

It was nothing for Knight to hand over a stack of hundred-dollar bills to Tupac for a weekend’s expenses. It had become increasingly clear that there was a steep penalty to pay for having thrown in with Suge Knight.Įven for the rough-edged music industry, which has historically been prone to excess and to connections with criminal elements, Death Row was a remarkable place. Tupac had made three earlier albums, but they had never reached the stratosphere of “quintuple platinum.” Still, the days preceding his murder were anything but halcyon for him.

The first album Tupac made for Death Row, “All Eyez on Me,” which was released in early 1996, sold over five million units. The company earned seventy-five million dollars in revenues last year. Death Row, the leading purveyor of West Coast “gangsta rap,” is a music-business phenomenon. 750 sedan driven by Marion (Suge) Knight, the head of Death Row Records. When twenty-five-year-old Tupac Shakur was shot and killed in Las Vegas last fall, he was riding in the passenger seat of a B.M.W.
