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ee nn ee a Name a ar 1 A REPORTER AT LARGE THE TAKEDOWN OF TUPAC Tupac Shakur was one of gangsta rap's biggest stars. But he got caught in a collision of cultures when inner-city garigs met up with the multibillion-dollar record industry. ALL INFORMATION CONTAINED UNCLASS ac, a pac Baye was 3s shot in killed in Las Vegas last fall, he was riding in the passenger seat of a B.M.W. 750 sedan driven by Marion (Suge) Knight, the head of Death Row Records. Death Row, the leading pur- veyor of West Coast “gangsta rap,” is a music-business phenomenon. The com- pany earned seventy-five million dollars in revenues last year. The first album Tupac made for Death Row, “All Eyez on Me,” which was released in early 1996, sold over five million units. Tupac had made three earlier albums, but they had never reached the stratosphere of “quintuple platinum.” Sull, the days pre- ceding his murder were anything but halcyon for him. It had become increas- ingly clear that there was a steep penalty to pay for having thrown in with Suge Knight. Even for the rough-edged music in- dustry, which has historically been prone to excess and to connections with crimi- nal elements, Death Row was a remark- able place. It was nothing for Knight to hand over a stack of hundred-dollar bills to Tupac for a weekend's expenses. Knight's office in Los Angeles was dec- orated in red, the color of the Bloods, one of the city's principal gangs. A guard holding a metal detector stood at the front door of the Death Row studio. “T have not been to one other studio to this day where you have to be searched be~ fore you get in,” a veteran of the L.A. music business who worked with Tupac told me. “They have a checklist of peo- ple who can go in with guns. So you have to figure, These guys have guns, and it’s a long nun to the front door, and there's security at the front door that may try to stop you, even if you get there. .. . Some of the security guys... CONNIE BRUCK were gangsters just out of the peniten- tiary. They would look at you, staring right through you. No words would have to be said.” Intimidation was Suge Knight's stock- in-trade. It is said that he forced a black music executive at a rival company to strip in the men’s room and then made him walk naked through his company’s offices. A mammoth, three-hundred- and-fifteen~pound man, Knight has a substantial criminal record, replete with violent acts. Even when he was on his best behavior—say, dealing with a white executive at one of the major enter- tainment companies—menace hung heavy in the air. One man told me about a negouation he had in the apparent safety of his own office. Knight was at- tended by a bodyguard, and when they reached a difficult point in the deal, the bodyguard ostentatiously leaned for- ward and let his gun, which was wom in a holster under his jacket, slip into full view. For a time, the aura of violence served Knight well. It granted him enormous li- cense in small things (like keeping other executives waiting for hours, without a murmur of objection) and in larger ones. Music and video producers who claimed that Death Row owed them money were too frightened to demand it, or to sue. The potential for violence was also a pow- erful disincentive to anyone who might have considered talking to law-enforcement authorities about questionable practices. Moreover, it did not keep him from do- ing business with two of the entertain- ment industry's corporate giants. Death Row has been funded since its inception by its distributor, Interscope, which for years was partially owned by Time War- ner, and which Universal has had a fifty- per-cent interest in since early last year. ILLUSTRATIONS BY MARK ULRIKSEN After Tupac’s murder, however, things began to unravel for Knight. In the summer of 1992, he had pulled a gun on two rappers, George and Stanley Lyn- wood, for using a phone at the studio. After beating one of them with the gun, he ordered them both down on their knees, threatened to kill them, and forced them to take off their pants. He was convicted on assault charges and put on probation, But four years later, just before Tupac was killed, Knight rook part in the beating of a man in Las Ve- gas, and this put him in violation of his probation. In February of this year he began serving a nine-year sentence and is now in San Luis Obispo state prison, In addition, hundreds of millions of dol- lars’ worth of suits have now been filed against Death Row (the largest being that of Tupac’s estate, charging thar he was defrauded of over fifty million dol- lars, and seeking damages of a hundred and fifty million). And there may be more to come. A team of agencies, in- cluding the F.B.L, the D.E.A., and the LR.S., are investigating allegations of money laundering, links to street gangs, drug trafficking, and organized crime at Death Row. “I think, Tupac, you brought down one of the most evil empires of my time,” one of his friends, who grew up in the music business, says. He did not intend to romanticize Tupac; this friend, like many others, acknowledges that Tupac was famously split between what he him- self referred to as his “good” and his “evil” sides, and that it was his darker side that seemed to have gained dominion during much of his tenure at Death Row. Nonetheless, these friends insist, that was not the real Tupac. The real Tu was gifted, sympathetic, intent on aiticu: lating the pain of young blacks in the i in- AL a ae a 2, 2 ~ oan OF