The couple’s project — chronicling the illicit lives of convicts — has given Don Diva a veneer of authenticity in the underworld as glossy as its brash, alluring covers, though, it must be said, on at least one occasion an employee of the magazine suffered a fate similar to the subjects profiled within it. In 2009, a president of the publication, Sam Ferguson, was killed in his Chevrolet Impala in a drive-by shooting in Miami. More recently, Don Diva has found itself embroiled in a defamation lawsuit that other, more staid media outlets might not have been involved in.

That entanglement began in late 2007, when the magazine, in its 30th edition, published an interview with Kenneth McGriff, a Queens drug lord known as Supreme, who inaccurately stated that a former partner was a government informant and had testified against him.

Given Don Diva’s robust readership within the penal system, the subject of the error, Russell Allen, said he suffered shame and bodily harm while serving time himself. After almost a decade of defending himself, Mr. Allen sued the magazine in 2015 in Federal District Court in Brooklyn. He is seeking damages of $1 million from the Chileses, saying he has spent the last 10 years fending off their enraged and misled readers who think he is a “rat.”

Such are the hazards of publishing a product so popular with inmates and so replete with intimate criminal lore that prison officials have banned — or tried to ban — it from any number of correctional facilities. But not unlike samizdat novels in Soviet Russia, issues of Don Diva still make their way into prison yards today.

“It’s like gold in there,” said one former inmate who wrote for the magazine while he was serving time and asked for anonymity to preserve his post-incarceration reputation. “When I was locked up, I used to get copies and have like 20 dudes outside my door just waiting to see it. Everyone in there was pretty much reading it cover to cover.”