Shortly thereafter, Newsweek reported that Jodeci, their leader Devante Swing, and Mary J. Blige had all signed contracts with Suge Knight’s West Coast Management. The magazine also made reference to Knight’s “unfriendly visit” with Andre Harrell. Both men denied the story, but Harrell, Newsweek noted, had since retained the security services of Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam security team, the Fruit of Islam: “These days, they go where he goes.”
Suge celebrated by presenting Devante Swing with a $250,000 Lamborghini. “That’s how I treat my people,” he told anyone who asked and many who did not.
Puffy Combs continued to flourish, however. He became a recording star in his own right, opened successful restaurants, and developed a line of designer clothing. In 1995 Bad Boy Entertainment would sign a reported $70 million five-year joint venture deal with Arista. The label’s brightest star was an immensely obese former Brooklyn crack dealer who recorded as Notorious B.I.G. but was perhaps better known as Biggie Smalls.
Biggie’s was the most melodious voice in the history of rap. “It was almost like he was singing,” Puffy Combs would say of the first time he heard Biggie rap. “And he was such a clever poet, the way he put words together, the way he saw things.” Puffy, who like Dr. Dre tended toward perfectionism, spent eighteen months producing Biggie’s first album, the fatefully titled Ready to Die, which would become the first platinum recording by a New York rapper in almost two years.
Even as he became rich and famous in his own right, Puffy professed to admire Suge Knight. “Bad Boy was kinda modeled on Death Row,” he told Rolling Stone, “because Death Row had become a movement.” Puffy claimed that whenever Suge came to New York he stopped by Bad Boy’s office, and that whenever he flew to L.A., Suge would visit his hotel to hang out. They had driven together to Snoop Dogg’s house at least a couple of times, Puffy told Rolling Stone: “It was all cool.”
Suge already despised Puffy, though, first as an overweening imitator who was putting out weak versions of Death Row’s product, and second as puny little peacock who lacked either the body or the heart to fight his own battles. By early 1995 Death Row’s CEO was openly mocking Puffy as a weak and cowardly “little nigga.”
Puffy, though, continued to attempt appeasement. Even as Suge dissed him publicly at that summer’s Source Awards, Puffy made it a point to congratulate Snoop Dogg with an onstage embrace when Death Row’s rapper won the Artist of the Year award. Immediately afterward, Bad Boy’s boss stepped to the microphone and pleaded for unity between rappers from both the East and West coasts. Suge’s boy Daz of Tha Dogg Pound broke the short-lived peace, however, by following Puffy to the microphone, where he told the New York audience, “Yo, from the bottom of my heart, y’all can eat this dick.”
Tensions between east and west turned even nastier one month later, when Suge and Puffy both flew to Atlanta to attend a birthday party for Kris Kross producer Jermaine Dupri. The crowd adjourned to the nearby Platinum Club for an after party that Combs attended in the company of several young men he would insist later were not his bodyguards. Knight was accompanied only by his favorite thug, “Jake the Violator” Robles. At six feet tall and 245 pounds, Jake was a powerfully built man who wasn’t inclined to waste words and really didn’t need to. After Daryl Henley went to prison, Suge had replaced him at Death Row’s Wilshire Boulevard offices with big Jake, who kept people in line just by glancing in their direction.
The most reliable witness to what happened at the Platinum Club that night was a Fulton County Sheriff’s deputy who was working off duty at the door as a bouncer. Shortly after 4 A.M., the deputy recalled, he was alerted to an argument inside that was about to become a brawl. When he ran toward the raised voices, the deputy said, he saw Suge Knight and Jake Robles faced off against Puffy Combs’s cousin “Wolf” and four other men he believed to be members of the Crips. He broke up the argument, the deputy said, ordered Wolf and his friends to leave, then insisted that Knight and Robles remain inside the club for at least fifteen minutes, so as to avoid a resumption of hostilities in the parking lot. Wolf and his friends agreed to go, and were followed shortly by Puffy Combs, while Suge Knight agreed, “reluctantly,” to stay, the deputy said. After only about five minutes, however, Knight and Robles became anxious to leave, and walked out the club’s front door to their waiting limousine. The two big men had just taken their seats in the limo when they climbed out again to confront Wolf and his friends, who were approaching from the passenger side, the deputy said. When he saw that Wolf had a gun, the deputy drew his own sidearm and chased Puffy’s cousin toward the back of the club but then lost him among the parked cars. Just as he turned around and headed back toward the front of the club, the deputy said, he heard three gunshots. By the time he made it back to the area where Suge Knight’s limo was parked, he found Jake Robles on the ground, mortally wounded by bullets that had ripped through his torso. As the screaming crowd fled the building, Puffy Combs stepped up to Suge and asked what had happened. Knight gestured toward the prone figure of his friend and told Combs, “You had something to do with this!”
Back in Los Angeles, word spread swiftly among the Bloods that Jake had died to protect Suge, who was the target of a hit. Shortly after, a black newspaper in Atlanta identified the killer as Combs’s cousin. Puffy denied any involvement. “Why would I set a nigga up to get shot?” he asked a writer from VIBE magazine. “If I’m’a set a nigga up, which I would never do, I’m’a be in Bolivia somewhere.” He was told that Death Row had put out a contract on his life. “Why do they have so much hatred for me?” he asked. “I ask myself that question every day. I’m ready for them to leave me alone, man.”
When Knight was asked if he would speak to Combs if Puffy called, Suge replied, “He done that shit a hundred times. What the muthafucka need to do is stop lyin’ in magazines! Sayin’ shit didn’t happen!” Jake Robles had died to protect him from a murder attempt planned by Combs, insisted Knight, who sneered at Puffy for arriving at that year’s Soul Train Awards in Los Angeles (the event that had ended with Kelly Jamerson’s death) with a squad of Fruit of Islam security guards. Puffy was paying “Muslims money for protection,” Suge said, buying “niggas to hang wit’ him.”
“That type of support don’t last,” Suge warned, and Puffy would be gotten to, eventually.
CHAPTER FOUR
Russell Poole found many more questions than answers in one of the first LAPD crime reports he read that involved Suge Knight’s vendetta against Puffy Combs and Bad Boy Entertainment. The “victim” named in the report was an independent record promoter from New York named Mark Anthony Bell, who worked occasionally for his old high school classmate Puffy Combs. According to Bell, he had been contacted back in September, shortly after Jake Robles’s death, by a man who refused to give his name but promised that if Bell “cooperated” he could get a record deal. When he asked what cooperation meant, Bell recalled, the man said he wanted home addresses for both Puffy Combs and Combs’s mother. Write those on a piece of paper, step outside, and drop the paper on the ground, he was told, and no one would ever know he had snitched. Bell insisted that he didn’t know where Puffy lived, said he didn’t want to get involved, then hung up. The caller never identified himself as an employee of Death Row Records, but Bell felt certain that he was.
Bell was in Los Angeles on business three months later when he learned that his friend Roderick Nixon had been hired to photograph the guests at Death Row Records’ Christmas party in the Chateau Le Blanc mansion on Astral Drive in the Hollywood Hills. He and Nixon stopped by Death Row’s office on Wilshire Boulevard, Bell explained, to ask if he could get an invitation. The manager they spoke to made a phone call, then said there would be no problem. “I should have known they were setting me up,” Bell told the police later.
He and Roderick arrived at the party about 10:30 that evening, Bell said. Suge Knight and his entourage didn’t show up until almost 2 A.M. Suge was making his rounds when he noticed Bell standin
g near the dance floor, then approached him and asked, “Why didn’t you cooperate when you had the chance?” He insisted he didn’t have Puffy’s home address and told Knight that Puffy’s business number was listed in the phone book, Bell explained. Suge then asked him to come upstairs to the “VIP room” for a little chat. Before he could decline the invitation, Bell said, he was surrounded by six other men. Two of them he recognized immediately as Dr. Dre and Tupac Shakur.
All seven men escorted him upstairs to a room where a reporter from MTV and a photographer from The New York Times were being entertained. Suge’s brother-in-law Norris Anderson asked the media to leave, held the door for them as they exited, Bell said, then stationed himself as a lookout. Suge pulled a chair into the middle of the room and told him to take a seat, Bell recalled, then sat in another chair directly in front of him, while the others formed a semicircle to his right and left. Suge again demanded to know why Bell wouldn’t cooperate and began to ask him a series of questions about Puffy Combs. Tupac Shakur was whispering in Suge’s ear the whole time. Meanwhile, an especially scary-looking Blood whose teeth were covered with gold crowns, began to pace back and forth, then whirled and hit him several times in the face, Bell said. “This is for Jake,” Gold Teeth told him, according to Bell. “We’re going to kill you.” Finally, Suge Knight stood up and walked into the bathroom, Bell said. Moments later, Suge came back with a champagne flute he had filled with urine and told Bell to drink it. When he refused, Bell said, Gold Teeth hit him in the face again.
Figuring he was a dead man, anyway, Bell explained, he dropped the champagne glass and dashed across the room, hoping to escape off a balcony that was suspended above the mansion’s lobby entrance. The whole group caught him at the guardrail before he could get over it, Bell said. Suge had him by the left shoulder and leg while the others tried to pull him back, all except Tupac, who was using his fists to pound on the promoter’s fingers where they clung to the rail. When they finally pried him loose, Bell said, the whole group fell on him, punching, kicking, swinging bottles and throwing champagne glasses. “Body blows only!” Suge roared. Gold Teeth got him in a chokehold, Bell said, and squeezed until he nearly passed out. The beating and choking stopped, Bell said, only when he played dead on the floor. Someone stripped him of his wallet, his Rolex watch, and a gold necklace studded with diamonds that was worth almost $20,000. Then Suge told him to stand up.
When he finally got to his feet, Bell said, Suge began acting as if they were old friends. “You can be part of this team,” Knight told him. “I can make you rich. Do you want to make half a million dollars? Do you have friends that could deliver?” Suge then walked him to the bathroom and told him to clean up. From the corner of his eye, Bell said, he saw a couple of the Bloods talking on what appeared to be police radios, and getting excited.
As Suge opened the bathroom door, he said, “If you want your jewelry back, call me tomorrow and we’ll talk about it,” Bell recalled. Gold Teeth immediately walked up and asked Suge, “Should I do him?” “He’s good,” Suge replied. “You’re lucky he said that,” Gold Teeth told Bell, then turned and headed toward the door. “Don’t let him leave till he’s cleaned up,” Suge told Norris Anderson, then walked out of the room trailed by Tupac and Gold Teeth.
Anderson let him leave a few minutes later, but by then a pair of LAPD officers already were at the mansion. Roderick Nixon, who said he knew “something wasn’t right” when he saw Bell being led upstairs by Suge and the others, had spotted his friend about fifteen minutes later hanging from the rail of the balcony as Tupac Shakur threw punches at him. Nixon promptly called the police on a pay phone and fled the scene.
The female LAPD officer who met him at the bottom of the stairs asked, “Are you Mark?” Bell remembered, then said he had a friend who was worried that his life might be in danger. The men who had assaulted him were all within ten feet, eavesdropping on the conversation. Suge Knight chose that moment to straighten a Christmas tree nearby, then turned to look at him over the female officer’s shoulder, Bell said. The expression on Suge’s face convinced him he would never get out of L.A. alive if he talked, Bell explained, and he told the officer, “Everything’s okay.” “Did you fall?” the officer asked. “Yes,” Bell answered, then asked if she would call him a cab. The officer stayed until the taxi arrived to take him to a friend’s house in West Covina.
The next day, his friends took Bell to the hospital, where he was treated for a hemorrhaging left eye, a laceration on his left elbow, an abrasion on his right arm, a large swelling behind his left ear, and bruises that covered most of his body. Bell did show up at the LAPD’s Hollywood Station to tell the police what had really happened to him at the party, but not until until four days later, when he filed a complaint of assault and robbery against each of the seven men who had been in the VIP room with him.
Russell Poole was astounded to discover that the district attorney’s office had refused to file charges. Numerous witnesses had seen Bell being forced up the stairs to the VIP room, and his friend Nixon had observed part of the assault while Bell was attempting to escape off the balcony. Even five days after the beating, officers who interviewed Bell noted that both his eyeballs were reddened by ruptured blood vessels and that he had cuts, scrapes, contusions, and swellings over most of his body. The D.A.’s office, however, insisted that its case had been compromised by Bell’s failure to report his beating at the time of the incident while police officers were present. “You see enough police reports, though, and you learn to read between the lines,” Poole said. “They didn’t want to prosecute because they knew if they charged Suge Knight he would accuse them of racism. They figured this was all some kind of black shit that they didn’t want to get involved with.”
Mark Anthony Bell eventually filed a civil suit against Suge Knight and Death Row Records, and received a reported settlement of $600,000. He moved to Jamaica after collecting the money, and had been lying low ever since.
To Poole, the only thing more amazing than the D.A.’s refusal to file charges was the fact that Suge Knight would expose himself to criminal prosecution in such a public way, especially given his legal situation at the time. Ten months earlier, in February of 1995, Suge finally had been forced to plead guilty to the felony assault of George and Lynwood Stanley at Solar Records in July of 1992. Given his criminal history, it looked as if prison time was inevitable. If Suge Knight had learned anything, however, it was that almost any problem went away when you threw enough money at it. Person after person praised Knight to Judge John Ouderkirk and pleaded with the jurist to keep him out of prison. Among those offering testimonials were the Stanley brothers, who recently had signed a $1 million contract with Death Row Records (a deal negotiated, of course, by David Kenner). Also speaking on Suge’s behalf was the deputy district attorney assigned to prosecute him, Lawrence Longo, who observed that Mr. Knight had become head of one of the largest record companies in the country and employed numerous residents of Los Angeles County, then recommended a nine-year suspended sentence, with five years of probation. Judge Ouderkirk, who did not know that a few months later Longo’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Gina, was going to become the first white singer signed to a recording contract with Death Row Records, or that a few months after this Suge Knight would move into Longo’s Malibu Colony home, or that David Kenner would pay the prosecutor’s family $19,000 in rent each month for the use of that property, went along with the deal. Any violation of his probation (including association with convicted felons) would send him to prison, but in the meantime all Suge owed the state was one month in a halfway house.
Thirty days later, Knight was back in his Encino mansion, ready to begin the pursuit of his biggest coup to date, a Death Row Records contract with rap’s brightest star, Tupac Shakur. Tupac was in New York State’s Dannemora prison during the summer of 1995, serving a sentence of fifty-two months for a sexual-assault conviction. During the past four years he’d been arrested eight times, narrowly avo
iding conviction in the 1993 shooting of two off-duty Atlanta police officers, and barely escaping death when he was shot five times in the lobby of the Quad Studios just off New York’s Times Square. Despite recording three hugely successful albums during this period, Shakur was broke and desperate. Suge Knight recognized an opportunity. Immediately after his release from the halfway house in Los Angeles, Suge began making a series of trips to Dannemora that lasted all through that spring and into summer. Eventually he persuaded Shakur that if the rapper agreed to join Death Row’s roster he would be out of custody in short order. One week after Tupac signed a three-page agreement handwritten by David Kenner, the New York Court of Appeals announced that it was releasing Shakur from prison on $1.4 million bail. Interscope put up the money, and when Shakur walked out of Dannemora, Knight and Kenner were waiting outside in a white stretch limousine.
Suge and Tupac appeared to be flying high and in tandem during the next twelve months. Attacks on gangsta rap by William Bennett and C. DeLores Tucker rattled Interscope’s corporate masters at Time Warner, but executive anxiety was considerably eased when Shakur’s first album for Death Row, All Eyez on Me, released in February 1996, sold 3 million copies. Knight draped his stars in luscious groupies and ruby-studded jewelry, achieving an acme of in-house excess when Death Row celebrated Snoop Dogg’s acquittal on murder charges with the purchase of four Rolls-Royces. Both Death Row and Suge Knight were about to experience a rapid reversal of fortune, however. And Tupac Shakur, all of twenty-five, had only a few months left to live.
During her 1971 pregnancy, Afeni Shakur was standing trial as a member of the Panther 21, a group accused of conspiring to blow up several New York department stores. She named her son Tupac, Afeni Shakur liked to tell people, for the last Inca chief to be murdered by the Spanish conquistadores.
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