(Photo illustration by The Bulwark / Photos: Shutterstock, Instagram)
FAMOUSLY HANDSOME LIVESTREAMER Clavicular appeared to overdose on drugs during a broadcast on April 14, slumping over a booth in a Miami restaurant before his security team rushed him to an SUV.
For a moment, it seemed like all of Clavicular’s frenzied “looksmaxxing”—hitting his face to shape his cheeks, smoking meth to lose weight, injecting steroids since he was 14—would come to nothing.
Instead, the 20-year-old whose antics have made him a media sensation survived to “mog” another day. In fact, he wasn’t out of commission for long: The day after the episode, Clavicular—real name Braden Peters—ripped the IV out of his arm and left the hospital against medical advice.
Why would he do that? Because he had to attend the opening that evening of his own Miami Beach nightclub, “Bacara.” And his new business partner isn’t a man to be kept waiting.
That man is Miami nightlife impresario Hai Waknine, who in addition to running Bacara operates several other clubs. Waknine lives a glamorous life: He’s married to a former model and he partied on his yacht with rapper Offset just before the rapper was shot earlier this month. Now he’s taken Clavicular under his wing, helping him sign a deal for a dating app meant to distribute women more equally to members of the incel community, and guiding him through condominium purchases.
Neither Clavicular nor Waknine responded to requests for comment.
Waknine frequently wears a chain bearing the Hebrew term “chai” (“alive” or “living,” but often loosely translated as “life”) and customarily ends his business activities before shabbos each Friday. He is a very different sort of person than Clavicular used to hang out with. Just a few months ago, Clavicular was vibing to “Heil Hitler” in a Miami nightclub with the likes of white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes.
But Waknine’s new alliance with the internet’s hottest “looksmaxxer” is notable for another reason. Waknine has a lengthy criminal record, and he has maintained close connections to some of Israel’s most feared organized crime groups, according to federal prosecutors. He has a history of terrorizing his business associates and served several years in federal prison for extortion. Just last year, prosecutors alleged that Waknine used members of the Crips and Mexican Mafia gangs as his enforcers.
Going into business with the club owner poses other kinds of risks for the appearance-minded Clavicular. Waknine has boasted, according to prosecutors, that he once cut a man’s ear after kidnapping him over an outstanding debt.
Meanwhile, Clavicular’s surprising new alliance with an Israeli-American ex-convict has enraged many of his antisemitic far-right friends and followers, who now fume in the chat whenever Waknine appears on one of Clavicular’s livestreams. For the rest of us, Clavicular’s new arrangement with Waknine offers some insight into the opportunities available in the tumultuous right-wing media world for a charismatic young man who may care deeply about his looks but evidently has little regard for his actual, physical well-being.
TO EXPLAIN JUST HOW WILD—and potentially brazen—this alliance is, I need to take you back a few years, to the height of the COVID pandemic.
During the era of lockdowns, a series of underground poker games catering to celebrities and other wealthy gamblers sprang up in houses around Los Angeles. In May 2023, someone started to target them, tossing Molotov cocktails at the luxury cars parked outside and in one case