Sean Combs’ biggest moneymaker — the Notorious B.I.G., aka Biggie Smalls, planned to leave Bad Boy Records before he died.
Biggie, real name Christopher Wallace, fell out with his friend Sean Combs in the months leading up to his death.
After Uptown Records’ Andre Harrell fired Combs in 1993, he secured a $10 million deal from Arista Records’ Clive Davis for his fledgling record label Bad Boy Entertainment.
Working with a Skelton crew, Combs released the label’s first hit – Craig Mack’s “Flava in Ya Ear”. A year later came Biggie’s debut album Ready to Die. The album spawned the hits “Juicy”, “One More Chance”, and “Big Poppa.”
More hits followed from Bad Boy’s other artists, Faith Evans, Mase, 112, Total, The Lox, Shyne and Carl Thomas.
At its 1997 peak, Bad Boy Records (Bad Boy Entertainment) was worth an estimated $100 million.
But Combs’ and Biggie’s business relationship fell apart. According to Rolling Stone, lawyers for Biggie demanded the rights to his masters.
“I will never give it up until I’m dead and my bones are crushed into powder,” Combs told the lawyers, according to The Big Payback.
On March 9, 1997, Biggie, 24, was riding with Combs in a GMC Suburban after attending a Soul Train Music Awards afterparty in Los Angeles.
A gunman drove alongside the Suburban and opened fire, striking Biggie. The East Coast rapper was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital.
Rumor has it that Puffy ordered the hit on Biggie, but Puff vigorously denied the allegations.
“[Biggie] was absolutely about to leave Puff. I know for a fact [because] he told me that,” celebrity photographer Monique Bunn tells Rolling Stone.
Another source added, “Everybody wanted to leave Puffy. Everybody leaves him.”
