Diddy reportedly kept The Notorious B.I.G. on such a tight financial leash that he couldn’t afford to help his former friend, Tupac Shakur, out of jail.
In an interview with VYRE’s So Reckless podcast, the embattled mogul’s ex-bodyguard, Gene Deal, claimed that he had personal knowledge of Bad Boy Records’ predatory contracts because he’d seen them himself.
“I asked Big about Tupac—I asked him all those questions,” he said to interviewer M. RECK. “When I asked him about Pac, when I asked him, ‘why you ain’t give Pac the money or nothing like that, man?’ because Jasmine Guy and Jada Pinkett [Jada Pinkett Smith] was going around, trying to get Pac out of jail…so I asked Big, ‘why you ain’t give him no money?’ And he said, ‘because I ain’t have no money. I was broke.'”
He continued: “I had to sell Puff [Diddy] my publishing. And I knew that because I read the contract when we was coming out to California. Puff gave me the briefcase.”
In October 1995, Tupac Shakur was released from prison on $1.4 million bail, following an appeal of his conviction for sexual assault earlier that same year. Though it has been commonly believed that Marion “Suge” Knight paid the bail in exchange for Pac signing to Death Row Records — a move which Shakur agreed to, thus setting the stage for the ensuing East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry — former Interscope Records exec Jimmy Iovine revealed that he was responsible for fronting Death Row Records the money in The Defiant Ones docuseries, a fact corroborated by David Cohen, Interscope’s then-Head of Business Affairs.
“I imagine Tupac himself thought Suge bailed him out. But the truth is we and Time Warner put up the money,” he said. “I mean, look…I was definitely part of bailing out Tupac.”
Meanwhile, Diddy is currently sitting in a New York correctional facility as he awaits sentencing on convictions of a myriad of federal charges. His new sentencing date is scheduled for October 3.
