Part One: P. Diddy: A Life in Crimes

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Speaker 3 Oh, welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast being recorded on a shockingly good week. We've all been in a real downswing since the election, but some great news lately.

Speaker 3 A thing happened that we probably shouldn't joke about, but you know what it is. Bashar al-Assad fled Syria.
Nick Fuentes got arrested.

Speaker 3 And our guest today is one of my favorite people, someone that the audience has not met before, but someone who has been a friend of mine for like 15 years. Great human.
Very human.

Speaker 3 I have told some stories about all of the great human stuff.

Speaker 3 Great human. My humanitarian friend,

Speaker 3 Greasy Will, Greasy with a Z, Grammy award-winning

Speaker 3 audio engineer.

Speaker 3 Yes, and proof that you can accomplish great things with half of a brain.

Speaker 3 For the album, you win that Grammy for the album Michael by Killer Mike. My audience will also know you as the other person in that story where I had a light bulb fight in Santa Monica.

Speaker 3 Oh, man. Amazing times.
Good times. You and I had some adventures.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and you know what's cool is like, I mean, you know, I'm going to have my best etiquette today because I am a behind the bastards fan.

Speaker 3 Because I, you know, I listen to this show because it's like hanging out with my friends still.

Speaker 3 You know, it's like, it's like every day that we've ever been together is like, like Robert against, I'm like, hey, man, you guys, you guys ever heard that story about the Egyptian guy?

Speaker 3 No, tell me more. Tell me more about this fucked up dude.

Speaker 1 And we had a lot of conversations about when we were going to introduce you to the Behind the Bastards audience.

Speaker 1 And I have made a request for three separate topics, and I have never told people those three topics that I have requested Robert to write about. But one of them is today.

Speaker 1 And I desperately wanted you on these episodes. So I'm very, very excited about this.

Speaker 3 As a representative of the hip-hop industry, it's appropriate that we are gathered here today to talk about P. Diddy.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Sean Puffy Combs. It has been an amazing opportunity to be here for this because,

Speaker 3 you know, there's a certain thing, and I'm going to try and be careful today because like there's, when you're in the industry as deep as I am, I'm 15 years into doing this. It is.

Speaker 3 It's damn near impossible to miss the rumors, right? It's like, and I actually had a huge viral like TikTok right at the

Speaker 3 beginning of all this, when the first lawsuit dropped, when the Cassie lawsuit dropped.

Speaker 3 I had a viral TikTok that got like 10 million views because I was like, immediately, I was like, oh, Diddy's going down, dude.

Speaker 3 Because there's certain people in the industry you've heard so many things about for so long that when that thing comes out and like the first damn breaks, that first little the Dutch boy pulls his finger out or whatever,

Speaker 3 you know it is going to start uncovering ridiculous things and i even said at the moment i was like if the tabloids are starting to run with this stuff it is only a matter of time before the feds get involved like the feds don't like looking stupid they don't like looking bad like that and when somebody is sex trafficking across

Speaker 3 countries i'm not laughing at the sex trafficking i'm just happy that he got caught yes yeah yeah you know it's like you just you got to know it's like this was coming it was going to happen and when it opened up, when the dam opened up, it was like, oh,

Speaker 3 let's see what happens. Let's see what happens.
Yeah, let's see. Let's see when this final.

Speaker 1 At one point, Robert was like, he had new baby goats. What kind of goats were they?

Speaker 3 That is the story that opens this podcast.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because you started by being like, in the industry, I've been hearing fucking rumors about P. Diddy for years.

Speaker 3 Well, roughly a year ago, my goat had little baby goats, and one of them was a hybrid Nigerian Angora mix with the softest hair I have ever felt on an animal if it's not a chinchilla.

Speaker 3 Beautiful animal.

Speaker 3 Previously, I had gone with the rubric of naming my livestock after famous historic dictators because it amused me to have to, for example, cut the shit out of Joseph Brodestito's ass dreadlocks.

Speaker 3 Like, that's just kind of funny, right?

Speaker 3 But this particular goat was really cute, so I decided I wanted to give him a mirthful name. And I told Sophie, my producer, I'm going to call him P.
Diddy.

Speaker 3 Now, let me say here, I'm not a pop culture guy. I didn't know anything other than like P.
Diddy was like a rapper.

Speaker 3 I actually didn't realize how into gangster rap he was because, again, not super aware of all this stuff. I was just like, oh, he's like a Snoop Dogg type figure.

Speaker 3 His image has never particularly been gangster rap. Like, not well, I mean, like, not since he was having people killed.
Yeah. Yes.
Yeah. He definitely did.
He was more mogul. Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 3 That is a great way to say it. He's like, he was, he was, he was the guy who has companies, the alcohol, Sirock.
He's got, you know, he's got this. He's got shoes.
He's got clothing.

Speaker 3 He's got all this stuff. Like, he definitely shifted like Ice Cube did to Disney movies.
Like, it was like that immediate, like, oh man, you can get away with so.

Speaker 3 Not accusing Ice Cube of anything, but you can get away with so much more. Yeah.
If you look a different way than the guy who's like involved in multiple deaths and shit,

Speaker 3 you know, yeah. And yeah, so, so, like, that was, I was like, oh, just named P.
Diddy. That's a fun name, right?

Speaker 3 Anyway, Sophie did her job, which is to dive in front of bullets for her host as a producer.

Speaker 3 Called the one today.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and said, no, you cannot name your goat after Diddy because he's a monster. And I was like, oh, and I looked into him and there wasn't a ton out at the time.

Speaker 3 And then he got righted by the FBI a few months later. And I was like,

Speaker 3 it only took a minute. It did take long.
It was only going to take a minute. It did not take long.

Speaker 1 It was a well-known secret most of my entire life living in Los Angeles.

Speaker 3 I had missed it.

Speaker 3 Everybody, everybody, if you're like in a certain kind of scene around the world, in like the, in the industry in LA, it's like you will always hear that, like some old, like, you know, it's like the caterers.

Speaker 3 It's the people that are like the service workers of the, of the world, you know, the engineers, the white dude in a room full of rappers sitting at the desk that's like, oh, shit. Like, really?

Speaker 3 They just say this out loud.

Speaker 3 And it's like, sometimes it's secondhand, sometimes, but it's like, you'll hear these things and it'll be like some older, like, grizzly dude that's like, yeah, man, don't ever, don't ever work for Kanye, man.

Speaker 1 You know, it's like, or, or, or famously, don't go to a Diddy party.

Speaker 3 Don't go to a Diddy party. Don't hang out with Diddy.
I had even watched earlier this year that movie Blink Twice, and I was like, oh, this is kind of interesting, you know? And then

Speaker 3 I find out later, like, oh, it's supposed to be about Diddy. Like, this was a veiled way of talking about this guy.

Speaker 3 So, if you're like me, or if you're someone who knows more about Diddy, you know, the question is,

Speaker 3 how did all this, like, how did this guy get to where he is and get to do what he he did for so long without having a downfall?

Speaker 3 And we are going to answer that question and more this week on Behind the Bastards, a podcast about people I almost named GOATS after.

Speaker 3 And we're back. So, Sean John Combs, which is kind of Sean John, which is the name of the clothing brand he's going to make later, was born on November 4th, 1969 in Harlem, New York.

Speaker 3 He was the son of Janice Combs, a former model who worked as a teacher's assistant most of his childhood.

Speaker 3 His father, Melvin Earl Combs, had served in the Air Force, but later in life became a drug dealer. He also, he worked for a guy named Frank Lucas.

Speaker 3 And does the name Frank Lucas mean anything to y'all?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 He is, if you've seen American Gangster, that's the guy Denzel plays. An American gangster.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Sean's dad works for a very serious gangster. Right.
Played by Denzel serious, right?

Speaker 3 As an aside, if your goal is to make a movie about like crime is bad, don't have Denzel play the gangster. That's just going to make me want to be a gangster.
Everyone wants to.

Speaker 3 The Aaron Taylor Johnson of situation, you know?

Speaker 3 You got to get like, you know, the right kind of feel for people. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Denzel's so handsome. What did they do with it?

Speaker 3 It was like the Gladiator 2 movie really wouldn't like it would have been a tiny bit of time. I thought he was the good guy the whole time.
Yeah, I was like, no, I'm on board.

Speaker 3 I Alexahomo, like the I thought he was the good guy. Get him.
Oh, I guess we're not supposed to like this guy. Oh, is he bad? I'm so confused, man.

Speaker 3 It's Denzel. He's wearing purple.
What's not to like? He looked regal as fuck. I was just like, oh, man.

Speaker 3 He should be the emperor.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 This seems fair.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So, tragically, Melvin Combs was never played by Denzel in a movie. Instead, he was assassinated, shot dead in his car in Central Park when he was 33 years old.

Speaker 3 Shaw. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is Diddy's dad. That is a young one.
Yes, yes.

Speaker 3 Sean is two years old at the time, so he never really knows his father.

Speaker 3 As a little boy, his dad's death served as a constant reminder of the consequences of crime as a lifestyle, or at least that's what he would say.

Speaker 3 I don't know how true that is, because again, very involved in crimes. You know, seems more like it was like a lesson on, like, don't be the guy in the car getting smoked at 33.

Speaker 3 You know, be the guy who Denzel winds up playing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, be a bit up. Be up a couple levels.
You know,

Speaker 3 you got some more wiggle room up there. Uh-huh.
Yeah, don't be a private, be a general. Yeah.
Yes.

Speaker 3 So his mom moved the family out of Harlem not long after Melvin's death, taking them to Mount Vernon, a suburb in Westchester County. Now, as an adult, going by the name P.

Speaker 3 Diddy, Sean would make a lot of statements about the poverty he was raised in, because if you are coming up in hip-hop in the way he did, you want to act like you came from a really hard back.

Speaker 3 For sure.

Speaker 3 I mean, this is, we will probably talk about this, I'm sure, eventually at some point but like this is the tupac thing like he went to he went to like a performing arts school like he didn't grow up i mean his mom was a revolutionary you know activist or whatever but he came up in a pretty decent kind of lifestyle and it wasn't until he got into that east coast west coast beef that he gangstered up hard yeah yeah whereas uh i mean we're going to talk about biggie biggie does come from like a rough background like biggie selling cocaine instead of making record deals uh yeah now uh and obviously Sean is massively exaggerating, how rough his background was.

Speaker 3 I don't want to minimize like his dad getting shot when he's two, but his mom is, like Tupac's mom, one of these people who works incredibly hard and is very responsible.

Speaker 3 She gives her kid a good degree, kids, a lot of stability and comfort. Sean goes to a prestigious private school, Mount St.
Michael. It's a Catholic school.
His family is very Catholic.

Speaker 3 He wears a uniform. He plays football.
His mom describes him in interviews as having been an entrepreneur from a young age, starting his own paper.

Speaker 3 And not in the way that you often mean that in hip-hop.

Speaker 3 He starts a paper route as a kid, right?

Speaker 3 In order to make money. She told the New Yorker, we had a Cadillac car and a house, and he liked life like that, right? So, yeah.

Speaker 1 Was the actual quote that he was an entrepreneur at an early age? That was a direct quote.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there will be a royal ass shit. Connor Roy was interested in politics at a young age.
There will be a lot of other stories like that.

Speaker 3 again, I mean, this has been brought up many times on the show. When

Speaker 3 kids show too much aptitude for something at a young age, you got to worry about it.

Speaker 3 When your kid says he wants to be a CEO, look, I'm not saying you should do this legally, but maybe get them into drugs.

Speaker 3 Slow them down a little bit. Slow them down a little bit.
Look, I got two kids now.

Speaker 3 You don't just give them drugs, you leave them around.

Speaker 3 You just leave them on the street. They'll figure it out.
Yeah. Yeah.
Put them outside and don't watch them enough.

Speaker 3 Like my parents did. Yeah, yeah, that's

Speaker 3 and we all turned out great.

Speaker 3 Your children could also be having light bulb fights in the streets of Santa Monica

Speaker 3 and winning a Grammy. And winning Grammys.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So one story Diddy likes to tell is of the time his aunt babysat him at her home, which was in a public housing project called the Patterson Houses and the Bronx.

Speaker 3 So again, his mom gets out to the suburbs. They own a home.
Other members of his family obviously are a lot less comfortable. And the story he tells is that he wakes up.

Speaker 3 Sometimes he'll say, I woke up with 15 cockroaches on my face, which you didn't count the cockroaches. Nobody would in that situation.

Speaker 3 You can feel a dozen cockroaches, but you can't count them as fast as you can. I don't know the exact number, man.

Speaker 3 And in other recitations, he's less specific. I'm not saying this didn't happen.
It probably did, just knowing the other stuff about his life.

Speaker 3 But he also.

Speaker 3 I've lived in decent places where cockroaches were on my face. I too have woken up with some cockroaches on my face.

Speaker 3 This apparently inspired him to seek wealth and success. Quote, and this is from him years later.
I was like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to get out of here.
I'm going to be somebody.

Speaker 3 I'm going to own something and be able to take care of my family. I don't want to live in these conditions no more.
And again, you know, I'm not,

Speaker 3 maybe something like this happened. He also does bring it up exactly the way you would if you're trying to like throw out in interviews scenes that people will put in a biopic about you, right? Right.

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. That one sound bite that grabs you at the perfect time and they're like, yeah, man, like, that's it.
That's not it. You're never going to be anything,

Speaker 3 Diddy. You'll never make it, kid.

Speaker 3 You're going to go down just like your father.

Speaker 3 Dead in the back of a car.

Speaker 3 Now, Diddy would later claim that the memory of this harrowing event inspired him whenever he made a change in his career. It was something that just kind of snaps on you.

Speaker 3 Don't take less in life and fight back. Those roaches still to this day, whenever I get comfortable, I just remember them.

Speaker 3 I remember living in a situation where babies weren't changed for two or three days and everything smells and there's no food the memory is the thing that really fuels me to make sure that one day none of us have to live like that and did he didn't do anything to make sure none of us had to live like that and you didn't live like that right yeah yeah

Speaker 3 he made sure he he don't live like that yeah he made sure you didn't have to live that way but um fair enough yeah fair enough no but that that's it i mean like that is often you know uh whether true or not you know i like there's definitely probably essences of that you know like

Speaker 3 of being true because like, you know, like that is the story of a lot of people in America right now. It's like going through some really tough times and like seeing trying to like get there.

Speaker 3 And like that is often the story, especially when it comes to successful people in the music industry. It's like, hey, man, I come up hard.
Used to be anyways. It's more Nepo babies these days.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's the more Nepo babies.

Speaker 3 It doesn't mean that music was the great equalizer, you know? It's like you could be poor and from nowhere and become the biggest in the world. That's what music used to be.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And it's, I mean, like everything, it becomes more oligarchic as it fucking ages and gets sclerotic.
But like, it's also not weird.

Speaker 3 You know, I can say, I didn't, I wouldn't say I had a hard upbringing. My parents were like poor when I was a little kid.
Financial stress is like a lot of my earliest memories.

Speaker 3 And that's definitely part of why I have gone after money as an adult, right?

Speaker 3 It's because like I didn't want to have screaming fights in front of my partner about the fact that we couldn't afford rent or whatever, you know? That's that sucks. Absolutely.
Like that's

Speaker 3 a lot of people have had that experience. A lot of people deal with that now.
It sucks ass. Like, so I, I don't doubt that some version of this is true, right?

Speaker 3 That he encountered a lot of poverty around his family and was like, well, fuck that shit, right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And I do think it's interesting that, like, his connections with financial desperation are not direct.
They're family members, right?

Speaker 3 So he always, there's always this sense of like, I'm separate too from this, from the hardship, right? Like, it's not direct to me, which is interesting.

Speaker 3 Now, it's worth noting that Diddy, as an adult, told lots of inspirational stories about moments from his childhood that inspired him to later greatness.

Speaker 3 And maybe all of these are bullshit, but you know, let's hear them out. Here's what we're talking about.

Speaker 3 That's definitely a market he has, is like the inspirational I climbed out of this, like, even in his verses. So can you?

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. But that's not also, that's not exclusive to him.
That's a lot of rap as well. You know, like, so, you know, it is, it kind of goes hand in hand.

Speaker 3 It's a, it's a bit of that, like, that, that tale of like rising up out of the worst situations that makes like so many people respect and understand you as a, as a rapper.

Speaker 3 so and i'll i'll even say that's not you know that's a thing that rap gets from the same source that a lot of other because you see that in evangelical christianity the whole like i was you know down and out loading

Speaker 3 high rising and low sliding popping reds and busting heads kicking in doors and banging whores and then i met jesus you know that sort of fucking deal um

Speaker 3 but it's this thing everybody gets from like you know, power of positive thinking, like hustle culture, where it's like, okay, you got to have like the down and out story.

Speaker 3 And then I had my realization and like you can do it too it works for everything it's not just ML

Speaker 3 and just to tag on to that I literally was just making fun of Nepo babies because like so it's like the opposite is literally when it comes to most of creative culture yeah to be considered the worst you can be to have privilege and everything that's considered like the worst because it's like whoa well you you don't have to learn guitar for on a guitar that only had three strings and like you know was given to you by blind willie down on the corner who definitely had tuberculosis and left us early type of shit, you know.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Yeah.
That's just, uh, that's just the way you like frame things if you want Americans to, if you want to be a fucking mogul.

Speaker 3 Um, anyway, here's a quote from something he said later in a CNN article. One day when he was a child, he asked his mother for a new pair of sneakers, but she couldn't afford them.

Speaker 3 He recalled in a 2016 CNN interview that his mother almost began to cry upon hearing his request. That day, he said, My hustle was born.
And he's got a lot of that day, my hustle was born.

Speaker 3 That was the one day.

Speaker 3 His mom being like, we had a Cadillac. Maybe she's exaggerating because she doesn't want to admit that things were harder than they were.

Speaker 3 But I kind of think it might just be more that he wanted expensive sneakers. And his mom wasn't like, no, we don't have the money.
His mom was like, no. You don't need those sneakers.

Speaker 3 I'm not going to spend $200 on fucking sneakers for you.

Speaker 3 It wasn't my mom being like,

Speaker 3 we could go to Goodwill and find you a dice, nice pair that you'll grow into type thing.

Speaker 3 It was like, oh, you want $300 Nikes, like

Speaker 3 hard pass.

Speaker 3 It's a lot less inspirational to be like my story, which is like, I wanted a computer that could play StarCraft. And my mom said, no, you don't need that.

Speaker 3 I was like, well, I want to be able to buy my own computers when I grow up. Right.
Like, that's not an inspirational story.

Speaker 3 That's not like, yeah, nobody's going to put that in the biopic. You know, the music swells and you get a fucking razor.

Speaker 3 So, yeah, one thing that we can definitely mark as a turning point in his life was a football injury that he acquired while playing for Mount St. Michael Academy.

Speaker 3 He will always say, I was going to be in the NFL. I was good enough to be in the NFL.
He'll kind of insinuate he was being scouted by the NFL. I don't know that he was.

Speaker 3 I'm not entirely sure, but I'm pretty sure he's like 5'9 or something, right? He's like, he's not a big guy. He's not a big guy, but there's positions for shorter guys.
Sure, for sure.

Speaker 3 Just to say, for the record, the amount of men that I've told me I was going to be

Speaker 3 a contender.

Speaker 1 I was going to be in Insert Professional Sporting League here.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You're like, sir?

Speaker 3 Yeah, for sure. When I was in the Marines, there used to be a joke about, you know, everybody was going to go to a great college.

Speaker 3 They had a full ride to go to a great college, and they were all varsity, whatever. And they were going to, one of the dudes in my platoon, it was so funny.

Speaker 3 He started off saying that he was going to be, he was scouted to be the quarterback at USC. And when everybody was like, dude, you were not scouted to be the quarterback.

Speaker 3 That's a prestigious position.

Speaker 3 We would have seen that. You would have been like in the news and shit.
Like, that's a big deal. And he was like, I didn't say quarterback.
I said cornerback.

Speaker 3 You know, like that was that was his way out of it player man

Speaker 3 cornerback you know one dude i remember he used to he had like one of his pecs was bigger than the other and he said yeah man i was i was gonna play quarterback and and then my coach always had me benching one side only you know and that's why my i was like what no one would do that no one would so that's i swear to god every guy in the entire world if they played sports for like five seconds has like a oh i was almost uh you know story could have been been great, could have been great.

Speaker 3 Then I broke my leg. Yeah, I ran for 12 touchdowns.

Speaker 1 If you've ever done that to me, just know I was like,

Speaker 3 bullshit. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 There's a certain inner bullshit detector I feel like you definitely have.

Speaker 3 Like, you kind of like, it's like the Sophie eye roll where it's just like, huh, yeah, like, just, yeah, yeah, that right there, the smirk and the uh-huh. Yeah, sure,

Speaker 3 it's a crucial life skill to develop. Sure, you've won a Grammy.
I bet you have. That's why you keep it directly behind you.

Speaker 3 Oh, man.

Speaker 3 Now, I will say, whether or not he was almost in the NFL, his team was very good. They won the division title in 1986, I think when he's a junior.
So, like, he does play on a very good team.

Speaker 3 I'm sure he was not bad at it. I just don't know that he was in the NFL.
That said, he does break his leg in his last year of high school badly on the field, which ruins his pro dreams.

Speaker 3 Now, man.

Speaker 3 As a fun aside, Will,

Speaker 3 while I was reading, you're going to love this. While I was researching these articles, I found an old 2012 interview in the New York Times with Diddy.

Speaker 3 This is back during his, you know, mogul, you know, generally popular phase.

Speaker 3 And the article was about a movie that he had helped produce called Undefeated.

Speaker 3 This was based on an Oscar-nominated documentary about a real-life high school football coach named Bill Courtney, who was apparently pretty good. I don't know much about high school football coaches.

Speaker 3 You're from Texas. How do you not know much about high school?

Speaker 3 I fucking played high school football or middle school. I forget which year I was in football, but I played football.
I did a sport once.

Speaker 3 I was not almost in the NFL. It wasn't as fun as drugs.

Speaker 3 Now that I could have gone pro in, Will.

Speaker 3 I really could have been

Speaker 3 in the NFL of drugs. Absolutely.
I still feel like I have a chance. Like, I feel like I got a field of dreams chance, in fact, you know.

Speaker 3 I do want to see the field of dreams of drugs where it's like they put up a table in a field and just like drugs start materializing

Speaker 3 john balushi walks out of a cloud willie nelson is like he's not even dead but he's the guy that gets to walk back on the field and get younger he's the ray liota randy dick pulls himself up out of a sewer

Speaker 3 oh my god

Speaker 3 if you build it they will go

Speaker 3 just

Speaker 3 the biggest bong ever and just like a table of cocaine. Oh, we could make this movie.

Speaker 3 So I feel like someone is going to rip this off from us. We better act quickly.

Speaker 3 Back to this story. So, Diddy produces this movie or helps to produce this movie about this high school football coach named Bill Courtney, and he's interviewed in the Times about it.

Speaker 3 And in the interview, Combs talks about his own football experiences in high school, and he laments, I didn't have a coach like Bill Courtney who stood by me and helped motivate me in everything.

Speaker 3 I was envious, to be honest. He's kind of insinuating that a better coach might have helped him overcome his broken leg or whatever.

Speaker 3 Anyway, he could have healed me with his witch doctor ways.

Speaker 3 Right, right, right.

Speaker 3 Anyway, the best part of that interview, though, is that Combs was working as a producer on the remake of that documentary with the Weinstein Company.

Speaker 3 And the interview with him in The Times includes this line next. Quote, Combs said he and Harvey Weinstein had been trying to do something together for seven years.

Speaker 3 And yeah, bro, I'll bet you guys were. Yeah.
I'll bet you had a couple projects you were in on. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 3 It is almost like, Pete, I hate whenever people start like, because like every time some of this stuff comes out, you know, that like a certain person's like a grease bag, then it's massive.

Speaker 3 Every person that's ever been in a picture with them is suspect, you know, and it's like, oh, this person, this person, this person, this.

Speaker 3 And it's like, yeah, but like, not all those people are actually doing bad shit.

Speaker 3 Some of them are just taking advantage of somebody's like status to up themselves a little bit or meet people or whatever. But also,

Speaker 3 yeah, a lot of times they are all

Speaker 3 the whole Harvey Weinstein connection maybe should have been a sign. Yeah, a lot of times they're absolutely running a fucking little circle jerk over there with each other, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, it was during Sean's high school years that he first acquired. Oh, actually, you know what? Speaking of Sean's high school years, you know what'll help you get through high school? Drugs.

Speaker 3 Well, and the products and services that support this podcast. Fair enough.

Speaker 4 A decade ago, I was on the trail of one of the country's most elusive serial killers. But it wasn't until 2023 when he was finally caught.
The answers were there, hidden in plain sight.

Speaker 4 So, why did it take so long to catch him? I'm Josh Zeman, and this is Monster: Hunting the Long Island Serial Killer: The Investigation into the Most Notorious Killer in New York since the son of Sam.

Speaker 4 Available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 5 In 1997, in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like The Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

Speaker 5 have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

Speaker 3 We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets.

Speaker 5 From Tenderfoot TV and iHeart Podcasts, this is Le Mansre Season 2, The Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 From the studio who brought you the Piketon Massacre and Murder 101,

Speaker 3 this is Incels. I am a loser.
If I was a woman, I wouldn't dame you either.

Speaker 1 From the dark corners of the web,

Speaker 1 an emerging mindset.

Speaker 3 If I can't have you, girls, I will destroy you. A kind of subculture, a hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women.

Speaker 1 A seed of loneliness explodes.

Speaker 3 I just hate myself.

Speaker 3 I don't know why you girls aren't attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.

Speaker 1 At a deadly tipping point, Incels will be added to the terrorism guide.

Speaker 6 Police say a driver intentionally drove into a crowd, killing 10 people.

Speaker 3 Tomorrow is the day of retribution. I will have my revenge.

Speaker 3 This is Incels.

Speaker 1 Listen to season one of Incels on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 3 All I know is what I've been told, and that's a half-truth is a whole lie.

Speaker 1 For almost a decade, the murder of an 18-year-old girl from a small town in Graves County, Kentucky went unsolved until a local homemaker, a journalist, and a handful of girls came forward with a story.

Speaker 3 I'm telling you, we know Quincy killed her. We know.

Speaker 1 A story that law enforcement used to convict six people and that got the citizen investigator on national TV.

Speaker 3 Through sheer persistence and nerve, this Kentucky housewife helped give justice to Jessica Curran.

Speaker 1 My name is Maggie Freeling. I'm a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, producer, and I wouldn't be here if the truth were that easy to find.

Speaker 3 I did not know her and I did not kill her or rape or burn or any of that other stuff that y'all said.

Speaker 6 They literally literally made me say that I took a match and struck and threw it on her. They made me say that I poured gas on her.

Speaker 1 From Lava for Good, this is Graves County, a show about just how far our legal system will go in order to find someone to blame.

Speaker 3 America, y'all better wake the hell up. Bad things happen to good people in small towns.

Speaker 1 Listen to Graves County in the Bone Valley feed on on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 And to binge the entire season at free, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.

Speaker 6 I'm Cheryl McCollum, host of the podcast Zone 7. Zone 7 ain't a place.
It's a way of life. I've worked hundreds of cold cases you've heard of and thousands you haven't.

Speaker 6 We started this podcast to teach the importance of teamwork in solving these crazy crimes.

Speaker 6 Come join us in learning from detectives, prosecutors, authors, canine handlers, forensic experts, and most importantly, victims' family members.

Speaker 6 Listen to Zone 7 with Cheryl McCollum on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast.

Speaker 3 And we're back. I hope you've all graduated and you are ready for the rest of the pod.
And don't join the military like I did, because it is not going to be a good idea.

Speaker 3 When you graduate, man, do anything else. But the recruiter says,

Speaker 3 I can even pick my MOS.

Speaker 3 I'm like, did I ever tell you that I had a friend that thought he was joining the Marine Corps snowboarding team?

Speaker 3 His recruiter literally showed him pictures of dudes on snowboards and was like, Yeah, man, if you, he was like from Colorado and he thought he was joining.

Speaker 3 Like, he was like two weeks into being in the fleet. And he was like, so when is the snowboarding?

Speaker 3 Is the guy from the snowboarding team going to like hit me up? Or like, how do I get over there? Like, bro, we are deploying for Iraq in like seven minutes.

Speaker 3 You are not going to the Marine Corps. There isn't even a Marine Corps snowboarding team.

Speaker 3 There ought to be like an Olympic for military recruiter lies.

Speaker 3 Snowboarding ones up there. Oh my God, there's so many beautiful.
I had another friend who literally the recruiter, he came in and he was like, yeah, man, I want to be in infantry.

Speaker 3 He's like, and the recruiter like, like, slow played him. He's like, well, I don't know, man.
It's, it's pretty exclusive.

Speaker 3 And he got on the phone with like his master sergeant in the back room. He's like a car dealer being like, my boss agreed.

Speaker 3 We never do this. We're going to do what we can for you.
We're going to, you know, we're going to hook you up, man. You seem like a pretty wise individual.

Speaker 3 You know you really you do you belong up in infantry man you know like we can get you in man

Speaker 3 so it was during sean's high school years that he first acquired the nickname puffy and we have two different stories for how that happened here's the first as related in an article on hip hop insider he used to puff out his chest to make his body seem bigger which is where the name originated maybe that's true That's what his mom said.

Speaker 3 I remember seeing his mom in an interview that said the same thing, that that's where it came from, that he used to, because he wasn't a big dude, back to to the point earlier.

Speaker 3 And there's a slightly different story that he told in 1998 to Jet magazine. Whenever I got mad as a kid, I used to always huff and puff.
I had a temper.

Speaker 3 That's why my friends started calling me Puffy. Right.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but you know, they're not necessarily. I mean, you know, they're not at odds with each other.
They might be bothered. He likes to puff.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 He's like one of those fish. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Anytime he's threatened, he gets big. Oh, man.
And puffer fish, infamous sex criminals. Do not let your friends go home alone with a puffer pufferfish.
I remember that in Finding Nemo.

Speaker 3 That was one of the subplots of Finding Nemo that pufferfish were sex criminals. Yes, yeah.
And he's pests. They're sex pests.

Speaker 3 Sex pests. Yeah.
So with football out of the way, young Sean leaned into the other less discussed aspect of his personality, which was that he was kind of an artsy theater kid.

Speaker 3 Diddy had a reputation at his private school for being neatly dressed, you know, and in college for wearing designer clothes, which he funded through a variety of legal entrepreneurial ventures.

Speaker 3 For example, in between classes, this is again when he's at college, he's at Howard University, he would operate a shuttle service to the airport, and he would also sell his old term papers, t-shirts, and soda to his classmates.

Speaker 3 So again, entrepreneur, but not exactly a gangster. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Ro Ronin's book, Bad Boy, which covers Diddy's influence on the hip-hop industry, paints a picture of a young man who was beyond everything else, an opportunist.

Speaker 3 At one point, while he's at Howard, there's this massive protest campaign on the campus over the presence of Lee Atwater on the University Board of Trustees.

Speaker 3 And again, Howard is a historically black university.

Speaker 3 Lee Atwater is the author of the Republican Party's infamous Southern Strategy, which I cannot relate directly to you without using the N-word repeatedly. Like, you had me at a Republican Party.

Speaker 3 It's just like,

Speaker 3 I was there. I was there already.
You were just edging me from there. The basic idea of the strategy that Lee Atwater helps put together is that you can't campaign in 1968.

Speaker 3 Before 68, you can campaign by just screaming screaming about black people and saying you want to hurt them, right? By 68, you can't do that.

Speaker 3 So you have to instead campaign on issues that will hurt black people, but that you can pretend aren't racist, like fiscal conservatism, cutting programs that help black Americans without calling them slurs, right?

Speaker 3 That's Lee Atwater. So obviously, Howard University students are like, the fuck is this guy doing on the board of trustees? Hey, bro, you forgot your hood, man.
Let me set you up. Yeah.

Speaker 3 That is essentially the tenor of the protest campaign. Now, Sean's Pierce rightly thought it was fucked up for this guy to have a seat on the Howard board, and they do win.

Speaker 3 I'm going to spoiler, he winds up stepping down. Hey, man, every now and then, plugging a CEO in broad daylight on a city street does something.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 3 Protests work. Protests can work.

Speaker 3 So there's this big protest campaign. There's like clashes with riot police.
They occupy buildings on campus. It's a whole thing.

Speaker 3 How far you have to go to get one white man fired from that man. One white man fired.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 In the book It Was All a Dream, culture journalist Justin Tinsley writes this of sophomore Sean Combs's involvement in this protest campaign.

Speaker 3 For Combs, the student protests in the spring of 89 presented an opportunity to unite the student body and put some money in his pockets at the same time.

Speaker 3 Combs took images from the protests, photos of students and police clashing and students being whisked away and printed up some posters. And he likes sells posters based on this.

Speaker 3 So he's like, he's a profiteer.

Speaker 3 Yeah. A write-up by Chris Malone goes further.
Future producer and co-worker of Diddy's Derek D.

Speaker 3 Dot Angeletti was at Howard at the same time as Diddy and saw how he made a quick buck from the protests.

Speaker 3 In the 2003 notorious BIG documentary Unbelievable, he spoke about Diddy's photo enterprise during the protests. He made hundreds of them and sold them for $10 and $15 a piece, Angeletti said.

Speaker 3 That's the type of guy I saw. All this protest shit is well and good, but who's getting paid off it? He was ready.
Yeah. This is the 80s.
Yeah, 89. Yeah, so, I mean, yeah.

Speaker 3 So 10 to 15 bucks, that's a lot of money, too. That's not, that's not cheap.
Like, we think of 10, 15 bucks now, but in 89, 10 to 15 bucks, like

Speaker 3 $700, $800. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's whatever. It's a lot more money.

Speaker 3 Whatever the math works out to, but yes, absolutely.

Speaker 3 This was back when a dime bag costs $10. Yeah, and that wasn't cheap.

Speaker 3 It used to be... I remember.
We used to be a country.

Speaker 3 We had onions on our belts. It was a style at the time.

Speaker 3 Amusingly enough, in 2009, Diddy made statements in support of another protest movement at Howard, promising, I got y'all back and saying, do what we did and take it over.

Speaker 3 Let's go and do it in a peaceful way, but do it. And again, you did not take anything over.

Speaker 3 You sold pictures of people doing that. Like, we're looking back through a lens, so it's easy to see that, like, oh, he probably was kind of, but you want to believe that, like,

Speaker 3 when you heard this earlier, you know, Diddy telling this story, you were like, like, yeah, good for you, Diddy. Yeah, good for you speaking up for the kids.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You did it, man.

Speaker 3 But, like, and then, like, hearing it in retrospect, you're just like, oh, you know, you know, everything that he did was slimy. Yeah.
He was just always pulling an angle. He was always doing it.

Speaker 3 He was always facing a riot line to get at water fucking fired.

Speaker 3 Right. If you're one of those, if you or your parents did, good for them.
That's good for them, man. Yeah.

Speaker 3 So a good deal of our knowledge of college-aged Diddy comes from Derek Angeletti, who I quoted earlier. He's the guy who described young Puffy as a flashy guy.

Speaker 3 Quote, he was always out at the clubs and the young girls loved him. That's a creepier line in modern context.

Speaker 3 He'd be in the middle of the floor doing all the new dance moves and his style of dress was a little more colorful, bolder. Everyone took notice of this cool, overconfident young dude.

Speaker 3 I was DJing at the time and one night he came up to me and said, I'd like to throw a party with you. You're pretty popular.

Speaker 3 And that's kind of how Diddy Diddy's really good at recognizing people that other people like. That's his primary talent.
He becomes a billionaire off the basis of that.

Speaker 3 You will definitely see, especially in the music industry, there are so many, there's such a wide-ranging culture of that being the thing.

Speaker 3 It's like the Lou Perlman or the, or the, or, you know, or, or the, the Diddy or the Jay-Z with Rockefeller or, you know, it's like Rock Nation, you know, it's like all these.

Speaker 3 different organizations, that's what they're looking for all the time is like, who is the thing that other people can look at and be, because like, that's what what it takes.

Speaker 3 You have to have, you have to have a stable of people for everything.

Speaker 3 To have a party, you got to have the best caterer in the world, but you also got to have the best DJ and you also got to have, you know, it's like, that's what all those people are the best at is collecting a whole bunch of the best of that they know.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And that's like, I mean, honestly, like, that's also just an entertainment industry thing.
Like, you know, Sophie and I, that's a skill we have in a different way, right?

Speaker 3 Like, yeah, yeah, you got a stable of really cool podcasts a year or so ago.

Speaker 3 I'm reading this Ed Zittron guy, and I'm like, I bet he could be a podcaster, you know, like that's just that is just kind of the industry, too.

Speaker 3 That's like how you, you know, and and he's going, Diddy's going to be one of the best podcasts. One day you will unify the entirety of all podcasters in the world, take over.
So, I don't know.

Speaker 3 Or start an East Coast-West Coast podcast rivalry, get Ed shot in a fucking conflict with one of the NPR guys.

Speaker 3 Oh, God. oh man, another movie idea.
You guys are

Speaker 3 great movie.

Speaker 3 I'm making Ed the biggie smalls of podcasts.

Speaker 3 Sorry, man, you've cooked.

Speaker 3 Enjoy the next couple of years, buddy.

Speaker 3 So, Colmes took things a few steps further than most people who throw popular parties on campus by sometimes successfully convincing or paying celebrities to show up.

Speaker 3 He included his name on flyers with their name, which is part of how he would brand himself, right? You're attaching yourself to celebrity.

Speaker 3 You're also just making sure everyone who goes to this huge party with like 1,500 people knows that's a Diddy party, right? Yeah. Reputation is everything.

Speaker 3 And he's good at reputation management. He prints business cards for himself that he hands out.
They have his name engraved on them as Sean in parentheses, Puff Combs. Just one F.

Speaker 3 So he's still working on the nickname, right? That's a bad thing.

Speaker 3 It's a process. It's a process.
It's a process. I'm workshopping some stuff here, guys.
I'm doing the best I can. I I knew you before you were Greasy Will.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 His friends are like, puff, puff, P-U-F. There should at least be two Fs.
It's like damn near poof, bro. Like,

Speaker 3 I don't know, man. It's going to be confusing.
Just a boardroom of guys.

Speaker 3 Oh, man. That's one of my, one of my, by the way, speaking of like wasted old people are lying.

Speaker 3 One of my, because this, this comes up periodically when people will like lie about having been in the military or special forces.

Speaker 3 If anyone ever tells you they served and they had a really cool nickname full of shit yeah

Speaker 3 like nobody gets called the like the avenger or fucking killer or whatever like no it's it's always like sack yeah like

Speaker 3 or like two thumbs yeah shit stain

Speaker 3 you're like oh man there's there's nothing about thumbs that could have been a good story yeah

Speaker 3 so uh these parties with diddy grow to be sizable affairs but the biggest of them was a homecoming event at a Masonic temple. 1,500, which actually does sound pretty cool.
Yeah, that sounds banging.

Speaker 3 Yeah, 1,500 attendees were expected, but Sean's marketing of the event was so successful, more than 4,500 people showed up, which causes a problem when three times as many people show up.

Speaker 3 And this is going to be a continuing problem for him. Angeletti later claimed, the D.C.
police shut down the whole block and brought out the dogs.

Speaker 3 We had to get on our knees and beg them not to lock us up. Which, again, not super gangster.
Yeah, getting on your knees and begging is not not exactly fuck the police.

Speaker 3 No, Biggie wouldn't have done that. I'll tell you that, bud.

Speaker 3 Tupac would have shot those cops. 100%.

Speaker 3 Tupac would have shot those cops. And he wasn't even that gangster, man, but he would have shot them cops.
Snoop Dogg would have shot them cops, man.

Speaker 3 We forget, man, this guy's hosting New Year's celebrations and shit, but that guy would shoot some cops. That guy was hardcore.
That was Martha Stewart's friend.

Speaker 3 Weekly parties were all well and good for getting attention, but Sean wanted much more out of life, and he quickly decided a business administration degree from Howard wasn't going to get it for him.

Speaker 3 So he drops out and he starts begging record executives in New York for jobs, using his party planning career as a resume.

Speaker 3 This did not work, but when he reduced the request from job to unpaid internship, he got a yes from Uptown Records's Andre Harrell.

Speaker 3 Now, this is not a guy I'd heard of before, but Sheila Flynn for The Independent describes him as the man who, quote, famously coined the term ghetto fabulous.

Speaker 3 So, yeah,

Speaker 3 that's Andre Harrell. He's a big guy in the industry.

Speaker 3 She describes his time interning for Uptown this way.

Speaker 3 Combs initially commuted weekly between college and his hometown, working 80-hour weeks as he literally ran to complete errands for his record superiors.

Speaker 3 And it wasn't long before he quit Howard altogether. By 1991, Harrell had installed him as an AR executive, and Combs was forging a reputation for identifying and molding top-tier talent.

Speaker 3 So he goes very quickly from unpaid intern to paid executive. He's very good good at this.
He works like crazy and he's got an incredible eye for talent. And this is also 91 rap is exploding.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Perfect timing for it all.

Speaker 3 So just for the, there's an actual term for that in the interviews called a runner. It's literally because you are in fact running for everything you do.
You go and get things all throughout the day.

Speaker 3 It's the first job you do in almost any like music industry position. So it's like this is what I did.

Speaker 3 I was an intern and then I became a runner and then an assistant engineer and then an engineer, but that's how you like work up with, and it's crazy.

Speaker 3 Something that people don't like, it's not like, it's not like being an actor, right? Like doing some of these jobs, like what Diddy did here, some of these jobs, it's not like being an actor.

Speaker 3 You get out here and you're competing against just like everybody working at every diner in all of Los Angeles, right?

Speaker 3 Like doing some of these specific jobs, like ARs or producers or engineers, you can get into the industry and be one step away from the top immediately. There's so many stories of that.

Speaker 3 It's like you get it.

Speaker 3 My first job, I lived in Texas where we met in Texas. I was playing in a metal band and then I was like, oh, I should maybe like do music for a career.

Speaker 3 I went to school for nine months, graduated from a tech school and started at the biggest studio in the world as a runner.

Speaker 3 But I was so good because my background in the military and all the stuff that I was in, I was a runner for like three weeks before I was like working for the studio as an engineer.

Speaker 3 So it was like, you're only a very, very short insert. It's like attacking the industry from a secret angle because you can do things like it's so fast.

Speaker 3 It's like your first job might be working for the president of a label. You know, if you have the right aptitude for the type of stuff, it could happen just like that.

Speaker 3 Now, it's still competitive and everything, you know, and it's really hard, but

Speaker 3 it's a different thing from like being like an actor or a musician where you're competing against thousands and thousands of people in the same proximity trying to do that job.

Speaker 3 It's kind of like a hack to get into the industry. Well, there you go, folks.
You could have your own Grammy

Speaker 3 and maybe even be a guest on this podcast. And more tips like this on my TikTok, Greasy Will Music.

Speaker 3 I don't have any tips for becoming a journalist or a writer.

Speaker 3 It's very hard, and it seems like no one's doing it anymore. Yeah.
I don't know how it worked for us.

Speaker 3 Get chat GPT and just plug a subject in and then post that on a website.

Speaker 3 There you go. You're a title.
Type the Lord of the Rings into

Speaker 3 ChatGPT and you too could be a novelist.

Speaker 3 Or sued by the Tolkien estate. Either way, same diff.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 he's, you know, by 91, he's an ANR executive. So he's, he's doing, like, while he does that, he continues throwing parties.
He understands that that's, number one, that's how I'm going to meet people.

Speaker 3 That's how I'm going to run into DJs, the people that I'm going to like poach, you know, as talent.

Speaker 3 He would throw what is described in one source as racially mixed daddy's house parties for street kids and preppy students from Columbia University and New York University.

Speaker 3 And this is where that's a Ronin who wrote a book about, you know, his role in hip-hop says, quote, that's where he saw what fans were dancing to and wearing. So this is also how he stays plugged in.

Speaker 3 Now, you know, it's, I should say, it's also how he's going to be committing a lot of his sex crimes, but we'll get to to that in a minute. So, yeah,

Speaker 3 yeah. Daddy's house parties don't go great for a lot of people.
He's a drug.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, you brought your soundboard.

Speaker 3 Two choices.

Speaker 3 And he makes the choice next to kill nine people.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 he's 22 years old. He's going as puff with one F.
He's a college dropout and an employed record executive. And one of the acts that Sean helps bring to prominence is Jordicky.

Speaker 3 J-O-R-D-E-C-I. I don't know about

Speaker 3 Jordash, the gene company. Yes, yes.

Speaker 3 He discovers that.

Speaker 3 Jordicky is an RB duo who are blowing up by 91. Oh, Jodicy? Wait, what are you saying? Is it Jodicy? It's J-O-Champ, right?

Speaker 3 Oh, you're saying

Speaker 3 Jodicy? I'll look it up. No, no, no, I can't.
No, no, no.

Speaker 3 It's not. Oh, my God.
It's not. Okay, so hold on.
What's the name? J-O-R-D-E-C-I-C.

Speaker 1 No, no, no. The way that Robert has it spelled, there's an R in there, but I think Will is right that it's Jodicy.

Speaker 3 Is it Jodicy? Okay, we'll say it's Jodicy.

Speaker 3 If that's an R and B duo. That's an R and B duo, yes.

Speaker 3 Then it's called.

Speaker 3 Look, I don't know these.

Speaker 3 You know me in fucking popping. It's not Jordisy.

Speaker 1 It's a Joe.

Speaker 3 There's a D in there.

Speaker 3 Yeah. I mean, you know, it could be.
I don't know. We might be able to do it.
Jodicy, but. No, no, no, it is.
It is. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Combs decided a good way to increase Jodicy's visibility was to throw a charity basketball game, pitting two teams of rappers against each other while fans watched.

Speaker 3 The event was to be held in the City College of New York gym. Once again, Diddy did what he does best, which is promote.

Speaker 3 And so a shitload of people show up. In fact, several times as many people as can fit in the actual gym itself.
This becomes a problem because Sean doesn't do anything but promote the event.

Speaker 3 Does he set up any of the safety measures, any of the staff, any of the bathrooms, none of that? He has two of his assistants who have never run large gatherings do that.

Speaker 3 And he does not inform them, by the way, every time I do something, several times as many people as we can actually support show up. Could be a problem.

Speaker 3 He just has his, it tells his assistants to handle it and then forgets all about it.

Speaker 3 Largely because his attention is occupied by executing fraud to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, because the game had been advertised as a charitable event, but like he hadn't told anyone what charity and in actuality.

Speaker 3 Charity, yeah. What kind of charity? You know, it's like kids with stuff that need stuff, you know? Yeah, kids with problems.

Speaker 3 As someone who has been that assistant that had to organize, like, I've been this guy.

Speaker 3 I've been this guy that had to put together a house party with three bands and like 500 people show up and the LAPD is circling with a helicopter. And then I have to be the representative of

Speaker 3 white people to go out and talk to cops so that it's okay.

Speaker 3 You know?

Speaker 3 One of the artists I used to work with, he used to always be like, like, yo, hey, man, the cops are here. So, yeah, you want to go

Speaker 3 talk to them?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, man. He's like, you know, you speak like cops and like white people and stuff.
Like, all right, I got it. I got it.
You know, go outside and skits. Hey, gentlemen, how are you doing tonight?

Speaker 3 Oh, yes, sir. Absolutely, sir.
You know, like, oh, the dogs, you don't need those.

Speaker 3 So there's no beneficiary actually selected for this party. And for the more than $24,000 in 1990s money that had been raised for the event.

Speaker 3 Further blame for what's about to happen goes to the police on duty. Sean's assistants had only coordinated with Pinkerton security guards hired by the university.
Yeah, there's Pinkertons in this.

Speaker 3 Everybody legendarily protective of people and safe and everything. Never hurt nobody, them Pinkertons.

Speaker 3 And the university had increased the number of security guards to 23 because they started getting worried before the event. But the NYPD just sends a few guys.

Speaker 3 And when it becomes clear that more than twice as many people as expected showed up, the sergeant on scene doesn't call for backup until it's too late.

Speaker 3 Eventually, there are like 60-something officers in attendance, but it takes a while. And the sergeant on duty also ignores repeated calls by the university, being like, there's way too many people.

Speaker 3 There's way too many people. You need to do something.
There's going to be a riot. And in fact, there is.
Yeah, they ignored the neighbors at our parties too, man.

Speaker 3 They just did not listen to them.

Speaker 3 So once it becomes clear, because they have to tell this huge crowd, most of you are not getting in. And then the crowd crowd gets rowdy and violent, and a riot begins.

Speaker 3 The NYPD officers who are there are as useless as the NYPD tends to be whenever they're actually needed for something, and things go very badly.

Speaker 3 At 7 p.m., with far too many people crowded into the venue, the single door they had been using to funnel people in was shut.

Speaker 3 Since that door was steel and at the bottom of a stairwell with the crowd basically pushed up against it, it creates a solid barrier in a room that has far more people than are supposed to be in it.

Speaker 3 People panic and a crush develops. Dozens are injured and nine young people are crushed to death, literally asphyxiated by the weight of the crowd.

Speaker 3 Medical examiners will note that like none of them had broken bones. They are just suffocated by the masses.
I mean, for those of you know, like I have been to a lot of concerts.

Speaker 3 I've been into metal music.

Speaker 3 Sometimes it feels kind of, you know, like, how could you be killed by a bunch of people?

Speaker 3 But like, if you have never seen a crowd or been in a crowd, like even I is like, I mean, I'm a fairly large person myself.

Speaker 3 Like I'm not huge or anything, but like, I'm and I'm pretty okay with like bad situations.

Speaker 3 I've been in some crowd crush situations that have terrified me where I'm like, this is like scary. Like this is bad.

Speaker 3 If you've never been in those situations, it's really easy to understand if you have like what that's like. It's like, it's like even a few hundred people can be like that.

Speaker 3 And you're talking about three times the capacity of a venue. You know, that's like so easy for a crowd to just crush the shit out of some people.

Speaker 3 It is like One of the best survival advice pieces I can give you is if you are ever in any kind of event and upon entering,

Speaker 3 your only way to get in is to push through a crowd of people with absolutely no gaps in it.

Speaker 3 And you immediately have like the hair stand up on the back of your neck and wonder, are there too many people in this room? Fucking back the hell out. Yeah.
Get out. There is.
Go.

Speaker 3 There absolutely is, and it is not a good idea. Don't fuck around with situations like that.

Speaker 3 Next thing you know, you're going to be surrounded by a bunch of juggalos at an ICP concert at at the Electric Factory and feel really uncomfortable.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 this is a horrible scene. Again, nine people die because of this thing that Diddy has orchestrated.
One EMT who shows you. This is early.
This is episode one for deaths.

Speaker 3 Is there more than one episode of this? Or are we one episode? There's two episodes. There's more deaths to come.
There's two.

Speaker 3 There's two, but Robert, I kind of feel like we can do this as a three-parter.

Speaker 3 I don't know. Maybe we'll see.

Speaker 3 Let's see what happens. One EMT who showed up on scene described the result as a plane crash without a plane.
There were bodies all over. People calling for help.

Speaker 3 That's a very bad way for your party to be. Although, you and I have both thrown parties that I would describe as looking like a plane crash afterwards.
Yeah, for sure. It's a cool plane crash.

Speaker 3 Hey, it's a very cool plane crash, man.

Speaker 3 You just feel like you're dead. It's like where people are like, man, that was the best night of my life type plane crash.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 Like the plane crash in yellow jackets. I haven't finished yellow jackets.
I assume it goes well for those girls. It goes well.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No cannibalism.

Speaker 3 This would mark the first time that Sean Combs drew media attention in a big way.

Speaker 3 New York News Day was one of the papers who first got reporters on scene, and years later, one of them recalled being told by a colleague, the organizer was some guy called Puff Daddy.

Speaker 3 In the days that followed, it became clear that a substantial amount of the blame for this disaster lay with Pup Daddy. Puff Daddy, Puff Daddy.

Speaker 3 A report compiled afterwards by the mayor's office read: Mr.

Speaker 3 Combs spent little time making the actual preparation for the game and delegated most, if not all, of the arrangements to Lewis Tucker and Terry Getter, both of whom claim to have no prior experience with such events.

Speaker 3 I found a fun article in the Columbia Journalism Review by one of the reporters who covered the crush, and this is, you know, him writing after Diddy has been disgraced.

Speaker 3 His piece ended with this line: I do remember thinking, man, this puffy guy can't have much of a future after this.

Speaker 3 Oh, let me tell you about America, my brother.

Speaker 3 This is the thing, though, too, is like, it's like, you know, that happened, right?

Speaker 3 But I can't tell you how many events, how many things I've been to that have been like, you know, thrown like this, like concerts, like, like, dude, I've been at a Riot Fest, which is like a major concert that has felt like this, where it's like, they didn't plan this very well.

Speaker 3 There's not enough things here. It seems dangerous.
And the fine line between, man, we just pulled off this crazy party and nine people died is it's it's razor thin, you know? It is there.

Speaker 3 There is some times where it's like, this is the coolest party I've ever been to.

Speaker 3 And it doesn't go completely wrong, but it could have at any time. One of those house parties, we had 200 people and they were raging in the living room.

Speaker 3 And I thought for, I started standing closer to the wall because I was like, this floor is going to give out, man. There's no way.

Speaker 3 This could end badly. This house could not be designed to have this many people jumping up and down like this.

Speaker 3 And, you know,

Speaker 3 a lot of being happy, especially like being happy about how you spent your 20s, is getting as close to that line as you can get without crossing over into the killing nine people at City College.

Speaker 3 Yeah. Absolutely, yeah.
Yeah, risking it. Yeah, I've been on the edge.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the edge is a place, but it's also a place that's called the edge for a reason because sometimes nine people fall off of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's a place where legends are made, Robert.

Speaker 3 You just, you know, hey, man, you know, sometimes you got to get right up to the edge and just live and laugh, man. LA VIN.
Yep.

Speaker 3 Hunter Thompson wrote eloquently about the edge and also died unable to hold in his bowels. So,

Speaker 3 you know, that is the consequence. It's not a long life.
It's not a long life. Not a long life.

Speaker 3 So, because this is America, getting a bunch of people killed due to your own staggering negligence does not mean that you don't have a lot of

Speaker 3 none at all. And Puff Daddy proves immune to consequences for his actions, even though, again, every review of the disaster is like he's to blame for a lot of this.

Speaker 3 Now, again, I don't want to say all of it because let's not forget the NYPD. Yeah, of course.
They also got those kids killed.

Speaker 3 Look, there's never a time where the NYPD hasn't been a little bit negligent in some people dying in New York City. It's like, you know, it's what they do best.

Speaker 3 That's part of their, that's what they get paid for, of course. Yeah.

Speaker 3 The NYPD operates one of the largest surveillance apparatuses on the planet so that they can know more places to get kids killed.

Speaker 3 So,

Speaker 3 Puff Daddy winds up testifying in court about the disaster when the families of the dead and the survivor sued the college after a 1998 1998 court appearance, he told me that.

Speaker 3 Oh, so they didn't go after him at all? They just went for the college? No, go after the college. I think at this point, the college is who has money.
He's not rich. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 He's a kid. Yeah, good point.
Yeah, no reason to go after him. He's got nothing.
Yeah, what's he going to do for you?

Speaker 3 After a 1998 court appearance, he told reporters that, like, I think about it every day. I think about, you know, the dead every single day.
You know, I'm always, my thoughts are always with them.

Speaker 3 Quote, but the things that I deal with can in no way measure up to the pain that the families deal with. I just pray for the families and pray for the children who lost lost their lives every day.

Speaker 3 So he literally wrote, I'll be missing you like

Speaker 3 about the people he got crushed to death. Yeah.
Yeah. Like, like right off the day, man.

Speaker 3 Every time I pray, man, I'll be missing you.

Speaker 3 He hit him early with that. He did, he did.
Right away. It's a thing that always works for him.

Speaker 3 Get the hits, man. Play the hits.

Speaker 3 I can't wait till we have our first dictator who takes a note at a who like fucking like uses chemical weapons on a crowd of protesters and is that then gets in like a studio and sings I'll be missing you

Speaker 3 pro tip for the future dictators who listen to this podcast there's got to be one of you and have a banger ready to go have a banger ready to go and look if you do succeed in becoming a dictator just give me a province just one province is all I ask oh hell yeah I mean let me you know I'll make a golden house for my of course I'm gonna make a golden house, you know, but like it'll be, it'll be gold-plated.

Speaker 3 I'm not that much of a criminal.

Speaker 3 You can bring your Grammy over to my gold-plated house, Will.

Speaker 3 Man, take shots out of it. Hell yeah.

Speaker 3 Now, speaking of I'll be missing you, I'm going to be missing you all because this is the end of part one. But don't worry, folks, we have a lot more coming.

Speaker 3 This is this whole week is going to be Diddy Week here at Behind the Bastards. Diddy Week.

Speaker 3 Will, my friend, you have a TikTok to plug. I have a TikTok.
I am Greasy Will Music. I have a podcast that's called That Sounds About Right.
I have a Instagram that you can find me. Greasy Will.

Speaker 3 I'm Greasy Will. G-R-E-A-Z-Y-W-I-L.
One L, because the second one wasn't pulling any heavy weight and I decided I was wasting time doing it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, fuck that L.

Speaker 3 But I am highly googlable. I am all over the internet.
I can be found almost anywhere.

Speaker 3 You could even send a telegram to me still. I accept telegrams as long as they are Western Union and contain money as well.
Yes, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 I send you telegrams, but entirely about our oil business down in the Arizona territory.

Speaker 3 I drank your milkshake. That's right, that's right.
That's how you and I spend our free time.

Speaker 3 An old-timey oilman.

Speaker 3 It's a great time, everybody.

Speaker 3 Well, until next week, folks, become an old-timey oilman yourself, you know?

Speaker 3 Start an oil rig somewhere.

Speaker 1 Next week, next part.

Speaker 3 Next part. Yeah, next part.
Not next week. We'll be back tomorrow, probably.

Speaker 3 Anyway. Minutes from now.
Just hold it.

Speaker 3 We're going to keep recording. Yes.

Speaker 3 Anyway, I love you all. Go to hell.

Speaker 1 Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.

Speaker 1 For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.
Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at behindthebastards.

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Speaker 3 Malcolm Glaubo here. This season on Revisionist History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.

Speaker 3 And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough.
But I didn't kill him. From Revisionist History, this is the Alabama Murders.

Speaker 3 Listen to Revisionist History, the Alabama Murders on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.