Seen on screen in the film Sing Sing
Money Grip
A Brooklyn crime odyssey by Divine G · Part one of a trilogy
Rasheen Smith wanted out of the projects. Killer Kato gave him a way out — suicide runs on rival drug houses, a life sentence, and a stolen future. Divine G wrote this novel while serving twenty-five years for a crime he did not commit. In Sing Sing, Colman Domingo autographs a copy of it. This is that book, rebuilt.
From $9.99 · $20 $15 paperback
The moment in the film
He asked himself for an autograph. On camera
In Sing Sing, Colman Domingo plays Divine G. In one scene a fan approaches him holding a novel and asks him to sign it. The fan is the real Divine G. The novel is Money Grip. The author is asking the actor playing him to autograph the book he wrote in prison.
The scene as it plays in the film.
Colman Domingo and Divine G on set, holding the book.
The working copy that lived on the production table.
Divine G appears alongside the actor portraying him. Sing Sing earned three Academy Award nominations, including Best Actor for Colman Domingo and Best Adapted Screenplay, which Divine G co-wrote.
4 credits
Story, screenplay, executive producer and an on-screen cameo in Sing Sing
25 years
Wrongfully imprisoned. The source of every page in this book.
8 novels
Published across the Divine G Entertainment catalog
PEN awards
Multiple PEN America honors and the 2008 Tacenda Literary Award
New in 2026
The same story. Twenty years of craft between the two printings
Money Grip first appeared in 2006, written by hand inside a maximum-security facility. The Revised & Enhanced Edition is the version its author always intended.
Original edition, 2006
New scenes throughout
Material cut from the 2006 printing for length, restored and expanded — including sequences that set up the trilogy's third book.
Deeper interior life for Rasheen
The prison chapters now carry the psychological weight the author could only write about years after living it.
Line-level revision
Two decades of published fiction went into tightening every chapter. The pace is faster and the prose is cleaner.
Positioned as part one of a trilogy
The connective tissue linking Money Grip to Money Grip 2 and the forthcoming third volume is now on the page.
New cover and interior design
Redesigned for the audience the film brought to this book.
Revised & Enhanced Edition
Buy direct from the author
Three ways to read it
Every order placed here goes straight to Divine G Entertainment. No retailer takes a cut, which is why the direct price beats the retail price and the paperback can be signed.
Buy one, get one free.
This isn't an audiobook. It's a movie without visuals.
Every character voiced separately. Full sound design — gunfire, engines, rain, rooms that sound like rooms. Scored and mixed like a feature film. Put the headphones on and you are inside the abandoned food-processing plant with twenty-five million dollars on the floor and nobody left to trust.
He survived the bullet. That was the easy part.
Rasheen Smith woke up on a table in a back-room clinic with a crooked doctor's hands inside him and twenty-five million dollars nobody else can find. Killer Kato is dead. Hoodaroma Entertainment — the rap empire built on blood money — is sitting unclaimed, and by a signature nobody expected to matter, Rasheen is the heir.
That makes him the most valuable dead man in America.
Aaron Wilson wants him in the ground — a federal agent with a badge, a body count, and a Colombian army on the payroll. Phillip Henderson wants him erased — a lawyer who finally got his hands on real money and will do anything to keep it. And in a state prison cell, Camila Nelson is raising a son who has never seen the outside, praying the father of her child is still breathing.
Everybody wants a piece. Everybody has a price. And the ones closest to Rasheen are the ones doing the math.
The streets take everything. The question is what you hand over first.
From the author whose true story became the A24 film Sing Sing.
John "Divine G" Whitfield is a PEN Award–winning novelist, an Oscar-nominated writer and executive producer on Sing Sing, and a founding member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts. Colman Domingo portrayed him on screen in an Academy Award–nominated performance. Money Grip — the first book in this series — appears on screen in the film itself.
These books are not written about the life. They were written from inside it.
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Format: MP3 (ZIP download) · Length: 7:16:31 · Production: Full-cast, multi-voice, with sound design · Unabridged · ISBN 978-1-940765-03-7
Also available on CD, and in paperback and eBook. Haven't read book one? Start with [Money Grip].
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Questions answered by the author himself.
Calvin Thompson spent countless years mastering the field of Time Travel Technology and just when he is finally about to become the first official time traveler, a jealous co-worker, Eric Seabright, sends him back in time to the year 1831 in the deep south at the height of slavery. He encounters Mary, a slave who is a carbon copy of his deceased wife, Cookie, and falls in love. With 4 months to make it to a Backlash zone (a safety component within the Time Machine that may transport him back to the future), Calvin struggles to overcome slavery, futuristic hitmen, the fact he will have to leave Mary behind, and the demons inside of him that are complicating his survival, his humanity and the victory of his journey.
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The story
Money is not just the root of all evil. It is the master of every motive.
Rasheen Smith comes up in a Brooklyn where the crack economy is the only economy that answers when you knock. He is smart and he is loyal, and both of those things get used against him. When Killer Kato takes Rasheen under his wing, the mentorship turns out to be a leash: suicide runs on rival drug houses, bodies that trace back to Rasheen and never to Kato, and a life sentence that arrives right on schedule.
Kato does not stop there. While Rasheen sits with a life bid, Kato takes Lameek — Rasheen's baby brother — and builds him into a platinum rap star, then works him like property. Two brothers, two cages, one man holding both sets of keys.
Then Rasheen gets out
The second half of Money Grip is what a man does with seven years of stored-up arithmetic. Rasheen comes home into a war he did not start and cannot leave: a Colombian cartel holding a standing contract on his life, a Dominican crew with its own ledger, a rap-industry beef being deliberately inflated by executives who profit from body counts, and federal agents who see him as leverage rather than a person. He chases the overnight comeback. He chases revenge. He learns which of those two things a man can actually catch.
Why this urban fiction novel and not another
Divine G wrote Money Grip inside Sing Sing Correctional Facility while serving twenty-five years for a crime he did not commit. The courtroom procedure in these pages is not researched. The CPL 440.10 motion Rasheen files is the motion the author filed. The prison bus, the calendar dates, the seven-page decision read eight times before it starts to feel real — that is reporting wearing the clothes of fiction. Street literature rarely arrives with this kind of provenance.
The ending turns on a piece of dramatic irony readers have been arguing about since 2006. It is the reason the trilogy exists.
Book details
Title
Money Grip (Revised & Enhanced Edition)
Author
John "Divine G" Whitfield
Genre
Urban fiction · street lit · crime
Settings
Brooklyn, NY · Watts, LA · 1990s–2000s
Series
Part one of a trilogy
Publisher
Divine G Entertainment
Formats
Paperback, eBook, full-cast audiobook
Content note
Explicit language, violence and sexual content. Written for adult readers.
Nobody could tell him, as he got inside that car, that there wouldn't be a wild-wild-west shootout the moment he stepped off the bus.
Money Grip, Chapter 13
Listen first
A full cast, not one narrator
Most independent audiobooks are one voice in a closet. Money Grip was produced with a cast of actors, and original location sound design — closer to a film you listen to than a book someone reads to you. Play three minutes and decide for yourself.
About the author
John "Divine G" Whitfield
Divine G served twenty-five years in New York State prisons for a murder he did not commit. Inside, he became a founding member of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, wrote eight novels along with a shelf of screenplays and stage plays, and won multiple PEN America awards and the 2008 Tacenda Literary Award for best play.
His life became Sing Sing, the A24 film nominated for three Academy Awards. He holds a story credit, a screenwriting credit and an executive producer credit on it, and he appears on screen himself — as the fan asking Colman Domingo, who is playing Divine G, to sign a copy of Money Grip.
Before you order
Questions people actually ask
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Yes. Money Grip is the novel Colman Domingo's character autographs on screen in Sing Sing. The real Divine G appears in that scene as the fan requesting the autograph — asking the actor playing him to sign the author's own book.Description text goes here
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DescripIt restores scenes cut from the 2006 printing, expands Rasheen's prison chapters, tightens the prose line by line, and adds the connective material linking this book to Money Grip 2 and the forthcoming third volume. New cover and interior design throughout.tion text goes here
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Yes. Money Grip 2 opens with Rasheen fighting out of a coma caused by the events that end book one. Reading them in order preserves the ending the rest of the trilogy is built on.ription text goes here
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Direct orders are cheaper, include a buy-one-get-one free offer and a 30-day guarantee, and pay the author several times what a retail sale does. Paperbacks ordered here can be signed at no extra cost.
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The unabridged novel in a full-cast dramatized production with multiple actors, original score and sound design, delivered as MP3 files you own permanently. No subscription and no expiry.
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No. Money Grip contains explicit language, graphic violence and explicit sexual content, and is written for adult readers.
Start the book Colman Domingo signs on screen
Revised & Enhanced Edition. Paperback, eBook or full-cast audiobook. Buy one, get one free. Thirty days to change your mind.