Suge Knight Interview

Straighten up your spine, suckas. Think about this knockin' on your front door: A 6'4", 330-pound (all muscle), gang-affiliated multimillionaire with nothin to lose. His skin clean, focus right and his once-untouchable company paralyzed but not folded, Suge Knight has found a strange peace while stuck behind prison walls for the last three years. And he's made millions of dollars while doin' time, scoring on projects like 2Pac's Greatest Hits and the Outlawz. ("I can only spend $140 a month in here. Think of how much I saved! I'm saving, like, $10,000 a day.") Even the controversial Death Row Records-released Suge Knight Represents: Chronic 2000 double album -- which sparked drama between Suge and ex-friend Dr. Dre about the Chronic trade-mark --went gold. And though there's no doubt that bad blood still swirls between Suge and Snoop and Dre, at least Suge recognized quality music. ("I think Dre's new record is good.")

After being sentenced to a nine-year bid on a probation violation for helping Tupac beat down Orlando Anderson on that fateful September day in Las Vegas, Suge has been almost invisible. Parole officials at his current home, California's Mule Creek State Prison, list 33-year-old Marion H. Knight's release date as May 10, 2001. However, Suge insists that with good time served, he'll be out sooner -- like this summer.

"I got a release date and I'm coming home. I know a lot of niggas are scared, but time went so fast. When I come home, I want all those people who was talking shit about me to be able to look me in my eye and say the same things. People afraid for Suge to his bright. They been callin up here, asking when I am gonna get out. When I hit bricks, it all belongs to me."

And he don't wanna play checkers or sip tea when he steps into freedom. The "former" CEO of Death Row Records begins his day at 7 A.M. with a meal in his two-man cell. ("I cook my own breakfast on my hot plate.") Then he fires up one of his trademark cigars, works out, showers, reads for a while and calls home. That leaves plenty time to sort out the future. ("In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you. That little buck gives you a lot of time to think.")

If Suge is indeed the vicious Compton Piru mastermind known for gangsta tactics (like forcing cats to drink piss and angling Vanilla Ice over a 15-story balcony), then Simon (Suge's biblical alias) is a charming devil. Asked about a prison basketball game that left his foot in a cast, he responds, "You know Suge Knight be playing above the time. I went up in the air like Vince Carter but came down like Kelly Price."

Sitting about five feet across from me in Mule Creek's bustling visiting room (kids, moms and girlfriends everywhere), Suge's eerily cheerful as he snacks on hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream and other items from a nearby vending machine. We chat for over four hours, and since no tape recorders or notebooks are allowed, I use napkins and paper towels to take various notes from the always-wild, occassionally venomous and consistently provocative mouth of Suge Knight:

"Before 'Pac got shot, Interscope didn't want to fuck with him. But by him being ghetto, I had to reach out to him, one black muthafucka to another. He was just pissed off that everybody just left him in there. Really, it was his girl Keisha who keep me up on him. It was her who really should have got the credit."

"A lot of these muthafuckas let these white executives pump them up. But when Dre gets into a fight or beatdown, Jimmy Iovine is not gonna net outta bed and go fight for Dre, is he? I would like to educate thug niggas on some million-dollar game: When Steve Stoute wants to get one dollar, he has to ask Jimmy for it. I bet you that when they was thinking about putting Puffy in jail, Clive Davis called up and said , 'Let's try to work something out because this nigga has to pay me back all my money.'"

"I think Jay-Z benefited from that fact that 'Pac and Biggie are dead. When they were around, he wasn't on that level. What I do like about DMX -- even though people say he bit 'Pac's style-- is that he has a great work ethic. I like them Ruff Ryder niggas. They real ghetto niggas, rappin;. I like Lil' Kim because she's grimy and a ghetto bitch. She shows pussy 'cause she's really like that."

"Hayy-O is a snitch. He has no credibility. He got on the stand and lied. There wasn't no truth in anything he said. He's a con man. If a nigga's a snitch, he will do anything to get free. And really, how could you be from the ghetto and be a rat? I think he sent the wrong message to kids. He reminds me of Sammy 'The Bull.'"

"I remember at the MTV awards. Snoop went to a New York radio station and said it was 'Pac with the East Coast-West Coast bullshit, not him. Snoop said he would do a song with Puffy, Biggie or anybody. 'Pac went crazy when he heard it on the radio. He was like, 'I'm covering this muthafucka's back when he was out there oding that video for "New York, New York." Muthafuckas shot up the trailer. They was cryin'. I went and smashed for them. I'm doing all this good, and here he is speakin' about hookin' up with my enemies? Me and him gotta get down.' This is what 'Pac told me. 'Pac went back and wrote a whole 'Hit 'Em Up' version of his dissin' Snoop, from beginning to end. But I ain't never put it out because of the simple fact that I thought 'Pac was angry then and might have just been talkin' because he was pissed off. I have no intention of puttin' it out, but it's there."

"I seen Prince (The Artist) up in the clubs a few times and I hollered at him. Then the muthafucka was walkin' around with 'slave' written on his face. He was sayin' that he didn't want to fuck with people at record labels. He should have stayed ghetto instead of runnin' back to Arista with his head between his legs."

"Everybody's always like, 'Pac got a bad deal. Pac is dead because of us.' But Pac always praised Death Row. Nobody ever leaves here alive. I lost a lot of loced ones like him. If you around me, then I have your back. I never make no fake-ass records talking about Pac like Puffy did 'Missing You.' He did that to benefit himself. That was my nigga and I will never do no record like that. People talk all that shit, but can't nobody say me and 'Pac didnt have fun."

SUGE KNIGHT: (Laughing) I ain't tripppin' . As far as him and anybody else in the rap game ever tryin' to assassinate my character, that's impossible. You talkin' about a man who has always walked the walk and talked the talk. Ain't nobody ever whip my ass or slapped me all up. That's reality for them -- not for me. When those muthafuckas get loaded, they're liable to say anything. I don't even trip off anything that Snoop says because there is always a lie behind it. He was tellin' everybody that, at the time his girl was pregnant, he was gonna name (the baby) 'Pac. Then all that shit happened in Vegas, so the naming never happened. But I'm not no paper soldier, so I'm not here to assassinate nobody's character. Say what you mean and keep it that way. If you wanna cross somebody, then do that. Don't act like it wasn't you.

I like Biggie. Like 'Pac, he was one of the best rappers in the business. Why would I try to do something to him? Who knows? Maybe one day he could have been signed to Death Row. I don't know why muthafuckas tryin' to pin that on me. I don't even know the muthafucka they tried to connect me with. Anybody with any kind of sense know I wasn't involved. Anytime you have somebody doing positive stuff and just doing their time and minding their own business, people will sit up there and lie. I never seen no shootin'. I only know what I heard and what I read. I had no involvement.

If I stay in here until I am a hundred years olds, I will-still be a man. I could strip down naked in here and show all my tat and never have no problems. People know who I am and who I am down with. One thing about bein' a savage it=s that you stay that way. Why would I get in jail and become a pussy? It's a lot of these rap niggas that's been slapped and drank piss. But you can't find anybody who ever said they slapped Suge Knight in or out of jail. If you always been my enemy, it's still that way. That's funny to me. When I went to jail, it was because I was involved in something. It's not like I was standin' by and not doing nothin'.

One of the things that prison does is make you a better judge of character. Like, if you take an artist or so-called friend or whoever. if they don't a have a good heart or they're not really your friend, you don't have to waste your time bullshittin' with 'em. You pick up on people much faster. In less than five minutes, you can have a conversation with somebody and tell if the person is a snake or he full of shit. There is a difference between me and most, which is that I am fresh off the block. I don't look for no special privileges. I'm a man who paid my does. No person ever gave me nothing but God. Like I said before, a lot of these Black guys go into these record labels tap dancin' and shakin' they ass to get in the door. One thing nobody can ever take from me is that I never been on no records, poppin' around in no videos or shakin' my ass. I don't be no cheerleader. I come in like a businessman and I do business. I make sure that the people around me have the success that I have. And that's not that Hollywood success. I don't care about how many times somebody recognizes my face. My thing was to be the man who makes his little 30 or 40 million a year and still get a cheeseburger and fries and don't worry about an autograph.

"It's the oldest game in the world: divide and conquer. The sad thing about is that you take artists like Snoop -- they are not educated and at the top of their game -- then they have people in their ears tellin' 'em if they only make $12 million, they should have made $100 million. But there's no way possible they should make that much. That makes them think, "Death Row is fuckin' with me. I should go over here." Then they go somewhere else and find that they're not treated as well. It's about Black-owned and being empowered. IF you take LaFace Records when TLC and Toni Braxton went bankrupt, people didn't say nothing negative about Arista. Now, of all the artists on Death Row, none of them went bankrupt. They was having chips and cars and all that. Now, if they fuck theirs off, then that's on them. There's a difference in running a business. Nothing negative about Dre, but when he first started with Aftermath, it was seven months and he was outta business. Even with Eve, she had to leave because of financial reasons and everything fell through. People don't know how hard it is to have your own business. even with Snoop's new label, a lot of them have been reachin' out to me, saying they aren't making enough money. Basically, people are never happy enough because they want more money. And they all have such bad deals."

"I wouldn't say it's a conspiracy; you got good and bad people everywhere, like you got good and bad cops. At the same time, you have a lot of those people who don't know where my head is at. They will say shit, do punk-ass interviews and make punk-ass records about me. But most of them are snitches and informants, anyway. So they thinkin', "When Suge come home, he's probably pissed off." But I am not trippin'. When people say the word "revenge," to me, the best revenge in the world is success."

"I'm passionate about everything, like my family and friends. I am a good judge of character and I only fuck around with my real homies, my real muthafuckas. Anybody that I am talkin' to is gonna be bonafide real. That means that your conversations are better. There is no substitution for happiness. Period."


	Welcome to Devoted To 2pac \| home Suge Knight Interview Straighten up your spine, suckas. Think about this knockin' on your front door: A 6'4", 330-pound (all muscle), gang-affiliated multimillionaire with nothin to lose. His skin clean, focus right and his once-untouchable company paralyzed but not folded, Suge Knight has found a strange peace while stuck behind prison walls for the last three years. And he's made millions of dollars while doin' time, scoring on projects like 2Pac's Greatest Hits and the Outlawz. ("I can only spend $140 a month in here. Think of how much I saved! I'm saving, like, $10,000 a day.") Even the controversial Death Row Records-released Suge Knight Represents: Chronic 2000 double album -- which sparked drama between Suge and ex-friend Dr. Dre about the Chronic trade-mark --went gold. And though there's no doubt that bad blood still swirls between Suge and Snoop and Dre, at least Suge recognized quality music. ("I think Dre's new record is good.") After being sentenced to a nine-year bid on a probation violation for helping Tupac beat down Orlando Anderson on that fateful September day in Las Vegas, Suge has been almost invisible. Parole officials at his current home, California's Mule Creek State Prison, list 33-year-old Marion H. Knight's release date as May 10, 2001. However, Suge insists that with good time served, he'll be out sooner -- like this summer. "I got a release date and I'm coming home. I know a lot of niggas are scared, but time went so fast. When I come home, I want all those people who was talking shit about me to be able to look me in my eye and say the same things. People afraid for Suge to his bright. They been callin up here, asking when I am gonna get out. When I hit bricks, it all belongs to me." And he don't wanna play checkers or sip tea when he steps into freedom. The "former" CEO of Death Row Records begins his day at 7 A.M. with a meal in his two-man cell. ("I cook my own breakfast on my hot plate.") Then he fires up one of his trademark cigars, works out, showers, reads for a while and calls home. That leaves plenty time to sort out the future. ("In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you. That little buck gives you a lot of time to think.") If Suge is indeed the vicious Compton Piru mastermind known for gangsta tactics (like forcing cats to drink piss and angling Vanilla Ice over a 15-story balcony), then Simon (Suge's biblical alias) is a charming devil. Asked about a prison basketball game that left his foot in a cast, he responds, "You know Suge Knight be playing above the time. I went up in the air like Vince Carter but came down like Kelly Price." "I'm in prison. But my heart and mind is free. Gangsta haters on the streets are doing more time than me. They need 30 police escorts with them every time they walk down the street." Sitting about five feet across from me in Mule Creek's bustling visiting room (kids, moms and girlfriends everywhere), Suge's eerily cheerful as he snacks on hot dogs, popcorn, ice cream and other items from a nearby vending machine. We chat for over four hours, and since no tape recorders or notebooks are allowed, I use napkins and paper towels to take various notes from the always-wild, occassionally venomous and consistently provocative mouth of Suge Knight: "Before 'Pac got shot, Interscope didn't want to fuck with him. But by him being ghetto, I had to reach out to him, one black muthafucka to another. He was just pissed off that everybody just left him in there. Really, it was his girl Keisha who keep me up on him. It was her who really should have got the credit." "A lot of these muthafuckas let these white executives pump them up. But when Dre gets into a fight or beatdown, Jimmy Iovine is not gonna net outta bed and go fight for Dre, is he? I would like to educate thug niggas on some million-dollar game: When Steve Stoute wants to get one dollar, he has to ask Jimmy for it. I bet you that when they was thinking about putting Puffy in jail, Clive Davis called up and said , 'Let's try to work something out because this nigga has to pay me back all my money.'" "I think Jay-Z benefited from that fact that 'Pac and Biggie are dead. When they were around, he wasn't on that level. What I do like about DMX -- even though people say he bit 'Pac's style-- is that he has a great work ethic. I like them Ruff Ryder niggas. They real ghetto niggas, rappin;. I like Lil' Kim because she's grimy and a ghetto bitch. She shows pussy 'cause she's really like that." "Hayy-O is a snitch. He has no credibility. He got on the stand and lied. There wasn't no truth in anything he said. He's a con man. If a nigga's a snitch, he will do anything to get free. And really, how could you be from the ghetto and be a rat? I think he sent the wrong message to kids. He reminds me of Sammy 'The Bull.'" "I remember at the MTV awards. Snoop went to a New York radio station and said it was 'Pac with the East Coast-West Coast bullshit, not him. Snoop said he would do a song with Puffy, Biggie or anybody. 'Pac went crazy when he heard it on the radio. He was like, 'I'm covering this muthafucka's back when he was out there oding that video for "New York, New York." Muthafuckas shot up the trailer. They was cryin'. I went and smashed for them. I'm doing all this good, and here he is speakin' about hookin' up with my enemies? Me and him gotta get down.' This is what 'Pac told me. 'Pac went back and wrote a whole 'Hit 'Em Up' version of his dissin' Snoop, from beginning to end. But I ain't never put it out because of the simple fact that I thought 'Pac was angry then and might have just been talkin' because he was pissed off. I have no intention of puttin' it out, but it's there." "We don't like that "bout it, 'bout it" shit. We too gangsta for radio." "I seen Prince (The Artist) up in the clubs a few times and I hollered at him. Then the muthafucka was walkin' around with 'slave' written on his face. He was sayin' that he didn't want to fuck with people at record labels. He should have stayed ghetto instead of runnin' back to Arista with his head between his legs." "Everybody's always like, 'Pac got a bad deal. Pac is dead because of us.' But Pac always praised Death Row. Nobody ever leaves here alive. I lost a lot of loced ones like him. If you around me, then I have your back. I never make no fake-ass records talking about Pac like Puffy did 'Missing You.' He did that to benefit himself. That was my nigga and I will never do no record like that. People talk all that shit, but can't nobody say me and 'Pac didnt have fun." "People act like it ain't no East-West shit. Like Jay-Z came out here thinkin' it was all good to kick it. He did songs with Dre thinking Dre was a real street nigga. But Dre ain't got love on the street like that." "People be so quick to judge me as a ghetto muthafucka. They won't let their kids spend the night at my house because I'm supposed to be such a ghetto, violent muthafucka, but my kids get everything they want and are raised well." "We (blacks) have so much hatred inside. It's a crab mentality. That's why we feed into that black-on-black feuding so much. Too many black people have that crab mentality which stops us from makin' money. We thinkin' white people's ice is colder than ours." The Source: Have you heard about the song Snoop put out about death Row -- dissin' you? SUGE KNIGHT: (Laughing) I ain't tripppin' . As far as him and anybody else in the rap game ever tryin' to assassinate my character, that's impossible. You talkin' about a man who has always walked the walk and talked the talk. Ain't nobody ever whip my ass or slapped me all up. That's reality for them -- not for me. When those muthafuckas get loaded, they're liable to say anything. I don't even trip off anything that Snoop says because there is always a lie behind it. He was tellin' everybody that, at the time his girl was pregnant, he was gonna name (the baby) 'Pac. Then all that shit happened in Vegas, so the naming never happened. But I'm not no paper soldier, so I'm not here to assassinate nobody's character. Say what you mean and keep it that way. If you wanna cross somebody, then do that. Don't act like it wasn't you. So when you hit the street, you want people who've said whatever about you to say it in person? When I come home, I want all those people who was talkin' shit about me to be able to look me in my eye and say the same things. People afraid for Suge to hit bricks. They been callin' up here, asking when I am gonna get out. When I hit bricks, it all belongs to me. What's up with the Biggie murder? Were you involved with it? I like Biggie. Like 'Pac, he was one of the best rappers in the business. Why would I try to do something to him? Who knows? Maybe one day he could have been signed to Death Row. I don't know why muthafuckas tryin' to pin that on me. I don't even know the muthafucka they tried to connect me with. Anybody with any kind of sense know I wasn't involved. Anytime you have somebody doing positive stuff and just doing their time and minding their own business, people will sit up there and lie. I never seen no shootin'. I only know what I heard and what I read. I had no involvement. That was some wild stuff you said about Dre when we talked last weekend. Do you still feel the same way? I have nothing negative to say about Dre. Like I said, I wish him the best. I ain't the one that called him a bisexual and faggot or none of that, like other people. That was done from Eazy-E and everybody else was before. I heard you spoke to Dre. So what did you talk about? Was it a positive conversation? (Laughing) Well, you know, with me it's always positive. We just talked about a few things. I also heard you supposedly put money on both Crips and Blood books in here to make sure you don't have any problems. If I stay in here until I am a hundred years olds, I will-still be a man. I could strip down naked in here and show all my tat and never have no problems. People know who I am and who I am down with. One thing about bein' a savage it=s that you stay that way. Why would I get in jail and become a pussy? It's a lot of these rap niggas that's been slapped and drank piss. But you can't find anybody who ever said they slapped Suge Knight in or out of jail. If you always been my enemy, it's still that way. That's funny to me. When I went to jail, it was because I was involved in something. It's not like I was standin' by and not doing nothin'. You've had a lot of time to think in here. Any regrets? Has being away from the street and all the people given you a chance to reassess your life? You mean as far as regrets? I mean, have any of your opinions changed since you been in? One of the things that prison does is make you a better judge of character. Like, if you take an artist or so-called friend or whoever. if they don't a have a good heart or they're not really your friend, you don't have to waste your time bullshittin' with 'em. You pick up on people much faster. In less than five minutes, you can have a conversation with somebody and tell if the person is a snake or he full of shit. There is a difference between me and most, which is that I am fresh off the block. I don't look for no special privileges. I'm a man who paid my does. No person ever gave me nothing but God. Like I said before, a lot of these Black guys go into these record labels tap dancin' and shakin' they ass to get in the door. One thing nobody can ever take from me is that I never been on no records, poppin' around in no videos or shakin' my ass. I don't be no cheerleader. I come in like a businessman and I do business. I make sure that the people around me have the success that I have. And that's not that Hollywood success. I don't care about how many times somebody recognizes my face. My thing was to be the man who makes his little 30 or 40 million a year and still get a cheeseburger and fries and don't worry about an autograph. So, why don't we have more Black-owned businesses like death Row Records? It was such a successful label with so many platinum artists. What happened? Why couldn't it keep going? Why did it end with 'Pac dead, you in jail and Dre gone? "It's the oldest game in the world: divide and conquer. The sad thing about is that you take artists like Snoop -- they are not educated and at the top of their game -- then they have people in their ears tellin' 'em if they only make $12 million, they should have made $100 million. But there's no way possible they should make that much. That makes them think, "Death Row is fuckin' with me. I should go over here." Then they go somewhere else and find that they're not treated as well. It's about Black-owned and being empowered. IF you take LaFace Records when TLC and Toni Braxton went bankrupt, people didn't say nothing negative about Arista. Now, of all the artists on Death Row, none of them went bankrupt. They was having chips and cars and all that. Now, if they fuck theirs off, then that's on them. There's a difference in running a business. Nothing negative about Dre, but when he first started with Aftermath, it was seven months and he was outta business. Even with Eve, she had to leave because of financial reasons and everything fell through. People don't know how hard it is to have your own business. even with Snoop's new label, a lot of them have been reachin' out to me, saying they aren't making enough money. Basically, people are never happy enough because they want more money. And they all have such bad deals." Do you think police want to keep you in jail? Is there a conspiracy? "I wouldn't say it's a conspiracy; you got good and bad people everywhere, like you got good and bad cops. At the same time, you have a lot of those people who don't know where my head is at. They will say shit, do punk-ass interviews and make punk-ass records about me. But most of them are snitches and informants, anyway. So they thinkin', "When Suge come home, he's probably pissed off." But I am not trippin'. When people say the word "revenge," to me, the best revenge in the world is success." How do you wake up everyday and feel happy? Do you have that much faith in God? Is it your family that's supportive? "I'm passionate about everything, like my family and friends. I am a good judge of character and I only fuck around with my real homies, my real muthafuckas. Anybody that I am talkin' to is gonna be bonafide real. That means that your conversations are better. There is no substitution for happiness. Period." So, Suge, you're talkin' about positivity, but are you still gonna put out this Snoop "Dead Man Walkin" album? "I am in the penitentiary. The only thing that I do is my time. I'm quite sure that Death Row will be puttin' it out." June 2000 \| The Source!