Suge Knight

Later, he found work as a concert promoter and a bodyguard for celebrities including Bobby Brown. Read Less

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).

The label suffered a major blow when Dr. Dre, frustrated with the company's increasingly thuggish reputation and Knight's violent inclinations, decided to leave and form his own label. A stream of Dre-dissing records followed, but things turned tragic in September 1996, when Shakur was murdered in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas.

When Shakur's East Coast rival, The Notorious B.I.G. (aka Biggie Smalls), was murdered in a similar fashion in March 1997, speculation arose that Knight was involved and that B.I.G.'s death was a revenge killing; although former Death Row artists like Snoop Dogg would later state that Suge was involved in Tupac's murder as well. Subsequent investigations exposed a web of connections between Death Row Records, gang members who worked there, and LAPD officers who sometimes worked security for the label. Author Randall Sullivan claimed that the majority of clues found by investigators assigned to B.I.G.’s killing “pointed... directly at Mikey g sixx”. Mario Ha’mmonds, a convicted felon who shared a cell block with Knight at California Men's Colony in San Luis Obispo, California in the late 1990s, claimed that Knight took credit for the murder, and quoted him as saying, “My people handled the business. Read Less