As they approached the auditorium’s main entrance, Suge threw his arm around Tupac’s shoulders, embracing him like the “little brother” that he often called his biggest star. Just as the two men passed through the doors, however, trailed by Alexander and Suge’s entourage of Mob Piru homeboys, a Blood named Travon “Tray” Lane approached Tupac and whispered something in his ear. Alexander could see trouble coming, especially after he watched Tupac turn his head to stare at a young black man who stood on the other side of the hallway, “like he was anticipating the arrival of someone,” as the bodyguard would put it later. The young man who stood alone was Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, a Southside Crip who, along with seven or eight of his homies, had jumped him, Tray said, outside a Foot Locker store in the Lakewood Mall. Anderson and the other Crips had snatched the Death Row medallion off the chain on his neck as they pummeled him, Tray said.
Anxious to impress Suge and the other Bloods with his continuing loyalty, Tupac immediately charged across the hallway toward Anderson, trailed by Knight and his entourage. “You from the South?” Tupac asked, but before Baby Lane could answer Tupac had thrown a punch at him. The Crip went to the ground immediately, recalled Alexander, who found it difficult to believe the skinny rapper could hit that hard. And Baby Lane offered almost no resistance, Alexander said, as Suge and the other Bloods surrounded him, punching, kicking, and stomping.
When Tupac’s Euphanasia medallion tore loose and fell to the ground, the rapper stooped to pick it up. Alexander, a bodybuilder who once had finished second in the Mr. World Championship, seized the opportunity to pull Tupac away and half-drag, half-carry him toward the nearest exit. Suge and the others were still on Anderson, kicking him while he was down, recalled Alexander, until the hotel’s security force arrived on the scene. Suge shouted, “Let’s go!” and the others immediately scattered in different directions.
Alexander led Tupac outside without waiting around to watch what would happen next, but they were at once spotted by a huge crowd of groupies and hangers-on who chased them back to the Luxor. Kidada (whom Alexander considered a surly, snobbish brat) was waiting in their room at the Luxor, where Tupac regaled her with a description of the beating. She was giggling in excitement, recalled Alexander; the girl seemed to love this stuff, though she never got any closer than hearing about it from her boyfriend. Tupac didn’t invite her to the party at the 662 Club, either, largely ignoring the young woman as he changed from a tan silk shirt and blue jeans into a black-and-white basketball tank top and teal-colored sweat pants, then led Alexander back downstairs.
As they stepped outside the main entrance to the Luxor, Suge and the rest of the Death Row entourage were loading into a caravan of vehicles for the drive to the 662 Club. They would go to his house first, announced Suge, who intended to delay their arrival so the group could make a grand entrance. Tupac wanted to drive his Hummer with Alexander in the passenger seat and two buddies from the Outlaws in back, but Suge told him that they had private business to discuss, and persuaded the rapper to ride with him in the big new BMW sedan he had purchased one week earlier. Tupac told Alexander to drive his friend Yafu Fula and another member of the Outlaws to Suge’s place in Kidada’s Lexus.
The group stayed only briefly at Knight’s house, where everyone took a look at the new Death Row emblem painted on the bottom of the pool. The caravan that headed toward The Strip about fifteen minutes later was composed entirely of luxury vehicles—Mercedes, BMWs, Cadillacs, Lexuses. Suge’s homies cranked up the Pioneer sound system in the Caddy they drove, so loud that “the ground was trembling,” recalled Alexander, who followed right behind Suge’s black BMW. Knight and Shakur were listening to Tupac’s newest album, Makaveli, at an obliterating volume until a police officer riding a bicycle waved them over and forced Suge to turn the sound down. When the cop let them go, Suge continued toward The Strip. Alexander hoped that Suge would turn right on Tropicana, so that they could enter the club from the rear, but instead the BMW blew through a light and turned on Flamingo Road, where Tupac’s approach to the club became a public spectacle. Cars filled with groupies whose breasts spilled out of low-cut dresses pulled up alongside to show Tupac their assets and angle for inclusion in his entourage.
By the time the caravan approached the Maxim Hotel, dozens of cars filled mostly with young women had joined it and the unarmed Alexander was becoming increasingly nervous. Scores of people on the street and sidewalk angled for a glimpse of Tupac when Suge stopped for a red light at Korval Lane, right behind the black Cadillac his homeboy K-Dove drove. A Chrysler sedan immediately pulled up on the BMW’s left, filled with four young women who smiled to catch Tupac’s attention. Moments later, a white Cadillac screeched to a stop slightly in front and to the right of the BMW. Four young black men were inside, but only the one in the left rear seat opened his window, extending the .40 caliber Glock he used to spray the BMW’s passenger side with between ten and fifteen bullets.
At least a hundred witnesses watched as Tupac tried to climb into the backseat of the BMW and was hit four times in the process. Two bullets tore open the “Thug Life” tattoo on his torso, while two others wounded him in the hand and leg. The Cadillac peeled away and made a right turn on Korval, heading away from The Strip.
Instead of calling 911 on his flip phone, Suge made a U-turn against the oncoming traffic as vehicles scattered to avoid a collision. The rest of the Death Row caravan did the same, jumping medians as they headed toward The Strip. Two bicycle cops who had heard the shots gave chase, and were able to catch the BMW only because two of the car’s tires had been shot out. The shooting scene itself was abandoned, as witnesses scattered and the white Cadillac sped away.
When Suge stopped the BMW, the two bicycle cops approached with guns drawn and ordered him out of the car. Suge stepped outside with one side of his head dripping in blood and told the officers he had been shot in the head. They made him get down on his knees anyway, as ambulances and cars sped to the scene, which within moments had become a maelstrom of flashing lights and shrieking sirens. Many in the huge crowd rushed forward and tried to retrieve mementos from the BMW, tearing off side-view mirrors, wire-rimmed hubcaps, and door handles. The cops screamed at them to get back and threatened to arrest everyone in sight.
By the time paramedics delivered Tupac to Las Vegas’s University Medical Center, he had lost a lot of blood. A team of surgeons removed his shattered left lung that night, then operated again the next morning. Doctors gave him a fifty-fifty chance of survival, then when Tupac regained consciousness said the odds might be better than that.
Outside the hospital, the Outlaw Immortalz held prayer vigils with the rapper’s fans, who drove media photographers away whenever they tried to snap pictures. In the hospital lobby, a teenage girl chanted lyrics from Tupac’s All Eyez on Me album: “Five shots and they still couldn’t kill me.” Outside Tupac’s room, Jesse Jackson and Minister Tony Muhammed, head of the Nation of Islam’s L.A. chapter, comforted the rapper’s family. Jackson was said to be a close friend of Afeni Shakur’s, but didn’t sound much like it when he delivered a sermon the next day at a black church in Las Vegas. “Before you condemn Tupac for calling women bitches and ho’s in his music, you need to understand and know about the background of this man,” Jackson told both parishioners and the media in attendance. “He was raised by a mama who was on crack. He didn’t have a real mama. Don’t condemn him for talking about his mama and for talking about women.”
The man the Las Vegas police were looking for was Suge Knight, who had left town despite being asked not to. When Suge was spotted at Death Row’s offices in Beverly Hills on September 9, David Kenner promised the Vegas police that Mr. Knight would appear for questioning the next day, but Suge never showed. He did arrive at the Las Vegas PD’s Homicide Headquarters on the evening of the eleventh, however, accompanied by Kenner, David Chesoff, and a third attorney. It was the only interview the Las Vegas police would ever conduct with Suge, and afterward
the disgruntled detectives let reporters know that Knight had not been helpful in solving the case.
Less than forty-eight hours later, at 4:04 A.M. on Friday the thirteenth, twenty-five-year-old Tupac Shakur was pronounced dead from respiratory failure and cardiopulmonary arrest. Suge arrived at the hospital in a black Lexus moments after the announcement was made. When he stepped out of the car, the crowd went quiet. Reporters noted that the supposed gunshot wound on his head was barely visible. Upstairs, Suge spoke briefly with Tupac’s family, then walked out the front entrance with a cigar between his teeth not ten minutes after his arrival.
Suge would discover his own vulnerability only four days later, when the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office announced that it was removing Larry Longo as the prosecutor on the case involving Suge’s assault of the Stanley brothers at the Solar Records studios back in 1992. Word that Longo’s daughter had signed a recording contract with Death Row was leaked to the media, and almost every statement that issued from the Longo family during the next few days would be met with derision. The most quoted comment was one Longo had made a month after Suge cut his deal for a suspended sentence: “I have never seen a guy transform as much as this guy has since he was first booked,” the prosecutor had told reporters. “It’s remarkable.”
More remarkable to most of the media was the insistence of Longo’s son Frank that he and David Kenner had “independently” negotiated the deal that made his eighteen-year-old sister Gina the first and only white performer signed by Death Row Records. Gina Longo defended herself by saying, “I’m no Milli Vanilli. The reason I’m on Death Row has nothing to do with my dad.” Suge, meanwhile, managed to keep a straight face when he said that Gina had the voice of Billie Holiday, only in a white girl’s body.
If anyone out there believed that, he was hard to find, especially in the district attorney’s office. When Longo reported to work on the morning of October 25, his superiors told him to go home. Reporters who now knew that Suge Knight was living in the Longos’ Malibu Colony home peppered the D.A.’s office with phone calls and questions. Lawrence Longo would be fired from his job before the end of the year.
The even worse news for Suge was that the attack on Orlando Anderson at the MGM Grand had been captured on videotape, and the D.A.’s office had decided to argue that Knight’s participation in the beating was a violation of his probation. At almost the same moment, the judge who had agreed to Suge’s “rather unusual” grant of probation, John Ouderkirk, was replaced by the much tougher Stephen Czuleger. Suge already had been sent to L.A. County Jail after failing a court-ordered drug test three days earlier. A hearing on a motion by the district attorney’s office to revoke his probation was scheduled for February of 1997.
Suge’s image only darkened during the next few weeks. On November 6, 1996, Knight was the subject of a report by ABC’s Primetime Live that began, “Some say he’s the most dangerous man in music …” Though the ABC report later would be discredited because of its reliance upon the exaggerated claims of Vanilla Ice, plenty of damage was done in the short term, as investigations of Suge by both news organizations and law enforcement agencies seemed to crop up on an almost weekly basis.
The most compelling media reports involved claims that startup money for Death Row Records had been supplied not only by Michael Harris but also by another notorious drug kingpin, Ricardo Crockett. Suge had been stopped by police in Beverly Hills with a gun in his glove compartment that had been purchased illegally by an associate of Crockett’s. Though convicted of transporting the gun across state lines, Suge won a grant of probation in federal court. At the same time, however, it was reported that the U.S. Justice Department had organized a multiagency task force to investigate claims that Suge and Death Row were trafficking in both guns and drugs.
The really bad news was that Steve Cantrock had become a federal witness. Cantrock worked for the conservative New York–based firm Coopers & Lybrand, but was known as one of the accounting trade’s most colorful figures, a hippie turned hustler who enjoyed socializing with clients like the members of heavy metal rock bands Slaughter and White Zombie. He and Knight had seemed to hit it off at first, but they began to bicker during the summer of 1996 over Suge’s suspicion that Cantrock was skimming money. And when American Express filed a lawsuit claiming that Suge Knight, David Kenner, and Kenner’s wife had run up more than $1.5 million in unpaid bills, Suge and Kenner said that the expenses had been incurred by their “rogue accountant,” Steve Cantrock.
Things came to a head at a meeting in the backyard of a San Fernando Valley home owned by singer Michel’le. From County Jail, Suge told reporters the meeting was Cantrock’s idea and described what happened this way: “After I caught him stealing millions of dollars and confronted him, he started crying. I said, ‘Okay, Steve, don’t get so bent out of shape.’”
Cantrock’s account was considerably different. Suge showed up for the meeting accompanied by not only David Kenner but also several of his Blood henchmen, Cantrock said, then began the meeting by stating, “All right, cut the bullshit. Steve, how much did you steal from me?” Before he could respond, Cantrock said, Suge doubled him over with a punch to the solar plexus. As he sank to the ground sobbing, Cantrock said, he heard Suge tell someone that he wanted a confession. David Kenner produced a handwritten document moments later and passed it to Suge, who handed it to him, Cantrock said, and told him he better sign it. Convinced he would die if he didn’t, Cantrock said, he wrote his signature.
The accountant promptly disappeared. A security guard was posted in the lobby at the Los Angeles office of Coopers & Lybrand, where receptionists told callers that Cantrock was “away on stress leave.” Word swiftly spread that Cantrock and his family had fled the country, but by late December of 1996 the Los Angeles Times was reporting that Cantrock had become a federal witness and would supply the U.S. Justice Department “with reams of documents detailing Death Row’s financial dealings over the last three years.”
Even as Suge hired Milton Grimes to represent him in the criminal racketeering investigation being conducted by the feds, he was forced to defend himself against a civil racketeering lawsuit filed by Afeni Shakur that accused Knight, Kenner, and Death Row of “a pattern of fraud and deception” in their dealings with her late son. Suge answered by claiming that in fact the Shakur estate owed him millions for monies advanced to Tupac and his family. Afeni asked reporters how it was possible that Tupac’s albums could generate more than $60 million in revenues for Death Row while the artist himself received less than $1 million in royalties.
After American Express filed its lawsuit against Death Row, creditors came out of the woodwork. One lawsuit asked for $75 million and sought to have the record company put into receivership. Suge’s mentor Dick Griffey and his ex-rapper the D.O.C., meanwhile, filed a $125 million breach of promise lawsuit against Death Row.
More ominous for Suge was the claim by Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney Bill Hodgeman that Suge should be forced to serve his nine-year prison sentence for the assault on the Stanley brothers. The MGM Grand’s videotape of the Orlando Anderson beating was the strongest evidence against Suge, Hodgeman told the court. At Knight’s bail hearing, David Kenner argued that the tape showed Suge had not been part of the assault, and in fact had tried to prevent others from attacking Anderson. When Judge Czuleger looked at the tape, he agreed with Hodgeman: “It looks like he’s trying to get a last lick in, that’s what it looks like to me.” Ruling on Kenner’s request for bail, Czuleger said, “He’s had every reason to believe things would work out … No one’s said, ‘Enough’s enough. That’s it.’” This judge would; bail was denied.
While Suge sat in his cell at County Jail, word spread on the street that Knight had bought out the jail commissary in order to distribute gifts to the other Bloods and buy protection.
Death Row was still a force in the music business, but for how long no one knew. The label would put out two of the three biggest-s
elling rap albums of 1996 while Suge awaited his court hearing. First came Tupac’s posthumous Makaveli, followed shortly by Snoop Dogg’s The Doggfather. Unfortunately for Suge, however, Snoop was the only real star still signed to Death Row, and he wanted to leave the label in order to save his life. Snoop “presently owns and oftentimes travels in an armored van equipped with gun ports,” Sharitha Knight would claim in a lawsuit that accused Snoop of failing to pay agent’s commissions of $1.6 million during the time her Death Row subsidiary Knightlife served as his manager. “Death threats have been reported against the defendant. The defendant’s life appears in jeopardy.” In other words, an LA Weekly writer observed, “Sharitha Knight wants her money before Snoop gets shot.”
Snoop, meanwhile, was already making plans for a life after Death Row, and during the next few months he would record cameos with nearly a dozen singers and rappers from other labels. He also began talking about a “reunion project” with Dr. Dre. “Snoop can’t talk on it—nobody can, really—but everybody’s trying to get away from Death Row,” his father, Vernall Varnado, would advise another Los Angeles reporter.
When Suge showed up in court for his hearing in February of 1997, he was not wearing one of his famous red suits, but rather the blue jumpsuit of a Los Angeles County jail inmate. His most important witness, Southside Crip Orlando Anderson, also wore blue. Anderson, who had cursed Suge bitterly after the beating, now said that Knight played the peacemaker when Tupac Shakur and seven others attacked him at the MGM Grand. “I seen him pulling people off me,” said Anderson, who described Suge as the only one yelling, “Stop this stuff!”
LAbyrinth Page 12