Sean Combs – the recording artist, hip-hop label boss and fashion mogul also known as P Diddy, Puff Daddy and Love – allegedly ordered the murder of West Coast rapper Tupac Shakur in 1996, in exchange for a $US1 million kill fee payable to members of LA gang The Crips.

The explosive claim is one of the main takeaways from the four-part Netflix documentary Sean Combs: The Reckoning, and comes two months after he was sentenced to 50 months in jail after being found guilty in July of two charges of transportation to engage in prostitution.

This masthead is not suggesting that any of the allegations made against Combs in the documentary are true, only that they have been made.

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Combs’ legal team, which is preparing to fight another 77 charges, has mounted a legal challenge to the documentary series, directed by Emmy winner Alexandria Stapleton and executive produced by rapper 50 Cent, on the grounds that it makes extensive usage of footage shot in the run-in to his trial in New York, without permission.

The Combs team insist the footage was “stolen”, and have labelled the series “a shameful hit piece”. Netflix insists the footage was legally obtained.

That dispute means there’s at least a theoretical risk that the documentary might disappear at any moment.

So, for the sake of posterity and just in case, here are some of the biggest takeaways from a show packed to the gills with shocking details from some of the people who know him best – his childhood best friend, his former manager, the co-founder of his business and a number of artists who worked with him and lived to tell the tale.

Nature or nurture?

Sean Combs tried to present himself as a respectable businessman, but there was always a darker side.

His father was a drug dealer, who was shot dead when Sean was two years old. “I never got a chance to know him,” Combs said in a 2006 interview, a clip of which appears in the series. “He got his brains blown out in Central Park West.”

But he did get to learn about him. “It was like a sigh of relief … because I finally knew that what I was feeling was true. That I was the son of a hustler, of a gangster.”

As a child, Combs was dressed as a Harlem pimp, in furs and fancy hats, by his mother, Janice. She took him along in her Cadillac while she did drops in the city. She played Blaxploitation movies at home and threw wild parties.

“There was a stage in the living room, and we used to have to go and dance,” says childhood friend Tim “Dawg” Patterson, a key interview subject. “And everybody’s calling you ‘baby’, and everybody’s saying, ‘Do that dance’.”

Allegations of sexual violence from a young age

The allegations of sexual violence date back to at least 1991, which is when Joi Dickerson-Neal claims she was drugged and assaulted by Combs.

She alleges he videotaped the attack, which took place while she was unconscious. He was 22 at the time. Her case is still pending.

Former business partner Kirk Burrowes, who met Combs when the singer was 19 and co-founded Bad Boy Entertainment with him five years later, claims Combs was aping the behaviour of a Harlem drug dealer called Alpo Martinez, who would screen videos of his sexual conquests at a nightclub, while also paying tribute to his own father.

“All his life he’s been trying to honour a man he believed was a famous Harlem gangster, and that gave him a certain mythic presence,” Burrowes observes.

Did Combs’ rising star cause his peers to look the other way?

People allegedly turned a blind eye to the bad boy behaviour of the young Combs because they could sense he was on the rise.

Burrowes recounts seeing Combs allegedly assault one of his earliest girlfriends, Misa Hylton. “They’re fighting in the street, he’s beating her into the car well,” Burrowes says. Two years later, when Hylton gave birth to Combs’ first child, Burrowes became godfather.

He says he told himself the violence he witnessed was just “a really bad moment”.

“Does that make me part of a Sean Combs cult?” he asks in the documentary. “Maybe so. I may have been the first disciple, believer, and then overall protector.”

Dickerson-Neal says that when she told people about Combs sexually assaulting her, the responses ranged from “‘What do you want me to do about it?’ to, ‘If I help you I can’t get into his parties’.”

Tupac was the great love-hate affair of his life

Combs had a love-hate relationship with Tupac Shakur. He admired and wanted to emulate the rapper’s hard-core West Coast style, but he was jealous of Shakur’s relationship with the New York rapper The Notorious B.I.G., the first signing to Bad Boy.

According to Shakur’s cousin, William Lesane, “Puff was very threatened by ’Pac”.

In November 1994, Shakur was ambushed as he entered a New York studio where he was due to record with Little Shawn. He was shot five times, and in the documentary, several people, including Shakur, identify it as an attempted murder rather than the robbery it was framed as.

Asked in the aftermath if he thought Combs was involved in the shooting, Shakur answered: “I believe so. I do believe so. I have proof.”

In September 1996, another attempt was made on Shakur’s life, and this time it succeeded. Though no one has ever been found guilty of the murder, Greg Kading, a former LAPD detective who was assigned to the cold case investigation in 2006, believes Combs ordered the hit.

In 2008, Kading interviewed drug dealer Duane “Keffe D” Davis, a senior member of LA gang The Crips, inside prison. Davis claimed he spoke to Combs numerous times in the year leading up to Shakur’s death, and Combs had allegedly made it clear he wanted to get rid of Shakur and Suge Knight, boss of the rival Death Row Records.

At a deli in Los Angeles one night, Davis allegedly told Combs, “We’ll do it for a million”, and Combs agreed.

As Shakur and Knight pulled up at a traffic light in Las Vegas in September 1996, they were peppered with bullets. Shakur died in hospital.

But Davis was never paid for the murder, says Kading. Davis’ associate, Zip Martin, reportedly received $500,000, but never forwarded any of it to the shooters. “The million-dollar solicitation amount, only half of it was fulfilled,” says Kading, “because only Tupac and not Suge was killed.”

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Davis is set to stand trial in 2026 for the murder of Shakur, but has since claimed his evidence was given under duress.

Combs – a ruthless boss?

It is claimed in the documentary that Combs bled his artists dry. He owned the studio in which his artists recorded, and charged them close to $100,000 a day. He inserted himself in their recordings, and in their film clips, and deducted his fees from their royalties.

“If Puff records a song with his artist, he pays hisself [sic],” former artist Mark Curry says. “If he’s in your video, he pays hisself [sic]. As an artist you can go number one … but you’re not making money off your royalties.”

Combs allegedly ‘ushered Biggie to his death’

In March 1997, six months after Shakur’s death, Combs took B.I.G. to LA for promotional events for his new album. Though the rapper feared for his life, Combs cancelled plans to fly to England, insisting they stay in LA longer. In LA, B.I.G. was assassinated in his car, when he ought to have been in the UK.

Combs always insisted it was B.I.G. who had wanted to go to LA. But, says Burrowes, “He’s lying about that. Sean wanted that trip. He ushered Biggie to his death.”

According to Kading, Combs was no help with the investigation into B.I.G.’s death. “In fact he was a hindrance in the investigation. Puffy was kind of stonewalling people from talking because he knows if you make inroads on Biggie’s murder, you’re going to make inroads on Tupac’s murder, and that potentially can lead right back to him.”

Combs was allegedly determined to ensure B.I.G.’s death was marked in style. But, says Burrowes, the bill would be settled out of the artist’s royalties.

Burrowes claims he was ordered by Combs to alter the terms of B.I.G.’s contract posthumously in favour of Bad Boy Entertainment. He refused, and “90 days later, I’m fired”.

Burrowes sued Combs in 2003, but the case was dismissed because it was filed too late.

Threats as a management tool

Combs’ former employee, Capricorn Clark, says that on the day she was hired as his assistant in 1994, she was allegedly taken to Central Park late at night, where Combs revealed he had discovered she knew Suge Knight. She says that if something happened that he deemed a breach of trust, he allegedly told her, it would be bad news for her. “You will be in a dark park, and there will be no one around,” he said.

Clark worked for him until 2012, but parted ways after an incident in which she says she was “kidnapped” and forced to drive with him to the house of rapper Kid Cudi, with whom Cassandra Ventura – Combs’ then-girlfriend – was having an affair. Clark claims Combs used her as leverage to make Ventura show up, and when she did, he “immediately begins kicking the shit out of her”.

“He never balled up his fists,” she adds. “It reminded me of pimp ’70s shit, like, ‘Oh, you’re not gonna touch her face, cause that’s where the money is’.”

Men were also victims of his alleged abuse

When it comes to sexual violence, intimidation and assault, Combs allegedly swings both ways.

Musician Rodney “Lil Rod” Jones was flown to Miami to work on Combs’ new album in 2022. He lived in Combs’ house for months, slowly working over material for what would become The Love Album: Off the Grid, his first new release in 13 years.

“I didn’t realise it, but he was definitely grooming,” the multi-instrumentalist producer says. “He promised me $250,000, he also promised me a house right next door. We had a conversation about making me the producer of the year.”

What Jones allegedly got instead was a crash course in depravity. He was drugged without his knowing, he claims. “There were days we would party, I would wake up not knowing what the hell happened,” he says. “Some days there were girls next to me. Woke up some days, he was in the bed. I would wake up feeling sore, still not understanding exactly what’s transpiring. There’s a lot of things happened to me I just don’t even want to speak of.”

For almost two years’ work and many indignities, Jones claims, he was eventually paid just $29,000. His legal action is pending.

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