From the moment the Fugees shot to fame in the mid-90s, Prakazrel “Pras” Michél was discounted as an incidental member of the hip-hop superstars. He was the unremarkable New Jersey rhyme spitter by way of Brooklyn who was lucky enough to be a high school classmate of the mesmerizing Lauryn Hill and a cousin to mercurial Wyclef Jean. On the group’s breakout album The Score, Michel’s eight-bar features were minor contributions, relative to Hill’s adroitness as an emcee and balladeer and Jean’s compositional polymathy.
“From Hawaii to Hawthorne, I run marathons, like / Buju Banton, I’m a true champion, like / Farrakhan reads his daily Qur’an / It’s a phenomenon, lyrics fast like Ramadan,” Michél raps on the band’s breakout single Fu-Gee-La, in one of his more pedestrian efforts.
The Score was a towering success commercially (with 22m units sold) and critically (with two Grammys), but Hill’s and Jean’s competing ambitions ended up seeing the band separate. Neither missed a beat as solo artists – Hill made Grammy history with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, and Jean charted with The Carnival before moving on to produce hits for Carlos Santana and Shakira.
Michél, who actually founded the Fugees, never really distinguished himself outside the group. His solo success was pretty much limited to the 1998 hit song Ghetto Supastar, another group collaboration – this time with with the R&B princess Mya and the Wu-Tang clan’s Ol’ Dirty Bastard. Instead, Michél was part of the second wave of rappers to go the Hollywood route, producing and starring in a 2006 documentary about Los Angeles’s Skid Row where he went undercover as an unhoused person. But his screen work didn’t garner the same reception as his gangbusters music partnerships.
Then in 2007, Michél attended a presidential campaign rally in downtown LA for a charismatic young Democrat named Barack Obama.
Michél had actually met him years earlier, when Obama was an Illinois state lawmaker. Now, at the rally, Obama invited Michél to a starry Beverly Hills fundraiser, hosted by the founders of DreamWorks – Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg – where he watched in wonder as Hollywood heavyweights raised $1.3m for Obama’s cause.
Michél was sold. “He’s a constitutional lawyer,” Michél said about Obama to Rolling Stone magazine in 2023. “At that time, who the fuck knew what that meant? ‘Constitutional lawyer.’ Not a criminal lawyer, not an entertainment lawyer, not a real estate lawyer – a constitutional lawyer. It sounded sexy as fuck. So I’m a surrogate, now – I’m everything Obama.”
But in his rush to become a high-stakes political operator, Michél wouldn’t just quickly find himself well out of his depth. He’d eventually emerge as a central character in an influence-peddling conspiracy to corrupt US politics with foreign cash – a weird and winding saga that ended last week with the 52-year-old sentenced to 14 years in federal prison.
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That this baritone hype man would find his way into high-stakes international politics after pivoting from music stardom was in some ways inevitable. During their time in the limelight, the Fugees made a point of standing up for Haiti at a time when asylum seekers were demonized on the right and left for washing up on US shores onboard flimsy rafts. In 2010, Jean launched a bid to become president of Haiti that fell apart over residency issues, and Hill has long maintained matriarchal status in the Marley clan, Jamaica’s unofficial first family.
But Michél would likely never have fallen from grace so spectacularly if, in 2006, he had not met the Malaysian financier Low Taek Jho – known as Jho Low.
Low is a notorious figure, the man behind the biggest scandal in Malaysian history. US and Malaysian authorities have charged him with embezzling a staggering $4.5bn from his country’s sovereign wealth fund, known as 1MDB, with considerable support from the former Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak.
But when Michél first met him at a Manhattan nightclub in 2006, as he told Rolling Stone, Low just seemed like a garden-variety finance bro – winning over the room by buying the club’s entire stock of drinks. Michél reckoned Low spent $1.5m on drinks in 20 minutes alone.
The two men are unlikely bedfellows. Where Michél was born to Haitian immigrants fleeing the violent regime of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and had a working-class upbringing just outside of Newark, Low grew up wealthy and studied at London’s elite Harrow school before graduating from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school.
Indeed, Michél might have written Low off if there weren’t so many A-list celebrities vouching for him. No less than Leonardo DiCaprio had just worked with Low to finance his $100m passion project, The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese’s monument to white-collar crime. DiCaprio later told a trial that Low made generous donations to his charity: a $3.2m Picasso, a $9.2m Basquiat.
Michél assumed Low was legit.
Although he rejected Low’s offer to perform in Malaysia, they kept in touch, and Michél regaled Low with his enthusiasm for Obama. A few years later, during Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, Low reached out, wanting to learn more about Michél’s connection to this well-placed Fugees fan (Obama reportedly had Ready or Not on repeat during the ’08 campaign).
By this point, Low was deep into the 1MDB scheme of embezzling Malaysia’s sovereign wealth, and he needed as many powerful friends as he could muster to keep it going.
In June 2012, Michél helped Low inside a fundraiser for Obama in Miami. The Malaysian wired the rapper $1m to cover their entry fees and those of anyone else Michél could wrangle among his glitzy contacts to be a straw donor.
It was the beginning of what the justice department said ended up being more than $21m in stolen 1MDB funds, diverted through Michél in the run-up to the election. It is illegal for a foreign national to give to a US political campaign, and to parcel out money to friends for them to donate under their own names. Still, they kept at it. Michél even set up shell companies to disguise it all.
In one instance he has publicly acknowledged, Michél made a “personal” donation of $1.2m to an Obama-friendly Super Pac called Black Men Vote, which aimed to turn out Black male voters in key swing states. The money was actually from Low.
At one point, Low had a holiday picture taken with the Obamas at the White House – a clout-enhancing souvenir that is alleged to have set Low back another $20m in stolen money.
Michél would later blame the photograph deal on Frank White Jr, a top Obama fundraiser who would prove to be another critical access point for the Malaysian. White, whose sister is married to Michelle Obama’s cousin, was a close collaborator with Michél during the campaign. (For example, Michél testified that White pressed him to fill a table with friends for donations at a fundraiser, which Michél funded with Low’s money.) Later, they launched a DC-based private equity firm, DuSable Capital, with seed money from Low’s 1MDB funds.
When justice department investigators cornered him with this information, White cooperated: he gave back $20m in 1MDB funds, admitted to acting as an agent for the Malaysian government in lobbying efforts, severed those ties and filed amended disclosures under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (Fara). As a result, he did not face criminal charges.
By the time the justice department went public with its investigation of the 1MDB scam in 2017, Low had already been on the run from Malaysian authorities for two years. The scandal had upended the political landscape in Malaysia. Razak, whose party had been in power since independence from Britain, was thrown in prison.
Yet Low doubled down – his troubles could all go away, he figured, if his friend Michél could influence the White House under its new president: Donald Trump. After all, Michél’s political fundraising triumphs from the Obama era had armed him with a thick Rolodex, including key political figures during the Trump years, too, such as Elliott Broidy, a prominent fundraiser not for the Democrats but for the Republicans.
But Low needed more than just the justice department off his back. He also needed Michél to insulate him from extradition to China – and that meant doing a favor for the Chinese government.
The Chinese, Low said, wanted help extraditing Guo Wengui – a billionaire businessman, friend to Steve Bannon and a Mar-a-Lago member. China was after Guo as part of its “Operation Fox Hunt” campaign to round up fugitive lawbreakers on American soil.
Low said he was prepared to spend $75m through Michél to take care of all this – scrapping the justice department investigation and getting Guo extradited to China – if Michél could close the deal in six months.
One clandestine meeting with Chinese government emissaries at the Four Seasons in midtown Manhattan unfolds like scenes out of a John le Carré novel. In interviews, Michél describes meeting China’s public security vice-minister Sun Lijun at the hotel. He claimed he and Sun – evidently while toggling between emails from former US attorney general Jeff Sessions and a phone call with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping – negotiated the release of a pregnant American detainee in China, in a show of good faith for his future efforts on the Guo extradition. The former rapper would claim that the cloak-and-dagger effort to draw him into the hotel had him thinking, for a moment, that he might very well turn up missing.
It was a long way from larking around in music videos and rocking sold-out stadium shows.
Ready or not, the justice department began rounding up key figures in the 1MDB scam in 2020. Broidy pleaded guilty to Fara-related crimes and forfeited $6.6m. Ultimately, he was pardoned by Trump. Two Goldman Sachs bankers received jail time for their role in facilitating payments, while the bank itself was forced to pay nearly $3bn in penalties to regulators on the US, UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. Altogether, the 1MDB scandal saddled Malaysia with an $11bn debt obligation – one that will continue to hamstring future economic development through 2039.
Low, who is believed to be hiding out in China, has maintained his innocence. His lawyers say his “motivation for giving Michél money to donate was not so that he could achieve some policy objective”. They say he “simply wanted to obtain a photograph with himself and then President Obama”.
Michél was left holding the bag. In April 2023, he stepped into the harsh glare of a federal trial in Washington DC – a solo star finally, albeit a notorious one now. Headlines blared testimony from Sessions and DiCaprio, who was not accused of wrongdoing, and described Low lavishing him with gifts, parties and the financing of The Wolf of Wall Street.
Michél, in his testimony, denied the government’s assertion that Low washed more than $100m through him. He said he viewed the $20m paid to him by Low over nine months in 2012 as “free money from a wealthy businessman that I could use” – and wound up perjuring himself when the justice department presented evidence of the shell companies he created to shroud his financial relations with Low.
What’s more, Michél was found to have sent letters to friends who had received 1MDB funds from him, in which he told them, in so many words, that the money was to stop them cooperating with the FBI. Prosecutors framed it as witness tampering.
In 2023 a federal jury found him guilty, convicting Michél on all 10 counts of money laundering and campaign finance violations, and ordering him to forfeit $65m because of his ties to Low. In October 2024 he requested a retrial, accusing his own lawyer of using AI to draft his closing arguments, which misattributed lyrics from Puff Daddy’s I’ll Be Missing You to Michél, and lyrics from his own Ghetto Supastar to the Fugees. The retrial was denied.
Department of Justice prosecutors recommended a life sentence. Michél, they said, had “betrayed his country for money” and intentionally deceived the White House, senior politicians and the FBI for nearly a decade. He didn’t get life, but he was still given 14 years; his new lawyer called it “completely disproportionate to the offense”.
Michél hasn’t commented publicly on the sentence. Neither have his Fugees bandmates. “What benefit would I get trying to break laws? It’s not worth it to me,” he told Rolling Stone in 2023. “I’m like a pariah now. I’ve got friends who won’t talk to me because they think there’s a satellite in orbit listening to them.”
In September 2021, the Fugees reunited for their first performance in 15 years, to commemorate the 25th anniversary of The Score. They would later wind up canceling their plans for a global tour after prosecutors placed Michél under severe travel restrictions. But on that first night they performed, at a Global Citizen Live pop-up concert at New York’s Pier 17, it was good vibes all around. Jean moved the crowd with his punchlines, Hill killed ’em softly with her songs and Pras hyped them up the whole way. It was a bittersweet reminder of what could have always been.
