Fat Joe loves Jim Dolan. Truly. He celebrates the owner, defends the organization, acts like the Knicks are family. Then ShinyHunters—a hacker collective—drops a data trove last month. 404 Media reports first. The extent of the surveillance? Not public until now.
Inside Madison Square Garden’s VIP database sits a label. It marks Fat Joe a “medium risk.”
Not banned. Not flagged for physical threat. Just… risky. Why? An insider says it’s about social media. Did you critique Dolan online? You get scored. Even if it’s just a tweet about a long line at the gate.
“You’ve done something in the publicity world… that has caught the attention of the wrong persons,”
The database holds nearly 40,000 entries. Only about 400 carry these risk scores. The rest? Clean. No scores. No judgments. Just names.
Fat Joe isn’t alone. Edie Falco? Low risk. Tracy Morgan? Low. Ben Stiller? Low.
Who’s medium? Anna Wintour. She never said a bad word about Dolan. She just showed up. That’s enough for security.
Lil Tjay is worse. He was in an altercation at a Hulu Theater under the Garden. The label: BANNED FROM MSG.
Pete Rock is iconic for Knick fans. He posts about them daily. He’s marked “DO NOT HOST.” Why? Because after Charles Oakley was dragged out of the arena, Rock called for a boycott. He said Dolan was petty. Now he doesn’t get free tickets.
Adam Pally? Same fate. “Not to be hosted.” He’s been critical of management.
Daisy Jones actor Will Harrison is flagged because a girlfriend allegedly wrote a NYT article. The source is unclear. Maybe irrelevant. The tag sticks anyway.
Julia Fox? Banned from complimentary tickets after showing up in something extremely revealing in spring 2024. Fashion police don’t exist. MSG does.
Is this normal? Insiders say these databases are common. Arenas want to know who shows up. But this scale feels paranoid.
Why track orientation?
93 entries in the VIP list are tagged LGBTQIA. Ricky Martin is on it. Phoebe Bridgers is on it. Emily Green from Geese is on it.
Why?
“There does seem to be a bit of pattern here… overly interested in queer and trans persons.”
Evan Greer from Fight for the Future calls it out. The group previously tracked how MSG surveilled a trans fan. Minute-by-minute. It wasn’t isolated.
Political influence runs deeper than fandom. 32 candidates are listed as SUPPORTED BY MSG PAC.
Hundreds of politicians too. Many got tags because they signed letters supporting Dolan’s permit renewal in 2023 union leaders, lobbyists, even a pizza guy from Penn Station. None of them have risk scores. Politics buys immunity. Art gets scrutinized.
The hack wasn’t just VIP lists. It was bigger.
Over 10.5 million records dumped. Email addresses. Phone numbers. Birthdates. One reporter on this story found his email in there. Zohran Mamdani was too. He tried banning biometric data collection. Ironic he was caught.
Class action lawsuits followed. Surveillance Tech Oversight Project says the spill proves Dolan collects too much. “Why hold data you don’t need?” they asked. MSG stayed quiet.
ShinyHunters has been around since 2019. They hit Panera. Wynn. GrubHub. Now the Garden.
French police arrested four members recently. Experts warned about their vishing scams—voice phishing. Fake tech support calls trick employees into resetting passwords.
They bypassed Microsoft Entra. Got into Salesforce.
On June 16 they posted: Final warning. Pay or leak.
MSG didn’t pay.
45 gigabytes hit the public sphere. Face scans weren’t in this batch. But blacklists were. People wrongly accused. Security tight. Trust low.
One document requests a full threat check on Jessica Tisch. Her address. Her number. She became NYPD commissioner shortly after.
Dolan complains about security publicly. Snubbed Mamdani. Then he won the championship. The mood shifted. A pep talk video went viral. Suddenly, he’s charismatic again.
A Boogie Wit da Hoodie is high risk. He still partied with the squad on Broadway. 2 million people cheered.
Fat Joe performed. Jadakiss was there. The medium risks laughed. The city watched.
Who cares about a score when you win?
Next season the slate resets. Maybe the tags fall off. Or maybe they tighten up. Who knows. The list remains hidden unless someone hacks it again.
