before sha Diddy comes was a business Mogul and rap artist and producer he was just a kid from Harlem just it's it's really surreal it's really overwhelming to come from New York we look at some of the things about com's childhood and past that he's revealed over the years thanks for joining me for Crime fix I'm Anette Levy sha Diddy comes has been all over the news for the last couple of weeks not for rap musics or stories about his marketing ability and business prow but for raids on his homes in California and Florida tied
to allegations of sex trafficking which he has denied we know comes as Puff Daddy puffy P Diddy Diddy and now love the rapper and producer and the clothing line designer and business Mogul but what do we really know about him as a person and how he became who he is today what shaped him let's go back to the beginning Shan John coms was born on November 4th 1969 in Harlem his mom was Janice his dad was Melvin we'll have more on Melvin and Janice in a bit we know that Janice eventually moved comes and his
sister to mount ver in New York after Melvin died she worked three jobs to put them through private school in a 2006 documentary Shan com's portrait in black and white comes revealed a lot about his upbringing some of that could tell us a lot about who he is today I want to bring in Shan Sato he's a music journalist who covers rap and hipop to discuss Sean com's upbringing so Sean thanks for coming on I want to talk a little bit about something that Shan comes brings up in this documentary and he talks about the
differences in which his grandmother treated him and his mother and he tells this story about how he was sent out by his grandma to go get cigarettes she would give him some money to go to the corner store he got beat up one time didn't come back with or he got the money was taken from him I should say uh he comes back without the money and his mom was like you go back and you get that money or you don't come back you know and he left the house crying his grandma would have let
him stay at the house but his mom told him to get out there and he used this quote uh that I thought was really interesting he says I M my mother I guess was Raising me for the real world she always told me if someone hits me to hit them back harder and he talked about getting into this big fight with the guy but getting the money back and going home what do you what does that tell us about how Shan com's kind developed you know hit them back harder if you get hit yeah I
mean look it's it's hard to draw conclusions from a single anecdote right but I think it tells us a lot about how he wants to be seen right of all the things he could have potentially said about his childhood you know he there are plenty of funny colorful anecdotes right he played football in high school with a member of The Gambino family so like you know there's plenty of you know funny interesting things he could have said about his time uh growing up I think it's notable that he chose that story you know to present
himself as a fighter as someone who overcomes obstacles and to you know sort of show uh you know the the influences mom had and and ways in which maybe like you said she tried to prepare him for you know difficulties he might uh he might experience I think it's when you're on top he was for so many years you know it's very difficult to portray yourself as an underdog anymore right and to gain uh appreciation and sympathy for that and I guess maybe one way to do it is to say you know is to sort
of call back to obstacles you had as a child another thing that he discussed was his father and he didn't really know his father he he describes the only thing he really remembers about his father because his father died right as he was turning three um was his dad throwing him up in the air you know a lot of parents do that you know you throw the little kid up in the air and and he said that's his memory doesn't even remember the sound of his father's voice and he says he knows that he was
quote a very stylish dresser the ladies loved him his whole everything is real meticulous he had a lot of drive a lot of determination you know he ain't want to be poor and seanc said that his mother had actually told him his father died in a car crash but that wasn't really true he later found out when he did some research later in life that his father was shot to death uh shot in the head he said his brains were blown out as were his words on Central Park West in Manhattan and he said his
research confirmed that his father was a hustler and a gangster so he was the son of a hustler and a gangster something that he had long suspected and his dad ran around with Frank Lucas Frank Lucas was a a big drug dealer in the area and he he knew his dad I mean Frank Lucas has been on YouTube talking about this about knowing Melvin combes so how do you think maybe that influenced Sean combes right I mean the the Melvin comes story is very interesting I found something actually just uh the other day you know
it's a daily news story from February 1973 which is a few years maybe year and a half or so after he was killed but it was around the time that this drug case in which he had been involved in which you know finally convictions happened in it uh but this article says well look you know this this case which is you know breaking up a giant heroin ring started when Melvin comes' phone was wiretapped and that that was sort of the break in this case and the article doesn't out and out say this but it
seems to imply that uh melbour com's death was somehow connected to that right right and you hear rumors people associated with Harlem in that time have said well look people mistakenly thought Melvin Colmes was an informant and that's why he was killed right it's sort of something that people who knew him back then or who knew the area back then have said and so you know it seems to me this article sort of trying to put two and two together and say maybe the reason they thought that was because there was in fact you know
this wir tap on his phone so that part was true but obviously wir tap are not something one does voluntarily right so if this Daily News article is to be believed I think that maybe uh sort of explains the story behind his death possibly um but yeah I think you know Diddy definitely had the image of his father was very important to him uh there was a speech he gave at Howard maybe 2005 or so something like that where he recalls very vividly you know I was in college at Howard and the first thing I
did was go to the library and look at the micro fish and look up the Amsterdam news and see this story about my father like it it is something that is very important to him this image of his father as sort of the the drug dealer but not just the drug dealer sort of the swaave powerful guy who hung out with you know the biggest of the big gangsters right Frank Lucas like you mentioned who who of course you know his story is now immortalized in movies right he's about as famous as you can get
in that sort of uh milu so I think that did he seemed to hold on to that image of his father and it it seemed very important to him that his father was someone big and notable and important I want to take a moment to tell you about something really cool that will help you learn more about the people you interact with in your life every day it could even be the people who live next door to you it's called truthfinder.com truthfinder is one of the largest public record search services in the world truthfinder has
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can go to private school and he went to a monor school at one point in time Wall Street Journal said it it it was a school that you know created a lot of people people who went into the so-called creative Elite and they called it I think the monory mafia and so he was a member of this according to the Wall Street Journal so obviously Janice Combs is somebody who wanted much better for her children than what they were getting in Harlem and was willing to work really hard uh so that her children did have
a better life than what she had absolutely and Mount Vernon is very important to Puffy's story you know certainly Harlem is and he he you know talks about and tries to represent Harlem a lot but Mount Vernon is equally important his first big break in the record business you know he started promoting parties in college and things like that but his first real break in the music industry began when he was an intern at Uptown records which is a job he initially got through a connection from Heavy D who was of course from Mount Vernon
right so there is a Mount Vernon connection from the the the very beginning of his story in the music business I want to move on now to something he he's asked about sex and love in this documentary and he talks very descriptively about losing his virginity at the age of 12 and and actually feeling like he was pretty good at sex at the age of 12 uh he talks about watching something called Midnight Blue which he described as a pornographic channel that was on TV at the time and I to read a quote um he
said the first time I had sex I wasn't scared it felt so good to me but I just remember how impressed I was because I used to watch midnight blue and how I felt I was just as good as the porno stars like midnight blue like in midnight blue and so I thought that was pretty interesting um this is somebody who was sexually active at a very very young age and and I'm not saying that relates to anything that's going on right now necessarily with these investigations because there haven't even been criminal charges filed but
this is somebody who's who's talking about being sexually active at a very young age and i' I've talked to people who say well you know you just don't know how it was back then and um and and who've defended Sean comes um who've said that they don't believe these allegations coming out but but what does that tell us about him Sean what do you think about that I mean he's he's got some um you know he speaks very descriptively about this losing his at 12 years old he's a kid at that point in time and
that and we know that happens but it's to me a kind of a sad fact yeah I mean look I don't I don't know exactly what that says about you know the kind of person he was or he became uh something else in that quote actually in that section actually struck me right in that uh when he was talking about how he had a college girlfriend and then the girlfriend broke up with him at a point which they were a part and he very definitively sets that as like oh that was the time at which
I had realized I had to turn my feelings off and become you know what he calls a player right and I found that interesting too because it's almost like he couldn't handle that pain so he shuts it all down shuts it off and then he he he changes the way he's looking at relationships almost yeah and look he's you know far from the only person to talk about that either in you know real life or art but I thought that was notable again I couldn't say what relationship that does or doesn't have to you know
his love life in the future when he became prominent but he talks in that film also about how he's lonely right he says I'm a lonely guy I don't have a lot of friends and I feel like that also is sort of like part of that is the workaholism as he mentions right but part of that I think also maybe goes to this sort of shutting himself off as expressed by the anecdote about the college girlfriend that brings me to my next Point um the lonely guy description he describes himself as a lonely guy who
doesn't have a lot of friends he said people think I have a lot of friends but I I don't have a lot of friends and the quote I thought was interesting he said I don't really think that I make a good friend I don't think I'm someone who someone's going to call when they're going through something I don't think I'm to have the patients to really slow down to give them the attention that they need and what I found really interesting about that is that he is talking about how he is a workaholic he just
became a machine he said that was a direct quote as well throwing himself into his work so this is somebody who I don't know is almost isolated in some respects sure I mean look if you talk to uh my my friend Zack omal Greenberg wrote for Forbes for many years and you know wrote a book in part about Diddy and interviewed him and you know he kind of broke it down as like the sort of Shand for Diddy is he doesn't sleep right he's always going sleeps you know single digit not single digit like very
relatively few hours a night and you get a sense of that in the documentary as well there sort of constant workaholism so I think that's that's one side that's definitely one side of it you know if if you look at other people in comparable positions in terms of you know popular music and business you know being successful in both of them I definitely remember an older interview with Jay-Z where he said you know I was unable to sit still in a movie theater long enough to watch a movie for many years I think part of
that you know part of that I think for him was this issue of he had been you know putting euphemistically in the streets for a long time and thus always looking over his shoulder and so part of it was that fear of sitting still but I think part of it also is this workaholism is the need to be on to the next thing and that part of it you definitely see inan Diddy as well and then the last thing I wanted to discuss was this H quote that he had where he was basically asked about
himself or he's describing himself and he says I'm one of the baddest emmer effers mother effers to ever walk the face of the Earth that's how he views himself and I have to think that his childhood kind of shaped all of that I know we're we're we're news people we're not we're not therapists or anything like that um but that's how he views himself as one of the toughest people to ever walk the face of the Earth that's what he's saying now he's sitting in front of a camera describing himself that way but this is
somebody who at the age of almost three loses his father mom moves him up to Mount Vernon she's working three jobs probably wasn't around that much trying to put him through private school so he has a better life you know School Hard Knocks he's being told go out and fight or don't get come home you know that type of thing so uh this is somebody who was raised to be tough yeah and I think part of the confidence also comes from accomplishing so much uh so quickly right if you think about you know he started
off at Howard University promoting parties then promoting parties in DC wasn't enough started promoting parties in DC and New York and he turns at a record label and then you know very quickly has two or three successful acts gets his own imprint gets fired comes back and you know is bigger than ever before and you know if you do the impossible once you might get a swelled head you do the impossible twice you know you might start thinking your hot stuff you do the impossible three or four times before you're 30 I can understand how
people how someone might go around saying you know I'm the best I'm the bad I'm the toughest guy because that has repeatedly shown to you know basically more or less have been true Sean Sato thanks so much for coming on to talk with us about Sean comes' childhood and so much more we appreciate it thank you Anette it was great to be here and that's it for this episode of crime fix I'm anginette Levy thanks so much for being with us we'll see you back here next time
