When Jamie Foxx hired a drug lord to remodel his house: “I thought he was a clean guy”
When the rich and famous need work done on their houses, it stands to reason they don’t go through the usual channels associated with mere common folk, what with the threat of stalkers and paparazzi being what they are. And yet, Jamie Foxx still ended up drafting in a drug lord to take care of some DIY.
What makes it even more unusual is that the suspected criminal was being pursued by the federal authorities at the time, but because it would have been detrimental to their investigation if they’d informed the Academy Award-winning actor, comedian, and musician of the fixer-upper’s true nature, they decided to keep him in the dark.
That would have created a bizarre situation for the surveillance teams, who thought they were in the midst of a standard ‘watch and learn’ operation until their target became a regular fixture at the home of a Hollywood superstar, bestselling recording artist, and world-famous celebrity who was none the wiser that he’d inadvertently placed himself squarely in the middle of a sting.
The surreptitious nature of the entire ordeal came as a surprise to Foxx, who claimed to The Hollywood Reporter that he’d “vetted him because you have to check people out that come in your house.” The mystery drug lord passed all of the requisite checks, if only because the feds didn’t want to place their cards on the table and shoot themselves in the foot.
“We come to find out the feds were watching him for a year, and so they didn’t want him to come back dirty,” he explained. “So, therefore, I thought he was a clean guy, but once in a while, a handle or something would come off, and I would call him.” As it turned out, not only was the drug lord not very good at the remodelling he’d been hired to do, but the government agents were just as bad.
Foxx revealed that he discovered “some of the fed guys were working in his construction place” to maintain the illusion of normality in the midst of an undercover operation, and “that’s why the shit was so shoddy.” He’d hired these people to help make home improvements, but the truth was a lot stranger than the crew simply not being up to the task.
Completely oblivious to the reality of the situation, Foxx had drafted in notorious figures in the world of illicit narcotics and several federal employees to potter around his abode and not really fix anything at all because that’s not why they were there, and they weren’t too skilled at it anyway. The real question is whether he got his money back after shelling out for a service that wasn’t fulfilled and turned his house into the unwitting backdrop of a drug investigation.
