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 no contest 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.
Early life Knight was born in Compton, California, the son of Maxine Dikemen and Marion Knight Sr. His name Suge (pronounced /ʃʊɡ/) derives from "Sugar Bear", a childhood nickname. He attended Lynwood High School in nearby Lynwood, where he was a football and track star.
Knight is affiliated with the Mob Piru Bloods, a set of the Bloods gang.
Football career From 1983 to 1985, Knight attended and played football on an athletic scholarship at El Camino College. In 1985, during his junior year he transferred to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and played football there as a defensive end for two years,Rachael Levy, Former coaches portray Knight in positive light , Las Vegas Sun, September 10, 1996. Retrieved November 3, 2008. though he did not graduate.
Knight went undrafted in the 1987 NFL draft, but was invited to the Los Angeles Rams training camp with a chance to make the team roster. He was ultimately cut by the Rams during camp, but unexpectedly became a replacement player during the 1987 NFL Players Strike, and played two games for the Rams.
Career After his brief NFL career, Knight found work as a concert promoter and a bodyguard for celebrities including new jack swing singer Bobby Brown. In 1989, Knight formed his own music publishing company. His first big profit in the business came when Vanilla Ice agreed to sign over royalties from his smash hit "Ice Ice Baby", because the song included material allegedly written by Knight's client Mario Johnson. Knight and his bodyguards confronted Vanilla Ice several times. There was a rumor that Knight entered Vanilla Ice's hotel room and allegedly dangled him by his ankles off the balcony. However, Vanilla Ice has said that never happened, only that Knight threatened to throw him off the balcony; the claim was resolved in court.
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.
Death Row Records Dr. Dre and The D.O.C. wanted to leave both N.W.A and their label, Ruthless Records, run by Eazy-E, another member of N.W.A. According to N.W.A's manager Jerry Heller, Knight and his henchmen threatened Heller and Eazy-E with lead pipes and baseball bats to make them release Dre, The D.O.C., and Michel'le from their contracts in April 1991. Ultimately, Dre and D.O.C. co-founded Death Row Records in 1991 with Knight, who vowed to make it "the Motown of the '90s".
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.
Tupac Shakur, MC Hammer, Dr. Dre, and the Death Row Label
Knight's feud with East Coast record executive Sean Combs progressed when Knight insulted the Bad Boy label founder on air at the Source Awards in August 1995. Openly critical of Combs's tendency of ad-libbing on his artists' songs and dancing in their videos, Knight announced to the audience, "Anyone out there who wanna be a recording artist and wanna stay a star, and don't have to worry about the executive producer trying to be all in the videos, all on the records, dancing, come to Death Row."
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 The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory.
M.C. Hammer's 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 Anthony Norris) 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.
Murders of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious B.I.G.: theories accusing Knight
Though never charged by any prosecutor for any involvement, Suge Knight has been the subject of theories in popular culture about the murder of two well-known rap artists. Tupac Shakur was shot four times in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada, on September 7, 1996, and died six days later on September 13. When Shakur's East Coast rival, The Notorious B.I.G. was murdered in a similar drive-by shooting in Los Angeles, California, on March 9, 1997, speculation arose that Knight was involved and that Biggie's death was a revenge killing.Video: Greg Kading's Book Says Sean Combs, Suge Knight Ordered Tupac and Biggie Killings By LA Weekly Mon., October 3, 2011 Former Death Row artists, including Snoop Dogg, also later accused Knight of being involved in Tupac's murder.
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: