Diamond District Supreme
The TraxNYC drama and the best pure NYC social media content.
I’ve been out of pocket for the last month thanks to 1. Needing a vacation. 2. Going on vacation. 3. Having laptop troubles while on vacation and no way of fixing them until now. So, sorry about the lag in posts. You know I still love you. Since I’m currently one of those people you don’t feel sorry about who is stuck in the Caribbean because the president’s whole kidnapping the Venezuelan president thing shut down airspace in the region over the busiest few travel days of the year, I’m still trying to get my life in order and dealing with tropical brain rot. It’s a sickness that I suffer from, basically being away from NYC for more than a week, week and a half, makes me dumber and I don’t like it. All I can do is obsessively start watching movies based there, reading all kinds of news from the tabloids, and looking at pictures from past eras as an attempt to at least comfort myself. I like traveling, but I don’t like being away for that long—especially when there’s not only a movie I desperately need to see (and I’m staying somewhere without movie theaters), but also local drama that I’d love to be on the scene for. In this case, I’m talking about Marty Supreme and the TraxNYC Diamond District beef. All I can do is sit in front of a little screen and try to get high off the images I’m seeing, look at every meme, and cackle at every person who posts “I don’t get it” about either the film or the real-life drama.
At first sight, it might look like I’m just trying to lump two things in the news cycle into one post to capitalize on SEO, but this isn’t 2013, and I’m not “chasing clicks” or anything. Instead, while I was still sitting around jealously looking at pictures of friends going to Josh Safdie’s premier or collecting orange ping pong balls at whatever theater they saw the movie at, the news that a fight had broken out in the Diamond District between Maksud Agadjani of TraxNYC and the owners of Akay Diamonds, because Agadjani claims they had been ripping him off for years. I follow pretty much every Diamond District dealer on Instagram, because, as Safdie and his brother showed us in their 2019 masterpiece, Uncut Gems, it’s one of the realest places in the entire city. I’d seen the entire buildup happening, but when I saw the video of Agadjani confronting the Akays, I could only smile and say we had one of the most New York City, Baby moments of 2026 come especially early this year. I joked that Agadjani had seen people post that Marty Supreme was the new Uncut Gems and decided to pull a “hold my beer,” turning “Where’s my fucking money” into the new “This is how I win.”
Even though some people have taken to TikTok and IG to claim the whole thing was staged, the Akay brothers were both actually arrested after, as Agadjani posted on the TraxNYC Instagram, “They tried to kill me . Strangle me with my own chain because I gave a refund to there scam.” And, I mean, look: if it was all staged, then I wouldn’t be mad about it. Anybody who knows anything about the jewelry business, especially in NYC, knows that it’s a game for hustlers, and maybe they pay a little money in fines or whatever, charges never actually get filed, and the whole things goes away after a massive social media win, the likes of which brands and politicians would pay insane amounts of money to try and pull off. Especially these days, when any businesses that rely on foot traffic need all the exposure they can get, the dealers along 47th have become the city’s greatest showmen alive. TraxNYC has 3.6 million followers on Instagram and 2.7 more on TikTok, while other dealers like Moses the Jeweler barely trail behind. Moses is a personal favorite, because he’s got what my family would call the “Yiddishe kop” when it comes to salesmanship: he’s got a catchphrase (“Mazal!”) and does stunts like giving out money and Rolexes to people while driving around in his million-dollar, one of one 1955 GMC Chrome Hearts truck. Even the more low-key dealers are fun to watch: Kerri Lavine—who looks and sounds exactly like my friend’s mom from Great Neck who told me she had seven nice Jewish daughters she could hook me up with before I got hitched—is another favorite. Her videos have an almost 1990s QVC vibe to them, and people I know who have purchased stuff from her because they saw her on social media say she’s lovely to deal with.
There aren’t many really good things to watch about the city that isn’t some person with an insanely annoying voice telling you, “I just found this low-key, goated, underground Jewish delicatessen in Brooklyn spot called Russ & Daughters,” or walking around interviewing people who don’t even live in the tri-state are like they’re some man on the street getting the real scoop on what’s hot in the city. People with large social media followings have become our new celebrities—for better or worse. The whole “influencer” thing is pretty played out, and there are a hundred cornballs for every one account that actually posts anything worth wasting your brain cells on. What I appreciate about the jewelry dealers of NYC is that they know they’re trying to sell people crazy expensive watches and chains, but they also know how to keep it interesting and feeling like whatever their schtick might be, is real. Is it? I don’t know. Is anything? I’m sure these people do a dozen takes and edits before they post anything to their followers, but what they do end up putting up feels more like the “real” side of a city that has been documented a billion times in books, movies, shows, and now on social media. They’re the modern Damon Runyon or Jimmy Breslin characters, and they’re all right there, creating their own stories. Watching their antics, whether it’s trying to negotiate the sale of a bracelet or getting into brawls, is as good as getting a buttered roll from a cart, reading a copy of the Post at a diner, or smiling whenever somebody says they don’t “get” a Safdie brothers film.