The trial of one-man entertainment empire Sean ‘Puffy’ Combs began last month. Gary Younge on the case that will bitterly divide America whatever the verdict
Take one African-American star with crossover appeal, add mixed-race relationship and heat until steaming. When simmering, place in a city with a recent, well-publicised history of racist policing. Bring to the boil. Stir in violent behaviour, police intervention and a high-speed car chase for flavour. Arrest and mix until ready. Serve in a courtroom in the full glare of media publicity; add lawyer Johnnie Cochran to taste. Best when served to hungry pundits for feeding frenzy.
The OJ Simpson recipe for legal drama is about to be perfected by rap mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs, also known as Puff Daddy. The trial of 30-year-old Combs, which began in New York on January 29 with jury selection and is set to last for five weeks, has all the ingredients of the kind of courtroom tussle that enthrals and appals Americans in equal measure, while the rest of the world remains baffled.
Combs has gained almost iconic status in the world of hip-hop and beyond: he is a one-man entertainment empire, worth obscene millions. He and his girlfriend, the actress, dancer and Latin-music singer Jennifer Lopez, are the MTV generation’s first couple; he is the more boisterous half.
He stands accused on charges of gun possession and bribery after a row in a nightclub turned into a shoot-out followed by a limousine-fuelled geta-way just more than a year ago, which could earn him up to 15 years in jail. Arguing his case, among others, will be Johnnie Cochran, the leader of OJ Simpson’s dream team. But there will be far more at stake than the fates of Combs and two members of his former entourage bodyguard Anthony “Wolf” Jones and teenage protege Jamal “Shyne” Barrow, who will take the oath alongside him.
He stands as one of the most prominent representatives of a music scene accused of promoting violence and racial enmity, in a city whose police department’s standing within the black community is so low it would make the East Rand dog unit blush. After a Haitian had a plunger inserted into his rectum by a police officer and a Senegalese man was shot 12 times as he tried to let himself into his apartment, the New York Police Department is suffering from the kind of legitimacy problem their colleagues in Los Angeles experienced following the Rodney King case.
So race, rap, fame and the NYPD will all be in the dock. And with them will come the perennial questions that keep the networks in special reports and panel discussions: can a black man get a fair trial in the United States? Can the wealthy buy justice? Does rap music reflect or encourage the violence in urban America? Like OJ Simpson’s, the trial will unite Americans before their television screens. And like OJ, the verdict, whichever way it goes, will divide them bitterly. All watching the same spectacle and seeing very different things.
As one of the few senior members of the old east coast-west coast rivalry who has so far not ended up either dead or in prison, Combs is no stranger to trouble. Throughout the 1990s both he and his Los Angeles-based adversaries in the industry lived the logic of their lyrics with such violent and often fatal consequences that both Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and the oldest civil rights movement in the country, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, sent emissaries to try to mediate.
Combs was with his late friend and partner in rhyme, the rapper Notorious BIG (aka Biggie Smalls), on the night the latter was murdered in a hail of bullets as they left a party in Los Angeles. Six months earlier Tupac Shakur had been gunned down. Biggie Smalls’s favourite lyrics at the time of his death had been: “I don’t want to live no more/Sometimes I hear death knockin’ at my front door.” It was to him that Combs dedicated his hit single I’ll Be Missing You.
Unlike either his friends or enemies, Combs always kept a clear head for business. As well as the small chain of soul-food restaurants and a clothing franchise, which he runs on the side, Combs is chief executive of Bad Boy Records a label that has counted Jodeci, Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, Mary J Blige, Jennifer Lopez and Biggie Smalls on its books and brings in more than $130-million for the Munich-based giant Bertelsmann most years. His title suggests suits, stuffy meetings and boardroom manoeuvre, but over the years Combs has done everything from producing and remixing to dancing in videos and adding his own lyrics whenever the mood takes him.
“I’m an orchestrator. I’m hearing the music and seeing how the kids are going to dance to it in the clubs. I’m thinking how it’s going to look on the video, how it’s going to sell. I’m looking forward to 40 or 50 years’ time when people will still be listening to it on the radio. I’m selling the whole lifestyle,” he says. “It’s an urban lifestyle. For people who are struggling and working hard. People who are facing prejudice. They want something that can make them feel good about themselves.”
Combs did not grow up with many of the problems that he says inspire his work. He started life in an upmarket part of Harlem and at the age of two was modelling for Baskin- Robbins ice cream. By 12 he had been whisked away to suburban Mount Vernon, where he went to a private, predominantly white Catholic boys school. “I was scared to death to bring home any grade below a B,” he says.
Around this time he earned himself the nickname “Puffy”, but accounts differ as to what it means. Some say it relates to him being jokingly bad-mouthed as a “cream puff”, while others claim it was because he puffed his chest out when playing American football at high school.
He was never rich. His father died when he was three and his mother held down several jobs to get him through school. Nor was he raised in the black underclass that has produced so many of the rap stars of recent years. He makes no apologies for this: “You may be middle-class but your family may not be and your friends may not be either. And as a young black male there are still some problems we all face, like prejudice or going to jail.”
When he left Mount Vernon at 17 he went to study business at Howard, the historically black university in Washington DC, but cut his course short after a work-experience placement at Uptown Records ended in a job. He so impressed Andre Harrel, who founded the R&B label, that he was first employed and then made director of the artistic and repertoire division. It was from here that the teenager created his distinctive “hip-hop soul” sound, which helped launch the careers of Jodeci and Blige. His aim, he says, was to make his records “sound like movies: a comedy, a drama, a love story, a gangster flick.”
By 22 he was vice-president, and had formed Bad Boy Entertainments, which at first still distributed through Uptown. But the word at Uptown was that Combs was getting too big for his sneakers. So he was ousted and shoved on to the open market, where he found his true value as rival companies bid for his talents.
He has consistently maintained a huge crossover appeal among the panoply of ethnicities in the US. He is one of the few people from the rap scene and one of the few black people to have made it on to the cover of GQ and Forbes. With considerable help from Lopez, he has also been successfully penetrating the Hispanic market, for whom he cut PE 2000 in Spanish.
But what works on the turn-table does not always gel in the boardroom. Conscious that his profile, in terms of race, age and class, makes him an anomaly among the corporate class, he has developed a keen sense of self-awareness and self-value: “There is nobody who can do what I do, so disrespecting me in the boardroom would be a big mistake. I don’t know what they’re saying when I’m not in the boardroom but that doesn’t really bother me. I just keep on going.”
Combs is basically a young executive. He likes the idea of making people who would cross the road to avoid him do business with him as an equal. “I’m comfortable,” he says. “I feel great wearing these pants and my sunglasses. Sometimes people get a little mad that there’s a young black man and you have as much money as them. I’m not trying to make them mad but I’m glad they are. It’s really not my problem.”
Whether it is a defensive reaction or a serious character flaw, however, sometimes he seems to value himself just a little too highly. Slightly built and softly spoken, he moonwalks on the thin line between confidence and arrogance. Occasionally, and increasingly in recent times, he tips over the edge.
In 1995 he was accused of pulling a gun on a newspaper photographer and, in a separate incident, on a cafeteria worker at Georgetown University. In April 1999 came his most serious brush with the law yet, when he was arrested and charged with assault after he attacked a music executive in his office in broad daylight.
Steven Stoute, who works for Interscope records, had a row with Combs over the latter’s participation in a music video. Combs was not pleased with the result so he returned to Stoute’s New York office with two bodyguards, trashed it and beat him up. With Stoute claiming he feared for his life and travelling around with 24-hour security, Combs appeared to be heading for a potential seven-year stretch. The prospect of jail time was averted only after he launched a charm offensive, believed to be backed up by a hefty out-of-court settlement. Following a public apology, reconciliation and a reported $1-million payment to Stoute, he pleaded guilty to the far lesser crime of a harassment violation. By the end of 1999 this left him with no criminal record and a sentence of a one-day class in anger management.
Whatever they taught him there it clearly didn’t work: in the early hours of December 27 1999 he found himself at the centre of the thoroughly avoidable row in Club New York, just off Times Square, which has put him before the courts again. “I’d give anything if I had stayed my butt at home,” he said in one of his pre-trial hearings.
The row, which allegedly ended with an ostentatious display of violence, began with a spat over ostentation, pure and simple. Combs is the high priest of what the world of hip-hop has termed “bling-bling” the profligate spending and displays of wealth with which so many rappers are associated. Over the years Combs has developed a penchant for the thickest of gold chains, open-top Bentleys and houses in the Hamptons, the upmarket weekend retreat in upstate New York where he throws lavish parties.
One party-goer at Club New York, who remains to be identified, was none too impressed by Combs’s flashy aura, and started to pick a fight. “Fuck you,” he is reported to have screamed at Combs. “We made you! Who do you think you are?”
Then the man who could clearly bling-bling with the best of them took out a roll of $3000 and hurled the notes in Combs’s face. A bouncer tried to intervene but Combs was in a rage. “It ain’t over,” he yelled. What followed was bedlam: hell broke loose and, depending on whom you believe, all common sense and proportion took off with it. “Shyne” Barrow started firing a 9mm semi-automatic gun, which the prosecution claims wounded three people, none critically, and was then arrested.
Combs claims he and Lopez then fled the building in a waiting limousine, after which they were stopped by police and accused of carrying unlicensed weapons. The police describe it somewhat differently. They say the car carrying the two stars took to the pavement to avoid a road block, jumped 11 red lights and finally stopped after a considerable chase. En route, they say, a gun was thrown from the car. When they arrived they found another gun, loaded and unlicensed, under the passenger seat.
Moreover, when they took the couple and their chauffeur to the station for questioning, Combs is alleged to have tried to bribe the driver, Wardel Fenderson, into claiming the gun in the car was his, with the offer of $50000. Combs suggested Fenderson take the $40000 diamond ring he was wearing, which Lopez had bought him for his 30th birthday, as collateral.
Lopez, the only one of the trio who was not charged, was by all accounts deeply upset by the experience. Partial to a bit of bling-bling herself, America’s best-paid actress of colour insists on sheets with a minimum thread count of 250 when on the road and being driven in a black Mercedes with a male driver. So being stuck in a police station for 14 hours, being questioned and spending much of the time handcuffed to a bench, was particularly traumatic. After one emotional outburst, she is said to have sent a policeman out to get her some cuticle cream.
She has resolutely stood by her man, stating that she never saw him with a gun nor felt a gun on his person all evening. But despite the very public support she has given to Combs since then, it has not stopped many from claiming that the incident almost forced them to split up. Only weeks before, the gossip columns had been gearing up for the possibility of a New Year’s Eve wedding; now they were predicting their imminent demise. “Lopez had Puffy huff,” declared the New York Daily News. “Are Puffy and Lopez at War?” asked the New York Post. Even the self-proclaimed paper of record, The New York Times, ran a story reporting that female court officers said that if Lopez had any brains she would dump Combs.
Had her mother been there she would doubtless have agreed. “It’s not what she would want for her daughters,” says a friend. The fact obviously weighs on Lopez. “The night she was locked up, Jennifer was very concerned about her mother,” says Ed Hayes, one of Combs’s lawyers who was present the night she was detained. “‘My mother’s going to be so upset,’ I remember her saying. She was extremely worried about her.”
The daughter of Puerto-Rican immigrants, Lopez was raised in a lower-middle-class area of the Bronx where, as in Combs’s neighbourhood, jail and stardom were equally alien prospects. Her mother taught kindergarten, her father is a computer specialist. “Where I come from, you got a job as a bank teller and got married, and being driven didn’t mean wanting to be a star,” she says. “It meant wanting to be a lawyer instead of a secretary.”
So a young Lopez irritated her parents by studying dance, first at Ballet Hispanico and then at jazz studios in Manhattan. She landed a none-too-challenging acting role in a television sitcom, In Living Color, and won acclaim for her title role in Gregory Nava’s Selena in 1997. The next year she was ousting Sandra Bullock for the lead opposite George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight. By the time she released her debut album On the 6 in 1999, she was the highest-paid Latina actor in the US and an unassailable star.
“Sexy, provocative, and visually spectacular,” was how Oliver Stone described her, having cast her in U Turn opposite Sean Penn. “She was this tough girl from the streets, a cunning actress, who really wanted to work hard.”
Until she got together with Combs, however, there were few indications that her search for status on the movie scene would ever intrude into her private life. She split up with her high-school sweetheart, David Cruz, in 1996; he went on to open a dry-cleaning business in the Bronx. She then fell for Ojani Noa, a Cuban she met when he was waiting tables in Miami. They married but within a year they had split up, albeit amicably; Noa now manages a club that Lopez co-owns in Los Angeles.
So Combs was her first high- profile boyfriend. They met when he helped her out with her music but they were not romantically linked until the summer of 1999. When Combs and Lopez appeared on his balcony at his annual party in East Hampton that September, dressed in white and waving at his guests, the penny finally dropped.
Some fear that he may be getting far more out of the relationship than her. Lopez has confessed before that she’s an idiot when she falls in love. Her friends say she looks lost in his presence. Said one: “I watched her spend a lot of time waiting around for him when he was working in the studio. When he introduced her to me, he asked her to get him a glass of water and I thought, ‘That’s Jennifer Lopez?’ She seemed like his assistant, she was so subordinate.”
Soon after they met he persuaded her to change her manager to his. “When he’s around he’s the man- ager,” says Eric Gold, her former manager. “Whether she takes a movie or not becomes his decision. And when she’s with him, she becomes entirely involved. I miss the Jennifer I used to know. But she is definitely in love. At the end of the day, she wants to be the mother of his kids.”
Whatever the imbalances, they remain close. Even though she did not join him in court she did give him another diamond ring for good luck.
“Jennifer has helped me through this particular time,” says Combs. “She’s my soulmate. When we’re together I don’t see her as a singer or anything like that. Behind closed doors she’s Jennifer and I’m Sean.”
For a man like Combs, who has two children by two different women, this is about as romantic as it gets. He remains, however, one ring short of the kind of commitment Lopez would like. “The time isn’t right to settle down just yet,” he says. “I’ve still got a lot of maturing to do.”
His excuse for not settling down with Lopez may yet be his best defence in court.