NEW YORK – Mega-mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has now spent more than a month inside a Brooklyn jail awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges that may tank the former billionaire hitmaker’s career.
The three-time Grammy winner, who once partied with the global glitterati, has traded his Gucci leisure wear for a brown Bureau of Prisons jumpsuit. He denies the salacious charges – even as new allegations of violent misconduct pile up.
Combs, 54, has a history of slipping out of legal jams, including a 2001 acquittal on gun and bribery charges, and a 2015 arrest for attacking his son’s college football coach.
But Combs’ first brush with infamy came decades ago, 13 miles north of the Metropolitan Detention Center, on a college campus in Harlem. There, a judge later ruled, Combs shared responsibility for the deaths of nine young people during a fatal crush on the stairs at a celebrity basketball game he organized.
Some were his own friends.
Now, as Combs works to salvage his freedom and fortune, families affected by the stampede are reliving the worst day of their lives – and the embattled star’s evasions about his role in the disaster at City College of New York.
Combs “overbooked it, he promoted it, and he left those people on the staircase and he wouldn’t open the door,” said filmmaker Jason Swain, whose big brother was killed that winter night in 1991. “And he didn’t own up to it.”
“From the days of City College…there’s always been this cloud that trailed him,” said Zach Greenburg, author of “3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, and Hip-Hop’s Multibillion-Dollar Rise.”
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