Suge Knight - Death Row Records

Death Row Records

Dr. Dre and The D.O.C. wanted to leave both N.W.A. and their label, Ruthless Records, run by Eazy-E, another member of N.W.A. According to N.W.A's manager Jerry Heller, Knight and his henchmen threatened Heller and Eazy-E with lead pipes and baseball bats to make them release Dre, The D.O.C., and Michel'le from their contracts. Ultimately, Dre and DOC co-founded Death Row Records in 1991 with Knight, who vowed to make it "the Motown of the '90s."

Initially, Knight fulfilled his ambitions: he secured a distribution deal with Interscope, and Dre's 1992 solo debut, The Chronic, has sold over three million copies. It also made a career for Dre's protégé, Snoop Dogg, whose debut album Doggystyle was another multi-platinum album.

Meanwhile, Death Row had begun a public feud with 2 Live Crew's Luther Campbell, and when Knight traveled to Miami for a hip-hop convention in 1993, he was apparently seen openly carrying a stolen gun. The following year, he opened a private, by-appointment-only nightclub in Las Vegas called Club 662, so named because the numbers spelled out MOB, which stands for Money over Bitches, on telephone keypads. In 1995, he ran afoul of activist C. Delores Tucker, whose criticism of Death Row's glamorization of the "gangsta" lifestyle may have helped scuttle a lucrative deal with Time Warner.