Fat Joe is a superfan, both of the New York Knicks and their controversial owner, Jim Dolan. The rapper celebrated with Dolan in Cleveland when the team clinched its first finals appearance in decades. When the Knicks organization came under intense scrutiny over aggressive security measures for game 3 of the NBA finals, Fat Joe stuck up for the boss.
“Shoutout to Mr. Dolan, greatest team owner in the game,” he told reporters at the time. “They villainize Mr. Dolan, like, almost like a Bruce Wayne, like a Batman movie and this is Gotham City … This man takes care of us.”
Within Dolan’s organization, however, some have a different view of Fat Joe. An internal Madison Square Garden database of VIPs labels Joe a “medium risk,” one of roughly 400 celebrities given a risk score. Many of those celebs are courtside fixtures at Knicks games: Edie Falco, Mark Ronson, John Turturro, and Tracy Morgan, to name a few. That makes the 400-ish entries unusual. The vast majority of the 39,539 entries in the so-called “talent” database—which tracks boldfaced names in business, technology, politics, media, and sports, along with their guests—are not marked with a risk score at all.
The database is part of a much larger trove of documents published last month by ShinyHunters, a criminal hacker collective. 404 Media was the first to report on the hack and the release of the VIP roll. But the extent to which Madison Square Garden labeled many of the Knicks’ most visible, loyal fans with a risk score hasn’t been previously revealed, nor has the rationale MSG used to do so.
The database doesn’t provide an explicit explanation for Fat Joe’s “medium risk” designation. But as WIRED has previously documented, MSG security keeps close tabs on what is said online about Dolan and the Garden’s management. Some fans have been targeted by MSG for criticizing the mogul; MSG security even asked local law enforcement to visit a teenager in Colorado after one tweet. “They scared the crap 💩 out of some 14 year old kid in Colorado,” an MSG security staffer texted in a message reviewed by WIRED.
A source with knowledge of the matter tells WIRED that Garden security has performed social media sweeps for prominent people looking for complimentary tickets to games. If you’re a celebrity and you’re marked with a risk score—even as a low risk—it means “you’ve done something in the publicity world, the social media world, that has caught the attention of the wrong people,” the source continues. The talent database, which has entries dating back to December 2020 and includes updates as recent as early June of this year, makes repeated reference to “SM concerns.” Physical security threats—potential harms to people or property—are documented in a separate database, the source says. (The source adds that these sorts of databases are common at arenas.)
Garden security cast a wide net in its search for anything remotely negative that someone posts online, the source says. “It doesn’t have to be that serious. You could just be critical of the team or the place itself,” the source notes. “You could post that you had a hard time getting in and you really didn’t like the way you were treated at one of the gates. Which is really nothing, right?”
According to the source, Fat Joe was flagged because of his connection to another legend of New York City rap, Jadakiss, who had been critical of Dolan in the past. (“It seems like he’s always more happier when the team sucks,” Jadakiss said in 2020.) Jadakiss is designated as a “medium risk.” The other members of his hip-hop trio, the Lox, are also in the database but don’t have a risk score.