Scandal by George Rush

Author:George Rush
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2013-08-26T00:00:00+00:00

15

Diddy, Clef, And Hova

Back in the ’80s, I never missed the rappers, DJs, and break dancers who came downtown to perform at the Roxy. White punks and painters and fashionistas got down with Harlem fly girls and B-boys while Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and Run-DMC scratched and busted rhymes. One city under a groove.

Then the gangstas burned down Old School. We heard that somebody known as Puff Daddy was having a beef with somebody called Suge Knight, who ran Death Row Records. We were told that Puffy, a skinny wannabe record mogul whose real name was Sean Combs, was so fearful of Knight that he’d hired drug gang enforcers as bodyguards for his twenty-fifth birthday party. Knight’s spokesman insisted he’d made no threats. At first Combs didn’t call back. Then the hip-hop radio stations started picking up our story.

“People are saying I’m scared,” Combs told me over the phone. “I’m not afraid of anyone!” Combs said his bodyguards were off-duty cops. I told Combs that we’d heard one of his Bad Boy Records artists, Faith Evans, had been at Suge’s L.A. home, and that she’d looked extremely friendly with somebody named Tupac Shakur. Combs claimed that was news to him.

Little did we realize the East-West crossfire we’d wandered into. We didn’t know that Shakur suspected that Combs had helped orchestrate an attempt on his life the year before. Nor did we know that Evans’s reported affection for Shakur was likely to inflame her estranged husband, Biggie Smalls, whom Shakur claimed had also set him up for the five bullets he took.

While no evidence confirmed these suspicions, Combs may have added us to his enemies list. After our conversation with him, a source told me he had called his bodyguard to say, “We have to chill for a while. Stay away from me. Press is trying to take me down.”

Yet as time went on, we developed an unlikely rapport with the rapper. He invited us to his infamous summer “white parties,” where scantily clad fire-eaters, acrobats, and belly dancers jumped in and out of the pool while Combs reminded everyone, “Don’t disturb the sexy!” Best of all, guests could register to vote! (Election records later revealed Combs himself had never been much of a voter.) Combs’s “Greatest Party of All Time” proved a little more difficult to penetrate. The invite had instructed all recipients to “pull the flyest shit in your closet.” I believed my shit to be sufficiently fly, since Combs had complimented my linen suit a few weeks earlier at the Kentucky Derby. Nevertheless, one of Combs’s fashion sentries turned me away with a single word: “Shoes!”

Shortly thereafter, Combs was arrested on weapons and bribery charges after he and girlfriend Jennifer Lopez fled a nightclub where gunfire had broken out. On the eve of his trial, facing up to fifteen years in jail, Combs gave his first sit-down interview to Joanna.

“They put [Jennifer] in cuffs,” he remembered with outrage. “I don’t think any woman should be put in cuffs. Me, you can throw in the dungeon till you sort it all out.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.