecutors estimated that the scam bilked Nextel out of $3 million in equipment and service charges. Sabatino reportedly saw little of the gravy from that grift, but that didn’t deter the judge from handing him another 11 years. While serving that sentence, he filed a lawsuit against rapper Sean Combs (stage names Puff Daddy, Diddy, etc.), asserting that he’d been cheated out of millions owed him for record- ing tracks of Combs’s protégé, the Notorious B.I.G., way back in 1994. To shore up his claims, Sabatino produced what appeared to be pages from hush-hush FBI files. The docu- ments mention various intrigues surrounding Tupac Shakur prior to his 1996 murder and refer to Sabatino as a mobbed-up shakedown artist, prominent in “the Hip Hop world.” The documents caused a sensation. The Los Angeles Times made extensive use of the materials in its investigative reporting on Shakur’s murder. But in 2008 the documents were exposed on the Smoking Gun website as a complete fraud. They were written on a typewriter, a tool the FBI had abandoned years earlier, and contained spelling errors consistent with those found in Sabatino’s typewritten jailhouse pleadings. The website slammed Sabatino as “a wildly impulsive, overweight white kid from Florida whose own father once described him in a letter to a federal judge as ‘a disturbed young man who needed attention like a drug.’” Sabatino denied he was the author of the hoax, but his lawsuit and his claims of being a hip-hop impresario soon went up in puffs of smoke. Still, he had managed to punk one of the nation’s most powerful newspapers. And his most audacious swindle was still to come. Shortly after his arrival at a federal prison in Miami in 2014, Sabatino wheedled a burner cell phone from a pliable corrections officer. He created fake email addresses and began reaching out to jewelry and luxury goods stores in South Florida. He introduced himself as a Sony or Roc Nation executive, or a top honcho at Creative Artists Agency or Univer- sal Music, and his emails had the logos to prove it. He was looking for certain goods — designer handbags, high-end apparel, shoes, and bling — that could be “loaned” and fea- tured in music videos starring performers he represented, including Beyoncé, Jennifer Lo- pez, Justin Timberlake, and Jessica Biel. Eager luxury store owners and brand reps delivered the items to Sabatino confederates on the out- side, who took the goods to pawn shops and funneled some of the proceeds back to Sabati- no’s prison commissary account. Although a mid-2015 search turned up the contraband phone in Sabatino’s cell, the op- eration continued for another two years, dur- ing which Sabatino corrupted more guards, obtained more burner phones, and plotted with co-conspirators about how to intimidate or permanently silence associates who might testify against them. On April 5, 2017, officers entered Sabatino’s cell for a surprise search and found him on the phone with one of his minions, in the process of negotiating an $800,000 sale of stolen jewelry. They seized the phone and three others. The fraudulently obtained goods and ser- vices were valued at more than $10 million. Sa- batino pleaded guilty to a single racketeering count and got 20 years. At his sentencing hear- ing, he readily agreed to the severe communi- cation restrictions that were being imposed as part of his deal, conditions he requested. But that didn’t mean he was feeling remorseful. “I don’t apologize to nobody,” Sabatino told U.S. Senior District Judge Joan Lenard. “As far as the government is concerned, they allowed this case to happen.... They should be embarrassed.” Supermax, Meet the U.S. Constitution A case could be made that there are many prisoners in solitary housing at ADX whose conditions of confinement are tougher, on a daily basis, than those facing Jimmy Sabatino. Muslim prisoners, who make up the majority of the SAMs cases in H Unit, have com- plained repeatedly of being unable to conduct group prayer, of other interference with reli- gious rituals, of forced feedings to break hun- ger strikes, and of lack of mental health resources. According to court documents, the position of contract imam, a non-BOP em- ployee who is supposed to minister to the Muslim population, has been vacant at ADX for at least seven years. One of the longest-running and most re- vealing lawsuits filed by an ADX prisoner was brought in 2020 by Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, the former imam of London’s Finsbury Park mosque, which was shut down by UK author- ities in 2003 because of its ties to jihadists. Charged with aiding in terrorist plots, Mo- stafa fought extradition to the United States for more than eight years. Extradition was fi- nally granted after U.S. officials assured the European Court of Human Rights that he would not be sent to ADX. In fact, his medical conditions and physical disabilities were so severe — Mostafa is missing both arms from the forearm down and is nearly blind, the re- sult of a chemical explosion in 1993 — that the European court concluded, “there was no real risk of his spending anything more than a short period of time at ADX.” But after he was convicted in New York in 2014 and sentenced to life in prison, Mostafa was sent to H Unit in ADX, where he’s been housed ever since, in a cell that offers few concessions to his disabilities. His claims touch on a wide range of constitutional is- sues, from religious freedom and disability rights to access to medical care and basic hy- giene materials, and whether he can have phone conversations with his grandchildren. Compared to Mostafa’s raft of grievances, Sabatino’s return to court last year, seeking a change in his communication restrictions, seems like a modest request. All he was ask- ing was that one name be added to his list of approved contacts, that of his stepmother’s fi- ancé, so he would have someone to contact about his stepmother’s condition while she was hospitalized. However, the request had confounding implications for SAMs protocol. Does the burden of proof fall on the govern- ment to establish that a prisoner’s requested social contact poses a security threat, or can it ban the prisoner from talking to anybody in the world until the prisoner somehow proves there is no threat? “The way the statute reads, they have to prove probable cause,” says Israel Encinosa, Sabatino’s attorney. “That is the argument we were making. All we were asking is that they be reasonable.” Ultimately, Encinosa says, his client de- cided to drop the issue for now, without pre- cluding other court actions in the future. Although he can’t share any details of his own communications with Sabatino because of the SAMs restrictions, Encinosa says he has had “good conversations” with him. “I don’t think too many people could do well under these conditions,” he says. “I don’t know which is worse — to be alone or to be with other inmates. I don’t know which I would choose in Jimmy’s situation.” If he had his druthers, Sabatino knows what he would choose. A prosecutor’s sug- gestion that Sabatino actually preferred “hav- ing a cell all to myself” prompted an outraged response in one of the inmate’s long-winded letters to Judge Lenard. “Think about it a minute,” Sabatino wrote. “I am in the harshest prison in the country. I have no contact (physical contact) with any- one. I hardly ever leave my cell, and when I do, I am in chains, black box over my cuffs, shackles, and surrounded by three officers with black clubs. He thinks that is a luxury? Tell him to try it. He wouldn’t last a week.” He went on to boast that, before his move to the Suites, he lived “like a king” in prison, surrounded by admiring inmates who were happy to clean his cell, do his laundry, and cook for him. “I am actually quite well-known throughout the BOP. You can put me in any penitentiary in the country and there will be people I know personally, and even more who know of me.... All of them know that I can change their lives. That I can make them more money than they ever dreamed of.” Being the most isolated prisoner in the federal system may add an aura of menace to the legend of Jimmy Sabatino; at the same time, it makes it more difficult for him to pro- mote his brand. A docuseries about his ex- ploits is said to be in development by fellow Miamian Billy Corben, director of the Co- caine Cowboys franchise. Corben’s produc- tion company did not respond to a request for comment, but gaining access to Sabatino in his current digs would be no mean feat. Not only is he prohibited from speaking to the media because of his SAMs status, but it ap- pears that prison officials haven’t granted any journalist a face-to-face interview with any inmate at ADX since 9/11, aside from a well- orchestrated tour or two. (An ADX spokes- person could not provide any specific instance of media access to individual in- mates over the past 20 years but insisted that “all interview requests are reviewed for con- sideration on a case-by-case basis.”) For a man with Sabatino’s can-do attitude, such challenges are meant to be overcome. Or, as he put it in a letter to the judge, “The only reason I am OK is because 1) my father raised a man! I am strong and will [not] be broken, 2) I have Allah in my heart, and 3) I live for the day that I can really achieve my goals.” [email protected] “I didn’t pay them girls nothing!” Jimmy Sabatino told New Times’ Terrence McCoy in 2013, insisting he didn’t use escorts. New Times file photo
