Benzino has claimed that he once ran JAY-Z and Dame Dash out of The Source magazine offices with the help of armed goons.
The Hip Hop media personality recalled the alleged incident during an interview with the We In Miami Podcast, where he reflected on his tumultuous time in charge of the once-influential “Bible of Hip Hop.”
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According to Benzino, the Roc-A-Fella co-founders came up to the magazine’s offices in New York City to complain about “a cover situation.” Little did they know, however, that seven of Benzino’s goons were lying in wait with guns at the ready.
“This one time, Jay and Dame was complaining about a cover situation, and they came up to The Source on some rah-rah shit,” he said. “So I had n-ggas strapped up in different rooms — they didn’t know that.
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“So they up there and started getting loud, because we just wanted them to think that Dave [Mays, co-founder of The Source] was up there with just one person.”
He continued: “Sure enough, it starts getting loud. N-ggas start coming out them rooms, and they had to get up out of there. There was a few of them, I think maybe three or four. But there was at least seven of us. There was at least seven guns up in The Source.
“Jay don’t get loud; it was Dame. They started getting loud with Dave and then, you know, ‘Aiight, enough is enough. That’s it. Y’all got to go.’ It’s nothing against Dame Dash — respect to Dame. But that happened.”
Artists intimidating (and even assaulting) Hip Hop journalists in the ’90s wasn’t uncommon. In 1994, Cheo Hodari Coker was allegedly punched by the Wu-Tang Clan’s Masta Killa over illustrations of the group that accompanied a story he wrote about them for Rap Pages.
Four years later, Jesse Washington, the then-editor of Blaze magazine, was reportedly badly beaten by four men — one of them Bad Boy producer Deric “D-Dot” Angelettie.
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Washington claimed that D-Dot was angry because Blaze had identified him as the Madd Rapper, the comical, chronically aggrieved character who made his debut on Biggie’s Life After Death.
Washington also reportedly had a gun pointed at him by Wyclef Jean, who was unhappy about a negative review of Canibus’Can-I-Bus album, which he helped produce.
According to Benzino, however, The Source was immune to such strong-arm tactics with him at the helm.
“If someone’s pressing up on me, that’s it. It’s war. The heavens will fall you try to press up on me,” the Boston native said. “You trying to bully me? You trying to take something from me? No, I’m the taker. I grew up taking. Nobody takes from me.”
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He added: “N-ggas knew in the industry, I be deep and we be strapped up wherever we went. We got into a bunch of beefs and fights and crazy shit and after a while, n-ggas knew, ‘Do not fuck with them.’
“You couldn’t press us for a cover. Nobody pressed us. In my 18 years, nobody has ever pressed us for anything.”
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Elsewhere in the interview, Benzino claimed that The Source comfortably pulled in seven figures a month at the height of its popularity, which made him personally wealthier than JAY-Z, Diddy and other NYC rap moguls at the time.
“At our peak, we were making a couple of million dollars in month — in cash,” he said. “At one point, I had more money than Jay, Diddy, everybody in New York.”
