Deadly Business

But it is on the East Coast where some of the smoothest entrepreneurs in rap are laying claim to the next generation. And none are cannier than 26-year-old Sean ''Puffy'' Combs, the head of Bad Boy Entertainment in New York City. Combs has long played a kind of politic Jay Leno to his longtime rival Suge Knight's cranky David Letterman. ''I'm not a gangster,'' insists Combs, even though he and Bad Boy's Notorious B.I.G. (who declined to comment) have long and loudly feuded with Shakur and Knight. ''I never professed to be that. We never made any negative statements toward Tupac or Death Row. We never made negative records, we never did anything. We just try to make positive moves and make music.''

Combs admits that the culture of the rap industry, no matter how powerful the participants, often still mirrors rough street life. In 1995, at a birthday party in Atlanta, Jake Robles, a friend of Knight's, was shot and killed. Knight blamed Combs and his entourage, though Combs denied any involvement. And at last month's hip-hop conference in Miami, shots were fired at a party given by Heavy D.'s Uptown Records. ''I've been in a lot of parties where shots rang out, so it wasn't like nothing I was new to,'' says Combs. ''A lot of time in parties, urban parties, shots ring out. It's a sad thing, but it has nothing to do with the music. It's the environment.''

That environment, Combs says (perhaps a bit disingenuously, considering all the money he's made off of gangsta rap), is what he hopes to change with his booming Bad Boy Entertainment — and a reported $75 million deal with Arista may provide ample incentive to toe the line. The word hood isn't used as much in New York, but Combs claims to be funneling some of his company's profits back into the inner city. He is only too happy to provide a list of the projects he plans, casting himself as something approaching the Mother Teresa of rap. He says he's buying a building in Harlem to house his year-old outreach organization for inner-city kids, called Daddy's House Social Program. (Combs boasts that he is donating more than 20 percent of his gross to Daddy's House.) ''My company right now is 100 percent black,'' says Combs. ''And it's 100 percent people who didn't have any prior experience. People that just needed a chance, just like me when I got my foot in the door.''

Monica Lynch, longtime president of New York-based Tommy Boy Records, says rap needs that kind of fresh blood. ''I think that musically and creatively rap has reached an impasse and things sound a little bit stale right now,'' says Lynch. ''There are a lot of people out there bored with rap, and there need to be musical innovations, new types of musical hybrids in rap.''

Back in Compton, and eating heartily from a cafeteria tray laden with macaroni and cheese, chicken wings, apple pie, and grape soda while his beeper goes off every few minutes, Jerome Wilson wonders who will help him get his foot in the door. He has a demo tape but is not sure how to shop it around. Plus he's ambivalent about what he sees as selling out. ''Don't kid yourself; a lot of these rappers aren't really gangsters,'' says Wilson, who claims he's ''been shot three times, stabbed. These guys talk like they're living the life, but all they're doing is getting rich off people in the ghetto.''

Living the life for many high-profile rappers actually means wearing the best Versace and Moschino, downing Cristal, checking their Skypagers, and dialing up their tiny $1,000 StarTAC cell phones. But as in the case of Shakur, or even less prominent rappers like his backup singer Yafeu Fula, 19 (a witness to Tupac's shooting whose own Nov. 10 murder remains unsolved), their money won't always protect them. Said Rev. Jesse Jackson after Shakur's death, ''Sometimes the lure of violent culture is so magnetic that even when one overcomes it with material success, it continues to call.''

In the meantime, the trail leading to the identity of Shakur's killer and his motivation for gunning down the star seems to be growing cold. Wilson says he doubts the killer will be caught anytime soon — if ever. ''Right now he's lying as low as a leprechaun with his legs cut off,'' says Wilson. ''He's not talking and nobody else is talking either.''

Shakur's fellow West Coast rapper Ice Cube rejects the notion that the young star was killed because of the kind of music he performed. It all comes back to the dangers of going up against the hood, even when you're a big star. ''Gangsta rap didn't kill Tupac,'' Ice Cube says. ''His music didn't come out of the speaker and kill him. Anybody can get murdered. Anyone can die.''

(Additional reporting by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, Beth Johnson, Billy Johnson Jr., Tiarra Mukherjee, Tom Sinclair, and Frank Swertlow)