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 donuts 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 the New York Police Department 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-20s 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 donuts 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 fanbase 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.
Drag races and highway takeovers have long been a tradition in New York City. Their roots can be traced back to the 1960s era of muscle cars and street racing, which used to occur on the city’s Brooklyn-Queens Connecting Highway. At the time the New York Daily News called it “a strip racer’s dream.”
Most of YouTube’s reckless drivers exist on the fringes of this illegal scene, although their viral videos focus on something entirely different: “swimming.” “It’s the craziest experience I could ever describe in my entire life,” says MBox, who likened these journeys to an out-of-body experience. “Maybe like skydiving, or fucking being in a shootout.”
According to New York City scene veteran Rafael Estevez—the main source for the 1998 Vibe magazine article “Racer X,” which later inspired the Fast and Furious franchise—swimming is a common practice amongst street racers, who are desensitized to driving at high speeds. “You feel so confident behind the wheel that you’re able to do that. What people might look at as, Wow, it’s impossible to do, for you it’s easy because you have total control of the vehicle. Or, at least, you think you do,” says Estevez, who is in his late-50s and now runs Drag Racing Technologies body shop in New Jersey.
The only difference between Estevez’s generation and today’s YouTube drivers is that they are documenting their journeys from A to B, rather than street racing, as a way to make income without much extra effort.
“We’re just driving. We drive like this everywhere, all day,” says Float, an NYC-based driver from Team Swim, a collective that posts their exploits to YouTube. (Float tells WIRED he works in “sales,” and that the nature of his job requires him to travel from place to place at high speeds; he refused to share any personal information about himself.) “The cameras just started coming into play because we might as well just record it.”
Of course, not everyone is an enthusiastic consumer of illegal driving content. New Yorkers reported more than 1,200 drag racing incidents in 2024 alone, compared to 127 reports in all of 2010. The situation has become so bad that in January 2024 the NYPD said it would launch a special task force to tackle the issue of reckless driving.
“NYers are fed up and tired with drag racers terrorizing our neighborhoods. It won’t be tolerated,” Daughtry wrote in an Instagram post in April of last year. “Thinking of putting lives at risk for cheap thrills? Guess what—we will seize your vehicle. We outside too!”
Then there’s YouTube itself, which removed several videos after WIRED reached out seeking comment for this story. “YouTube prohibits videos that encourage dangerous or illegal activities,” says YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle.
Last November, a 25-year-old influencer named Andre Beadle, who was known for his street racing videos on YouTube and Instagram, died when, police say, he crashed his BMW into a metal pole on a New York expressway.
Despite the risk of arrest, drivers with heavy YouTube presences seem to enjoy antagonizing law enforcement. Videos with titles like “Going Ghost on 6 Cop Cars,” “The most wild police chase you will ever see,” and “Dominican Demon vs. NYPD” are among the most popular videos of the genre.
Vloggers, however, insist the footage isn’t being created with the intent of aggravating the cops. “I don’t seek out the police at all. I was never looking for the chases,” claims Bobby, a driver in his mid-20s from Team Swim who goes by Wheres981 on YouTube. His two most popular videos, montages titled “almost every time I ran from the cops (compilation)” and “almost every time I ran from the cops 2 (compilation),” have been viewed more than 6 million times.
Most YouTubers believe that the NYPD and other law enforcement are responsible for escalating street-racing scenarios, and brazenly goad the police. In one YouTube video posted last July by an account with more than 150,000 subscribers, Squeeze “sees a cop and can’t help himself,” according to the caption, and does several donuts around an idling Newark police car before speeding away. The stunt, which occurred next to the city’s Prudential Center, was cited by the Newark Department of Public Safety at the time of Ginestri’s arrest; he was charged with one count of eluding, saying the alleged incident happened in April.
Until the appointment of Jessica Tisch as NYPD commissioner late last year, there were no rules explicitly banning NYPD officers from pursuing dangerous drivers. Tisch has since announced a new police vehicle pursuit policy, which prohibits high-speed chases unless an individual is suspected of having committed a felony.
MBox believes “you could definitely make a good, valid case that it’s way more selfish and egotistical of the police to pursue these young kids, rather than just trying to call in their plates … or call in their car and then look for them when they’re parked up.” Estevez also thinks the police shouldn’t bother chasing young drivers. “That is the biggest waste of time that the NYPD or any police department can do,” he says. “Because that’s not going to change, that’s not going to stop anybody.”
The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment on this story, and also wouldn’t comment on whether or not Ginestri is the driver they’ve alleged is Squeeze.
Of course, there is another thing standing in the way of these YouTubers’ future: the funding of their cars. Some drivers, like Bobby, claim to use cryptocurrency to support their hobby; others, like Float, are more secretive about their sources of income. Although the pair presently use their everyday cars for racing and filming, further fame could increase the cost of participation if they don’t want to be arrested.
To prevent their own arrests, MBox and Squeeze have had to turn to concierge services— companies which own fleets of cars under an LLC—to rent their vehicles. “A lot of times they’ll rent to us without any credentials—credentials being license, insurance, and stuff like that,” MBox explains. Due to the pairs’ “connections,” renting cars sets them back anywhere from $75 to $300 per day, although they once spent up to $10,000 renting a Lamborghini for a week.
MBox claims he and Squeeze have managed to offset their rental costs by monetizing their YouTube channel—a tricky business that involves adding disclaimers which claim the driving in their videos is done by “trained professionals” (other street racing videos insist the footage was made using Unreal Engine). Still, their clips don’t attract the kind of big-money payouts more brand-friendly content creators get. (According to YouTube, videos must abide by the company’s advertiser-friendly content guidelines.)
Street racers are also subject to deletion from social media companies—MBox claims Squeeze’s Instagram account was bringing in around several thousand a month for promotions, and even more from merchandise drops, before it was taken down—which makes it difficult to keep income consistent. Eventually, many hope to follow in the footsteps of influencer giants like Jake Paul or David Dobrik, who initially found fame by engaging in wild stunts before transitioning into more palatable creators for brands.
Bobby and Float’s Team Swim has started this process by setting up a pay-to-join server on the driving game Assetto Corsa. The server, which is overseen by the team’s technology officer, allows members—paying fans and Team Swim drivers—to race against each other in real time. (Players can also employ special pedal sets and steering wheels, manufactured by brands like Hori and Logitech, which mimic the sensations drivers would feel in a real car.)
The group also hopes to expand to a new server on the Grand Theft Auto V mod FiveM, an online multiplayer game which allows for real-time roleplay. “You can race around the city and get chased by other players who are working as cops,” explains Rome, a 21-year-old racing enthusiast based in Switzerland who works with Team Swim remotely.
Team Swim hopes that setting up and playing on these will help them bond with the fans they race alongside and bring in money from membership fees, eventually negating any need for them to film videos. Video games also serve as a safety measure—they can prevent their followers from engaging in IRL copycat behavior. “There’s a lot of young people that really like to watch videos like this online, and they look up to us,” says Bobby. If those fans can stream with Team Swim, Bobby says, “and I’m [there] actively telling you not to do this, for some people that is enough.”
MBox and Squeeze, however, have a different route, one that involves pouring money into Squeeze’s YouTube channel. “We’ve got a bunch of GoPros, two 360 [cameras]—we have the Ray-Ban Meta glasses. We have all that shit to make us a real, efficient camera crew,” MBox says. At present, all that capital is being poured into a new venture: creating a “team” of young, rookie drivers who have been specially recruited to drive like Squeeze.
Team members are expected to provide footage in exchange for use of MBox and Squeeze’s camera equipment, and access to Squeeze’s 735,000 subscribers and brand. “Those are the kids that are going to be taking the automotive risks going forward,” MBox says, “and Squeeze is going to be mainly doing more PR marketing stuff.”
Currently, Squeeze’s non-verbal PR presence feels akin to Top Gear’s silent, helmet-wearing driver The Stig, although there are plans for a face-reveal later down the line, when Squeeze’s brand is somewhat less illegal; according to MBox there will be more family-friendly go-karting and content vlogs in his future.
It’s not clear how financially viable that transition will be for either group. Bobby and Team Swim make “a couple hundred dollars a month” at present from their videos due to advertising restrictions on their content; and their sales of server memberships and self-made merchandise have not yet resulted in any tangible profits. MBox and Squeeze have also faced similar issues, and currently struggle to attract sponsorship or attention from brands, who are understandably reluctant to fund Squeeze’s illegal activity.
MBox is hopeful that, as Squeeze himself moves away from lawbreaking content, they’ll attract more attention from companies looking to advertise through them. “We want to get real brand deals, you know, real endorsements now that we’re no longer a brand risk,” he says.
MBox made these comments in September 2024. In January of this year, a judge in New Jersey sentenced Antonio Ginestri to five years in state prison in connection with a series of robberies, including driving off with an ATM filled with $4,000 from a Dunkin’ Donuts. The sentence came after a contested plea deal, which a Bergen County prosecutor noted in court, was negotiated following a crime spree that allegedly included “racing across the streets of NYC, though these charges haven’t been proven.” Ginestri still faces an assault charge in New York. There are also still open charges against him in two other New Jersey counties, and an active warrant for him in Connecticut.
Ginestri’s attorney, Stefan Erwin, and MBox maintain it’s not Ginestri driving in those YouTube videos. It’s unclear when he might stand trial for any of the additional charges. During Ginestri’s New Jersey sentencing, Judge Christopher Kazlau said he didn’t believe Ginestri when he claimed he’d stay out of trouble if released. The only thing that stopped Ginestri was that he got caught, Kazlau said, “You’re not very good at covering your tracks.”
Additional reporting by Matt Giles.