The Give-Back Scam

Humanitarian.   That’s what we call someone who gives selflessly to needy persons in order to promote human welfare.  Those who assist in order to extract some personal advantage and those who support their own family or friends are not humanitarians, of course. In fact, there is an implicit belief that the less the giver has to gain and the more remote the recipient is from the giver, whether geographically, ethnically, or socially, the more noble is the giving. 

Many inner-city-oriented “give back” guys are quintessential scam-artists—the antitheses of humanitarians—pretending to advocate for the poor.  These scammers care for no one but themselves.  Most often, the give-backer is a high-profile businessman, performer, or athlete, trying to escape social censure or legal indictment, intent on rehabilitating his own tarnished image, or sometimes the give-backer merely is after self-aggrandizement, cold, hard cash, or both.

Stephen Fried, Philadelphia Magazine June 2012, wrote about one such scammer, Tyrone L. Gilliams, Jr., and it is from that article that I take the facts cited in this blog.

According to Fried, Gilliams has claimed to be a mogul and philanthropist, literally comparing himself to Andrew Carnegie, George Steinbrenner, and Walter Annenberg.  (Perhaps he took a cue from Barack Hussein Obama whose propaganda includes references to him as a 21^st Century Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, to name a few.)  The piece explains that Tyrone had been a Penn basketball player, rap show promoter, would-be minister, and investment wheeler-dealer.

The investment wheeler-dealer role is the one that has caused Gilliams grief because on February 29, 2012 he was arrested by the FBI for wire fraud involving a five million dollar scam that included deception of an authentic philanthropist.  Among other ways, Gilliams allegedly used the money for “paying off debts from previous deals gone bad; more than $25,000 for each of his kids’ Shipley School tuitions; charging meals and hotel rooms and airfares and limo services; taking $50,000 cash advances pretty much every week; and eventually paying for all the Joy to the World Fest events, a tab of more than $1 million. He even paid a Chester video production company to follow him around for an online reality show about his life.”

World Fest, said to be like a “hip-hop Academy Ball,” was the “give back” scam that Gilliams sponsored and for which he enlisted a host of high-profile black big-shots.  Rap superstar Sean “Diddy” Combs headlined the event, but don’t think that he did it from the goodness of his heart.  Rather, he pocketed at least $100,000 to participate in helping the “poor folk” who supposedly were to benefit from the event.  And, like any good rapper, Diddy interjected a racial tint saying, “This is my nigger, he’s one of my brothers, give him some applause y’all, Tyrone Gilliams, he’s my man Tyrone.”

The Tyrone L. Gilliams, Jr. story, then, has all that we have come to expect from bimps: a narcissistically-absorbed protagonist who uses race to lift himself up by treading on the very same inner-city black people that he pretends to love, illegal activity, and, of course, hyper-masculine swagger, or, as they say in the hood, “swagga”  And, oh, I forgot one last quote about Tyrone from one of his supposed friends:  “He got a gun and a license so he could carry it and look like a ‘big dog.’”  Just as all true humanitarians do!