Police investigating several homicides raided the Beverly Hills office of Marion “Suge” Knight‘s hip-hop label Tha Row Records, formerly known as Death Row Records.
The raids began at about 5 a.m. Thursday by a task force including members of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s Operation Safe Streets Bureau, the Special Weapons Teams and homicide investigators. The offices are located at 8200 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills.
According to Reuters, detectives served 17 search warrants in Los Angeles County and in Las Vegas today, seeking additional evidence related to several homicides and conspiracy to commit murder. Officials, however, refused to say what murder or murders were being investigated.
Police said Knight, who was released from prison last year after serving a four-year sentence for a parole violation, was not a suspect at this time.
Knight and Tha Row Records have been at the center of an East Coast-West Coast rap feud that some believe was behind the unsolved killings of rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.
When Shakur was shot while sitting on the passenger side of a car in Las Vegas in 1996, Knight was driving and was also wounded. Knight has since denied any involvement in Shakur’s death, as well as in the murder of Notorious B.I.G., who was shot and killed in Los Angeles in 1997. No arrests or charges have been made in either case.
Two of Knight‘s other former associates have been shot to death this year as well. Alton McDonald, 37, a former production manager at the record label, was killed in April as he pumped gas at a Los Angeles gas station, and 33-year-old Henry Smith, who designed the label’s electric chair logo, was killed last month while sitting in his parked SUV.
No arrests have been made in any of these cases or in the hip-hop world’s latest slaying, the Oct. 30 shooting of 37-year-old Jason Mizell, aka Jam Master Jay of Run-DMC, at a New York City recording studio.
Death Row’s link to the murders of Shakur and B.I.G. is the subject of a newly released documentary, Biggie & Tupac, and Randall Sullivan’s book, Labyrinth: A Detective Investigates the Murders of Tupak Shakur and Biggie Smalls, the Implication of Death Row Records’ Suge Knight, and the Origins of the Los Angeles Police Scandal.
