For years Poole carried a photograph that had been taken at the scene of a gun battle between two carloads of Crips and Bloods. “Two Bloods were in this car near Fremont High School when this car full of Crips pulls up on the driver’s side, flashing signs and exchanging epithets, and finally their guns come out. The passenger in the Bloods car whips out a sawed-off shotgun and points it past the driver’s face in the direction of the Crips. Just at that moment, though, they come to a curve, and as they go around the Bloods driver leans forward and the shotgun goes off. When I arrive, the driver is sprawled out the car’s open door and half his head is gone. One eye is blown to bits and the other is just lying in the cavity of his head. There’s pieces of brain and bone and blood everywhere. It was the goriest thing I ever saw, and believe me, I saw a lot of gory things. You never get used to it. Anyway, I kept the crime scene photographs to show to some of the young kids I met who were just starting off in the gangster life. They all said they expected to die young, but when I’d show them these photographs, they’d get a lump in their throat, some of them. I always wondered if it made any difference.”
Suge Knight’s childhood was idyllic compared to that of most youngsters in his Compton neighborhood. He had two gainfully employed parents, Marion Sr., a janitor at UCLA, and Maxine, who worked on the assembly line in an electronics factory, and both doted on him, excessively in his mother’s case. Suge also could claim the ghetto’s one universally accepted exemption from membership in a street gang—he was an athlete. Six feet, two inches tall, with a strong body that was growing thicker every year, Suge earned letters in both football and track all four years at Lynwood High, then won a football scholarship from El Camino Community College after his graduation in 1983.
In 1985, now listed on the program at 260 pounds, Suge transferred to the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Wearing number 54 and starting at defensive end, Suge was voted UNLV’s rookie of the year, got elected defensive captain, and won first-team all-conference honors. On campus, he was regarded as a big, friendly guy who slapped backs, told jokes, and indulged with remarkable moderation in drugs, sex, and alcohol. Other teammates from the inner city were arrested for armed robberies, carjackings, and sexual assaults, but Suge made his extra spending money by working as a bouncer at the Cotton Club.
During his senior season, though, Suge became a more remote and mysterious character. Overnight, he had enough money to rent an apartment by himself and to purchase a series of late-model sedans. He regularly received visitors from Compton, and developed a reputation as perhaps the biggest drug dealer on campus. When he was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams after his last season at UNLV in 1987, Suge promptly dropped out of school and moved back to L.A. He made the Rams’ roster during the strike-shortened 1988–89 season, and crossed picket lines to perform as a “replacement” player, but was cut from the team when the strike ended and the real pros returned to action.
Suge Knight’s criminal record began at almost the same time his football career ended. In October of 1987, his future wife, Sharitha Golden, first obtained a restraining order against her possessive boyfriend, then had him arrested for grabbing her by the hair and cutting off her ponytail during an argument in the driveway of her mother’s house. Two weeks later, on Halloween night, Suge was arrested in Las Vegas for shooting a man twice—once in the leg and once in the wrist—while stealing his Nissan Maxima. When the Las Vegas police arrested him, Suge was carrying a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson revolver in the waistband of his pants. Incredibly, though, a well-connected attorney, a contrite courtroom appearance, and his reputation as an athlete helped Suge have the felony charges against him reduced to misdemeanors. He escaped with a $1,000 fine and three years’ probation. In 1990, also in Las Vegas, Suge used a loaded pistol to break a man’s jaw, and pleaded guilty to felony assault with a deadly weapon, yet managed to walk away with a $9,000 fine and a two-year suspended sentence.
By then, Suge was working in Los Angeles as a bodyguard for Whitney Houston’s future husband, singer Bobby Brown. He soon found a new employer, though, in Beverly Hills sports agent Tom Kline, who had become fascinated by the music business and hired Suge as a driver-bodyguard–talent scout. Once he began using the agent’s office to audition rap acts, however, Suge was talking about forming his own record label. His best listener was a lanky, yellow-complected young rapper named Tracy Curry who performed as the D.O.C. When the D.O.C.’s first album, No One Can Do It Better, produced a single (“It’s Funky Enough”) that hit No. 5 on Billboard’s Top Rap Singles chart, he started hanging with a group of young men from Compton who would become the core members of the group N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude). These included Eazy-E (who owned N.W.A.’s label, Ruthless Records), Ice Cube, and a young producer-composer named Andre Young, better known as Dr. Dre and widely regarded as the best ear in rap.
With the D.O.C. (as, later, with Tupac Shakur), Suge practiced what would prove his greatest skill as a businessman, exploiting an artist’s vulnerability. When the D.O.C. was hospitalized after a serious auto accident, Suge not only visited him daily but became a combination chauffeur/confidant to the rapper’s mother. Knight soon began setting up autograph-signing appearances for the D.O.C., and eventually persuaded the rapper that Eazy-E was robbing him blind. More important, Suge used his relationship with the D.O.C. to capture the attention of Dr. Dre, convincing Dre that he was not receiving anything like a fair share of royalties from N.W.A’s hugely successful 1988 album, Straight Outta Compton.
A lot of what Suge offered performers like the D.O.C. and Dre was protection. All the rappers talked tough, but very few actually were. With an album on the charts, the D.O.C. was a local celebrity who suddenly had to contend with lots of hard-core gangbangers who believed that whipping his ass would give them status on the street. Having Suge at his side solved that problem. In an early interview, the D.O.C. described leaving a club one evening and having “some nigga run up on me like he was fixin’ to hit me in the jaw. Suge just tore his ass up,” the D.O.C. recalled. “I mean he broke him down to his component parts.”
Dre was a big man, 6’1” and 230 pounds, who appeared in videos carrying assault rifles and threatening to kill cops, but in reality his history of criminal violence involved mostly beating up women and throwing sucker punches at men half his size. Before joining N.W.A., Dre had belonged to a group called The Wreckin’ Kru that took the stage wearing spandex jumpsuits, flowing scarves, knee-high boots, Jheri curls, and eyeliner and mascara. Growing up in Compton, he lived in both Blood and Crip neighborhoods but never joined either gang. What Dre had going for him was a magical ear for how sounds—especially rhythms—could be combined to complement one another. He’d begun to develop his talent at age four, when he began to play the role of deejay at the parties thrown by his young, single mother.
Dre’s career in gangsta rap was launched during the late 1980s, when his Mazda RX7 was impounded for unpaid parking tickets. When he couldn’t find anyone who would put up the $900 he needed to get the car released, Dre turned to a Compton drug dealer named Eric Wright, but better known as Eazy-E. He would pay the fines, Eazy-E said, but only if Dre promised to produce songs for the record company he wanted to form.
Rap was just beginning to realize the commercial potential of a form that had been in development for almost thirty years. The origins of what would become known as “hip-hop” culture went back at least to the year 1966, when New York City’s Bronx borough was transformed by a pair of seemingly unrelated events. The first involved the completion of a 15,382-unit co-op apartment complex near an expressway on the northern edge of the Bronx. As thousands of poor families poured into the borough, the Bronx’s middle class began an evacuation that resulted in the sale of one apartment building after another to slumlords, many of whom would eventually abandon the structures. That same year, a group of young men who lived on or near Bruckner Boulevard began to bill themselves as the Savage Seven and to prey on the residents of the Bronxdale P
roject. As the group added members, it became known as the Black Spades, the first and largest of the street gangs that rapidly took control of street corners all across the Bronx. These gangs were the first to use graffiti to create both collective and personal identities. Monikers like TAKI 183, SLY II, and TRACY 168 began to appear on walls in every corner of the borough. The largest group of graffiti writers attended DeWitt Clinton High School, directly across from a New York Transit Authority storage yard that gave them easy access to city buses.
Subway cars soon became an even more popular target. Gangs and graffiti writing groups became increasingly indistinguishable. TRACY 168 was a white street kid so tough that he became a sort of honorary member of the Black Spades, until he formed his own group, The Wanted, which maintained a permanent headquarters in the basement of a building at the corner of 166th Street and Woodycrest Avenue. By the mid-’70s, groups like Bad Artists, Mad Bombers, and Wild Style were covering whole subway cars with murals. When the Transit Authority developed a petroleum hydroxide wash that stripped even enamel paint from its trains, TRACY 168 and the even more famous graffiti artist Lee Quinones began to cover the walls of handball courts with their work. Quinones eventually joined a group formed by fellow graffiti artist Fred Braithwaite that called itself the Fab Five, and began to sell its work in Manhattan art galleries. Braithwaite, soon known as Fab Five Freddy, eventually formed a relationship with the white painter Keith Haring, whose own graffiti art was the basis of his early fame.
The graffiti writer who made the greatest impact on the culture of the Bronx, and ultimately on the rest of the United States, was a young man who signed his work with the moniker Kool Herc. Around 1973, Kool Herc began to work as a deejay at local dance parties. Kool Herc very quickly recognized that his audiences responded most enthusiastically to the “break” sections on the records he played, the half-minute mid-section of a dance tune in which drums, bass, and rhythm guitars stripped the song to a pounding, primal beat. Kool Herc soon began to play only these sections of the songs, using two separate turn-tables to repeat the same break section again and again. “Break beats,” these repeated riffs were called. Those who danced to Kool Herc’s sounds soon became known as “break dancers.” Break dancing swiftly yielded other styles, such as “electric boogie,” which required its practioners to twitch their muscles in time to the music, and the more improvisational “free style,” which sent dancers to the floor, spinning on their hips and shoulders. The baggy clothing that eventually became associated with rap music and hip-hop was intially worn to accommodate the break dancers’ range of movement. The style of wearing pants low on the hips was said to have originated in New York’s state prisons, where inmates were forbidden to have belts.
Kool Herc’s practice of shouting out either encouraging or incendiary rhymes during his break beats led other deejays to become more and more vocal, eventually composing what amounted to spoken-word lyrics that accompanied the music they played. A young deejay named Theodor implemented a technique that involved spinning a record back and forth with the needle in the same groove, which became known as “scratching.” The Bronx deejay George Saddler, better known as Grandmaster Flash, developed what was called “punch phrasing,” a sound that layered one break beat onto another.
A relatively mainstream group called the Sugar Hill Gang produced the first rap records to gain significant radio airplay. Soon after, Run-D.M.C. and Public Enemy became the first rap groups to sell large numbers of records to white teenagers. Both groups (whose members were all raised in middle-class families) were inspired to some degree by the former Black Spades leader Afrika Bambaataa. “Bam,” as he had become known, was the closest thing hip-hop culture had to an ambassador, and his organization, Zulu Nation, was a persuasive advocate of the movement to replace gang membership and drug use with a devotion to rap music and break dancing. Just as Run’s brother, Russell Simmons, launched the first successful rap label, Def Jam, however, the advent of gangsta rap was about to change everything. At once a derivation and a degradation of hip-hop culture, gangsta rap was inaugurated in 1986. A duo from the South Bronx called Boogie Down Productions put out an album that year called Criminal Minded with a featured single titled “My 9mm Goes Bang,” all about a drug dealer who shoots his rivals in the head and gets away with it. Soon after, Schoolly D’s “PSK” (a song celebrating the grisly exploits of North Philadelphia’s Parkside Killers street gang), and Ice-T’s album Rhyme Pays became gangsta rap’s first big hits. Southern California—or, more specifically, Compton—was about to become the epicenter of the gangsta rap universe, however, and Dr. Dre soon would be the genre’s most sought-after talent.
Straight Outta Compton was an astonishing hit, despite early reviews that reviled the album. Even black radio stations refused to air songs that celebrated shooting police officers, beating and degrading women, smoking pot, getting drunk on malt liquor, and making money any way you could, but Straight Outta Compton was an immediate hit among the Crips and Bloods. The man who did most to boost sales of the album, however, was FBI public relations director Milt Aerlich, who responded to the album’s anthem “Fuck Tha Police” with a letter to Ruthless Records that chastised N.W.A. for “encouraging violence and disrespect” toward police officers. Ruthless immediately forwarded the letter to dozens of newspapers and magazines. The resulting articles and editorials that condemned the group almost instantly created a huge new audience of white teenage boys for N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton promptly sold 500,000 copies in a single month and more than two million by the end of 1988.
Almost at this moment, Suge Knight, armed with little more than a promise from the D.O.C. that he might consider leaving Ruthless Records, began trying to form a rap label he called Funky Enough Records. Suge quickly signed his friend DJ Quik, a Piru Blood who fronted a group called the Penthouse Players, and a few other local rappers, among them a young man named Mario Johnson who went by the stage name Chocolate. In late 1990, when a white rapper named Vanilla Ice put out the first rap song to top the Billboard Pop Chart, “Ice Ice Baby,” Chocolate complained to Suge Knight that he had both written and produced the song. Chocolate was even more incensed when Vanilla Ice brought out an album titled II the Extreme that sold a staggering 18 million copies; he had written seven of the album’s twelve songs, Chocolate said, yet received almost nothing in the way of credit or money.
Suge, who had just finished defending himself against a charge of felony assault with a deadly weapon in Las Vegas, promptly showed up at The Palm restaurant in West Hollywood, where Vanilla Ice was eating with his security team. According to Vanilla Ice, Suge was accompanied by two guys just as big as he was who grabbed the white rapper’s bodyguards, lifted them out of their seats, shoved them aside, and sat down in their places. Suge stared at him for a long time, then said, “How you doin’?” Vanilla Ice recalled. Similar incidents were repeated on several occasions before Suge showed up at the white rapper’s suite on the fifteenth floor of the Bel Age Hotel, accompanied by Chocolate and a member of the L.A. Raiders football team. For several years, Vanilla Ice claimed that Suge and his companions drew guns to chase away two security guards, then pulled the white rapper out onto a balcony and threatened to throw him off unless he signed over the disputed song rights. Suge Knight denied this story (and so, eventually, did Vanilla Ice), but something happened in the room that convinced the white rapper to sign over the rights to all seven songs, free of charge.
However he accomplished it, Suge’s successful “negotiation” with Vanilla Ice swiftly made him a legend in the rap world. He was the first black music executive many rappers had ever met who would not answer to white corporate masters, or even try to appease them. Now Suge wanted to show Dr. Dre and the D.O.C. that he could deal with Ruthless Records. The main object of Dre’s animus was Ruthless Records’ white business manager, Jerry Heller, whom he claimed had made more money from N.W.A.’s Straight Outta Compton tour than had the members of the group. When Dre began to bo
ycott the sessions where he was scheduled to work as a producer for Ruthless’s other rappers, the label stopped paying him, and Dre soon was at risk of losing not only his new home in Calabasas but all of the vehicles that filled his four-car garage.
According to Heller, he began receiving threats when a man he had never seen before walked into his office one day, put a finger to his head, and said, “I could have blown you away right now.” Suge Knight began to phone in threats to Heller’s assistant, Gary Ballen, then arrived at Ballen’s office one day with a whole squad of Bloods and forced him to sign a written apology to Dre’s girlfriend, the R&B singer Michel’le, for “disrespecting” her. Ballen began carrying a stun gun and taking karate classes but still couldn’t sleep at night. Neither could Jerry Heller, who hired a pair of weight lifters (one named Animal) to serve as his bodyguards and put a shotgun in a drawer of the front desk at his office. Suge would claim he came to the office one day when Heller was gone and “made those two motherfuckers get down on they hands and knees and walk around like dogs.”
Heller had known for some time that Suge wanted to see Ruthless Records’ contracts with its artists, but it was early 1991 before he asked. When Heller refused, Suge showed up at the offices of Ruthless’s corporate attorney, forced his way inside, and searched the file cabinets until he found what he wanted. Ruthless was screwing everybody, he told Dre and the D.O.C. after he read their contracts. By now Jerry Heller was driving home (by a different route every day) with an armed bodyguard who searched under the beds and in the closets of his Mountainview Estates mansion before the Ruthless executive would enter it. He had installed a state-of-the-art security system, Heller said, slept with a .38 under his pillow, stocked his cupboards with canisters of pepper spray, armed his girlfriend, and kept more than two dozen guns around his house “in places where I could get caught.” Every time a car drove by or he heard a dog bark, Heller said, he grabbed a gun and went outside to check for danger.
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