Dre’s version of the incident was that someone rang his bell, claiming to be Jimmy Iovine. When he opened the door, Dre said, “In comes Suge with eight or nine niggas … Suge said, ‘We tryin’ to get the tapes.’” When he told Suge the tapes were being copied right now, Dre recalled, Suge said he would wait, then suggested that he put the Death Row logo on his next album. Several days later the two met at Gladstone’s restaurant in Malibu and reportedly worked out their differences. But when Suge was asked about their parting of the ways, he answered, “The nigga just kind of hid. Stopped callin’.”
All Dre cared about was that Death Row at last seemed ready to leave him be. Suge couldn’t afford to let Tupac Shakur simply walk away, however.
CHAPTER FIVE
Tupac tipped his hand more by what he did than by anything he said. During early 1996, he insisted upon negotiating his movie deals without Suge Knight’s agency. And in February of 1996, Death Row’s biggest star formed his own and entirely separate production company, Euphanasia, then brought his old friend Yaasmyn Fula to L.A. to run the business. From the first, Fula found it difficult to obtain any financial accounting from Death Row Records. Whenever she sent Suge Knight’s office a request for documents, Fula said, what she received instead were cars and jewelry. She began to feel “there was this dark cloud over us,” Fula told The New Yorker’s Connie Bruck. “I knew so much was wrong.” While Tupac would not let Fula prod Suge Knight with legal threats, he did refuse to let any of his younger cousins sign contracts with Death Row. Tupac also began to rely increasingly on his East Coast attorney, Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, who was frustrated by his dealings with the rapper’s Los Angeles lawyer, David Kenner. Since Tupac’s finances were entirely controlled by Death Row, he had no choice but to rely on the record company’s assistance in settling Tupac’s numerous civil lawsuits, Ogletree complained. David Kenner would tell him the check was in the mail, then that it was being sent by FedEx, then that it was being wired. The money never seemed to arrive, however.
By that summer, Tupac had become increasingly overt about his plan to escape Death Row. “He had a strategy,” Ogletree told Connie Bruck. “The idea was to maintain a friendly relationship with Suge, but to separate his business.” That was not a difficult thing to accomplish legally, Ogletree said, “but you have to live after that … It was a question of how to walk away with your limbs attached and your bodily functions operating.”
Tupac and Suge at least were still united in hostility toward their rivals at Bad Boy Entertainment. Tupac’s first album released by Death Row Records, 1996’s All Eyez on Me, sold more than half a million copies during its first week in the stores, earning $10 million, second only to The Beatles Anthology as the best commercial opening in the history of the music industry. Executives at other labels were duly impressed, but even more astonished by the vehemence of Tupac’s attack on Puffy Combs and East Coast rappers in the song “Hit ‘Em Up.” Especially startling was Tupac’s vicious assault on Biggie Smalls, whom he continued to blame for his shooting at Quad Studios. For several months before the album’s release, Tupac had been seen at parties in L.A. with Biggie’s wife, singer Faith Evans. Evans, who knew that her husband had been carrying on with his former flame L’il Kim, called Tupac “mad cool” in one interview, and agreed to perform with him on a number for Shakur’s new album. Biggie’s wife was startled and embarrassed, however, when the song came out with the title “Wonda Why They Call U Bitch.” Even more humiliating was Tupac’s claim to an interviewer from the Source that he had been sleeping with Faith. Tupac repeated this claim, only much more crudely, on “Hit ‘Em Up:” “I fucked your bitch, you fat motherfucker.”
Biggie handled the attendant publicity with an impressive aplomb. “If honey was to give you the pussy,” he told an interviewer, “why would you disrespect her like that? If you had a beef with me, and you’re like, ‘Boom, I’m a fuck his wife,’ why would you be so harsh on her? Like you got a beef with her. That shit doesn’t make sense.”
Little more than a month after the release of All Eyez on Me, Biggie came to Los Angeles to accept an award at the 1996 Soul Train Awards and in his speech thanked Brooklyn. Loud jeers erupted from the Death Row section of the audience. Afterward, Biggie and Tupac came face to face for the first time in almost two years. When he looked in Tupac’s eyes, Biggie said, “I thought, ‘Yo, this nigga is really buggin’ the fuck out.’” Suge Knight was at Tupac’s side, and both were surrounded by a security squad of bad-looking Bloods as they began to shout, “We gonna settle this right now!” Bad Boy rapper L’il Caesar shouted from behind the Southside Crips who were working security for Biggie, “Fuck you! Fuck you, nigga! East Coast, mother-fucker!” Tupac yelled back, “We on the West Side now! We gonna handle this shit!” As the two sides faced off, one of the Crips drew a gun and the crowd scattered from the clutch of scuffling, shouting gangbangers.
After the incident, both Biggie and Puffy Combs admitted that the East Coast–West Coast feud was real. Tupac “ain’t mad at the niggas that shot him,” Puffy told an interviewer. “He knows where they’re at. He knows who shot him. If you ask him, he knows, and everybody in the street knows, and he’s not stepping to them, because he knows he can’t get away with that shit. To me, that’s some real sucker shit.”
Suge replied that the feud wasn’t between the East and West Coasts, but between “ghetto niggas and phony niggas.” Puffy, he said, was “a phony nigga. He’s frontin’, tryin to be somethin’ he ain’t. Here’s the whole thang with Puffy: They say shit to make themselves bigger. I ain’t never did no interview sayin’ shit about people. By sayin’ shit about Death Row in magazines, they tryin’ to put themselves on our level, and it ain’t no motherfuckin’ comparison.” Suge’s proposed solution to the conflict was to put Puffy and Tupac in a boxing ring together. “Look at [Puffy’s] body,” Knight said. “Who can he whup? How you gon’ talk shit and be in a girl’s body? And I’ll beat Biggie’s ass all over the ring! We can do it in Vegas and give the money to the ghetto.”
In April of 1996, Suge upped the ante by announcing that Death Row Records intended to open an East Coast division in Manhattan. Tupac advised a radio station in Oakland that Suge meant to sign New York–based acts like Big Daddy Kane and Wu-Tang Clan. Observing from the sidelines, Dr. Dre commented, “If it keeps up this way, pretty soon niggas from the East Coast ain’t gonna be able to come out here, and vice versa.”
Suge Knight, however, brought a huge entourage with him to New York for the MTV Awards show on September 7. The group made an aggressively grand entrance, stalking past the music industry executives—some of them presidents of other labels, who waited in line with tickets in hand—to take seats without delay. After the show, the Death Row group had to be separated from Bad Boy’s contingent by more than twenty NYPD officers.
Only a few weeks earlier, Puffy Combs had made his most ominous comments on the “East vs. West” feud in an interview with VIBE: “Bad boys move in silence. If somebody wants to get your ass, they’re gonna wake up in heaven. There ain’t no record gonna be made about it. It ain’t gonna be no interviews; it’s gonna be straight up. ‘Oh, shit, where am I? What are these, wings on my back?’” Puffy had ended the interview by telling VIBE, “I’m ready for [this beef] to come to a head, however it got to go down. I’m ready for it to be out of my life and be over with.”
Tupac Shakur seemed finally to feel the same way. His decision to leave Death Row had changed him, according to his fiancée Kidada Jones, whose father Quincy Jones owned VIBE. Tupac was tired of the lifestyle he had been sharing with Suge Knight, Kidada said. Instead of hanging out at strip clubs, she told an interviewer, Tupac had taken up cooking. After finishing his next album, the last he owed Death Row Records under the contract he had signed in the prison at Dannemora, Kidada said, Tupac might sign with Warner Bros. Her boyfriend also intended to move out of the house Death Row had leased for him and settle with her in another part of
town, perhaps father a child.
Any doubt about Tupac’s intention to break with Death Row had been removed on August 27, when the rapper made the move that a lot of people predicted would get him killed—firing David Kenner as his attorney. Outside the MTV Awards show one week later, Tupac seemed intent upon defusing rather than escalating the East vs. West feud. “We are businessmen. We are not animals,” he told the interviewer for a film crew who asked what would happen if Death Row met Bad Boy inside. “It’s not like we’re going to see them and rush them and jump on them.”
As word that Tupac Shakur had discharged David Kenner spread through the music industry, Suge Knight insisted the problem was between the two of them and that he had no hard feelings toward Tupac. At the MTV Awards in New York, Suge invited Tupac to join him in Las Vegas for the Mike Tyson–Bruce Seldon heavyweight title fight three days later, on September 7. Tupac seemed to sense that his attendance would put him at risk, and on the morning of the seventh he told Yaasmyn Fula that instead he would go to Atlanta to deal with some problems among his relatives. During the next several hours, Suge Knight convinced Shakur to change his mind and go to Las Vegas after all, but Tupac confided to Kidada Jones that he still felt uneasy about the trip. She advised him to wear his bullet-proof vest, but Tupac said the weather was too hot for that. Late that afternoon, he boarded a flight to Vegas and said good-bye to Los Angeles for the last time.
Suge Knight had spent much of the past year establishing himself as a presence in Las Vegas. The most visible indication of how Suge hoped to be viewed in Sin City was the house he purchased on Monte Rosa Avenue in the Paradise Valley Township, home to both the toniest estates and most influential citizens in the Las Vegas Valley. Suge’s new house was right across the street from Wayne Newton’s Shenandoah Ranch, and just two doors down from the home of fighter Mike Tyson, who had persuaded Knight to buy the place. Built of red brick, the house was a sprawling 5,215 feet set on 1.33 acres, with a backyard that bordered a golf course. Suge first had seen it in the Martin Scorsese film Casino, where it served as the home of the organized crime character played by Robert De Niro, Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. Suge wore a seven-carat diamond in his ear when he made the deal to buy the place, then proceeded to redecorate in a style not seen previously even in garish Las Vegas, painting the bottom of his swimming pool blood red, then covering the interior of his home with same color carpet. Much of the furniture was red, too, as was the Rolls-Royce Corniche that Suge drove around town.
Even before he purchased his house in Paradise Valley, Suge had endeavored to form associations with those connected to the organized crime families of New York and Chicago. Among the first Las Vegas attorneys he hired was John Spilotro, whose father, “Tony the Ant” Spilotro, had been headman for the Chicago mob during most of the 1970s (before being brutally beaten, then buried alive in an Indiana cornfield). Suge would step up a class when he retained the services of the notorious Oscar Goodman, an attorney who billed himself as “Mouthpiece for the Mob” and represented most of the important Mafiosi charged with crimes in Nevada, as well as Goodman’s partner, the former U.S. Attorney David Chesoff.
To open his new nightclub just off The Strip, Suge had relied upon the only two Caucasians who were significant figures at Death Row Records. The first, of course, was David Kenner, whose connections to the Genovese Family had long fascinated Suge. Perhaps even more helpful, though, was the accountant Suge had hired as Death Row’s new business manager, Steve Cantrock. It was Cantrock who introduced Suge to Robert Amira, the Las Vegas “businessman” who several years earlier had been indicted along with Joseph Colombo Jr. and Alphonse “the Whale” Merolla in a scheme to defraud the Dunes Hotel with an airline ticket scam. (The case against Amira had been dismissed—in inimitable Las Vegas fashion—when the judge claimed he had seen the prosecutor and the jury foreman communicating improperly.) With Amira’s assistance, Suge was able to take possession of a club that had been known as Botany’s back during his days at UNLV, when the patrons were mostly wealthy white people. Botany’s previous owner had been convicted a few years earlier for helping the Chicago mob skim money from the Stardust Hotel, however, and the nightclub had languished ever since. Suge reopened the venue as the 662 Club, and catered to a predominantly black clientele. The name “662” had multiple meanings. On a phone pad, those numbers spelled out MOB, for Member of the Bloods. Tupac Shakur liked to say the letters stood for Money Over Bitches. The numbers 662 also appeared in the California Penal Code, however, where they were used to refer to Death Row inmates.
Tupac’s first performance after his release from the New York state prison system had been at the 662 Club in November of 1995. The club was packed to nearly twice its capacity that evening, and a crowd that included the entourages of athletes Mike Tyson and Deion Sanders got completely out of hand. The Las Vegas police were not happy about being forced to deal with this many drunk and dangerously violent characters, and threatened to close the place down.
The scene was only slightly less rowdy when Suge brought Tupac and Snoop Dogg back to Las Vegas with him for the Mike Tyson–Frank Bruno fight in the spring of 1996, and again when Suge and his Death Row entourage opened the club after Tyson’s fight with Peter McNealy that August. Suge did post himself at the door of the club that night, and personally tossed several troublemakers out into the parking lot, but the cops were furious anyway about the trouble the 662 Club was causing them, and followed through on their promise to close the place. Knight was able to open the club for the evening of the Tyson-Seldon fight on September 7 only by arranging to have his after party sponsored by Las Vegas PD Officer Patrick Barry, a retired professional boxer who was ostensibly using the event to raise money for Barry’s Boxing Gym. A big sign on the club’s marquee advertised the event as “Barry’s Boxing Benefit,” while smaller letters identified the organizer as “SKP” (Suge Knight Productions). A line started forming outside the club at 5:30 that afternoon, hours before the fight’s scheduled start, and hundreds of people were trying to buy $75 tickets for the 662 Club’s party.
Tupac Shakur was staying with Kidada Jones at the Luxor Hotel in one of the rooms Suge had booked for the weekend. Although his backup singers the Outlaw Immortalz served as both an entourage and a security detail, Tupac’s two main bodyguards were a pair of black ex–police officers, Kevin Hackie and Frank Alexander. Hackie wasn’t in Las Vegas, however, having fallen out with Death Row’s head of security, Reggie Wright Jr., over $10,000 he had been paid to work on the set of Tupac’s most recent film, Gang Related. That money should have been paid to Wrightway Protective Services, insisted Wright, who retaliated by firing the bodyguard. Frank Alexander was alone when he arrived for a meeting with Suge’s Las Vegas attorneys, who explained that neither Alexander nor any of Tupac’s other security personnel could carry firearms, because Death Row had failed to secure the proper clearances from the police.
While Alexander fretted about Tupac’s vulnerability, the rapper himself was losing big at a blackjack table in the Luxor. The other members of the Death Row contingent noticed right off that Tupac wasn’t wearing the medallion of the hooded figure in an electric chair that had been around his neck since Suge presented him with it months earlier. The new figure on Tupac’s gold chain was a $30,000 diamond-studded replication of the emblem he had chosen for his own company, Euphanasia: a black angel of death, on its knees, head tilted down, backed by enormous wings and a golden halo. Tupac finally broke his losing streak and was ahead of the game when he left the casino and made his way across a footbridge to the MGM Grand, where the Tyson-Bruno fight would take place.
Since his release from prison following a rape conviction, Tyson had become a heroic figure for many ghetto gangbangers and an honorary member of the Death Row family. Suge attended every one of his fights, and so did Tupac. Included with Knight and Shakur in the crowd that evening would be the Reverend Jesse Jackson, basketball stars Charles Barkley and Magic Johnson, as well as the hi
p-hop acts Run-DMC and Too Short.
At the entrance to the big room where the MGM Grand staged its fights, Tupac was forced to stop and wait for Suge, who had the tickets. It had become commonplace in recent months for Suge to keep even his biggest stars waiting two, three, four, even five hours so that he could make an entrance that established his dominance over them. As he watched other celebrities slip inside and take their seats, Tupac was surrounded by fans who pressed forward, ducking under the arms of security guards to take his photograph or demand an autograph. Finally he lost his temper. “Fuck this shit!” he told Alexander. “Every time we go somewhere, he always has to be fuckin’ late! I didn’t want to come to Vegas, no fuckin’ way. We gonna miss the fuckin’ fight.” Just as Shakur began to threaten to find his own tickets, Knight showed up. Tupac immediately wiped the angry expression from his face, recalled Alexander, who understood that the rapper still hoped for a more amicable parting with Suge than Dre had managed.
Suge and Tupac sat together, but weren’t in their seats long. The fight was over in less than two minutes, as Tyson came out of his corner throwing punches at a furious rate and Seldon dropped to the canvas for good 109 seconds into the first round. While many at courtside were disappointed, and a few even shouted that the fight had been fixed, Tupac was thrilled by what he’d witnessed. He danced around with a wild look in his eyes, pumping his arms and throwing punches at the air as he shouted, “Fifty blows! Fifty blows! I counted them!” Tupac led the Death Row group backstage to mingle with Tyson, but after only a couple of minutes Suge announced that they had to leave. A startled Tupac complained that it would be the first time he had not congratulated Mike personally after a fight, but big Suge grabbed the little rapper’s arm and led him toward the exit.
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