Puff Daddy's nightmare rap
That night at Club New York was bananas,' says Cindy (not her real name). 'It was off the hook. There's a party there every week called Hot Chocolate, and this night they had rappers, actors - they locked the door at one o'clock.
'Meanwhile, there were all these gangstas and thugs waiting to get in, saying, 'we got money!' But they weren't letting no one in. All of a sudden, Puffy's car pulls up. He was with Jennifer [Lopez]; Shyne, the rapper; an entourage of about 40. They let Puffy and his whole entourage in, and the thugs waiting outside who couldn't get in were screaming. Finally the thugs paid off the security guys and got in - that's how it is at every one of these parties. Right then I said to my friend, 'Something's gonna go down'.' On January 4, hours after he had testified before a grand jury that would eventually indict him for unlawful possession of a handgun, Sean 'Puffy' Combs stood on the terrace of his New York apartment surveying the world as it appears from Park Avenue. In many ways, the picture looked good for the 30-year-old music mogul. His second album, Forever, had recovered from an embarrassing start - it had been placed second behind former Mouseketeer Christina Aguilera's CD in its first week of release - and was now selling respectably in the United States and even better in Europe. Beyond that, an album he had produced on his Bad Boy Records label for rapper Black Rob had been generating promising pre-release buzz. And, of course, Combs had been lucky in love: his girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, was such a delicious Hollywood movie-star morsel that she made his rivals livid.
But on the terrace that afternoon, Combs did not see his cup as overflowing, or even as half-full. In the living room of his apartment - a quad-plex in Manhattan's fashionable East 70s - various members of his entourage and two lawyers were finishing off some takeout fried chicken. But Combs, says one person who was there, 'couldn't eat'. Instead, 'he just went out on the terrace and stood for a long time'.
Several weeks later, at the Apparel Guild convention, an annual show of urban sportswear held in Las Vegas, Combs still seemed uncharacteristically subdued. He had come to oversee the presentation of his new line of Sean Jean clothing - and it could have been a moment of glory. His collection of fur-trimmed parkas and rhinestone studded jeans had just won rave reviews at a show of top designers during Fashion Week in New York; one could easily imagine the suburban white boys who are Combs' biggest constituency grabbing up the stuff in their quest for instant gangsta glamour.
Yet Combs was taking no victory laps. He was not, as they say, 'rolly deep' through the centre of the action - that is, travelling within concentric circles of intimates, bodyguards and hangers-on, in the normal Puffy manner. Instead, he thought it best to stay out of the spotlight. When Run DMC performed at the convention, Russell Simmons, the Def Jam Records founder and an old friend, offered to usher Combs to a choice seat up front. But Combs made it clear he would rather be in the balcony - the last place anyone would expect to find Puff Daddy. 'That's not usually his way,' says Simmons with considerable understatement.
There's a one-word answer as to why Combs is so mellow and given to moments of quiet reflection these days . . . prison. 'Puffy's really scared,' says a friend about the rapper's New York indictments, one for gun-possession charges and one for attempting to bribe a witness, which could result in a maximum sentence of 15 years. Combs has faced down the law before, of course. In 1991, he promoted a disastrous concert at the City University of New York at which nine people died because of a stampede at the oversold event. Last year he pleaded guilty to harassing a record company executive. But he has always either escaped with a light punishment or settled in a civil suit.