Entertainment Daily: Suge Knight - Death Row Records boss talks tough after 5 years in jail
TAPE: EF01/0692
IN_TIME: 13:38:14
DURATION: 6:13
SOURCES: APTN/Death Row Records/ABC
RESTRICTIONS: music video/performance rights must be cleared
DATELINE: Los Angeles, USA. 10th August 2001
SHOTLIST NB: this story is on EF01/0692 at end of tape
1. Clip - 'Regulate' - Warren G and Nat Dogg
2. Clip - Snoop Dogg - 'What's my name?'
3. B-Roll in office - track down to logo
4. Sot - Suge Knight - "I was around that area, I was getting 5 years. I feel like I look better, more rested before I went to prison."
5. Tupac -Video - California, 2pac Shakur
6. Pullback of road sign to wide of crime scene of Tupac's murder - ABC file, 9/96
7. Cu Tupac's Car - ABC file, 9/96
8. ECU Car door with bullet holes - ABC file, 9/96
9. Cu bullet - ABC file, 9/96
10. SOT Suge Knight - On Post Tupac, will he be taking Death Row away from Gangster rap? - "I'm going to give them what it is, what it is in the inner city. I think it's commercial rap at the same time. If you go to the ghetto that is what goes on. You can't talk about being in the ghetto and describe Beverlly Hills, it just doesn't work that way. The artist that want to make record sales they have got to talk about the ghetto even though they aren't in the ghetto, somebody is writing their stuff. I'm going to give people what they want. What they want is the real stuff that they can feel."
11. Clip video - Gin and Juice, Snoop Doggy Dog
12. SOT Suge Knight - On why rap needed to change - "It needed change because a lot of stuff that I was doing in '92, '93 they are still doing now. It's like almost 2003. The same videos, same concept. People take a lot of lyrics that have been used already and they are re-doing them. I think it's going to be different for the stuff that we put out. It's going to cater to the people in the streets first."
13. Snoop In Court - File, ABC 1995
14. Posters of Dre and Snoop
15. SOT Suge Knight - Bitter about Dre & Snoop leaving Death Row while you where in jail? - "I don't have anything to be bitter about. I'm a successful business man, a man and those are my creations, I made them. Therefore, there is nothing bitter at all. That's why I can't see whay they say how can they be bitter towards Death Row because their kids are Death Row kids, they had those babies because of Death Row, they have got those women because of Death Row and those women weren't coming out saying I want to be with you because you are a nice looking guy so let's have a baby. They were saying he's a rapper, he's on Death Row, so if it weren't for Death Row they wouldn't have none of that so they should worship still."
16. Clip Video - 'California Love', Tupac Shakur
17. SOT Suge Knight - On people who criticise his business/management style - "My point to you is if a person uses muscle instead of brains how can they get a great deal. It takes this to get these types of deals that I do. I feel I'm smarter than the majority of guys out there. Ifeel that I am one of the most wiser people in the world. The only problem I have had on Death Row is a lot of people don't finish high school, a lot don't know how to read or write. If they read something they can't comprehend what they have read. Even though they have got a great deal they don't understand that they have a great deal."
18. B-Roll on Tupac Video shoot - Death Row EPK
19. B-Roll - Suge and Tupac mess about on video shoot - Death Row EPK
20. SOT Suge Knight - Place in hip hop history assured. - "The only thing that I can do is play my position and do what I do and live my life, no matter how bad people think it is, no matter how good people think it is, there is no way you can cut me out of history. When you turn around and speak of Hip Hop you can't leave my name out of it. If you speak about who owns the ownership of the masters, I will probably be the only one going like this."
21. Tupac Video - 'California Love'
SUGE KNIGHT BACK IN THE HOOD
He's the most fearsome and feared man in rap and he's back on the streets looking to to settle some old scores.
Indeed, Dr Dre and Snoopy Doggy Dogg - former proteges of Knight - are reported to have upped the security around themselves, fearing retaliation from their mentor.
Marion 'Suge' Knight, head of Death Row Records, is finally out of jail, and APTN talked to the baddest man in gangsta rap, and found that he still harboured a few grudges.
Former prisoner No. K43480 is ready, he says, to 'get back to business'.
That ex-con is Marion 'Suge' Knight Jr, CEO of Death Row Records, and the ringleader behind one of America's largest black exports, gangsta rap.
Knight, 37, is six foot three inches tall, weighs more than 300 pounds and is as intelligent as he he is intimidating.
Gangsta rap has sold massively in the United States, representing over 20 percent of all music sold in the US, and has been an important influence on popular culture.
And of all its personalities, Knight remains the most beguiling: a violent hoodlum who took an embryonic label, applied his considerable acumen and turned it and its leading stars - Dr. Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur - into a corporate dynasty that sold more than 18 million albums, with a revenue of $325 million plus in four years.
According to his rap sheet, however, Knight certainly has all the qualities of a mobster.
In 1990, he allegedly held rapper Vanilla Ice over the balcony of the Ballage Inn Hotel in Beverly Hills, eventually persuading him to sign away 25 per cent of his royalties from seven songs on his debut album, II The Extreme.
It is said that he would drag out-of-favour employees into a storeroom at the company's offices on Wilshire Boulevard and beat them to a bloody mess. Knight also led a gun war against his New York equivalent, Sean 'Puffy' Combs, that is thought to have contributed to the murders of America's biggest-selling rappers - Tupac Shakur in 1995, and Christopher 'Notorious BIG' Wallace in 1996.
Knight has been connected to the death of both. He was sitting beside his close friend and gifted rapper, Shakur, when he was killed by hail of bullets in then neon glow of the Las Vegas strip. Knight's most recent sentence was for carrying a gun on the fateful evening.
Like the Shakur case, the subsequent slaying of Biggie Smalls remains unsolved by the cops. But a recent scandal to rock the LAPD, involving over 40 African-American officers operating as a secret, has implicated a rogue cop currently doing time.
The corruption inquiry has looked into cases of police officers on Death Row's payroll at the time.
Knight's life was forged at the hard end of the American Black experience.
Knight Sr, a truck driver eager to escape the evil blood lust of the South's lynch mobs, moved his family from Mississippi to California in the early Sixties. Not long afterwards, on 19 April 1964, Marion Hugh Knight Jr was born in a downtown Los Angeles hospital.
In the sunshine state, Knight Sr took work as a janitor at the University of California, while his wife, Maxine, found work at the assembly line in a local electronics firm.
In 1969, having cobbled together enough savings, the Knights paid for a modest, two-bedroom home in Compton - an area synonymous with the city's Bloods and Crips gangs.
But that didn't stop Knight from honing his entrepreneurial skills - a unique blend of intelligence and violence - from an early age. Already over 6ft tall by his teens, Knight would catch a bus to the moneyed and manicured Hollywood hills, where he extorted money from terrified rich white kids.
70Seventies, Compton had become a by-word for inner city violence. Death and destruction was all around the young Knight, but luck or fate meant he never got 'capped' or joined the body count.
But he was also a gifted sportsmen and a local hero, playing football for the LA Rams. This gave him a 'free pass' with the local hoods and connections to large sums of ill-gotten cash.
By the late 80s and early 90s, Los Angeles was enjoying a black music boom that would eventually stifle New York, its main cultural rival. In 1988, LA hip-hop group Niggaz With Attitude's debut album, Straight Outta Compton, sold in excess of 500,000 copies in six weeks - it's new sound kick-started a self-sufficient industry for disenfranchised African-Americans.
The new black sound, as culturally important as Motown's 'Sound of Young Black America' 30 years before it, was dubbed G-Funk - a relaxed, Californian pop motif that gathered together the city's gang culture, car clubs, 70s funk music alongside the popular language of the day. And in a curious twist of irony, its musical director was a black middle-class kid who had probably never held a gun in his life - Dr. Dre.
After NWA split in 1991, Dre (Andre Young), introduced to Knight by a mutual friend, signed to Knight's fledgling Death Row Records label. It was a partnership that would end New York's decade-long domination of the rap market - and take the popular 'diss record', where rappers attack each other on vinyl, to its obvious conclusion - an all-out gang war.
As label boss of a black empire, and unlike the disciplined but businesslike Berry Gordy at Motown before him, Knight's reputation for violence was enhanced by the band of gang bangers he grouped around Death Row, and rumours that he even had corrupt black cops on the pay role.
He quickly established a ruthless reputation for himself: one writer from the New Yorker magazine, on asking the wrong question, was beaten up. Knight and his henchmen, dressed in the red insignia of the Bloods, later tried to bundle the writer into a fish tank filled with piranha.
His understudies at the label were equally wayward: Snoop Doggy Dogg, a shy teenager from LA's Long Beach, was charged with the first-degree murder of gang member Philip Woldemariam and the subsequent trial lasted nearly 18 months.
The rapper was eventually found not guilty. In 1995 Knight's most prolific artist, the trouble prone Tupac Shakur, was sentenced to four years for statutory rape - he'd been shot five times a year earlier.
The label's reputation, and the fear it inspired, allowed Knight to find a target for his excess rage - the middle-class label executive Puff Daddy. He went about aggravating the West Coast-East Coast enmity to such a degree that it became impossible for rap groups to tour the country without facing multiple death threats.
The end, inevitably bloody, could easily have been rapped by one his musical prot?g?s. Tupac Shakur was killed in in 1995 as he left the Tyson-Seldon fight. And in the repercussions that followed, Knight's musical maestro, Dr. Dre, resigned from Death Row Records to form his own record label.
What kind of financial negotiations took place? Rumour has it Knight and his associates arrived, carrying baseball bats, at Dre's Beverly Hills mansion and Dr Dre left the company with nothing.
Snoop Doggy Dogg similarly abandoned Knight to join a rival imprint called No Limit. His defection remains a particular source of irritation to Knight who paid more than $2.5m in legal fees to defend him against a murder charge.
Meanwhile, as Knight sets about rebuilding his shattered empire, Death Row being renamed Tha' Row, law enforcement agencies and avowed underworld foes are keeping a close eye on him.
MUSIC CLEARANCE DETAILS
TITLE: Regulate
ARTIST: Warren G and Nat Dogg
WRITER: Griffin/Hale/Leiber/Stoller/Sanford/Mcdonald
PUBLISHER: Warner Chappell / EMI / Hornall Brothers Music
LABEL: Death Row/Interscope Records
TITLE: What's my name?
ARTIST: Snoop Dogg
WRITER: Broadus/Clinton/Shider/Spradley
PUBLISHER: Bridgeport Music
LABEL: Death Row/Interscope Records
TITLE: California Love
ARTIST: 2pac Shakur
WRITER: No Details at time of broadcast
PUBLISHER: No Details at time of broadcast
LABEL: LABEL: Death Row/Interscope Records