Suge Knight’s LAPD Ties: Will He Get Away With Murder?

TMZ has obtained raw video in which a truck allegedly driven by former Death Row Records CEO Suge Knight runs over two men in a parking lot.

The footage shows Knight entering the parking lot of a Tam’s Burgers in Compton on January 29, 2015. Two men, later revealed as Terry Carter, 55, and Cle “Bone” Sloan, 51, approach the driver’s side window of the vehicle, and an altercation appears to ensue. Seconds later, Knight’s red truck plows into both men, killing Carter and injuring Sloan.

Knight has since been brought up on charges of murder and attempted murder, as well as two counts of hit-and-run, TMZ reports.

It is far from Knight’s first brush with the law. According to Vulture, the hip hop mogul has a decades-long rap sheet with the LAPD. Also decades long is Knight’s alleged association with dirty LA cops.

One of them is David Mack. In a startling exposé entitled “Bad Cops,” the New Yorkerdetailed how Mack, who was found guilty of a 1997 LA bank heist which garnered $722,000, actually grew up with Knight in Compton and was known to have worked as his bodyguard off the clock. While in prison, Mack displayed his affiliation with the Mob Piru Bloods, the street gang with whom Knight and his Death Row records are known to have close ties.

LAPD officer Frank Lyga’s fatal shooting of fellow cop Kevin Gaines in 1997 was the inaugural event of the much-publicized Rampart Scandal, which exposed the wanton corruption of the LAPD. More disturbing than the black-on-white shooting, though, was the discovery by Detective Russell Poole that Gaines not only shared a home with Sharitha Knight, ex-wife of Suge Knight, but that he was known to frequent popular Death Row hangouts like Monty’s steakhouse, the New Yorker reports.

Poole posited that, like many LAPD cops, Gaines was probably hired to work security for Knight’s Death Row label. (Knight was known to pay top dollar for cops–their badges and firearm permits making them “especially valuable” security assets).

If Knight managed to weasel his way out of jail time for the January hit-and-run murder, it wouldn’t be the first time he escaped punishment. As Vulture notes, before sending Knight to prison for nine years in 1997, the District Attorney asked the courts “How many bites of the probation apple does this defendant get?”

He was referencing the preceding ten years of shootings, pistol whippings and drug smuggling for which Knight was convicted but, unsurprisingly, served no jail time. However, with his ties to corrupt cops now fully exposed and his $2.2 million bail revoked due to his sordid criminal past, we can all continue on with our regular lives knowing Suge Knight probably won’t.