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y oa rs eer eee ee eee ee ee Ce me a4 : ~ 58 with Knight's business practices. How many of these stories had reached Iovine is not clear. He did, of course, know of Knight's criminal record and propensity for brutality when he first made the deal with Death Row, and as time went on he became aware of the continuing cli- mate of violence that enveloped the com- pany. A lawsuit against Death Row and Interscope was filed on behalf of a man stomped to death at a Death Row party in early 1995. As for Michael Harris's bankrolling of Death Row, Iovine told federal investi- gators that he had heard a rumor about it in 1994 or 1995, but it was not until December, 1995, when Harris threat- ened to sue the company, claiming that he owned half of it, that Iovine took the rumor seriously. If this was true, then Tovine was strangely insulated, for in L.A. music circles Harris’s role was widely gos- siped about. Indeed, in the summer of 1995, months before Harris wrote to Io- vine about his intentions to sue, the head of the Time Warner music division, Mi- chael Fuchs, made an overture to arrange a prison meeting with Harris. He was uying to decide whether the company should yield to the political pressure about gangsta rap and sell its interest in Interscope, and he believed that it might well be Harris, not Knight, who could speak with authority to Time Warner about the future direction of Death Row. The meeting never took place, because Time Warner executives and the board of directors quickly decided that the com- pany should shed its troublesome invest- ment by selling its fifty-per-cent stake back to Interscope. Interscope was able to exploit that rebuff by turning around and selling the fifty-per-cent stake to MCA Music Entertainment Group (now known as Universal), for a profit of roughly a hundred million dollars. EMPTING as Knight's offers were (Death Row was the premier rap label, putting out one multi-platinum record after another), Tupac had consis~ tently declined to leave Interscope. But in the summer of 1995, when it seemed as though his incarceration might con- tinue indefinitely—for years even, if he was not allowed to post bail—he was more desperate than he'd ever been. It was in this bleak moment that Knight— and, apparently, ovine as well—saw the opportunity to arrange things the way they wanted to. It had become not only attractive but vital to Death Row that Tupac join the label. One of the com- pany’s biggest stars, Snoop Doggy Dogg, was facing a murder trial, and it was m- mored on the street that Dr. Dre was leaving. (Dre would indeed leave by early 1996.) Death Row could not afford to lose both artists. And Knight surely knew that Tupac would be more popular than ever after his prison term, more “real” to his audience than he had been before. Even though Interscope advanced Tupac six hundred thousand dollars dur- ing the nine months he was in prison, he was broke and frustrated. To Tyehimba, there seemed to be an unmistakable synchrony at work. Interscope would not or could not provide enough funds for Tupac. And as Knight became a more and more importunate suitor, Interscope “was squeezing us to get us to go to Death Row,” Tyehimba says. Knight— accompanied by Death Row's lawyer, David Kenner, who had come to play a major role in the company, far exceed- ing specific legal tasks—made repeated trips to Dannemora to visit Tupac. Knight promised to solve Tupac’s most intractable problems. According to several people close to Tupac, Knight claimed that Kenner could cure the legal logjam and win permission to post bail. Knight further promised that he would put up some portion of the bail and, more im~ portant, make Death Row the corporate guarantor for the entirety. Knight swore he would make Tupac a superstar, much bigger than he’d been with Interscope. And he would solve Tupac's financial worries. He would even buy Afeni a house. It was a dazzling hand. What was probably Knight's ump card, however, was the thing that he, and he alone, could offer Tupac—the aura of gangster power. Even though Tupac had claimed that he had outgrown the gangster pose, his stay in Dannemora had made him feel more vulnerable than ever before. “He wanted to get out of jail, and he needed a label that could back him,” a friend who visited him in prison that summer says. “The street shit had to be dealt with, and Suge had power on the street.” Tupac brooded about being shot in the Times Square recording studio and about what he believed was the setup by who were there in the studio that night: Andre Harrell, now the head of Mo- town; Bad Boy Entertainment C.E.O. Sean (Puffy) Combs; the rapper Chris- topher Wallace, known both as Biggie Smalls and as the Notorious B.1.G.; and others. (They all denied any involve- ment.) At first, Man Man said, Tupac did not believe that Biggie, who had been a good friend of his, and who had come to visit him when he was recuper- ating from his wounds, had been in- volved in any way. “But when Tupac was in jail he was getting letters from people saying Biggie had something to do with it, he started thinking about it, it got so out of hand, it grew—and once it got that big, publicly, you had to go with it.” Warani Tyehimba, Stewart Levy, and Charles Ogletree all say they argued vig- orously with Tupac about his decision to go to Death Row. “Tupac told us, ‘The trouble with all of you is, you're too nice,” Levy recalls. Tyehimba told me that at his last meeting wich Tupac at the prison, Tupac hugged him, wept, and said, “I know I’m selling my soul to the devil.” Kenner drafted a handwritten, three-page agreement for Tupac to sign. Within a week, in a stunning coinci- dence, the New York Court of Appeals granted him leave to post bail. (The money was provided by Interscope and a division of Time Warner, although Tupac always gave Suge full credit.) Knight and Kenner arrived in a pri- vate plane and white stretch limousine to pick Tupac up. Underscoring the degree of porousness between Interscope and Death Row, Tupac was, according to someone familiar with the negotiation, given a “verbal release” from his Inter- scope contract. As for Kenner’s hand- written document, Ogletree, who would not see it until much later, says, “It wasn't a legal contract... .It was absurd that anyone with an opportunity to reflect would agree to those terms. It was only be- cause he was in prison that he signed it. Tupac was saying, ‘My freedom is every~ thing. If you can get me my freedom, you can have access to my artistic product.’ ” ie ways large and small, in both art and life, Tupac Shakur instinctively pushed past customary boundaries, and when he came out of prison and joined Death Row that impulse was height- ened. He would work the longest hours (nineteen-hour stretches, despite:the consumption of enormous amounts of alcohol and marijuana), he would:be-