[ad_1]
The first time that MBox ever went speeding around Times Square in New York City, he didn’t know it was going to change his life.
He had slipped into the car of his friend, a driver known online as Squeeze or Squeeze.benz, who MBox says was 21 years old—and set off for a drive in the early hours of the morning. The duo was armed with nothing but a camera, Squeeze’s BMW, and the shared desire to “go viral.”
The video they ended up filming that night shows them running red lights, narrowly avoiding scrapes with other cars, doing doughnuts at intersections, and even driving backward up a one-way street, all at high speeds. After being posted to YouTube last year, the footage was viewed more than 11 million times. It seemed their brand was on the rise—at least until the New York Police Department got involved.
On May 21, the department’s deputy commissioner of operations, Kaz Daughtry, proudly posted on X that the NYPD had “Squeeze.benz” in custody. Authorities cited his reckless driving, including outracing police. But when the NYPD charged Antonio Ginestri, 19 at the time and linked to the social media account in a New York Post report, the offense was third-degree assault, which law enforcement said stemmed from an unrelated incident several months prior. “One of the most prolific street racers in NYC can no longer treat the Big Apple like the Indy 500,” Daughtry claimed.
There’s just one problem: MBox swears that the NYPD implicated the wrong guy as Squeeze.
“I don’t even want to get too much into that, but that was somebody else. They don’t have the real Squeeze,” MBox, an up-and-coming rapper in his mid-twenties who claims to be Squeeze’s “best friend” and interpreter, alleges to me via a Discord voice call. (MBox, like other YouTubers WIRED interviewed for this story, declined to give any identifying details.) “The real Squeeze is right next to me—he hasn’t been publicly identified.”
It would be easy to write this all off as bravado from a bunch of high-speed clout chasers, except for one thing: In September, more than three months after Ginestri’s arrest, while he was still in custody, a new video appeared on the Squeeze.Benz YouTube channel. It showed footage of several vehicles—one purportedly being driven by Squeeze—drifting and doing doughnuts in the center of Columbus Circle and Times Square, surrounded by pedestrians they narrowly missed hitting with their convoy of cars.
It is one of a barrage of clips uploaded to the channel, which has more than 735,000 subscribers and features video after video of high-speed, palm-sweat-inducing jaunts around New York City. Together, MBox and Squeeze have amassed an enormous fan base of car enthusiasts and adrenaline junkies—and set the scene for YouTube’s riskiest new niche: “swimmers” who weave through traffic at breakneck speeds.
The trend, partly driven by the lure of internet clout and social media fame, has become a focal point for the NYPD, who seem determined to stamp out the practice. Now, the drivers swear they have plans to go legit—before they get arrested, or worse.
[ad_2]
Source link
