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Marion Hugh " Suge" Knight Jr. ( ; born April 19, 1965) is an American former record executive who is the co-founder and former CEO of Death Row Records. Knight was a central figure in gangsta rap's commercial success in the 1990s.Travis L. Gosa, "The fifth element: Knowledge", in Justin A. Williams, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hip-Hop (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p 56. This feat is attributed to the record label's first two album releases: Dr. Dre's The Chronic in 1992 and Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle in 1993. Knight is currently serving a 28-year sentence in prison for a fatal hit-and-run in 2015.
Before founding Death Row Records, Knight played college football at UNLV as a defensive end. He briefly played in the NFL for the Los Angeles Rams as a replacement player during the 1987 NFL players strike. In 1995, Tupac Shakur began serving a prison sentence of up to years for a sexual abuse conviction. Knight struck a deal with Shakur that October, posting his $1.4 million bail and freeing him from prison pending an appeal of his conviction, while signing him to Death Row Records. In 1996, the label released Shakur's greatest commercial success, All Eyez on Me. That September, in Las Vegas, an unidentified assailant shot into the car Knight was driving, injuring Knight and fatally wounding Shakur.
Dr. Dre left Death Row Records shortly before Shakur's death, followed by Snoop Dogg two years later. The label rapidly declined. Meanwhile, allegations mounted that Knight, beyond employing gang members, often used intimidation and violence in his business dealings. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Knight spent a few years incarcerated for assault convictions and associated violations of probation and parole.
In September 2018, Knight pleaded Nolo contendere to voluntary manslaughter in a fatal 2015 hit-and-run. Knight's conviction, along with his previous felonies, triggered California's three-strikes law. He was sentenced to 28 years in prison, and is eligible for parole in October 2034, when he will be 69 years old.
Knight is affiliated with the Mob Piru, a set of the Bloods gang.
Knight went undrafted in the 1987 NFL draft, but was invited to the Los Angeles Rams training camp. He was cut by the Rams during camp, but became a replacement player during the 1987 NFL Players Strike, and played two games for the Rams.
Knight next formed an artist management company and signed West Coast hip-hop artists DJ Quik and The D.O.C. Through the latter, he met several members of the seminal gangsta rap group N.W.A.
Initially, Knight fulfilled his ambitions: he secured a distribution deal with Interscope, and Dre's 1992 solo debut album, The Chronic, earned triple platinum status in the United States by the end of 1993. It also made a career for Dre's protégé, Snoop Dogg, whose own debut album Doggystyle obtained a quadruple platinum certification in the United States in 1994. Rollin' With Dre: The Unauthorized Account: An Insider's Tale of the Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of West Coast Hip Hop (Williams/Alexander, 2008)
Meanwhile, Death Row had begun a public feud with 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell. The following year, he opened a private, by-appointment-only nightclub in Las Vegas called Club 662, so named because the numbers spelled out MOB on telephone keypads, MOB standing for Member of Bloods. In 1995, he ran afoul of civil rights activist C. Delores Tucker's campaign against gangsta rap, whose criticism of Death Row's glamorization of the "gangsta" lifestyle may have helped scuttle a lucrative deal with Time Warner.
Conrad Tillard, then the Nation of Islam minister known as Conrad Muhammad, the Hip Hop Minister, counseled Combs during his ensuing feud with Knight, and also asked Knight to stop terrorizing Combs.Mark Curry (2009). Dancing with the Devil; How Puff Burned the Bad Boys of Hip-hop Tillard also protected Combs, sending elite guards from his Mosque No. 7 to guard Combs, who was receiving death threats from gangsters connected to Knight.
The same year, Knight offered to post bail () for Tupac Shakur if the rapper agreed to sign with Death Row. Shakur agreed, setting the stage for his 1996 double album All Eyez on Me and .
MC Hammer relationship with Suge Knight dates back to 1988. With the success of Hammer's 1994 album The Funky Headhunter (featuring Tha Dogg Pound), Hammer signed with Death Row Records by 1995, along with Snoop Dogg and his close friend, Tupac. The label did not release the album of Hammer's music (entitled Too Tight) while he had a career with them, although he did release versions of some tracks on his next album. However, Hammer did record tracks with Shakur and others, most notably the song "Too Late Playa" (along with Big Daddy Kane and Danny Boy). After the death of Shakur in 1996, Hammer left the record company. He later explained his concern about this circumstance in an interview on Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) since he was in Las Vegas with Tupac the night of his death. Hammer released 2Pac's "Unconditional Love", on his Family Affair album, in 1998. The friendships between Hammer (played by Romany Malco), Tupac (played by Lamont Bentley) and Suge (played by Ahmed Johnson) were depicted in the television film, Too Legit: The MC Hammer Story (airing on VH1 in 2001).
Dr. Dre, frustrated with the company's increasingly thuggish reputation and Knight's violent inclinations, left and formed his own label, Aftermath Entertainment, in March 1996.
Ex-detective Russell Poole conjectured that Knight had Tupac killed before he could part ways with Knight's label and then conspired to kill Biggie to divert attention from himself in the Tupac case. The Biggie murder theory implicated Knight, a rogue cop, and a mortgage broker named Amir Muhammad (who was never a police suspect) along with the chief of police and the LAPD in a conspiracy to murder and cover up the murder of Biggie. The Biggie theory formed the basis of a lawsuit by his family, the Wallaces, against the city of Los Angeles. A key source for Poole's theory was Kevin Hackie. Hackie had implicated Knight and David Mack. Hackie, a former Death Row associate, said that he had knowledge of involvement between Knight and Mack and other LAPD officers. His information was used by the Wallace family in their suit against the city of L.A. for Biggie's death. But Hackie later told Los Angeles Times reporter Chuck Philips that the Wallace attorneys had altered his declarations. The suit brought by the Wallace family against the city of L.A. based on the Russell Poole theory was dismissed in 2010.
In 2005, Chuck Philips of the Los Angeles Times reported that another source for the theory of Biggie's murder implicating Muhammad, Mack, Knight and the LAPD was a schizophrenic man known as "Psycho Mike" who later confessed to hearsay and memory lapses and falsely identifying Muhammad. John Cook of Brill's Content noted that Philips's article "demolished" the Poole-Sullivan theory of Biggie's murder.
Around the same time, Philips wrote an L.A. Times two-part series titled "Who Killed Tupac Shakur?" about the murder of Shakur and events surrounding it based on police affidavits, court documents and interviews.
The L.A. Times story indicated that "the shooting was carried out by a Compton gang called the Southside Crips to avenge the beating of one of its members by Shakur a few hours earlier. Orlando Anderson, the Crip whom Shakur had attacked, fired the fatal shots. Las Vegas police discounted Anderson as a suspect after questioning him once briefly. He was later killed in what police said was an unrelated gang shooting." The article implicated East Coast music figures, including Biggie, Shakur's nemesis at the time, alleging that he paid for the gun. Before their own deaths, Biggie, his family and Anderson denied any role in Shakur's murder. Biggie's family produced documents purporting to show that the rapper was in New York and New Jersey at the time. The New York Times called the documents inconclusive, stating:
The pages purport to be three computer printouts from Daddy's House, indicating that Wallace was in the studio recording a song called Nasty Boy on the afternoon Shakur was shot. They indicate that Wallace wrote half the session, was In and out/sat around and laid down a ref, shorthand for a reference vocal, the equivalent of a first take. But nothing indicates when the documents were created. And Louis Alfred, the recording engineer listed on the sheets, said in an interview that he remembered recording the song with Wallace in a late-night session, not during the day. He could not recall the date of the session but said it was likely not the night Shakur was shot. We would have heard about it, Mr. Alfred said.
Mark Duvoisin, an editor at the L.A. Times, wrote in an opinion piece in Rolling Stone that Philips's account had withstood attacks to its credibility.
However, the L.A. Times printed a full retraction of the two-part series and released Philips shortly thereafter during a wave of layoffs.
In Tupac Shakur: Before I Wake, a documentary by Tupac Shakur's bodyguard, he and Cathy Scott, author of The Killing of Tupac Shakur and The Murder of Biggie Smalls, said that Knight would not have placed himself in the path of bullets he knew were coming. On her website Scott responded to a reader of her book stating that she felt there was never evidence to link Knight to Tupac'
/ref> Scott also told CNN, "That theory doesn't even add up. 'Open fire on my car, but try not to hit me?'"
A 2006 law-enforcement task force probe into Biggie's murder, which included then-LAPD Detective Greg Kading, included the murder of Shakur. In his 2011 self-published book, Murder Rap, Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations by the Detective Who Solved Both Cases, Greg Kading, One Time Publishing, 2011. Retrieved January 8, 2012. Kading wrote that Duane "Keefe D" Davis, a member of the "Crips" street gang, gave a confession years later saying he rode in the car used in the Las Vegas shooting of Shakur. The Crips said they had been offered a million dollars by associates of Bad Boy Records to kill Shakur. Kading, who named Sean Combs as having been involved in the conspiracy, also wrote that a bounty was offered for Suge Knight's murder.
While in Las Vegas, Kading's book stated, Davis and fellow Crips members crossed paths with a BMW carrying Knight and Shakur. The fatal shots were fired by Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, who sat on the side of the car closest to the BMW.
Kading alleged that Knight hired Wardell Fouse to kill Biggie, Sean Combs' most valuable star, whose murder was done following a party at the Peterson Automotive Museum. Poochie later survived a murder attempt in 2000, but was killed in 2003. Charges were never brought against Fouse or Knight and the task force disbanded for reasons of "internal affairs".
After Shakur's death and the release of Tha Doggfather, Snoop Dogg openly criticized Knight for the murder of Shakur and left the label in 1998. He signed with Master P No Limit Records and then formed his own record label, Doggystyle Records. In 2002, Snoop released the song "Pimp Slapp'd", in which he repudiated Knight and Death Row. In 2006, Snoop again attacked Knight verbally. Knight responded, stating that Snoop was a "police informer" who "never goes to jail".
On July 7, 2006, the federal judge, Ellen Carroll, ordered a bankruptcy trustee takeover of Suge Knight's Death Row Records, saying the record label had undergone a gross amount of mismanagement.
He filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which allows a company to continue business operations while restructuring. Death Row was being operated by Neilson during the bankruptcy proceedings, while Knight oversaw his bankruptcy estate as a debtor in possession.
In June 2007, he placed his 7 bedroom, bathroom home in Malibu, California, on the market for $6.2 million as part of his "financial makeover". The mansion was finally sold in December 2008 in bankruptcy court for $4.56 million. HipHopDX.com - Suge Knight's Mansion Sold In Bankruptcy Court . HipHopDX.com. Retrieved December 3, 2008.
In June 2008, Death Row Records was put up for auction in Bankruptcy Court. The winning bid went to New York-based company Global Music Group. Death Row label is sold for $24m , BBC News, July 15, 2008. Retrieved December 18, 2009. Global Music Group failed to secure funding and the Death Row Records catalog eventually went to Wideawake Entertainment.
In early 2008, Knight formed a new record company called Black Kapital Records as a vehicle of releases after his former label Death Row Records filed for bankruptcy, rumored to be due to having few artists and Knight's prison time. Knight alongside Manager Nino Cappuccino, Young Life and label A&R executive Lesane Casino debuted a reality show called Unfinished Business. The show was based on Knight dispelling long-standing rumors in sit down interviews, his days with Death Row and the artists he worked with, and finding new talent for his record label.
On January 25, 2009, an auction was held for everything found in the Death Row Records office after the company filed for bankruptcy, including some of Knight's personal items. Of note was the Death Row Records electric chair which sold for $2,500. Some of Knight's personal items appeared in an auction during the debut episode of A&E's Storage Wars, and a vault full of items (including a coat) was purchased by featured buyer Barry Weiss.
In October 2023, Suge Knight co-founded a podcast with Breakbeat Media.
Knight refused to cooperate with law enforcement on the matter. Party attendee Jeezy later said on The Breakfast Club that he would have been shot had he not been pushed out of the way just prior to the shooting.
In March 2015, Knight was hospitalized after he told a judge that he was suffering from blindness and other complications. Knight fired attorneys handling his murder case and said he was receiving inadequate medical treatment while in custody. The same month, a court set bail for his release for . Knight collapsed in court shortly after the bail setting was announced. On April 16, 2015, Knight's bail was reduced to . In July 2015, Knight's lawyer said that Knight might have a brain tumor "Suge Knight -- My Toilet Is Possessed ... Oh Yeah, I May Have a Brain Tumor" , TMZ, July 17, 2015. on the same day that Knight's request for lower bail was refused.Anthony McCartney, "Judge refuses to lower Suge Knight's bail" , USA Today, July 17, 2015. In January 2016, Knight changed counsel in his murder trial for a fourth time. In May 2016, three attorneys replaced the two hired earlier in the year. In July 2016, the judge denied Knight's motion to reveal the identities of several key prosecution witnesses, citing Knight's long history of violence. Knight became emotional after the ruling, stating that because of his health problems, he will die in jail. In March 2017, Knight was hospitalized after suffering from blood clots, a condition that had been affecting him for two and a half years by that time. Knight's hospitalization delayed the trial to September 2018.
When September arrived, Knight pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter. The judge sentenced Knight to 28 years in prison: 22 years for running over the victim and 6 years because it was Knight's third strike under California's three-strikes law. As of March 2023, Knight is incarcerated at RJ Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, and will not be eligible for parole until October 2034.
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