Bedside Man: The Diddy Files Chapter Five

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1:00You've never been one to settle. Stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner. Energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you. You can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now? Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing, because you've always had the drive. Now go earn the degree, Capella University. What can't you do? Visit Capella.edu to learn more. Hi everyone. We've reached the final chapter in our collection of Ditty Files episodes. We'll be back next time with a brand new documentary episode about Tupac Shakur, his life, art, and mysterious death. And I can't tell you how excited I am to share what I've learned in both the courtroom and in my extensive research and interviews. Working on the Tupac in Biggie Stories reminds me in a lot of ways of the revelations I reached when reporting on this element of the Ditty story,

2:02the overlap with the Michael Jackson case. It can feel like the stuff of tinfoil hats or reddits gone wrong, to talk about the ways in which it's all connected man, this story, the clear and objective links between Ditty's people and Michael Jackson's is proof that the connection is at least kind of there. People like alleged Ditty fixer Fahim Muhammad, who I talk a lot about in this episode, they fascinate me. Partially because I don't think Fahim isn't anomaly. I suspect that he just happens to be someone whose name got caught up in a couple legal documents whose name became public knowledge that there are actually a lot of Fahim's hiding in worlds like Ditty's working their way up while keeping things hush hush.

3:03Testify. Before Justin Bieber was old enough to drive, somebody decided he was old enough to spend a weekend at Sean Ditty Combs place. Here's Combs in a video the two of them made documenting McGatoway for Bieber's YouTube page. Justin, you have seen the movie 48 hours, right now he's having 48 hours with Ditty. For some context, this movie Combs is talking about 48 hours. It came out 12 years before Bieber was born. In the aftermath of the charges against Combs, Justin Bieber has said through a statement that he is quote, not among Sean Combs victims.

4:04Well, Bieber denies Combs preyed on him. I still find this visit between Bieber and Combs disturbing. Even taken at face value, this is a 41 year old man having a weekend play date with a child. This interaction strikes me not because it's unheard of. The opposite actually, this scene feels familiar. An extremely powerful superstar bringing in a young person with artistic ambitions of their own. This is the dancing prodigy turned choreographer Wade Robson. In the documentary, Leaving Neverland. Robson is one of several people who have accused Michael Jackson of grooming and assaulting him throughout childhood.

5:18Robson doesn't end up coming forward with his allegations until after Michael Jackson is dead. But others speak up sooner. As early as the 90s, Jackson is publicly accused of molesting a young child. Then again in 2003, a kid and its family press criminal molestation charges. Here's Jackson attorney, Mark Garagos. Days after the singer's arrest, claiming he'll vindicate his client. That the case is just an extortion attempt. Michael Jackson is not going to be abused. Michael Jackson is not going to be slammed. He's not going to be a piñata for every person who has financial motives. Who are every person who thinks that they can get as the lawyer for the charter company said today. We had a lottery ticket and we thought we were going to do something with it. More than two decades after this press conference, this same attorney, Garagos, will be speaking to reporters after he gets a different client.

6:24Sean Diddy-Colnes, acquitted of the most serious charges facing him. I talked to Sean. He's thankful. He's relieved. And he thanks to jurors. I think the jurors did what jurors do, which is they saw through a an overcharged, overzealous kind of a crazy prosecution and they did the right thing. He was acquitted of the trafficking. He was acquitted of the rico. Those were always, I thought, as an observer, a ridiculous use of taxpayer resources. This caragos guy isn't the only direct connection between Sean Combs and Michael Jackson. Jackson, like Combs, is ultimately acquitted of the serious charges he faces. Like Combs, though, Jackson's legacy suffers a huge hit after he's accused of assault.

7:25The fallout seems to take a toll on Jackson himself. Something keeps Jackson up all night. He becomes addicted to the drugs that knock him out. Something keeps Jackson burning through his giant fortune. The Prince of Pop becomes a pauper. It's clear Michael Jackson the man is a threat to Michael Jackson, the legend. What's less obvious is whether Michael Jackson the alleged predator also becomes Michael Jackson the prey. Because at the sad end of his life, Michael Jackson surrounds himself with new people. People, I have questions about. Because one of these people isn't just there literally next to Michael Jackson as he breaks. He also goes on to be Sean Combs, a legit fixer. I'm Tess Barker and this is Pop MysteryPod.

8:26On this show, I'm looking into misunderstood moments in pop culture history, things we missed the first time around, and things that were intentionally hidden from us. Today's episode, Michael Jackson, Sean Combs, and the man in the middle. Maybe it's just a coincidence that one man holds a key role in both of these giants' life stories. Or maybe in the shadows of the music industry, everything happens for a reason. You've never been one to settle. Stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner, energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you, you can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now, not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing, because you've always had the drive.

9:27Now, go earn the degree. Capella University, what can't you do? Visit Capella.edu to learn more. To understand the interconnected world of Sean Diddy Combs, and the way it touches other celebrities like Jackson, it's helpful to look at the complaints filed by former Combs associates. One of these suits, filed by the producer Rodney Lilrod Jones, is particularly striking in its detail and mention of other power players in Combs Orbit. Jones complained repeatedly states that Jones has videos to substantiate what he's claiming. In his public document, Jones includes a lot of photographic evidence. There are pictures of what seemed to be orgies in red-lit rooms. Pictures of celebrities. Pictures of a public restroom floor, splattered with blood. Bloody men's clothing strewn all over the toilet.

10:28Jones says he witnessed what led to this grisly bathroom scene. This is because Jones is a producer on Combs' most recent album, Love. While the album is being made, Jones works on a majority of the album's tracks, which are all kind of vibe-y R&B music. Songs like this one, Tough Love, kind of feel like they were written in and around red-lit rooms. Jones says while he's working on the album, he attends a writers and producers camp at a recording studio in Hollywood. Here he alleges, Jones witnesses Combs and Combs' son Justin. Get into an argument with a friend of Justin Combs. Jones says he witnesses this argument become increasingly heated. He says the conversation moves out of the studio and into a nearby restroom,

11:32which is just two feet away from Jones. Suddenly, Jones says he hears multiple shots ring out. That after the shots subside, a crowd gathers outside the restroom. He says the bathroom door opens and out walks, Sean and Justin Combs. Jones says he enters to find Justin's friend in fetal position on the bathroom floor, bleeding out of his stomach. Jones says he places pressure on the guy's gunshot wound. He lifts him up and brings him out in front of the studio where an ambulance is waiting. Here, Jones says Combs issues strict instructions. Everyone in the studio is to tell the cops that Combs had nothing to do with the shooting. Here too, a character emerges from the dark haze of this narrative. Fahim Muhammad, Combs head of security.

12:37Jones says it's been made clear to him by Combs that Muhammad has the power to make problems and people disappear. That Combs has told his staff to drop Muhammad's name if they ever have problems with the cops. That Muhammad is in with them. He says that on this night, at this record studio shooting, that Muhammad talks to the LAPD. The cops spend hours observing this crime scene, the blood all over the bathroom. Thanks to Muhammad's connections with the cops, Jones says the LAPD leaves without making an arrest. The next day, news outlets report the shooting as having occurred outside the studio. This alleged cover-up by Combs' friendly cops is hardly the first time the LAPD has been implicated in a shooting connected to Combs.

13:38One person whose sounded alarm bells about Combs is Gene Deal. Deal worked as a bodyguard for both Sean Combs and Biggie Smalls. Deal has insinuated that Combs himself played a role in his own artist Biggie's murder. Deal was with Combs the night Biggie died and Deal believes the police also played a role in Biggie Smalls' murder and the lack of charges filed after Smalls' death. Here, Deal discusses Biggie's murder on the Art of the Dialogue podcast. You would think that the LAPD and the rolled cops that was there may have had something to do with it too. Concerns about what appears to be LAPD involvement in Biggie Smalls' murder are pervasive in the years after his death. Smalls' family even files a lawsuit against the LAPD, alleging that officers working for one of the involved record labels shot Biggie Smalls.

14:44Though the family receives a $1.1 million settlement from the city of Los Angeles, the cops are never found guilty of conspiring with Combs or playing any role in Smalls' death. Many of the accusations by Biggie's family stem from the investigative work of a former LA detective named Russell Pull. Prior to his death in 2015, Pull spoke extensively in interviews like this one with Documentary and Nick Broomefield about his theories on Biggie's death. The department at time and time again has avoided the truth. And when you add everything up, what other reason could there be? The reason being is because they do not want to expose to the public that Los Angeles police officers were involved in the conspiracy to kill Biggie Smalls. The two-pock and Biggie murders don't only raise questions about Combs' connections with police. Others who have allegedly worked with Combs have friends in different low places.

15:46One man, a guy named Keefe-D, is currently awaiting trial for killing two-pock. He's told detectives he was hired by Combs to execute the rapper. And Keefe-D is a former member of the gang, The Crips. The Crips are actually a coalition of gangs that the Department of Justice estimates has chapters in 41 cities in the United States. Like many criminal organizations, the Crips are allegedly involved in things like drug dealing, murder, and sex trafficking. According to multiple witnesses, Sean Combs and Bad Boy Records were heavily involved with the Crips at the time of the two-pock and Biggie murders. They allegedly hired them as security. In the documentary Murder Wrap, Reggie White Jr., a former cop who also acted as Combs' Bad Boy Records head of security for many years,

16:46recalls working side by side with known Crips. I knew that they were Southside Crips, were affiliated with supplying security services for the Bad Boy crew when they came inside. I think it's significant that both Crips and cops appear to have been colleagues here. Both Crips and Cops acted as Combs' Security Guards. This matters because as recently as 2025, Combs has faced federal charges for Rico and racketeering, aka Doing Gangshit. I'm also intrigued by Combs' history of using Crips as security guards because I have major questions about the man who becomes Combs' Head of Security, that guy who allegedly covered up the studio shooting. Fahim Muhammad Muhammad doesn't start out his professional career as Combs' Head of Security.

17:50In fact, early in his life, Muhammad seems poised to go on an entirely different trajectory. In 2008, Muhammad graduates from Sacramento State College, where he majors in business administration with a concentration in real estate. Just months after leaving school, Muhammad lands a job that would probably feel wildly out of reach for almost any new college grad. Muhammad starts working as a close personal security guard to one of the most famous people in the world. Michael Jackson, who is in the last year of his life. Muhammad appears to get the job through his friend, a guy named Michael Amir Williams. Here's something to know about Williams. One of his early jobs is working as an assistant for Sean Diddy Combs.

18:51By the time Fahim Muhammad has graduated college, Williams has moved on to working for Michael Jackson. These men's roles in Jackson's late life and death are substantial. After Michael Jackson dies, Conrad Murray, the doctor who treated him with severe and aesthetic drugs, is charged with manslaughter. Both Muhammad and Amir will ultimately be key witnesses in the Murray case. Here's Muhammad on the witness stand, fumbling and a little unsure as the defense attorney questions his history with Williams. Where did you meet Michael Amir Williams? Thank you, bro. Thanks, Johnny. I'll sustain the objection. Sociality, professional capacity. Michael Amir Williams, you can just answer socially or professionally. Oh, socially. Muhammad's courtroom description of his job with Michael Jackson sounds like fairly standard security stuff.

19:52My responsibility is to raise the chance to make sure his house was protected, making sure his children were protected, and making sure his day-to-day activity was all safe and planned and mapped out. By the time Muhammad is Sean Combs head of security, descriptions of his job will be less cut and dry. In Combs' criminal trial, a former assistant will testify that Muhammad would dole out cash for employees to purchase drugs like cocaine, Xanax, and Molly. This assistant alleges that Muhammad would then submit receipts for the money he used for these drugs. Rodney Jones lawsuit also alleges that Muhammad helped pay off drug dealers and sex workers. This allegation strikes me because of its similarity to the ones against a different Combs employee, Robin Greenhill. Greenhill allegedly managed payments to sex workers and drug dealers as well.

20:55As I discussed in a previous episode, Greenhill also played an integral part in the coercion exercised over Britney Spears throughout her conservatorship. So here are these same figures over and over again, seemingly trying to stay under the radar, but cropping up as players in these seemingly different stories. Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, and in the middle of the Venn diagram, Sean Diddy Combs. This overlap signals to me that people like Muhammad may be part of a quiet web of a complices. I'm especially curious about Muhammad's professional network when I zoom in on the timeline and details of Muhammad's work with Michael Jackson. Muhammad again begins working security for Jackson just a few months after he graduates with a degree in an unrelated field.

21:56Muhammad is only 21 years old when he gets this gig. Still, even given his young age and inexperience, very early into this gig, Muhammad performs a pretty big task. He finds a medical professional for Michael Jackson. It seems unconventional that a new security guard would be asked for a medical referral. Nonetheless, on Muhammad's recommendation, a nurse practitioner named Sheryl and Lee is hired. In the Jackson trial, Muhammad is also a furtive in his description of how he knows Sheryl and Lee. How did you know her? professing me. She had treated you. Yes. And she is a nurse practitioner? Yes. Is she a friend of yours? No. No, she's just treated you. After a long pause, the attorney prompts Muhammad. You knew her professionally?

22:57Yes. When Sheryl and his call to the stand in the Jackson trial, she herself becomes so visibly nervous when asked about Muhammad hiring her? That she kind of has an incident. Well, I had a call from a dear friend of mine. Her son is one of the security for Michael Jackson. Who was it that called you? Faheim. Faheim, Muhammad? Yes. Okay. May I have some water please? Absolutely. You want to wait a moment or are you okay to continue? Well, it's a wait a moment. You have some water. Sure. Okay. Could we please? Can I bring her a cup? We have a room. Okay. All right. Give us a moment. Thank you. Sheryl and his testifying at this trial because, like it's defendant, Dr. Conrad Murray, Sheryl and is one of the last people to treat Michael Jackson for his chronic insomnia. Unlike Dr. Murray, though, Sheryl and is highly opposed to the use of drugs.

24:03Sheryl and says she's more like a natural path. I'm a holistic practitioner. I'm a nurse practitioner. And what I do, I have an integrated clinic where I see people and treat them on a nutritional basis. At first, this approach sounds innocuous enough. The way in which Sheryl and often treats patients raises some alarm bells for me, though, given that she comes into Michael Jackson's life by way of Fahim Muhammad. Sheryl and favors IV therapies, or what she calls IV nutrition. On the stand, she discusses some of her medical training. I recently attended a course that teach classes on IV nutritional. So I've been certified in IV nutrition through the top major schools in advance, in medicine.

25:05As I've discussed in previous episodes, IV treatments are a recurring theme in the story's surrounding Sean Diddy-Kombs and his alleged victims. Kombs' former partner, Cassie Ventura, has said that she was regularly given IV fluids after days-long drug-fueled freak-offs. Kombs made her performant. Prosecutors claimed sex workers at these freak-offs were also regularly given IVs. The alleged victim Ashley Parham has said she was offered fluids after being brutally gangraped by Kombs and his associates. And, according to Kim Porter's autopsy report, Kombs' former partner was not given traditional treatment on the last day of her life, as she suffered acute pneumonia. Rather, she was given IV fluids from an unknown provider.

26:05If the people around Kim Porter in her final days flouted medical and scientific norms, so apparently did Jackson's caretakers. In her Jackson testimony, Sherylen makes clear that she views health care as a spiritual practice. In my practice, the one thing that we do do is put God first. Even decades after the Jackson trial, Sherylen remains committed to extremely alternative health care. In this YouTube promo, she announces a partnership with a company that makes an app using AI that purports to generate sound tones that can treat everything from kidney dysfunction to circulation issues to diabetes. Skeptical? Sherylen has an answer for you. A lot of people would say, can you explain this? How does it really work? How does this? I said, can you explain how people walk the water?

27:08Can you explain it? Some things you just cannot explain. You cannot explain. I can explain. Walking on water is objectively not something human beings do. I think these non-scientific medical beliefs are important to point out, given that other caretakers who favor religion-based health care have cropped up in Muhammad and Combs vicinity. As we may recall, the nurse who is named in Ashley Parham's lawsuit has some unconventional medical ideas of her own. I say, gallbladder come into alignment with exactly how God created you to be. You contain just enough file to break down exactly what you were created to break down. Gallstones be dissolved right now in the name of Jesus. A quick note about this case that names this gallstone nurse defendant.

28:12As recently as the week of publishing this episode, there has been some strange activity on that docket. Basically, a different defendant claimed that he should be excluded because he had evidence he wasn't at the attack. That defendant's attorneys appear to have bullied the plaintiffs' attorneys into stepping away from the case. Even after stepping away, though, Ashley Parham's attorney files a scathing motion that seems to really dispel this defendant's alibi. It's a lot and I'll likely unpack that more in a future episode. For now, though, I want to zoom in on Ashley Parham's anonymous coal plaintiffs who go by Jane and John Doe. These plaintiffs don't give a lot of personal details about themselves. They say they're living in secret because they're terrified for their safety. What we do know about them is that they didn't know Ashley Parham when they joined her lawsuit.

29:13They say they heard of her case and added themselves as plaintiffs when they realized they too had been victimized during the same alleged incident. Of the little we do know about John and Jane Doe themselves, one detail really stands out to me. These two people, a mother and son, say they are directly connected to Michael Jackson. They say the son is someone who was actually assaulted by Michael Jackson and who sued the singer in 2005. These plaintiffs who were formerly based in Las Vegas say that while they were there, they were taken at gunpoint. The guy they say takes them, a dirty cop, working with Sean Combs. They alleged that this corrupt cop works with gang members to transport Jane and John Doe to the apartment where Parham is allegedly gangraped. In the midst of this terrifying event, these anonymous plaintiffs say they find themselves in a heated discussion with a close associate of Combs,

30:23who is pressuring them to sign documents related to money the Jackson estate owes them. If this is true, this means a direct associate of Combs also had a vested interest in protecting the Jackson estate. It means the same people were working different crime scenes. One of the first responders to the scene of Michael Jackson's death is Fahim Muhammad. Muhammad says he's out running errands on the afternoon of June 25, 2009. When he gets a call from his friend and fellow Jackson security guard, Michael Amir Williams. Williams has just received a frantic voicemail from Dr. Conrad Murray. A muffled version is played at the trial. Call me right away. Thank you. Jackson has had a bad reaction.

31:23Dr. Murray tells Williams, Williams doesn't call 911. He tells his friend Muhammad to rush to Jackson's house. Muhammad heads straight to Jackson's bedroom when he gets to the place. There are only three other people in the room when Muhammad walks in. He's got a good friend of his friend, Dr. Murray, and lying unconscious on the floor. Michael Jackson. When you came around to the far side of the bed, what was Conrad Murray doing? He appeared to be administering CPR. He appeared very nervous. He was on his side. He was sweating. He appeared to be administering CPR. At that time did you see Michael Jackson's face and his full body? Yes. What did you observe about his face at that time?

32:24His eyes were open. His mouth was slightly open. Did he appear to be dead? Yes. In the hour or two before the rest of the world finds out what's happening in this bedroom, Muhammad goes into fixer mode. With the body and the doctor in the bedroom, Muhammad goes up and downstairs, coordinating with the rest of the security team. He doesn't know if they should wait for an ambulance. I realized that it's a possibility that the ambulance could take some time. So I went back downstairs. I got the securities that were on guard, and I had them line the vehicles up, and I was like, I'm just in case we might have to take them ourselves. The ambulance does come. Jackson is loaded into it and taken to UCLA Medical Center. The place is already a zoo. As we arrived, the paparazzi were trying to swarm the paired medics. So the first thing we did was, shoot his body and took off our jacket, shoot it to them so they couldn't get too many pictures of him going inside.

33:29Muhammad takes care of more than just that to cover up. At the hospital, the inner core of Jackson's detail, stands by in one of those nerve-wracking and confining waiting rooms. They learn it's official. Michael is pronounced dead. On the streets outside UCLA Medical, a mob of fans is processing the shocking news. Inside the Quiet Hospital, Muhammad and Williams become the de facto shot-colors. These two men decide who is and isn't permitted to enter Michael Jackson's house. At some point after learning that Mr. Jackson had been pronounced dead, did Michael and Mayor Williams relate to you a request of Conrad Murray? Yes, what was that? That he needed to go back to the house, and that there was a creme that Mr. Jackson wouldn't want the world to know about that he needed to get.

34:33And did you reach an agreement with Michael and Mayor Williams as to what the response should be to Mr. Dr. Murray? Yes, what was that? That he shouldn't enter the house under any circumstances. Do you remember coming up with a story about the police taking your keys? Yes, sir. Muhammad and Williams also really do talk to the police. They give a statement to detectives shortly after Jackson dies. It's not until two months later, though, that Muhammad and Williams tell detectives about Dr. Murray wanting to get into the house, and the fib that Muhammad and Williams create to keep him out. Whatever Dr. Conrad Murray's reasons for wanting to get back to Michael Jackson's house that day, whatever Muhammad and Williams' reasons for keeping Murray out, then not telling detectives for months? In the end, it is only Dr. Conrad Murray who faces criminal charges in Michael Jackson's death.

35:36Murray's case is far from the only one to arise from Jackson's passing, though. Jackson's touring group AEG will be sued by Jackson's family. Jackson's estate will be repeatedly litigated by the IRS. Basically, there is a lot of money to fight over. It is abundantly clear that Michael Jackson is worth more dead than he was alive. Much more. According to his lawyer, at the end of his life, Jackson was $500 million in debt, negative half a billion dollars. Once Jackson dies, though, he once again becomes one of the world's most successful artists. He kind of goes back in time to thriller Michael Jackson, peak Michael Jackson, and stays there. His music is all over the radio. His concert documentary, this is it, smashes box office records.

36:37There is a Michael Jackson Broadway show, a Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil. The Michael Jackson estate is currently valued at over $3 billion. Within this massive corporation, there are several sub-companyes and scores of people caching in on Jackson's body of work. What there hasn't necessarily been is transparency, in terms of how the estate's money is being spent. As recently as 2025, Jackson's own daughter, Paris, has accused the estate's executors of improperly gifting attorneys hundreds of thousands of dollars. Paris argues there is a gross lack of diligence here in terms of understanding why certain individuals are receiving money from her dad's estate. While the Jackson money machine starts humming after the star's death, Fahee Muhammad and Michael Amir Williams start stacking their cash, too.

37:39Muhammad goes from the Jackson job to working security for Sean Diddy-Kombs. Michael Amir Williams doesn't appear to follow Muhammad to this particular posting. Still, these two men do continue working together, and they do utilize their mutual connection to Kombs. In 2018, these former security guards form a real estate investment company called Oasis Investment Group. In social media videos like this one, Williams and Muhammad explain their vision. We are on a mission to make 100 million ads through real estate and we're already in motion. Early on, ties between Oasis and the Sean Kombs Empire are clear. Kombs production company, Revolte, partners with Oasis on a real estate project in Chicago. At its face, Oasis is a company that's all about empowering the black community. Here is Muhammad in a recent promo video talking about Oasis's grassroots partnerships.

38:44I now you don't get to trace through this. It's a Genesis construction, partying with Oasis and we do. We teach young brothers and sisters in the community how to do the different trades. I've reviewed the SEC filings for Oasis Investment Group. They paint a picture of a company that is not exactly so community-minded. The company's business address is not even in the United States, but in Shanghai. There is a domestic mailing address listed, but that address doesn't go to a commercial building or a PEOBOX place. This address is a three-bedroom brick house in a suburb of New Jersey. This place looks like the kind of house where you'd get wine drunk at Bunko, not the mailing address for a huge investment group based in Shanghai. Digging through property records for this home, I find more questions than answers.

39:46The title to this house was made out not to Oasis Investment Group, but to an attorney who is a partner at an international law firm headquartered in Israel and the US. If the whole purpose of Oasis Investment Group is to invest in real estate, why is Oasis not on this property's title? This structuring of Oasis Investment Group, in my opinion, belies some obvious attempts to avoid transparency. Firstly, there is the level of secrecy afforded around being based outside of the US, and presumably being able to open bank accounts in Shanghai. Then, there's the cover afforded by using a law firm as the group's point of contact in the US. I think this is particularly relevant given some of the other channels for financial discretion afforded to come spy the people around him. Recall that Combs Business Manager, Lou Taylor, is married to the pastor of Omega Church,

40:51which allows her access to tremendous financial secrecy. Viewed together, the mechanisms around the Combs Money Machine create a situation where it could be possible to hide and move giant amounts of money. In any case, the sophisticated arrangements around Oasis Investment Group indicate to me, at least, that Fahim Muhammad is using his real estate and business administration degree after all. This becomes especially clear just about a year before the allegations against Combs first come to light. Muhammad actually goes out of his way to talk publicly about one of his real estate purchases. In an interview with ABC News, he says he's recently bought almost 200 acres of land in Southern California. Here's the thing about this land, though.

41:52It's undeveloped. Just wide open land. Also, when I say Southern California, I mean very Southern California. This huge plot of land is directly on the US-Mexico border. They say in real estate, location is everything. The US border is certainly an interesting location for someone to buy land, especially someone who's been described as a fixer for Sean Combs, a man who has been accused multiple times of engaging in sex trafficking. I've been to the Southern border. I know the pitch black of that sky at night. I wonder if Sean Combs has had his close associate, Muhammad, past people,

42:54or things through this stretch of darkness, Muhammad owns. Because it chills me to know that for decades, people like Fahim Muhammad, Robin Greenhill, and Lou Taylor have been there in the shadows, doing the bidding, and holding the purse strings of music legends, alive and dead. These stories all feel bound by the same eerie thread. Rapstar Tupac Shakur died last night after a brief life in a rough business. He was 25. Another gangster rapper gunned down. This time, 24-year-old notorious B.I.G., A.K. 8, Big E. Smalls, killed and an apparent drive-by shooting outside a Los Angeles party early Sunday. Breaking news about Michael Jackson now in the past few minutes of Los Angeles Times, and the Associated Press have reported that Jackson has died. CNN cannot confirm those reports, but earlier the entertainer was taken to the hospital

43:58in Los Angeles in cardiac arrest. This morning, Britney Spears demanding to regain control of her life, testifying remotely in court Wednesday that 39-year-old lashed out at her father and the conservators who've managed her care and finances for the last 13 years, calling them threatening and abusive, and saying she's been forced to endure oppressive conditions comparable to slavery. We want to warn you that this video you're about to see is extremely graphic. The surveillance footage allegedly shows Combs assaulting then-girlfriend Cassie Ventura in a hallway. A now-settled lawsuit file-vivened Tura claimed that she was trying to leave the hotel after a drunken Combs punched her. The video appears to show Combs chasing her down the hall throwing her to the ground and then repeatedly kicking her. Maybe the music business is just a small world. A world so small that at the end of the day, there's not that many people you can call

45:00when you need someone to procure the drugs, pull out the cars, fix things with the cops, obscure the investments, and cover up the bodies. I'm Tess Barker and this is Pop Mystery Pod. You've never been one to settle. Stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner, energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you, you can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now? Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now, go earn the degree. Capella University, what can't you do?

46:02Visit Capella.edu to learn more. Pop Mystery Pod is written and produced by me, Tess Barker, produced by Tyler Hill, theme song by Rick Wood. Thank you guys so much as always for listening to the show. If you've been listening for a while, you know that I've been revisiting the Sean Diddy Comed story, kind of coming back to it in between doing other stories. I want to let you know that if you want to listen to all these city stories in order in a sort of easy way, I am creating a new feed or just those will there, that way if you want to recommend the Diddy episodes to other people, they have an easy way to listen through back to back as well. Also, the Michael Jackson story is quite a complex and deep one in one that I will probably be revisiting down the road. So if you have specific areas in the Jackson story that you'd like me to explore, of course, you can always email me at Tess at pop mystery pod dot com. I'm going to be taking a couple weeks off here just to get us reset for our next season and some new juicy stories.

47:02So in the meantime, please go back and listen to your favorite episodes. Most importantly, take care of yourself and drink water. I can't tell you guys how grateful I am for you. You guys know this. I tell you every week because I'm in it. I do. You're the reason I make the show. Thank you so much for sharing the show with friends. Thank you for leaving me nice reviews. I see them and they make my day. And thank you, thank you, thank you for my wonderful patrons who support me so much to me. I hope you guys pick up a new book and it's so good you can't put it down. You've never been one to settle. Stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner. Energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you. You can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now. Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now, go earn the degree. Capella University, what can't you do? Visit Capella.edu to learn more.