The time Eazy-E hired an Israeli soldier to threaten Suge Knight
Suge Knight has a reputation for violence.
The Death Row Records co-founder is believed to have deployed threats as a regular way of doing business, creating an aura of fear around him and leading some of his rivals to take drastic measures to protect themselves. Eazy-E is one such rival, and he felt compelled to turn to someone with an especially fearsome, bloody past for help.
The tension between Knight and Eazy in the ’90s was obvious. Dr Dre sought to leave NWA and its label Ruthless Records, which was led by Eazy, and Knight wanted to snap him up. It’s rumored that Knight and a bodyguard threatened Eazy-E with lead pipes and baseball bats to ensure that Dre was released from his Ruthless contract. Regardless of how that situation actually played out, the fact is that Dre did eventually leave Ruthless and helped Knight to set up Death Row in 1991.
Knight personally knew how to handle himself, having, at one stage, worked as bodyguard for celebrities including the new jack swing performer Bobby Brown. But, when he started working in the music business, he hired bodyguards of his own—and he allegedly used them to intimidate clients and rivals alike. It’s rumoured, for instance, that he and his cronies threatened to toss his associate Vanilla Ice from a balcony.
“I went to my hotel room and Suge was in there with several people,” Vanilla Ice recalled in the 2001 documentary Welcome to Death Row. “He let me know he wanted to get some points off the record ‘Ice Ice Baby.’ Suge took me out on the balcony, started talking to me personally. He had me look over the edge, showing me how high I was up there. I needed to wear a diaper that day. I was an ‘investor’ in Death Row Records with no return on my money.”
Knight, who is currently serving a 28-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter following a hit-and-run incident in 2015, had previously spent stints in jail in the ’90s and ’00s, having been convicted of assault and later breaking the conditions of his parole. All of this is to say that his reputation for violence was hardly unfounded.
One person who knew of Knight’s reputation perfectly well was Eazy-E, who, it turns out, was so fearful of the label boss, that he took drastic measures to protect himself. That, at least, is how Gary Ballen told it on the Murder Master Music Show in 2018. Ballen is the cousin of Jerry Heller, who used to manage NWA and Eazy-E, so he would have been privy to a lot of the stuff that was happening around the time that NWA split up and Knight was rising as CEO of Death Row.
In the interview with Murder Master Music Show, Ballen explained that Eazy-E, fearful of his rival Knight, decided to hire some muscle to keep him safe. But this bodyguard that he ultimately selected, Mike Klein, was apparently an extremely intense person in his own right. “The first time I ever saw Mike Klein,” Ballen recalled, “it was a picture of him holding up two severed heads.”
Klein, according to Ballen, was a military man, a former soldier of the Israel Defense Forces. “He was one of those crazy Israeli army guys,” as Ballen put it, “and when I met him, he had a real strong crew of guys who worked for him and they became our bodyguards.”
Eazy deployed this Klein person to face up to Knight—a fearsome prospect for most people. But, for a person with such an apparently violent past, it was nothing. “The first thing I heard was he told Suge if he ever comes back, he would chop him up and put him in dumpsters all over the city,” Ballen claimed. “And the second thing I heard was he told Suge if he ever comes to the office uninvited again, he would leave in a box.” This sort of crazy rhetoric, it seems, was just the way of doing business in the context of gangsta rap’s early days.