Have Gun will Travel: The Spectacular Rise and Violent Fall of Death Row Records

Death Row Records is one of the most successful music labels of all time.  From its inception in 1992, it exploded on the rap music scene with sales climbing to the $125 million mark in just four years.  Even more noticeable than the label's financial success is the effect it had on American youth culture, making gangsta rap more popular with suburban white youth and MTV viewers than traditional rock groups.  But under the guidance of six-foot-four-inch, 300-pound CEO Marion "Suge" Knight, Death Row also became the most controversial record label in history--a place where violence, gang feuds, threats, intimidation, and brushes with death were business as usual.

Have Gun Will Travel details the spectacular rise and violent fall of a music label that had at its heart a ferocious criminal enterprise cloaked behind corporate facades that gave it a guise of legitimacy.  With inside access no other writer can claim, Ronin Ro, the country's preeminent rap journalist, exposes the facts everyone else is afraid to divulge--from the initial bankrolling of Death Row by a leader of L.A.'s notorious Bloods gang, to links with New York's Genovese crime family.  Have Gun Will Travel lays bare the full story behind this influential label, including the still-unsolved murders of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G., as well as Suge Knight's rise to power, his fight with East Coast rap titans such as Sean "Puffy" Combs, and his eventual imprisonment.

Although it has been all over the news--from The Wall Street Journal to Rolling Stone--this is a timeless story about an empire built on greed, corruption, murder, and exploitation.  With exclusive interviews and bloodcurdling eyewitness accounts, Have Gun Will Travel combines the behind-the-scenes fascination of books like Hit Men and Hit and Run with the violence and dramatic sweep of The Godfather, in a brilliant and blistering document of contemporary culture.


From the Hardcover edition.

• Welcome To Death Row: The Uncensored Oral History of Death Row Records in the Words of Those Who Were There
• Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls & Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations by the Detective Who Solved Both Cases
• Labyrinth: The True Story of City of Lies, the Murders of Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. and the Implication of the Los Angeles Police Department
• The Rose That Grew From Concrete
• Once Upon A Time In Compton: From Gangsta Rap to Gang Wars... The Murders of Tupac & Biggie... This is the story of two men at the center of it all.
• Freeway Rick Ross: The Untold Autobiography
• Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur
• The Killing of Tupac Shakur
• The FBI War on Tupac Shakur and Black Leaders: U.S. Intelligence's Murderous Targeting of Tupac, MLK, Malcolm, Panthers, Hendrix, Marley, Rappers and Linked Ethnic Leftists
• Diary of a Madman: The Geto Boys, Life, Death, and the Roots of Southern Rap