Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - P. Diddy: 4 Shocking Details of Sean Combs' Childhood

Starting point is 00:00:00 Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law & Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Before Sean Diddy Combs was a business mogul and rap artist and producer, he was just a kid from Harlem. It's really surreal. It's really overwhelming to come from New York. We look at some of the things about Combs' childhood and past that he's revealed over the years. Thanks for joining me for Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Sean Diddy Combs has been all over the news for the last couple of weeks, not for rap musics or stories about his marketing ability and business prowess,

Starting point is 00:00:41 but for raids on his homes in California and Florida tied to allegations of sex trafficking, which he has denied. We know Combs 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. Sean John Combs was born on November 4th, 1969 in Harlem. His mom was Janice and his dad was Melvin. We'll have more on Melvin and Janice in a bit. We know that Janice eventually moved Combs and his sister to Mount Vernon, New York after Melvin died. She worked three jobs to put them through private school. In a 2006 documentary,

Starting point is 00:01:26 Sean Combs, Portrait in Black and White, Combs revealed a lot about his upbringing. Some of that could tell us a lot about who he is today. I want to bring in Sean Sotero. He's a music journalist who covers rap and hip hop to discuss Sean Combs' upbringing. So Sean, thanks for coming on. I want to talk a little bit about something that Sean Combs 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

Starting point is 00:01:57 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:02:21 And he used this quote that I thought was really interesting. He says, 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 does that tell us about how Sean Combs kind of developed? Hit him back harder if you get hit. Yeah. I mean, look, 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.

Starting point is 00:03:06 So, like, you know, there's plenty of, you know, funny, interesting things he could have said about his time growing up. I think it's notable that he chose that story, you know, to of show, you know, the influences mom had and ways in which maybe, like you said, she tried to prepare him for, you know, difficulties he might experience. I think it's when you're on top, as he was for so many years, you know, it's very difficult to portray yourself as an underdog anymore, right? And to gain 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.

Starting point is 00:03:57 Another thing that he discussed was his father. And he didn't really know his father. He describes the only thing he really remembers about his father, because his father died right as he was turning three, 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 he said, that's his memory. He 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 Sean Combs said that his mother had actually told him

Starting point is 00:04:36 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, shot in the head. He said his brains were blown out. Those 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. Frank Lucas

Starting point is 00:05:05 was a big drug dealer in the area, and he knew his dad. I mean, Frank Lucas has been on YouTube talking about this, about knowing Melvin Combs. So how do you think maybe that influenced Sean Combs? Right. I mean, the Melvin Combs story is very interesting. I found something actually just the other day, you know, it's a daily news story from February 1973, which is a few years, maybe a 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. But this article says, well, look, you know, this, this case, which was, you know, breaking up a giant heroin ring started when Melvin Combs' 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 Melvin Combs' death was somehow connected to that, right?

Starting point is 00:06:10 And you hear rumors people associated with Harlem in that time have said, well, look, people mistakenly thought Melvin Combs 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 wiretap on his phone. So that part was true, but obviously wiretaps 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:07:14 And the first thing I did was go to the library and look at the microfiche and look up the Amsterdam news and see this story about my father, like, it is something that is very important to him, this image of his father as sort of the drug dealer, but not just the drug dealer, sort of this suave, powerful guy who hung out with, you know, the biggest of the big gangsters, right? Frank Lucas, like you mentioned, 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 milieu. So I think that Diddy seemed to hold on to that image of his father and 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

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Starting point is 00:09:12 You will love it. After his father, Melvin, was shot and killed, his mom, Janice, moves them to suburban New York, Mount Vernon, which is north of the Bronx, so not that far away. And she reportedly works three jobs. So Sean and his sister, Sean Combs and his sister, can go to private school. And he went to a Montessori school at one point in time. Wall Street Journal said it was a school that created a lot of people who went into the so-called creative elite, and they called it, I think, the Montessori mafia. And so he was a member of people who went into the so-called creative elite, and they called it, I think, the Montessori 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

Starting point is 00:09:57 getting in Harlem and was willing to work really hard 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, 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 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.

Starting point is 00:10:37 Right. So there is a Mount Vernon connection from the very beginning of his story in the music business. I want to move on now to something. 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 actually feeling like he was pretty good at sex at the age of 12. He talks about watching something called Midnight Blue, which he described as a pornographic channel that was on TV at the time. And I want to read a quote. He said, the first time I had sex, I wasn't scared. It felt so good to me, but I just remember

Starting point is 00:11:16 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. This is somebody who was sexually active at a very, very young age. 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 talking about being sexually active at a very young age. And I've talked to people who say, well, you know, you just don't know how it was back then. And who've defended Sean Combs, who've said that they don't believe these allegations coming out. But what does that

Starting point is 00:12:01 tell us about him, Sean? What do you think about that? I mean, he's got some, you know, he speaks very descriptively about this, losing his virginity at 12 years old. He's a kid at that point in time. And we know that happens. But it's, to me, a kind of a sad fact. Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know exactly what that says about, you know, the kind of person he was or he became. Something else in that quote, actually, in that section actually struck me, right? In that when he was talking about how he had a college girlfriend, and then the girlfriend broke up with him at a point in which they were apart.

Starting point is 00:12:42 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 changes the way he's looking at relationships almost. Yeah. And look, he's far from the only person to talk about that either in real life or art, but I thought that was notable. Again, I couldn't say what relationship that does or doesn't have to 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

Starting point is 00:13:32 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, 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 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's someone's going to call when they're going through something.

Starting point is 00:14:09 I don't think I'm going to have the patience 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 my friend, Zach O'Malley Greenberg, wrote for Forbes for many years and wrote a book in part about Diddy and interviewed him. And he kind of broke it down as like the sort of shorthand for Diddy is he doesn't sleep, right? He's always

Starting point is 00:14:49 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, this sort of constant workaholism. So I think that's one side, that's definitely one side of it. You know, 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, 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

Starting point is 00:15:31 been, you know, putting it 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 onto the next thing. And that part of it, you definitely see in Diddy as well. And then the last thing I wanted to discuss was this 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 M or Fers, mother Fers 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

Starting point is 00:16:12 that. I know we're, we're, we're news people. We're not, we're not therapists or anything like that. 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 come home, that type of thing. So this is somebody who was raised to be tough. Yeah. And I think part of the confidence also comes from accomplishing so much so quickly.

Starting point is 00:17:01 If you think about, 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 interns 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 you're hot stuff.

Starting point is 00:17:31 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 baddest, I'm the toughest guy, because that is repeatedly shown to, you know, basically more or less have been true. Sean Sotero, thanks so much for coming on to talk with us about Sean Combs' childhood

Starting point is 00:17:54 and so much more. We appreciate it. Thank you, Anjanette. It was great to be here. And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with us. We'll see you back here next time.

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Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - P. Diddy: 4 Shocking Details of Sean Combs' Childhood

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Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - P. Diddy: 4 Shocking Details of Sean Combs' Childhood

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