Suge Knight was almost always cheery in court.
Whenever the judge overseeing his murder case cracked a sarcastic aside, the former rap impresario belly laughed so hard his broad shoulders bounced for several seconds. Where he could, he slipped compliments to Judge Ronald S. Coen.
"I trust you," Knight told him during a pretrial hearing. "You've been my judge and my adviser. You're my only friend now."
Coen smiled.
As the kowtowing played out in court hearings over the past three years, it became hard to reconcile the man with a graying beard seated at the defense table with his longtime image as one of the most powerful and intimidating men in music.
In the burgeoning West Coast rap scene he helped popularize, chronicling gang life, drugs and police brutality, Knight was an imposing figure _ a swaggering record producer with a cigar in his mouth and a diamond-studded "MOB" ring on his pinky finger.
The Death Row Records co-founder long swore he'd acted in self-defense on the murder rap and deserved to be set free. But Thursday, four days before his trial was scheduled to start, he struck a deal with prosecutors, capping his cinematic legal saga with an anticlimactic coda.
Knight pleaded no contest to voluntary manslaughter for ramming his truck into two men in the driveway of a Compton burger restaurant on Jan. 29, 2015, after an argument on the set of a commercial for the N.W.A. movie "Straight Outta Compton." One of the men _ Terry Carter, a 55-year-old businessman, was killed.
The deal, under which Knight, 53, could serve up to 28 years in prison, perplexed some onlookers, but defense experts said eleventh-hour moves aren't uncommon and often pay off.
If convicted at trial, Knight faced life in prison. His court-appointed attorney, Albert DeBlanc Jr., declined to comment after the deal, but it's likely that video evidence played into his client's calculus. Prosecutors had surveillance footage from Tam's Burgers capturing the moment Knight's Ford F-150 pickup barreled over the men before leaving the scene.
Knight, who turned himself in to authorities a day after the hit-and-run, has said there were people with guns at the scene and that he hit the men while fleeing for his life. In court papers filed last year, Knight claimed that his former business partner Dr. Dre paid $20,000 to have him killed, and said a hit man was at the burger stand that day. (An attorney for Dr. Dre dismissed the accusations as "absurd.")
Born Marion Hugh Knight Jr., the Compton native was a standout athlete. He played football in college and, for a split second in 1987, joined the Los Angeles Rams as a replacement player during the strike. Standing 6-foot-4, Knight's size led to his next job as a bodyguard for celebrities, including R&B singer Bobby Brown.
In the early 1990s, Knight and Dr. Dre formed Death Row Records and as the seminal label exploded into a $100 million a year enterprise, Knight built an infamous reputation. Some compared him to mobster John Gotti and newspapers almost universally described him with three adjectives: feared, imposing, intimidating.
Through the years, he built a lengthy rap sheet, including a 1992 arrest, in which authorities accused him of ordering two aspiring rappers to their knees in a Hollywood studio and pistol-whipping one of the men in an argument over use of a company phone.
Late in the summer in 1996, Knight was driving a BMW just off the Las Vegas Strip when an unknown gunman fatally shot his passenger, rapper Tupac Shakur. A few months later, a judge sentenced Knight to nine years in prison for violating his probation in the assault case by getting in a fight at a Las Vegas hotel hours before the fatal shooting.
In "Straight Outta Compton," Knight is a depicted as a menacing and cruel enforcer who pistol-whips a man for taking his parking spot and watches with a smirk as henchmen beat N.W.A founder Eazy-E. Outraged by his portrayal, as well as the fact he didn't get paid for the use of his likeness, authorities say Knight sent a threatening text message to the movie's director, F. Gary Gray. In 2017, grand jurors indicted Knight of criminally threatening the director.
That case, and a robbery charge stemming from a 2014 incident, in which prosecutors say Knight and comedian Micah "Katt" Williams snatched a woman's camera, will be dismissed under the plea agreement.
Many among Knight's family and friends say his tough-guy image was never the full story.
He's always had a fun spirit and a soft side, Knight's sister, Karen Anderson, said. That's how he got his childhood nickname _ a shortened version of Sugar Bear. In recent years, when family gathered at their mother's home, Anderson said, her brother sat in a circle with the children playing "duck, duck goose."
"I'm not sugarcoating anything. I'm not saying he's an angel," Anderson said. "But he's not the person everyone's portraying him to be either."
To criminal defense attorney David Chesnoff, who represented Knight in two assault cases and a federal investigation years ago, Knight's courtroom joviality is no surprise.
"He understands that a judge is a judge," Chesnoff said. "He's a much more sophisticated person than given credit for."
His former client, Chesnoff said, has always been a complex person _ a big tough guy, sure, but also a charismatic businessman who understood industry expectations at the height of Death Row's power.
"The artists he represented also had the same kind of image as part of the scene that they were in, but many of them have become like household names," Chesnoff said. "Snoop (Dogg) does TV shows with my other client, Martha Stewart. Who would have thought?"
