“That is the police! We’ve a warrant! Come out along with your fingers up!”
Final March, a caravan of legislation enforcement vehicles and vehicles introduced their arrival by way of loudspeaker earlier than busting by means of the most important gate of two Star Island Drive—the luxurious oceanfront residence that Sean “Diddy” Combs bought from music government Tommy Mottola again in 2003 for $14.5 million.
Accessible solely by water or a single slender bridge, this manicured man-made island in the course of Biscayne Bay is normally off limits to outsiders. However on the afternoon of March 25, 2024, the Feds had been all over the place. A helicopter hovered overhead and a police boat pulled as much as the marina behind the opulent dwelling the place Diddy had entertained A-list celebrities and trade energy brokers for many years. Now the place was overrun by a joint process pressure of officers from the Miami Police Division, FBI, and Homeland Safety Investigations, who spent hours finishing up cardboard bins of proof and plastic luggage of laptop computer computer systems and cellphones.
In the meantime an analogous scene performed out 3,000 miles to the west as Diddy’s 10-bedroom 13-bath Los Angeles mansion on “Billionaire’s Row” in Holmby Hills—not removed from Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion—was concurrently raided by closely armed federal brokers accompanied by digital camera crews who beamed the spectacle world wide stay.
Sitting in my New York Metropolis house, watching red-and-blue lights flashing on my iPhone, I used to be reminded of my very own expertise at Star Island ten years earlier, and the whole lot I noticed at that “grown-and-sexy” Diddy after-party. My ideas turned to Sean Combs’s exceptional rise by means of the leisure trade, and the way the self-proclaimed “Unhealthy Boy for all times”—a determine who as soon as topped the pop charts with a tune proclaiming “Can’t no person maintain me down”—was now going through the combat of his life. Wanting again on that second, simply days earlier than United States v. Diddykicks off with juror choice on Could 5, it’s clear that even when Sean Combs, who has denied all costs, has hosted his remaining “freak off,” the shadow of the Puffy get together period nonetheless lingers.
The rise of Diddy
The raid got here simply 4 months after Diddy settled a lawsuit filed by his ex-girlfriend and former Unhealthy Boy artist Cassandra Ventura, which detailed years of “savage” sexual, bodily, and emotional abuse. Federal brokers confiscated medication and firearms, to not point out Diddy’s so-called “freak-off provides.” Who can overlook the memes about these 1,000 bottles of child oil? The media feeding frenzy conjured sordid fantasies of marathon intercourse events and fueled rampant hypothesis about which celebrities had been captured on the supposed stash of surveillance movies.
Events have all the time been central to the Sean Combs phenomenon. Again when of us known as him Puff Daddy, Combs made his identify internet hosting jams at Howard College within the late Nineteen Eighties earlier than transferring to New York, the place he helped to make Mecca, a Sunday night time get together at The Tunnel, the middle of the hip-hop universe. There’s no denying that Puffy’s events modified the sport, enjoying a vital function in hip-hop’s transition into the most well liked pressure in mainstream popular culture. Diddy’s style in music, dance, and trend made his seductively shiny model of rap music the soundtrack for a era of “ballers, shot-callers” who created a booming new economic system round Black tradition, incomes Combs, his associates, and his imitators billions of {dollars} within the course of.
For higher or for worse, lavish events outlined Diddy’s transcendent trajectory, from the tragically overpacked 1991 charity basketball sport at Metropolis Faculty New York that ended with 9 individuals crushed to loss of life to the 12,000-square-foot Hamptons property he rented for Biggie’s “Juicy” video shoot—“celebratin’ every single day, no extra public housing”—to the fateful get together he and Biggie attended on the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles on the night of March 9, 1997, to his over-the-top twenty ninth birthday bash at Cipriani on Wall Avenue the next yr, whose star-studded VHS invitation featured shout-outs from the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Tommy Hilfiger, Mariah Carey, and Donald Trump. Puffy, Diddy, Love—the nickname adjustments mirrored an incessant strategy of reinvention. The son of a Harlem hustler whose story had no completely satisfied ending, Sean Combs got here into the sport as a younger Black man from money-earnin’ Mount Vernon who noticed himself as a kind of larger-than-life names. He generally referred to himself as “the Black Sinatra,” and by the point he copped a mansion within the Hamptons, the legendary “white events” he hosted there regarded like one thing straight out of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. “Have I learn The Nice Gatsby?” he replied to a reporter in 2001. “I am the Nice Gatsby!” However after all Gatsby—revealed 100 years in the past—was an American tragedy.
The person who spent half 1,000,000 {dollars} on his 1998 party celebrated his fifty fifth journey across the solar final November at Brooklyn’s notorious Metropolitan Detention Middle, the place he now awaits trial on costs of racketeering, conspiracy, and intercourse trafficking.
“I watched grown males rattling close to cry to get right into a Puffy get together”
I first heard of Puffy in 1993 throughout an editorial assembly to plan the primary difficulty of VIBE journal. Scott Poulson-Bryant, our senior employees author who got here up with the journal’s identify, pitched a narrative a few younger get together promoter, stylist, video director, producer, and A&R man at Uptown Data who was accountable for the success of Jodeci and Mary J. Blige. Scott spent weeks reporting the primary in-depth profile of Sean Combs, which I had the pleasure of enhancing. Simply as our story went to press Puffy’s mentor Andre Harrell fired him. He would quickly hyperlink with Arista Data founder Clive Davis, who reduce him an enormous verify and the Unhealthy Boy period was born. Puffy wasted no time signing MCs Craig Mack and Biggie Smalls, and R&B chanteuse Religion Evans to construct out his beginning lineup—however the true star of Unhealthy Boy was all the time Sean himself. Though Dying Row CEO Suge Knight was usually solid because the unhealthy man of their rivalry, Suge’s speech on the 1995 Supply Awards about Puffy being “all within the movies” was just about on level.
Because the Unhealthy Boy empire grew, so did VIBE. Some take into account the opening get together for the 1995 VIBE Music Seminar on the Tavern on the Inexperienced to be the precursor for Puffy’s all white events within the Hamptons. “I bear in mind when that shit was the most well liked ticket on this planet,” says OG hip-hop journalist Michael Gonzales. “ I simply wished to be as distant from it as doable. To begin with, I ain’t a n*gga that’s gonna be sporting all white until I’m on a safari someplace. Plus I heard individuals would get up within the visitor bed room with their pants off.”
As a result of there’s “no upside” to talking about Puffy, one Black leisure government I interviewed requested anonymity. “Now the entire world is piling on,” he says, “and no person desires to speak in regards to the fortunes that had been made, whole industries that didn’t exist. There have been clearly unhealthy issues he was concerned in. There have been additionally necessary issues that he was concerned in.” This specific exec, who nonetheless refers to Diddy as “Sean,” and knew him nicely and did a lot enterprise with him over a 30-year interval, swears that he by no means heard of a “freak off” till it was throughout TMZ. “However I’ll let you know the reality,” he says in a quiet voice, “flossing whereas Black is a really harmful sport. This was the primary time in historical past that the enterprise individual was the artist as nicely…These events modified the whole lot. I watched grown males rattling close to cry to get right into a Puffy get together. There was no increased honor than to be in considered one of his occasions.”
The start of the “All-White Get together”
Puffy’s White Events formally began in 1998, a time when Combs was attempting to place the tragic murders of Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace behind him and embrace his personal stardom. After spending $2.45 million for a 4,500-square-foot waterfront mansion on Hedges Financial institution Drive in East Hampton, he determined to throw a housewarming get together. “So I moved into this new neighborhood,” Combs recalled throughout an interview in 2009. “They had been like, ‘What’s this hip hop man movin’ in?’”
“All people come on over,” Puffy advised his neighbors. “Let me invite a few of my buddies from Harlem from 145th Avenue. Let me combine you all collectively and see you ain’t received nothin’ to be afraid of. You ain’t gotta maintain your pocketbooks tight or nothin’ after I’m joggin’ within the neighborhood.”
“I bear in mind the primary get together he threw within the Hamptons,” Paris Hilton recalled to The Hollywood Reporter 20 years later. “It was iconic and everybody was there.” Leonardo DiCaprio was in the home, contemporary off the discharge of Titanic. “Having a whole get together all wearing white was a shocking sight,” Martha Stewart stated. Company had been turned away on the door for sporting beige or black footwear. “‘I wished to strip away everybody’s picture and put us all in the identical coloration, and on the identical stage,” Puffy would clarify to Oprah. Years later he was quoted as saying “I really feel secure in white as a result of deep down inside, I am an angel.”
That was the identical yr VIBE put Puffy on a cut up cowl—one styled as an angel and one as a satan. Final summer season my colleague Danyel Smith wrote about her ordeal because the journal’s editor-in-chief throughout that point. I used to be conscious that Puffy wished to get a have a look at the duvet forward of time, and that Danyel was standing on enterprise. I didn’t know that he advised her he’d see her “lifeless within the trunk of a automotive” if she refused. Puffy likes to remind those that he’s from Harlem, however Danyel is from Oakland and he or she didn’t again down. Not lengthy after that, the servers that contained the digital information of our journal pages disappeared mysteriously from the workplace. However the journal got here out directly, and with none apology. Sacha Jenkins’s cowl story is a primary instance of hip-hop journalism at its most interesting. In it, he confronts Puffy about calling a younger feminine editor at VIBE, irate a few photograph caption in an earlier difficulty of the journal. “I’m gonna hunt that bitch down,” he threatened.
“I used to be an irate father or mother calling the college,” Puffy stated of the outburst. “There was an image of me and my son [on the “I’ll be Missing You” video set], and he was holding a pink water gun. And it stated, ‘Didn’t Puffy be taught but?’ However all people’s kids play with water weapons!”
Bönz Malone, the storied hip hop ambassador, A&R, actor, graf author, and essayist, is a person of many abilities. Along with writing his month-to-month column “Tuph Avenue,” and the occasional function or cowl story, he was listed on VIBE’s masthead as our consigliere, a time period acquainted to followers of The Godfather trilogy. Bönz is a person of respect whose relationships from the streets to the suites helped the VIBE editorial staff navigate sticky conditions resembling this one. He took it upon himself to deal with the matter in his personal approach.
The Monday after Puffy’s threatening telephone name, Bönz placed on a crisp tailor-made go well with and paid a go to to the Unhealthy Boy places of work with a Bible in his hand. “They had been like, ‘Ah, don’t let him in! Don’t let him in!,’” Bönz remembers. “I’m dressed like considered one of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I can hear him yellin’ within the background, “Nah, don’t let him in!”
The subsequent day Bönz reached out to Puff’s then-manager, Benny Medina. “It was the primary time I ever spoke with him,” VIBE’s consigliere remembers. “I known as him up. I stated, ‘Yo, I gotta see you, man.’”
“Come to my lodge,” Medina advised him.
“I stated, ‘Yeah, OK. You higher have garments on! Trigger if you happen to come to the door bare I’m gonna bust your ass, interval. I’m not havin’ none of that shit.’ He may hear in my voice that it was one thing severe. He was stayin’ on the Sheraton… I received up there and he opens the door. I see he’s received his garments on. ‘Alright, that’s cool. Now we may go ahead,’ I stated. ‘Inform your man to cease gettin’ excessive. As a result of he’s gettin’ sloppy. And if he goes over the road once more that’s it. There’s gonna be no dialog in anyway.’”
(Complicated reached out to Medina by way of e-mail for remark. As of publication we’ve acquired no response.)
A while later, Puffy was invited to participate within the so-called Massive Willie Panel at an trade occasion known as the VIBE Music Seminar. That “Massive Willie” was widespread hip-hop slang on the time did nothing to make the panel any much less tasteless. As Danyel wrote within the Occasions, the time period was not only a phrase to explain an enormous boss, however “a euphemism for a big penis.” Including insult to harm, “VIBE honchos organized ‘Massive Willie’ panel discussions,” the previous editor-in-chief wrote, “when feminine artists and executives had been working twice as onerous for much less cash and solely whispered credit score.”
Bönz stepped to a microphone through the viewers Q&A and requested Diddy whether or not Unhealthy Boy Leisure’s plans for the long run included threatening feminine journalists. “It’s not about no violence,” Combs replied as Bönz walked away.
The Diddy get together spinoffs
Within the years that adopted, Puffy’s white events turned an establishment, going down at his East Hampton waterfront dwelling over the Labor Day Weekend. In 2004, he and his entourage arrived on twin helicopters—one purple white and blue and the opposite navy camo—and he walked across the get together exhibiting off a uncommon copy of the Declaration of Independence to advertise his “Vote or Die” marketing campaign. The summer season soirees, generally lasting a number of days, would later department out to St.-Tropez and Beverly Hills, California, when Combs moved to the West Coast. There have been Fourth of July spin-offs too—and ultimately there have been imitators.
In the summertime of 2021, Michael Rubin, the CEO of the sports activities merchandise firm Fanatics, and co-founder—with Jay-Z and Meek Mill—of the Reform Alliance, started throwing his personal “white events” at his $50 million Bridgehampton dwelling. Company included Jay and Beyoncé, Megan Thee Stallion, and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred. The visitor record grew ever flossier in years to return.
Fourth of July 2023 marked a bittersweet milestone for Combs. Though it was the twenty fifth anniversary of his first White Get together, Rubin’s get together had formally upstaged the unique. A lot to Combs’ consternation, the largest stars—your Leo DiCaprios, your Tom Bradys, your Drakes, your Kardashians—had been dressing up in white and flocking to Rubin’s mansion to pop bottles and smile for the flashing cameras. Depart it to my previous pal Elliott Wilson to stoke the controversy. “Can’t imagine Puff let a white brother take July 4 Hamptons white away from him,” Wilson posted on X. “Take that! Ha.”
“I’ve by no means been to a Diddy get together,” Rubin stated throughout a Breakfast Membership interview final yr. “And he’s by no means been to considered one of my events in my life.” Even earlier than the raids on Diddy’s dwelling the entire concept of a white get together within the Hamptons gave the impression to be dropping its attract. Kai Cenat turned down an invite to Rubin’s 2024 get together, and a few even speculated that Kendrick Lamar launched his “Not Like Us” video on July 4 to distinction with Drake’s anticipated attendance on the lavish occasion. Rubin considerately banned the tune from being performed out of respect for his Canadian visitor. This yr Rubin has quietly canceled plans for any future white events. “With all of the Diddy controversy it’s simply not look,” stated one staffer on the Reform Alliance, who spoke on situation of anonymity. One other nameless supply stated Rubin’s white events had been “canceled without end,” blaming Diddy’s authorized troubles for giving the theme “such a foul stigma after the whole lot that got here out this previous yr.”
Inside Diddy’s White Get together
As I stared at my telephone, watching legislation enforcement officers breaking down the ornately carved wood gate at 2 Star Island Drive, I remembered standing exterior that gate whispering the key password to realize entry to a celebration inside.
Extremely Weekend 2014 had Miami Seaside totally turnt as fashions in swimsuits rode up and down Collins Ave in Lamborghinis. On the final day, Diddy popped up at Purple Bull Visitor Home for an impromptu late-night preview of 11 11, his collaborative album with Israeli DJ Man Gerber which marked the hip-hop mogul’s first foray into the surging, and largely Caucasian EDM market. All weekend lengthy, celebrity DJs like Skrillex, Diplo, Steve Aoki had been throwing down at rooftop pool events full of A-list visitors. However Sean Combs introduced a special form of vitality. Wearing black from his leather-based bucket to his kicks, offset by a gold chain and Jesus piece, he grabbed the mic to introduce his new venture for the invitation-only crowd. “I personally wished to name it Ketamine,” he stated of the album. “It ain’t for everyone…it’s for demented, after-hours minds.”
After urgent play Diddy frolicked for a bit to absorb the afterglow. Reshma B, a fellow music journalist, snapped a fast photograph with Diddy whereas I navigated previous his hulking bodyguard to ask the music mogul if he remembered me. “What up, playboy?” he replied as we dapped one another up. We had been hardly on a first-name foundation, however after 17 years at VIBE I’d met Puff on various events. I figured there could be an after-party someplace and I requested if it could be cool to drag up. Puff gave me the OK and advised his bodyguard to inform me the small print. “Two Star Island,” the hulk stated. “Come after 3 AM and ask for ‘Marcus’ [this was a pseudonym] if you get there.”
Me and Reshma B confirmed up earlier than daybreak and located a dozen or so interlopers milling about on the road exterior Diddy’s gate. They didn’t know the password however we did and the gate swung open simply sufficient for us to step by means of. The guard inside warned us to maintain our telephones in our pockets or they might be confiscated. Strolling down the palm-lined pathway, I believed in regards to the island’s historical past. This was the identical place Diddy invited Chris Brown and Rihanna to reconcile weeks after the violence between them on Grammy night time 2009. Pulsating bass-heavy rhythms grew louder with every step till we came across a protracted, shallow, rectangular pool. Within the water had been a half dozen ladies in skimpy swimsuits dreamily gliding forwards and backwards sporting masquerade masks with devilish horns connected. Not sure what to make of this spectacle, I advised myself Miami is a metropolis the place scenes from rap movies are all the time bleeding into bizarre life—vehicles with spinners, bottles with sparklers, video vixens within the VIP so far as the attention can see. When all of that turns into previous hat, what higher technique to make a splash than some Eyes Huge Shut shit?
All of the bars had been totally stocked with Ciroc in each taste in addition to bottles
of Diddy’s new premium tequila model, DeLeon. By early 2014 Diddy was formally ranked hip-hop’s “Money King,” in keeping with Forbes, whose reporters estimated his earnings over the earlier yr to be $50 million—a modest sum by at the moment’s requirements, however sufficient to edge out Jay-Z at $43 mill and Dr Dre at $40 mill. Forbes attributed Diddy’s standing to his profitable Ciroc endorsement take care of the $80 billion worldwide liquor megacorp Diageo. However after 20 years as a CEO, he knew the toughest a part of being on high was holding onto your spot.
A couple of months after the Star Island after-party, Apple would purchase Beats by Dre for $3 billion in money and inventory. Jay-Z and Beyoncé had been already licensed because the world’s highest incomes movie star couple, and the worth of Jay’s possession stake in Ace of Spades champagne had not even begun to pop. Though Diddy had no fairness in Ciroc, he was happy with his DeLeón three way partnership. “It is a historic day for Sean Combs as a businessman, and even hip-hop,” he advised me in January 2014, two months earlier than the Star Island get together. “I’m not beginning this from scratch. That is the primary firm I’ve ever purchased. I couldn’t go and purchase Ciroc from Diageo, however we’re shopping for this collectively.”
The DeLeón deal would finally show to be a disappointment. In Could 2023, Combs filed go well with in opposition to Diageo, claiming that the spirits company had did not market DeLeón correctly as a result of they “typecast” the tequila as a “Black model” that would solely be bought on the “city” market. The dispute successfully ended a profitable working relationship between Combs and Diageo, who reached a settlement in January 2024, a couple of months after Combs was hit with a collection of lawsuits regarding sexual assault costs.
However throughout that Star Island after-party, the long run nonetheless regarded shiny. Diddy’s employees had been quietly environment friendly even within the wee small hours of the morning. I observed that each server and safety guard was an individual of coloration whereas the extra menial jobs—sweeping the patio, accumulating empty cups, selecting cigarette butts out of the grass—had been dealt with by white of us. Reshma made her approach out again to the place Diddy stored his Jet Skis and posed for a photograph by the water’s edge with out getting her telephone snatched. The solar was simply starting to rise when Diddy, now wearing white, appeared on an higher balcony to make an announcement. “OK get together individuals, the true get together is about to start,” he stated matter-of-factly. “The remainder of y’all can seize no matter bottles you need, however you could stand up outta right here.” We made our approach again to South Seaside, purple plastic cups of coconut Ciroc in hand, none the wiser about what “demented after-hours minds” had deliberate for the after-after get together.
The after-after get together
“Ain’t no get together like a Diddy get together,” as LeBron James as soon as noticed. Sean Combs could also be one of the vital prolific hitmakers in music historical past, one of the vital influential shapers of late twentieth century widespread tradition, one of the vital profitable entrepreneurs within the rap trade—however greater than his work on the stage, within the studio, or within the boardroom, Sean Combs legacy has been formed by his lavish soirees. These star-studded, over-the-top occasions have all the time been the stuff of legend, however now no person desires to speak about them.
None of celebrities, executives, or public figures who ever attended considered one of Diddy’s well-known features can go exterior with out some roving TMZ digital camera individual asking whether or not they ever took half in a “freak off.” Even Reshma B’s canine Pup Daddy now goes by Pup D. “As quickly because the information broke I used to be getting WhatsApp messages from abroad,” she says. “They had been like, ‘Your canine may wish to take into account a reputation change.’ It’s simply not look.”
Reworking rap from an genuine subculture with its personal ethics, morals, and codes of conduct right into a bankable enterprise that’s nonetheless “All Concerning the Benjamins” concerned the celebration of extra, decadence—even sexual exploitation. Sean Combs was hardly the primary to find this system, which is de facto as American as apple pie. Gordon Gecko’s “greed is sweet” mantra is alive and nicely even amidst flagrant deception and corruption in excessive and low locations.
However throughout the leisure trade, of us are rethinking the over-the-top bacchanalia that had been as soon as the norm in hip-hop circles. The top of Diddy’s reign represents that reckoning. Kendrick Lamar may need put it greatest when he launched his untitled monitor final September 11, 2024. Possibly it’s time to “watch the get together die.”