In a flip-flopping move, Mayor Bloomberg said today that “maybe that was the appropriate thing” for the police to give rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs an escort so he could make a $75,000 gig in New Jersey.
“When you really look at it, I don’t know whether it’s true, but what you read in the paper is that a sergeant had a big crowd, wanted to get the guy out of there, said to somebody, ‘Get him out of here, give him a ride, give him an escort for one block to get out of the crowd.’ Maybe that was the appropriate thing,” said Bloomberg.
The mayor added, “I’ll leave that up to the Police Commissioner when he does an investigation.”
Earlier this week, a furious Bloomberg blasted the star treatment, saying, “The bottom line is the Police Department should treat everybody exactly the same. If you don’t get a police escort, P. Diddy shouldn’t.”
Internal Affairs cops swarmed the city’s busiest precinct house, Midtown South — searching log records and work schedules — after The Post’s Page Six revealed that New York’s Finest helped whisk the hip-hop honcho from outside the Hammerstein Ballroom toward New Jersey so he wouldn’t be late for his second gig Friday night, at a West Orange club.
“[Kelly] told me is he did not get an escort over to New Jersey or any long distance whatsoever,” Bloomberg said. “And whether it was appropriate for one or two blocks or whatever, I’ll leave that up to them. It does not seem like the great brouhaha that had been made of it.”
The fireworks came after Upper East Side dry cleaner John Mahdessian told Page Six on Monday that he called in favors from police pals to get Diddy’s Escalade-and-Bentley motorcade a police detail complete with flashing lights.
He said calls for the 11:30 p.m. escort came after plans to fly Diddy to Jersey by helicopter went awry.
The NYPD admitted the well-connected dry cleaner scored the help. The department said the police van escorted Diddy’s parade of cars for one block, from West 35th Street near the Hammerstein to just near the Lincoln Tunnel entrance.