For weeks, rumors have been swirling that Breakfast Club host DJ Envy has been promoting a real estate venture of a friend, Cesar Pina, that was a straight up Ponzi scheme.
In addition to promoting the business on the popular radio show, Envy and Pina did seminars together about flipping properties in worn down parts of New Jersey.According to various news sources—including NBC New York—the pair would convince someone to invest in distressed properties that would be renovated and flipped for money. In return, that person would receive 30% of the profits. Multiple folks would invest, but never received anything in return.
On Wednesday, DJ Envy spoke out about the allegations he’s facing. “Let me explain some things. My attorneys don’t want me to speak but I think there’s things that I need to clear up a little bit.”
Envy continued:
“Cesar and myself did seminars. Now the reasons why I did this seminars is because i wanted to uplift my community. I wanted to teach my community about real estate, things that I didn’t know when I was first buying my first home. I wanted to teach our community about investing and in generational wealth. So I did these seminars and brought industry professionals to all these seminars…that’s what I wanted to do for my people. Now, Cesar? If he took money, I wasn’t privy to it nor did I even know. But, I do understand how people feel if they did give him money, because I gave him a lot of money that I didn’t see a dollar of returned. But for anybody to say I was involved, that is totally not true. I would never. I’ve been on radio close to 30 years and never in my 30 years’ time did I do nothing but try to uplift people… And I would never take a dollar from somebody.”
Envy added: “If you read the court documents, Cesar wrote an affidavit that said that ‘DJ Envy..had no knowledge of me investing people’s money. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t part of those conversations, he wasn’t even nowhere in those meetings.’ Those are documents that is out there. So if we are going to talk about truth, let’s talk about the truth.”
Massimo D’Angelo, Envy’s lawyer, also stated that “[Envy] is a victim, just like the other alleged victims are in connection with the scam. He is contending daily with cases that are being filed improperly against him.”
