Only Eazy-E, however, had the power to release Dr. Dre from his contract with Ruthless.
Suge now was in business with Dick Griffey, chairman of Solar Records and owner of the Soul Train TV show. Solar had signed a contract in 1989 with Sony Records calling for the delivery of several albums. Griffey told Sony executives in the spring of 1991 that he could arrange to have those records produced by Dr. Dre. Sony wanted Dre to produce the soundtrack album for a movie called Deep Cover. Griffey said he could make that happen, but only if Ruthless Records would surrender its claim on Dre. Sony proposed to buy Dre’s music publishing rights from Ruthless for a million dollars if the label would let him go. The two labels were still negotiating in April of 1991 when Eazy-E got a call from Dre inviting him to a meeting at the Solar Records building in North Hollywood to “discuss our differences.”
Eazy was so convinced of Dre’s sincerity that he showed up for the meeting without his security team. When he reached the third-floor headquarters of the record label (Futureshock, it was called back then) that Suge Knight and Dre were putting together, however, his old friend wasn’t there. Instead, Eazy was met by Knight and two of his thugs. Suge began the meeting by explaining that several of his artists—Dre, the D.O.C., Michel’le, Above the Law—wanted to leave Ruthless Records, recalled Eazy, who promptly refused. Suge replied by stating that he was holding Jerry Heller hostage in a van outside and knew where Eazy’s mother lived. At that moment, Suge’s thugs walked into the room carrying lead pipes and stood on both sides of him, said Eazy, a former Crip.
Suge again denied the story, but something the big man said or did that day must have made a powerful impression on Eazy E, who signed away five of his top acts—including the leading talent in rap—for no compensation whatsoever.
* * *
With Dre on board, all Suge needed was financial backing for his record label. His first major investor was the legendary drug lord and “Ghetto Godfather,” Michael “Harry-O” Harris. A Blood member, Harry-O during the mid-1980s had achieved a level of notoriety that exceeded that of any black gangster in the city’s history. Six feet, five inches tall and draped in Versace suits, Harris could go straight from a meeting of gangbangers who worked the streets for him in South Central to a movie premiere in Westwood or a party in Bel Air. He not only maintained three expensive homes in the San Fernando Valley and a fleet of luxury automobiles, but he also invested his cocaine profits in at least a half-dozen legitimate businesses, several of them based in Beverly Hills. When he was arrested for the attempted murder of a criminal associate in 1987, Mayor Tom Bradley personally announced the seizure of Harris’s property. Sentenced to a minimum of twenty years in state prison, Harris continued to run an assortment of businesses, aided mainly by his wife, Lydia, an R&B singer. Even with Harry-O behind bars, the couple’s production company, Y-Not, financed a Broadway play, Checkmates, in which Harris personally cast an unknown actor named Denzel Washington as the male lead. Then during late 1991, Michael and Lydia Harris began to make plans to form a new music label, Death Row Records.
The link between Harris and Knight was David Kenner, a short, thickset Jewish criminal attorney with a slicked-back ponytail, unblinking black eyes, and a ferocious attitude. Born in Brooklyn but educated at USC, Kenner, then in his mid-fifties, lived in an Encino mansion hidden behind high walls and surrounded by surveillance cameras. The attorney enjoyed the story that he kept a loaded Uzi on the desk in his home office and liked to tell people he was best friends with Tony Brooklier, whose father, Dominic, once had been among the biggest Mafia bosses in the country.
Kenner, who was handling Harry-O’s criminal appeal at the time, set up the first meeting between Harris and Suge Knight in the fall of 1991 at the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles. The deal negotiated among the three was an agreement that the new record company would be a joint venture in which Knight and the Harrises each owned fifty percent. Kenner would form the Death Row Records corporation and help run its parent company, Godfather Entertainment. The contract Kenner eventually drew up gave Suge control of Death Row’s day-to-day operations, while Harris (who was to invest $1.5 million as start-up capital) provided the company’s “overall philosophy and direction.” Almost two years would pass before Harris realized that Knight and Kenner had walled him off with a barrier of corporate shells from any actual involvement in Death Row Records, including profit sharing.
The money Harris put up helped get Death Row Records rolling, but Knight and Kenner soon were enmeshed in a complex and costly legal dispute involving both Ruthless Records and the Sony Corporation. The two needed major backing to make records with Dr. Dre and the other artists Suge had taken from Eazy-E. In late 1992 the unlikely partners got what they needed, $10 million dollars from Jimmy Iovine and Ted Field of Interscope, an independent company that was financed by and distributed through Time Warner’s corporate network. Field was a department-store heir best known as a playboy until he started a film company that produced a string of critically panned but commercially successful movies like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and Three Men and a Baby. Iovine, the son of a Brooklyn longshoreman who had produced records for the likes of Bruce Springsteen, John Lennon, and U-2, was the brains of the operation, and he believed Dr. Dre to be a genius.
Death Row Records soon moved out of the Solar Records building (with David Kenner on board, Suge no longer felt he needed Dick Griffey) and set up shop alongside Interscope’s offices on Wilshire Boulevard near Westwood. The first album released by Death Row Records, Dr. Dre’s keyboard-heavy homage to marijuana, The Chronic, became the biggest-selling gangsta rap album of all time, holding a place in Billboard’s Top 10 for eight months. The same day The Chronic was released, David Kenner filed articles of incorporation for Death Row Records that listed Suge Knight and Dr. Dre as the company’s sole directors. All Michael Harris received was an acknowledgment in the liner notes: “Special thanks to Harry-O.”
The debut album of Death Row’s newest rap artist, Snoop Doggy Dogg’s Doggystyle, also went multiplatinum, and by the end of 1993, the label’s first full year in business, the company had grossed more than $60 million. The label already was becoming known as the first gangsta rap label owned by real gangstas. The release party for The Chronic was held at the Strip Club in Century City, where porno “stars” sashayed through throngs of drooling Bloods, and guests were served slices of a cake complete with iced marijuana leaves. The atmosphere, many of those in attendance would remark, was notably more ominous and volatile than at the functions Death Row had sponsored during its start up. Suge Knight now was traveling with an entourage of hard-core gangbangers—”penitentiary niggas,” the label’s more dignified employees called them—that numbered as many as three or four dozen on some occasions. Suddenly he seemed to think he was Al Capone, other record executives whispered among themselves. At an L.A. club called Prince’s Glam Slam, Suge—surrounded by an audience of his homeboys—got into a fight with a security guard named Roderick Lockett and beat the man so badly that several surgeries were required to repair his spleen. When Knight’s violent former L.A. Rams teammate Daryl Henley was suspended from the team for his implication in the operation of a large drug ring, Suge put the football player to work as his general manager and personal enforcer at Death Row’s Wilshire Boulevard office. Many of his fellow employees were relieved when Henley’s state prison sentence cost him that position.
Death Row’s bad reputation became national news when Suge, Dre, and the D.O.C. were arrested following a melee in a hotel lobby at the Black Radio Exclusive convention in New Orleans. After a fifteen-year-old fan was stabbed, the New Orleans cops rode horses into the hotel lobby to break up the brawl. What appeared to be negative publicity, however, only increased sales for Death Row Records.
In a business where bad was good, Suge Knight had positioned himself as the baddest gangsta around. Suge publicly proclaimed his membership in the Bloods gang, and in his office at Death Row�
��s new Tarzana studios the sofa, chairs, and cabinets all were deep red. The carpet was red, too, except for the white outline of Death Row’s logo— a man strapped to an electric chair with a sack over his head. A guard with a metal detector greeted guests at the studio’s front door, and kept a list of “security personnel”—many of them Bloods members—who were permitted to bring guns inside. White executives and black journalists were kept waiting for hours; when they finally were admitted to Knight’s office, Suge stood up to give them a good view of the 315-pound physique he maintained by lifting weights for two hours every morning, then blew cigar smoke in their faces and told them his German shepherd guard dog Damu (Swahili for “Blood”) was trained to kill on command. After one reporter asked him a question that Death Row’s CEO found offensive, Knight dragged the man to a fish tank filled with piranha and threatened to let them eat the man’s face.
For Suge, the consequences of such behavior were all for the good. Knight not only was embraced by ghetto musicians and lionized as an authentic gangster in the emerging hip-hop press, but found that he could use his menacing image to cut corners as well as deals; Death Row Records was becoming notorious for stiffing music and video producers, none of whom had the nerve to sue.
At the same time, though, Suge was adept at pandering to the fatuous platitudes of white liberals who wanted to believe that Knight’s “act” was some useful form of performance art, the self-serving pantomime of a man who was just doing business, like everybody else in town. Most of his legal problems had been created by “police out looking for trouble,” Suge told one reporter. “It don’t bother me none, though. That’s the way it’s been as long as I can remember. I’m used to it.” Knight’s commitment to violence was genuine, however, and his rap sheet showed it. In 1992 alone, Suge was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and convicted of misdemeanor battery in Beverly Hills, convicted of carrying a concealed weapon in West Covina, and convicted of disturbing the peace in Van Nuys. The most serious charge filed against Knight that year, however, and the one that would haunt him the longest, involved an incident that had taken place at Solar Records shortly before Suge made his deal with Interscope.
Dre, the D.O.C., and the newly signed Snoop Dogg were among the performers working in various studios on the building’s third floor that evening when Suge noticed an aspiring producer named Lynwood Stanley using his company line. “Say, Blood,” Suge told the man, “don’t be on the phone.” Lynwood replied, “Don’t be coming at me with that gangbang shit. I’m not from L.A.” Lynwood’s brother George intervened and hustled his brother into the lunchroom to use the pay phone there, but Suge came in after the two a moment later, pushed the receiver on the pay phone down, pointed a loaded pistol at Lynwood Stanley’s head, and asked, “Whassup?” Suge then proceeded to beat both brothers senseless as they retreated down a hallway to a recording studio. Suge stopped at the door to tell Dre, Snoop, the D.O.C., and others in the crowd that followed him, “Get out. Close the door. Go upstairs,” then followed the Stanleys into the studio, where he continued to beat the two, finally ordering them to their knees. When Lynwood Stanley refused, Suge fired off a round, smacked the producer across the temple with the barrel of his gun, threatened to shoot both brothers in the head, then forced them to take off their pants and lay naked from the waist down on the floor in front of him. After removing Lynwood’s wallet from his pants pocket, Suge said he would keep the producer’s ID, so that if the brothers went to the cops he could have them and their family members killed.
The Stanleys called Suge’s bluff, though, and less than an hour later a team of LAPD officers stormed into the building. Performers and producers scrambled to escape, screaming at one another to get rid of their drugs and guns. Some locked themselves in closets, others dashed to the stairway. The Stanley brothers stepped onto the third floor surrounded by cops and pointed at Suge, who immediately denied everything. Only when the brothers showed the cops the bullet embedded in the wall of the studio where they had been beaten did the police arrest Knight.
The prosecution’s case would be tough to beat, but David Kenner (aided by Suge’s newest defense counsel, Johnnie Cochran) was able to delay Knight’s trial date for almost three years, and in the meantime Suge still was living large. He had homes in Westwood, Encino, and Anaheim Hills, as well as his parents’ old place in Compton, which he had completely remodeled, adding a four-car garage. Nearly every morning, Suge stopped at Death Row’s auto customizing business, Let Me Ride, where he kept a fleet of luxury vehicles for his personal use. He also began to branch out into a variety of new and socially accepted directions, hosting an annual Mother’s Day celebration for fifty single moms at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, sponsoring Christmastime toy giveaways at Compton churches and hospitals, establishing (most amusingly) an anti-gang foundation in Compton, and volunteering to underwrite Maxine Waters’s new youth program.
Suge was becoming a sort of living urban myth, especially after gangbangers threw shots at him outside the Roxbury and Glam Slam nightclubs. A minor scuffle outside the Beverly Hills restaurant, Larry Parker’s, soon was inflated into the story that Suge had survived unscathed a shoot-out in which four of his attackers were wounded. And Suge really had escaped death one afternoon at nearby Lawry’s, where he was lunching with the former Black Entertainment Television anchorwoman Madeline Woods when a Crip at a nearby table spotted him and used his cell phone to set up an ambush. Just as Suge stepped outside and the Crips prepared to open fire, however, an LAPD patrol car pulled into the parking lot, and the Crips sped away. The guy even had dumb luck going for him, the gangbangers said.
Suge’s business, meanwhile, was booming. At the very first Source Awards ceremony at the Paramount Theater in Manhattan, Death Row artists Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg swept nearly every major award: Album of the Year, Solo Artist of the Year, Producer of the Year for Dre, New Solo Artist of the Year and Lyricist of the Year for Snoop.
The second annual Source Awards ceremony, though, was dominated not by Death Row Records’ artists but by its CEO. Suge stunned the crowd in the hall—not to mention the television viewers at home—by storming to the stage trailed by his effeminate new R&B singer Danny Boy, who brought the Death Row contingent to its feet by flashing both Blood and Crip signs. Knight stood by himself at the microphone for several moments, staring balefully into the audience, then announced, “If you don’t want the owner of your label on your album or in your video or on your tour, come to Death Row.” The crowd gasped, understanding that Suge had just made a very public attack on Sean “Puffy” Combs, the New York–based CEO of Bad Boy Entertainment, who during the past year had made cameos in most of the records and albums his label produced.
The melodrama that enveloped Knight and his outlaw label had been taken up one very big notch. Suge had now not only named a legitimate rival, but acquired an archenemy whose defeat would become his overriding ambition.
Perhaps the ultimate commentary on the perverse ethos of gangsta rap was that, by 1994, Puffy Combs had taken to telling the people he worked with that he grew up in Harlem as the son of a drug dealer. That was the true story of Puffy’s first two and a half years. His father, Melvin, was a street hustler who died in Central Park when he was shot in the head during a drug deal. Puffy’s mother told the children their father had died in a car accident, however, and enrolled her only son in an all-white Catholic school where he became an altar boy. The family moved to Westchester County when Puffy was eleven, and by the time he turned twelve the boy was working two paper routes in the suburbs. He attended an all-boys’ prep school in Manhattan, then matriculated to Howard University, where he majored in business administration. Puffy didn’t discover until he was seventeen how his father really had died.
During his sophomore year in college, Puffy convinced Uptown Records president Andre Harrell to take him on as an unpaid intern. Within a few months, Combs was on salary as Uptown’s director of A&R. Then in December of 1992, Harrell made tw
enty-two-year-old Puffy the youngest vice president for A&R in the history of the music business. The success of his performers Mary J. Blige and Jodeci made Puffy a celebrity and convinced Andre Harrell that his protégé had become a competitor. Harrell fired Combs from Uptown in 1993, but only a few months later Puffy’s new enterprise, Bad Boy Entertainment, signed a $15 million distribution deal with Arista Records.
Suge Knight made his first incursion into the New York rap scene when he began courting not only Mary J. Blige, who had followed Puffy Combs to Bad Boy Entertainment, but also Jodeci, a group that was increasingly disenchanted with Uptown Records. Suge demanded a meeting with Harrell, who was terrified of the big man. When Suge showed up at Harrell’s office, though, he said he believed the place was bugged and insisted on adjourning to the bathroom. Afterward, three stories circulated about what had happened in there. One was that Suge pulled Harrell’s pants down and threatened to rape him. Another was that Suge held Harrell’s head over the toilet bowl and threatened to drown him. The third was that Suge held a gun to Harrell’s head, handed him a contract, and said, “Sign this or else.” Whatever actually happened during the bathroom meeting, Harrell almost immediately upgraded Jodeci’s contracts, doubling their royalty rate to 18 percent and giving them an unusual degree of creative control over their records. And not only Jodeci but Mary J. Blige as well were freed from their management contracts with Harrell.
Suge also arranged a meeting with Bad Boy Entertainment’s lawyers and executives in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel to discuss the company’s contract with Mary J. Blige. In an interview, Suge described the meeting succinctly: “I told them they was lettin’ Mary out of that fucked-up deal. And they did.”
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