In Shakur’s defense, the timing of the song’s release was an incendiary move by Biggie and Diddy, given their proximity to such a high-profile shooting. And both were beginning to play the roles of the characters they’d created for themselves in an increasingly aggressive script. “[Diddy] just was looking to have fun and make people happy and dance and make money—and then, unfortunately, he had to deal with the other things,” says Meiselas. “It just wasn’t in his personality to back down.”17
For Biggie, the gun-toting outlaw image went beyond “Who Shot Ya.” In “I Got a Story to Tell,” released in 1997, he brags about sleeping with an NBA player’s girlfriend—and robbing the basketball star at gunpoint when he comes home. Astonishingly, Diddy confirmed the tale in 2016. (The victim: late New York Knicks forward Anthony Mason, who stood six foot seven and two hundred and fifty pounds in his prime.)18
Shakur similarly seemed to be transforming into the violent, misogynistic protagonist present in many of his songs. On Valentine’s Day of 1995, he landed in an upstate New York jail after being sentenced to one-and-a-half to four years for sexually abusing a groupie in a hotel room. The rapper maintained his innocence and was given the option to leave prison pending appeal, but he didn’t have the $1.4 million needed to post bail. He spent several months locked up—until Knight, with Iovine’s backing, cut a check and sent a white stretch limo to drive him to a private jet bound for California, where a spot on the Death Row roster awaited him. Though Shakur had previously been signed to Interscope and was simply shifting to its partner label, the September 1995 agreement placed him in a new, sinister milieu. “I know I’m selling my soul to the devil,” he allegedly told a confidant.19
Shakur touched down on the West Coast and immediately went to the studio to start recording for his new employer. Dre played him the track that would become “California Love” and asked Shakur what he thought of it. Shakur liked it so much that he went directly into the booth and laid down his vocals: “Out on bail, fresh out of jail, California dreaming / Soon as I step on the scene, I’m hearing hoochies screaming…” Shakur recorded a flawless verse the very first time around, and to add emphasis through what’s known as overdubbing—making the track sound heavier—he went back and recorded it again. Remarkably, he matched his own cadence and inflection, word for word, without writing anything down. “That’s some incredible shit,” marveled Dre.20
Knight agreed, and when Shakur’s double album All Eyez on Me debuted at the top of the Billboard charts months later, the bailout move looked as brilliant as the diamond certification the record eventually earned. Shakur may have recognized that he’d sold his soul to a malevolent force, but by the time he got out of jail, he was feeling rather devilish himself. He reserved his most caustic words for Diddy and Biggie, whom he still blamed for the attack in New York. Shakur released “Hit ’em Up” in the spring of 1996. The vitriolic takedown opens with a suggestion that Shakur had sex with Biggie’s wife: “I ain’t got no motherfucking friends—that’s why I fucked your bitch, you fat motherfucker.” Shakur and a handful of associates proceed to skewer their East Coast rivals in verse before Shakur closes with a rant.
“Fuck Biggie, fuck Bad Boy as a staff, record label, and as a motherfucking crew, and if you want to be down with Bad Boy, then fuck you, too!” he screams. “Die slow, motherfucker, my [forty-four magnum] make sure all y’all kids don’t grow!”
Like many of Death Row’s personalities, the Tupac that emerged in the mid-1990s looked nothing like the version that had existed previously. “He wasn’t a gangster,” says Jeff Weiss, coauthor of the book 2pac vs. Biggie, who blames the rapper’s transformation on Knight. “It was honestly Suge versus the world. I think Tupac was sort of his weapon. He was the cavalry. Like a nuclear-armed cavalry.”21
This particular cavalry-human had always been caught between several disparate worlds. Tupac’s mother, Afeni Shakur, was an active member of the Black Panthers—and successfully defended herself after she was tried with a group of comrades in the early 1970s for conspiring to bomb public buildings.22 Shortly after dodging a life sentence, Afeni gave birth to a boy: Lesane Parish Crooks (he didn’t meet his biological father until he was in his twenties). She soon changed his surname to reflect her marriage to Mutulu Shakur, a radical who robbed banks with former members of militant groups like the Weather Underground and ended up on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Afeni gave her child a new first and middle name, too, drawing inspiration from Túpac Amaru, the last ruler of the Incas, who resisted colonial rule in the sixteenth century, and Túpac Amaru II, who led a rebellion against the Spaniards some two hundred years later. (Both Amarus were eventually executed by colonial authorities.)23
Beginning his life in New York, Tupac was forced to adapt to constantly changing surroundings. His mother developed an addiction to crack cocaine and always found herself short on cash; she moved Tupac and his half-sister, Sekyiwa, between homeless shelters and rough parts of Harlem and the Bronx. A sensitive, thoughtful child who enjoyed writing poetry and reading, Tupac didn’t fit in; neighborhood kids teased him for having long eyelashes and high cheekbones, and for his inability to fight. Salvation came in the form of a move to Maryland, where Shakur was admitted to the prestigious Baltimore School for the Arts, a free charter school. There he studied ballet in addition to traditional academics.24
At school, he befriended a young Jada Pinkett (long before she became a famous actress) and started rapping—ironically, in retrospect—as MC New York. But during his senior year, just after Shakur had finished his college applications, his mother got evicted and he was shipped across the country to a family friend’s home in a public-housing complex in crime-ridden Marin City, California. Upon reaching the West Coast, Shakur experienced something worse than teasing when neighborhood gangs repeatedly jumped him. His mother relapsed and he dropped out of the local high school; to make ends meet, he started working for a local drug dealer. But as Shakur recalled in the 2003 documentary Tupac: Resurrection, after two weeks, “the dude was like, ‘Give me my drugs back,’ because I didn’t know how” to sell them.
Shakur kept writing poetry in private and began to hone his skills as a rapper. By 1991 he’d caught on with the group Digital Underground, initially as a dancer and hype man, and soon found himself on the tour on which Jay-Z was performing a similar role for Big Daddy Kane. “The guy I met who was in Digital Underground, he was so well-spoken and so sweet,” says Rosenblum. “[With Death Row], it’s like he was playing a role and a character, because that’s not the guy I met.”25 Adds Fab: “With an arty bunch of dancers, or pro-black, Afrocentric folks, or some real street corner cats, he could ingratiate himself and just blend in and become a leader within those groups.”26
Like Shakur, Biggie was a good kid who grew up in a tough neighborhood, Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant, long before it became a haven for yuppies priced out of Park Slope. After his father left, Voletta worked as many as three jobs at a time to spoil her only child, taking him on summer trips to her native Jamaica and buying him the latest video game systems. (He’d charge his friends, who already knew the portly grade schooler as “Big,” a dollar apiece to rent the games.) Biggie attended Queen of All Saints Middle School and earned excellent grades, moving on to high school at Bishop Loughlin Memorial, which counts former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and onetime NBA star Mark Jackson as alums.27
Because the Wallaces weren’t Catholic, they didn’t receive the school’s faith-based discount, and the financial strain eventually caused Voletta to enroll Biggie at Jay-Z’s public alma mater, George Westinghouse. Biggie started to lose some of his mama’s boy tendencies at the school, a training ground for rappers who honed their craft in the cafeteria—and for drug dealers and stickup kids who moved in the shadows. “There was a lot of fear,” recalls Salvador Contes, who went to Westinghouse at around the same time as Biggie and Jay-Z. “Lights were always busted… You never went to that first-floor [staircase] because everythin
g was pitch-black. You knew someone was waiting there.”28
Drawn by the prospect of fast money, Biggie soon became one of those nefarious characters. His mother never figured it out, despite finding a curious dish in his room one day. “Wow, did I serve Irish potato?” she asked herself before taking the plate downstairs and washing off the white powder. Years later, she read her son’s account of the event in a magazine: evidently, she’d thrown out his cocaine supply; he had to dig through the garbage to recover it.29
Biggie dropped out of high school in 1989, aged seventeen. More like Jay-Z than like the ill-fated dealer Shakur, he followed the laws of supply and demand—all the way to North Carolina—to find the best market for selling crack cocaine. Two years later, the law caught up with him and he was arrested, but his mother bailed him out. He returned to New York, and to his other main extracurricular activity: rapping. Biggie met Shakur for the first time after playing a show in Maryland in 1993, and they became friends; Voletta remembers Shakur calling the house and referring to her as “Ma.” Later that year, Big Daddy Kane invited the young rappers to join him onstage at Madison Square Garden, and they traded freestyle verses. Biggie even introduced Shakur to Easy Mo Bee, who’d go on to work with Shakur on his next record.30
“Tupac and Biggie were friends,” recalls Rosenblum. “I knew all the promoters and all the clubs, so we ran around [New York] and I would go up to the doors or whatever, and we would dip in… They would bum-rush the stage and do these performances.”31
So how did the two rappers’ relationship sour so quickly? It all came down to Shakur’s belief that Biggie and Diddy had set him up at Quad Studios—a theory whose roots appear to lie at least partially in the childhood trauma of constantly getting picked on—and Suge Knight certainly didn’t try to disabuse him of the notion. In Knight, Shakur had found a modern take on the Arabian Nights–style genie: a three-hundred-pound gun-toting golem who could grant wishes of freedom, physical protection, and boundless wealth.
“He was a studio gangster… He happened to be a big guy physically. He figured out how to manipulate,” says Rosenblum of Knight. “Suge sold [Shakur] the dream and he manipulated him… He’s like a poison dart. He fucked up a whole era of hip-hop.”
Knight may have started out as a studio gangster, but he gradually turned the myth he’d created for himself into reality more than any one of his peers, broadcasting his exploits to earn an increasingly fearsome reputation. He strengthened his ties to the notorious Bloods gang, opening an appointment-only nightspot in Vegas called Club 662 (on a telephone keypad, the numbers can spell m-o-b, shorthand for “member of the Bloods”). Back in Los Angeles, Knight would throw massive parties for the Death Row crew at rented mansions in the Hollywood Hills; he’d hire a shady operator known as Party Man to set up illegal gambling on one floor and arrange for scantily clad women to perform sexual favors on another.32
On one occasion, the cops showed up at around midnight to break up Dre’s birthday party. Knight had just arrived—only to discover that there were no women in the building—and had his goons throw Party Man into a limo. Dre’s onetime right-hand man, Bruce Williams, driving in the car ahead of them, remembers seeing the limo rocking back and forth with the force of the beating unleashed upon Party Man. When they arrived at their next destination, Dre, who’d been increasingly skipping out on Death Row–related activities, disappeared into a hotel room with his latest conquest. Knight demanded a full refund from Party Man, who came up short. “They took Party Man to the bathroom,” wrote Williams, “and fucked him up so bad he didn’t even press charges.”
This was the milieu into which Shakur landed upon his arrival in Los Angeles, and he played the part, covering himself in tattoos; one was of a machine gun, another the phrase “THUG LIFE.”33 In 1996, the increasingly bellicose Shakur shelled out for a quarter-million-dollar military vehicle: a black Hummer H1 outfitted with off-road wheels, three sirens, and a diamond-plated bumper.34 His first encounter with Biggie since the Quad attack came while he was sitting in the truck after the Source Awards in Los Angeles; he rolled down his window and saw Biggie standing with some Crips that Bad Boy had reportedly enlisted for protection. “West Side! Fuck y’all!” shrieked Shakur. Guns were drawn, but no shots were fired, and members of the Nation of Islam stepped in to defuse the situation. “I looked into his eyes,” Biggie later recalled. “And I was like, ‘Yo, this nigga is really buggin’ the fuck out.’”35
Knight catered to Shakur—and likely stirred up his paranoia—by fortifying the Death Row offices. There were security wands, pat-downs, and a giant bank vault–style door. Recalls concert promoter Kevin Morrow: “You’d have to have a police battering ram to get through there.”36 The fortifications were also for effect, and Knight made sure to broadcast his label’s fearsome image with signals powerful enough to cross oceans. Fab 5 Freddy remembers attending a fashion show in Italy during the mid-1990s and discovering a European publication’s cover story on Death Row. The article opened with the terrified writer in Knight’s office, being told not to step on his rug (Bloods red, of course), and cowering in front of a pair of snarling dogs. “That was a part of this mythmaking thing that he kind of poured gasoline on,” says Fab.37
As with any good Hollywood villain, Knight occasionally exhibited another side of his personality. He gave away turkeys at Thanksgiving and presents at Christmas to the less fortunate, donated school supplies and even his old shoes, and held elaborate Mother’s Day bashes. At one, the hundreds of guests in attendance were treated to performances by Shakur and the Isley Brothers; one year, all attendees received gold chains featuring a miniature Death Row logo.38
Despite the occasional Robin Hood gesture, Knight seemed to prefer darker imagery—he even had an old-fashioned electric chair installed at Death Row’s headquarters—and his vision eventually made it to the silver screen via the N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton. Director F. Gary Gray noted that Dre suggested the details of scenes in the film that depict the depravity of Death Row, including one in which the producer finds Knight puffing on a cigar while a dog attacks a man who’s been forced to strip down to his underwear. “He said, ‘This is what’s going on in Death Row at that time. It was a circus—pit bulls, violence.’… Facts are so much more interesting than fiction sometimes.”39 Says Fab: “It’s always, to me, been like he’s living in a bad gangsta movie.”40
All of this finally pushed Dr. Dre to his breaking point. Two other life events had also placed things in sharper perspective: he’d gotten engaged to girlfriend Nicole Threatt, and he’d just done five months in a Pasadena jail after a drunk-driving charge violated his parole for a previous offense.41 Real danger lurked around the corner of every platinum-plaque-encrusted wall at Death Row, and Dre didn’t want any more run-ins with the law. “It turned into a fucking Don Corleone thing,” Dre said. “It made me say… ‘Is this the life I wanna lead, or do I wanna be a businessman, be able to take care of my family, chill out, have fun, and make money while I’m sleeping?’”42 So in the middle of 1996, Dre walked away from the company he’d cofounded, leaving his master recordings and Death Row equity in Knight’s hands.
Through it all, Knight seemed to show no compunction about his actions, real or implied. If anything, his story got worse the more he told it. When Eazy-E contracted AIDS in the mid-1990s, the diminutive rapper’s N.W.A. bandmates, including Dre, put aside their differences and came to visit him in the hospital during his last days. Knight, on the other hand, danced a figurative jig on the rapper’s grave—and possibly implicated himself—during an appearance on Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show years later.
“They get blood from somebody with AIDS, and they shoot you with [a syringe], so that’s a slow death,” said Knight with a chuckle, chomping on a cigar, shoes up on Kimmel’s desk. “The Eazy-E thing.” Some of Eazy’s children have gone on record saying that they believe this is what happened to their father. When asked about this theory, Ice Cube said, “I can’t s
ay they’re crazy, because I don’t know for sure.”43
Like most bullies, though, Knight had a way of backing off when someone had the pluck to stand up to him. Months before Dre left Death Row, Williams remembers arriving on time for a meeting with Knight and leaving after an hour when he hadn’t shown up. Knight called him in a huff five hours later, threatening him over his departure. “I don’t care about all that,” Williams told him, and hung up. A friend at Death Row later called to tell Williams that he’d been on speakerphone and overheard by the label’s staff. Shortly thereafter, Williams asked Dre if he should be worried about Knight. “Suge likes you,” Dre said. “He says you’re the only one who’s got nuts.”44
Leland Robinson, son of Sugar Hill Records founders Sylvia and Joe, shared a similar anecdote. Death Row sampled a song whose rights were owned by the Robinsons, and Joe didn’t look kindly on it. “He told [Knight] what the deal was; the check was there in twenty-four hours,” says the younger Robinson. “They was two kinds of people. One was a studio gangster, and one was the real gangster.”45
The money kept pouring in for gangsters, studio and otherwise, and big labels like Interscope responded by expanding recording budgets. Tommy Boy chief Tom Silverman remembers his company doing $21 million in profits on $50 million in billing in 1992—and Interscope making just $500,000 on $100 million in Death Row–fueled billing. But as budgets soared from $50,000 per album in the late 1980s to $50,000 per song just a few years later, companies like Silverman’s got edged out.46
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