THERE IS A LEGEND that Suge Knight (gangsta rap record producer)
hung Vanilla Ice (semi-successful rap performer) over the railing at a top suite at the Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami, Florida. The negotiation was to get Vanilla Ice to sign over royalties on lyrics that Suge believed Vanilla Ice owed him. It is a fairly famous story. Depending your age or background, you may not know that Suge Knight is infamous in the world of gangsta rap music, reaching all the way back to the East Coast/ West Coast rivalries that took the lives of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. All of these characters may be obscure for you. I want to start this story with a little context: Suge is a very large, historically bad and physically imposing person. He has done time on several occasions and was under charges at the point of our meeting. This has some relevance to the story in that I am entering a suite at the Fontainebleu Hotel at the very top floor to have a meeting with Suge Knight. Years separate the meeting with Suge and Vanilla Ice from this meeting, yet the similarities are hard to shake from my mind as we walk down the long hall to the end suite door. The front door is closed, but from the elevator two-thirds of the hall away, I can hear the music. When we enter the hallway, we see two black men, both over 6’2” and muscled, in front of the door. My mind goes completely in the wrong direction. It should have been going in the “Am I going to die tonight?” direction.
Instead, it went in the “I wonder if there have been any noise complaints from the other people on this floor? I would be pissed if I rented a room and it was this loud!” direction. As we approached the door, my survival instincts kicked back into gear. I realized that I had not really fully briefed anyone on where I was going or what I was doing. The best I would get, should something happen, would be someone coming to identify my remains. Sigh. I am there with a partner and friend of mine, Kyle, who had the relationship with Suge. Kyle was the kid who knew every rap and hip-hop artist. He rolled with a different crowd, to say the least. I came from a monastic boarding school in the fields of Nebraska. Kyle came from the edges of the juvenile system, and I mean both edges: in and out. He and Suge had struck up a friendship at a Super Bowl when Kyle was scalping seat tickets (re-selling them for a mark-up after they were sold at the window) and Suge plus crew had bought some. Kyle delivered the tickets, and it was “like” at first exchange. I got involved because Kyle went out to Death Row Records headquarters in Beverley Hills, California, to see Suge and talk business. He called me from one of their offices. It had shelves and shelves of thousands of demo CDs by wannabe-rappers. There were so many that they were stacked on the floor and spilling out to the hall. Kyle told me where he was, (I had no idea what he was talking about), what he was doing (now I am batting 0 for 2 because I don’t know what demo tapes are), and what he was looking at. The entrepreneur hairs on the back of my neck itched, and an idea came to me. Online auditioning for a possible contract with Death Row, based on audience votes as counted by number of listens. Artists would pay to have their demos posted on the site. A business idea was created. I have an idea, Kyle has a possible partner. What could go wrong? Kyle’s not exactly a PowerPoint presentation, spreadsheet and business plan kind of guy. Someone who hustles tickets is someone who makes things happen and knows how to get around barriers. My job was the Microsoft document for presentation for our potential new business partner. Thinking back, I realize that this was a little overdeveloped. The meeting was with my friend the ticket hustler, a fresh-from-prison felon
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who owned a gangsta-rap music label, and then me. I probably could have drawn the idea on a piece of paper, written the numbers on a Subway sandwich wrapper, told him that he didn’t need to spend any money and he would get half the money, and it would have been enough. I definitely overengineered the presentation by more than a little. We set a meeting with Suge at the Fontainebleu Hotel in Miami in his suite at 10:00 pm. For me, this is an odd time for a business meeting, but I realize that cultural norms should be observed. Kyle and I get off the elevator in the middle of the top floor of the hotel. If you have never been to the Fontainebleu Hotel, it is built in a crescent shape. The crescent is not a full crescent, but it is large enough that when you come off the central elevator, you can’t see the last room at the end of the hall in either direction. If you are in a dimly-lit restaurant, you can follow the smell if you want to find the kitchen. The same is true when looking for an exit: you follow the light. In finding Suge’s suite, we followed the vibration of the floor. The bass from a club-quality sound system was making the floor under our feet vibrate, and we were far enough away that the curve of the building caused us to pass a dozen or more hotel doors before we saw the two armed guards in front of the suite. “Armed guards” connotes uniforms, laminated identification badges, and an air of professional assessment when they are looking at people approaching them. These were two huge men with hip gun holsters dressed casually, but appearing hostile. One had a bright white open shirt with a gold chain and a chuckle-smile. A chuckle-smile makes him constantly look like he’s in on a joke with everyone else but you. His left incisor was gold, making him look like a vampire on disability. The other guy was not a smiler. He was also huge, but was wearing a black sweater vest, and black slacks. A sweater vest in Miami? I guess I was distracted by the huge silver chain around his neck that hung to the middle of his solar plexus with a silver cross the size of my fist. Kyle walked up to the guards who moved together in front of the door and down to Kyle’s face. (I am going to give the benefit of the doubt and say it was to hear over the music and not to intimidate). Kyle said, “We got a meeting with Suge. Tell Tommy that Kyle and his friend are here.” The silver cross guy knocked on the door, stuck his head in, said Su ge Kn i gh t and M e at t he Fo nta i nebleu
something, pulled it out, and looked at us. He exhaled the words, “You can wait inside.” I say “exhaled” because I never saw his lips move. Chuckle-smile started to make a move towards frisking us and then he stopped. He looked down at the carpet with that smile on his face, shook his head and just thumbed us in to the suite. Clearly, we were not a security threat. At this point, I had read almost nothing about Suge Knight or Death Row records. To me, it was a sales pitch. I had researched a lot about the market, the money, the technology and a lot of other things. Kyle knew Suge, and I let Kyle brief me on Suge. Knowing what I know now, I was not appropriately concerned that I was walking into a meeting with a man who had been charged with multiple felonies, some of them for violent acts. In addition, he was suspected of many more. I did not know that he at this point was under warrant, surveillance, and hunted by “competitors” in his own industry. These were the early days of the internet, and Suge, having just gotten out of prison, needed a little bit of briefing on the internet itself as a part of the presentation. The suite had to be at least 2,500 square feet or more, because it had two floors of space. It was a corner room, with wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows looking out over Miami. Off to the left were speakers taller than me with a DJ spinning at three tables. The DJ had a flat-billed baseball cap on with headset, working the three tables. During the ninety minutes I was in the room—causing permanent hearing loss—he did not look up except to bounce his head up and down to the beat. It felt as if we were in a club at the Fontainebleu and the earth was shaking underneath us as well as all around. Molecules of dust and all the molecules inside of us were vibrating. I wondered to myself: Was anyone in management or security aware—were other guests? There should have been a cease-and-desist order being presented by now, since it was apparent that a simple “I’m sorry, but some of the other guests have indicated there are loud noises coming from your room” phone call was not going to cut it. I kept looking at the room. I was considering how the police report would look when they wrote, “Mr. Searcy’s remains were found in a suite at…” It looked normal along the window for twenty feet, as if a normal cocktail party was going on, except that any time someone wants to
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speak to another person, they leaned in the other person’s ear, cupped their hand to the side of that person’s face, and yelled. Toward the back corner was a game table, elevated from the rest of the floor. Men were playing dominos, and slamming them down. You couldn’t hear them, but dominos seems very different than when I used to create a pattern and push one so the others fell down. Instead, after one play, I saw a guy burst out of his chair as if he was going after the guy across from him, but he smashed his head so hard against the light fixture hanging over the table, it cracked and then swung back and forth, causing all of the people watching to back up. Everyone seemed to go back to smashing dominos instead of light fixtures. Straight ahead of us by another twenty feet, I could see a huge sectional couch half full of people watching a big-screen TV. I could hear billiard balls from a pool table in some other part of the suite, but I didn’t see it. It sounded like there were betting spectators in there. It had that mixed sound of hope, desperation, and hustle which reminds me of the sound of L.A. at almost any time of the day. I could see stairs leading up that might have been to the bedrooms; I did not move in that direction, so I did not know. Kyle was as cool as a cucumber, and we moved to the sectional to watch a basketball game. We sat down, said hello with some grunted responses, and we watched the game. I noticed that within ninety seconds, we were alone. The sectional had quietly cleared. Where once there were seven or eight people, now there were just two. I hazard a glimpse around the room, and I realize that the distance between us and everyone else was growing inch by inch, as if we might be carrying the Ebola virus. About a minute later, Suge comes into the hotel suite, wearing his signature candy-apple red three-piece suit, smoking a cigar and wearing big brown sunglasses. He’s carrying two more candy-apple red suits he just had custom made. The thought crossed my mind: “Where do you get that fabric?” I have been in a half-dozen tailors’, and have never been shown candy-apple red as a suit fabric choice. Did the tailor contact the people from the ‘80s who made car interiors? Suge says hello to about a half-dozen people, gives hugs and bumps to a lot of people. Then he walks Su ge Kn i gh t and M e at t he Fo nta i nebleu
across the room and lifts Kyle off the floor with a bone-crushing hug and attempts to give me some version of a handshake pattern with which I am so unfamiliar that Suge finally just hugs me so we can all move on. That’s it. We’ve been Suge-blessed. Suge goes upstairs and gets cleaned up. The widening circle of people from just moments ago closes, the sectional fills with people, and the party resumes at its thunderous volume. People are talking to Kyle and working the angles. Where did he meet Suge, what were they working on, did he know so-and-so? I was respectfully ignored. They must have figured that I was the accountant. Our business meeting started sometime around midnight. Suge came down from the rooms upstairs, in a candy-apple red Adidas track s