As of October 2026: Michael Harris has been free since January 2021; President Trump granted him a full pardon on May 28, 2025. Suge Knight disputes Harris’s account that he helped finance Death Row from prison.
The founding story of Death Row Records includes a man who never set foot in the office. Michael Harris was already in prison when the label was born, and he says he put up the seed money. To Tupac he was neither friend nor foe. He belongs to the prehistory of the company that got Tupac out of prison in 1995 and that his estate later fought for years. How Death Row operated is covered on Death Row Records.
From South Central to a drug empire
Harris grew up on 46th Street in Los Angeles, in an area he called “the low bottom.” As a boy he shined shoes; later he studied marketing at a community college. By 20 he had dropped out and was selling crack in South Central. Five years later the business he built with his brother David reached halfway across the United States. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, it was part of a ring that linked Los Angeles street gangs to a Colombian cocaine cartel.
Harris also owned legitimate businesses: a Beverly Hills beauty salon, a deli, a limousine service, an electrical contractor, and a theater production company that in 1988 helped finance the Broadway play Checkmates, featuring a young Denzel Washington. That same year Mayor Tom Bradley held a news conference to announce the seizure of his mansions, cars and speedboat.
Prison from 1987
In 1987 Harris was convicted of kidnapping and attempting to murder a member of his drug ring, a distant relative he suspected of stealing. The man testified that he was taken to the Antelope Valley, shot several times and left for dead. Harris denies having shot him. In 1997 the Los Angeles Times described a 28-year sentence for crack dealing and attempted murder. On top of that came a federal sentence handed down on November 26, 1990: 235 months for cocaine trafficking.
Accounts of his sentences vary. The White House described a term of 25 years to life for conspiracy to commit murder in 2021, and according to a 2022 Spectrum News 1 report, the victim later recanted. What is clear is that he spent about 33 years behind bars.
Death Row: the view from a cell
Harris’s account, as he gave it to the Los Angeles Times in 1997, runs like this. In the fall of 1991 he introduced his lawyer, David Kenner, to Suge Knight. That October Kenner brought Knight to see him in custody, initially about a demo of his wife Lydia’s singing. Within months, Harris says, he put up $1.5 million for half of a company called GF Entertainment, which was to include a record division named Death Row. What convinced him was Knight’s promise that Dr. Dre would produce.
Parts of this are documented. State records show Knight visited Harris at the prison in Tehachapi nearly two dozen times over 18 months. At a party marking the launch of Death Row on February 22, 1992, Knight and Kenner gave “special thanks to Harry O” on videotape, according to the paper’s sources. In May 1992 Lydia Harris and Kenner incorporated GFE Inc., short for Godfather Entertainment. By November 1992, Harris says, Knight and Dre had cut the Interscope deal behind his back.
Knight denies it. Death Row, he said, was launched with money from deals with Sony, Interscope and Time Warner, and Harris was making things up to get out of jail. Kenner cited attorney-client privilege. Harris shot back: “I am not a rat.” Most accounts name Knight, Dr. Dre, The D.O.C. and Dick Griffey as the founders.
The judgment for Lydia Harris
In court, the fight was carried mainly by Lydia Harris. In 2005 a Los Angeles court awarded her $107 million against Knight for her stake in Death Row and unpaid royalties. Knight did not pay. When a judge moved to put the label into receivership, Knight and Death Row filed for bankruptcy in April 2006. “Mr. Knight doesn’t have $107 million,” his lawyer said. Michael Harris claimed half the sum in his divorce. In 2009 Death Row’s assets were auctioned for $18 million, and in 2022 Snoop Dogg bought the label.
And Tupac?
No direct connection between Harris and Tupac is documented. When Tupac signed with Death Row in October 1995, Harris had been in prison for eight years. The sources reviewed show no meeting and no conversation between them.
The stories are linked indirectly. David Kenner, the lawyer Harris says he brought to Knight, went on to represent Knight and Death Row; in April 1997 Afeni Shakur sued Death Row, Knight and Kenner over royalties and her son’s unreleased recordings (1997 report). That same year a federal grand jury investigated the label’s alleged ties to gangs, drugs and money laundering; Harris was subpoenaed and, according to the Los Angeles Times, testified (September 1997 report).
Commutation, freedom, pardon
In prison Harris became editor-in-chief of the inmate newspaper San Quentin News and set up mentoring programs for fellow prisoners. He was paroled on the state charges, while several bids for early release from the federal sentence failed, the last one in 2020 over the risk of COVID-19.
On January 20, 2021, as his term ran out, the White House announced that President Donald Trump had commuted the federal sentence; Snoop Dogg had reportedly lobbied for it. Harris was free shortly afterward. He went on to work with Snoop on the new Death Row, as its chief operating officer according to Spectrum News, founded a nonprofit and endorsed Trump’s presidential campaign in October 2024. On May 28, 2025, Trump granted him a full pardon.
Where this leaves things
The documents described by the Los Angeles Times in 1997 and the 2005 judgment for Lydia Harris support Harris’s role in Death Row’s founding. Knight disputes it to this day. In Tupac’s story Harris is a minor figure: not a witness, not a suspect, but part of the answer to the question of who owned the label that shaped Tupac’s final years.