“Puff who?” I asked.
“Puff Daddy.”
“Puff Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“Who the hell is that?”
“How should I know? That’s what my guy said.”
Breslin was confused. So was I. He was on a pay phone somewhere in New York City. I was in the city room of New York Newsday in midtown, the only reporter on duty. It was a little hard to make him out through the static and car horns.
I leaned over to the assistant city editor, Kristen Kelch.
“Have you ever heard of someone called Puff Daddy?”
“Puff who?”
It was December 28, 1991, a cold Saturday night, the city still dressed up in decorations that seemed a little depressing after Christmas. I was a new reporter at New York Newsday—an aggressive offshoot of the Long Island paper—which was just more than halfway through its ten-year lifespan, and it was my fate to work Saturday nights.
The good news for me was that, because New York Newsday was printed on Long Island and then had to be trucked into the city, we had an early Saturday night deadline—9:30pm. Plenty of time to go out and have fun: I was just twenty-five. But this was bad news for our competitive journalism if a big story broke. In that pre-website era, our readers would have to wait for Monday morning’s edition to get late-night Saturday news from us.
Usually, this was no problem. Saturday nights tended to be slow. I’d start my shift at police headquarters in downtown Manhattan, check in with the public affairs office (known as DCPI), and then head uptown in my little white Volkswagen Fox, my first car and my pride and joy. At the office, Kristen and I would order dinner and watch TV as the week wound down.
Once an hour I’d check in with DCPI (to this day I remember the number, 212-610-2700) to see if anything was happening. Some of the cops were friendly and we’d chat. Others would just say no and hang up. But that cold post-Christmas night, I detected a hint of energy when I made my 9pm call. Something was up. I pressed and got an answer: “We have a situation at City College. Some kind of stampede. There might be some deaths.”
Kristen turned down the volume and started to eavesdrop on my half of the conversation.
“Deaths? How many? Six or seven?”
Kristen sat bolt upright. She started making phone calls—to off-duty reporters, the metro editor, the copy desk on Long Island, the editor in chief, Don Forst. I resorted to begging. “Please, c’mon, what do you have? Can we confirm that? I only have thirty minutes. C’mon, c’mon—help me out here.”
“Some kind of problem at a basketball game. I don’t know. I gotta go. The world is calling.” Click.
Nothing to do but work the phones—the local precinct, a number I found in the phonebook for City College security. I had a few detective sources, but none were working that night; still, I sent out pages. I ran to the shelf with the reverse directories that gave you phone numbers for addresses and started calling as many as I could near the school. Few answered, and those who did didn’t know anything, except for one lady who said there was a crowd outside her window.
Then Kristen got a call. She listened for a sec, asked a few questions, listened some more, and transferred the caller to me.
“It’s Breslin. He has the story.”
I’d chatted with Jimmy Breslin a bunch of times in the city room, even once reading his column at his behest before he handed it in, “to see if it worked.” (It did.) He’d been hired around the same time I joined the paper, though with considerably more fanfare. Now I found out that the guy had sources, if there was ever any doubt. One from the NYPD had called him with the basics, even before DCPI had them.
“Okay, there are seven dead. Maybe more. It was a celebrity basketball game. The organizer was some guy called Puff Daddy.”
That’s when I first heard the name. Jimmy had more details—all kinds of hip-hop stars were supposed to be there, and the event was sponsored by the City College student government. The victims had been trapped in front of a locked door near the gym entrance. Thousands had been turned away, leading to a near-riot. It was so crowded the police couldn’t get inside.
Other New York Newsday reporters started calling in, filling in the blanks. Some ticket holders had been let in; others were barred, and so they stampeded, eventually pressing those in the front against doors that could only open outward. “It was a plane crash without a plane,” said Sy Collins, one of the first EMTs to arrive. “There were bodies all over, people calling for help.”
I did my best to construct a coherent narrative from the few facts and factoids and rumors flying my way. I referred to the promoter as PuffDaddy. We didn’t get his full name—Sean Combs—in that first-day story.
The front-page headline, known as “the wood,” was: “Crushed At Basketball Game: 7 Dead In Stampede At CCNY.” Lots of details were missing, and we were two short of the total of deaths, but we got the gist: this event had been very poorly planned.
Short as it was, I was proud of how quickly I’d turned around my story. (Alas, our main competitors, the Daily News and the Post, with their later deadlines, had multipage coverage the next day.)
Then I got in the car and sped uptown. We’d have to come back bigger and better for Monday’s edition, so no time like the present to get rolling. I went to the precinct and was given a list of the dead. But I was asked not to publish it until officials notified family members. I stood around with the other reporters, my hands in my coat pocket, stamping my feet to stay warm. Soon it was 2am.
A man and woman came bounding up the steps. They looked worried but were trying to keep it together. The man wore a felt fedora with a leather band. We asked him if he was there because of what had happened at City College.
He told us his name, and then said, “My son is Darren Brown. I’m here to see my son.”
I remember he said his son’s name with great pride.
I got a sick feeling in my stomach that crept up my neck.
Darren’s name was on the list.
We didn’t ask any questions. We didn’t tell him. We just thanked him and stepped aside so he and his wife could go into the precinct.
In addition to the nine young people who died, twenty-nine were injured, some badly. Officials cited the lack of planning and the failure to hire enough security guards as both contributing to the disaster. They blamed numerous organizers and participants, including crowd members, as well as Combs—described as a “hip-hop producer”—the rapper Heavy D and the City University of New York.
A report prepared for the office of then-mayor David N. Dinkins said, “Mr. Combs spent little time making the actual preparation for the game and delegated most, if not all, of the arrangements to Louis Tucker and Tara Geter—both of whom claimed to have no prior experience with such events.”
But none of the actions of those involved rose to the level of criminality, and no charges were filed. In time, Combs would reach out-of-court settlements stemming from civil suits filed by the families of victims. Testifying in one suit in 1998, by which point he’d had a series of hit singles from a breakthrough album, Combs said: ”City College is something I deal with every day of my life.” He started going by “P. Diddy” in 2001.
I didn’t know any of that as I drove home to Brooklyn that night. But I do remember thinking, “Man, this Puffy guy can’t have much of a future after this.”
Wendell Jamieson worked for four New York newspapers as everything from copy boy to metro editor. He is the coauthor, with Joshua A. Miele, of Connecting Dots: A Blind Life, which will be published in March. Visit his website here.