America's Most Lovable Pimp

Snoop says his friend the Bishop Don Magic Juan, the legendary Chicago pimp-turned-religious man, was crucial in keeping the beef from turning homicidal. "Bishop kept saying, 'I don't like that situation. Y'all need to talk.' I was like, 'Fuck talking. Fuck that nigga.' But after hearin' him say it so many times, it got to the point where I was on peace, like, 'OK, I ain't tryin to fuck cuz up.' A lot of niggas put fuel to the fire. Bishop put water. It takes a grown man to do that."

In 1998, while Snoop was in Master P's No Limit crew, he acted in some straight-to-video flicks made by Master P and quickly realized acting was a good way to make money and something he wasn't bad at so long as he was playing characters close to his own life. He's now working on Coach Snoop, a film about a famous entertainer who comes home to coach a local youth-football team.

Snoop pulls into a driveway and says, "This is my house." It's a nice, large, two-level ranch house with a white fence in a gated community in the hills of Diamond Bar, California. It's not a rapper's mansion, and nothing of the exterior says "Rap Star Lives Here," except maybe the two huge niggas sitting out front in an SUV. It's a big family home where each kid gets his own large room. In his oldest son's room, there's a Snoop Dogg doll on the mantle and limited-edition De La Soul-designed Nike high tops in the middle of the floor. There's lots of art on the walls, including all sorts of dogs in graceful poses and various images of Snoop. His daughter is in the downstairs living room doing homework with her tutor (Snoop says, "She like the brains of the house"); his sons frolic with their friends in the upstairs living room, in a corner of which is a recording console. Snoop says this room used to be his home studio, but he's lost the room; the kids have taken it over. "The kids was always in here, so I said fuck it." So he made a little soundproofed mike booth in a room off to the side that's smaller than a cell. There's a mike, a slouchy couch, a little TV, a T-shirt with Tookie's picture on it hanging on the wall and a little pocket thesaurus, dictionary and vocabulary builder.

Out back, by the two pools, there's a small guest house that he's turned into a clubhouse for himself with a big TV, a fridge filled with Miller Genuine Draft, an Xbox and on the wall, an oversize photo of him at his thirtieth birthday party wearing a brown fur hat and matching coat, standing beside Puffy and his wife's father, Cecil "Doc" Fuller, who he says was a pimp in Long Beach in the Seventies. Snoop puts in a DVD of his Steelers from earlier this season playing against the team they'll face in the Super Bowl on Sunday and starts rolling a blunt.

One of the more memorable and bizarre moments in Snoop's career came in 2003 when he walked the red carpet at the MTV Awards with two women on leashes who had looks of deference that suggested they were real prostitutes. Lots of rappers throw around the word "pimp," but there's no way a top rapper would take up pimping as a hobby midcareer with a wife and three kids at home. So what was the deal with the girls -- named Delicious and Cream -- on leashes?

"I was flexin' my pimp muscle and lettin' people see how real pimps do it," he says. "If you really a pimp, you should be able to get two bitches to walk on a leash with you down the red carpet and be yo ho's for the night. And when I did it, it really was pimpin'." I had thought it was all for show, metaphorical pimpin', but Snoop says it really was pimpin' with so much feeling, I can't help but think that he was a professional pimp. Indeed, for two years, he was.

"I wouldn't even say a real pimp," he says. "I'd just say I had it like that. See, that shit was my natural calling and once I got involved with it, it became fun. It was like shootin' layups for me. I was makin' 'em every time. 'Cause pimpin' ain't a job, it's a sport. I had a bitch on every exit from the 10 freeway to the 101 freeway, 'cause bitches would recruit for me. I had barracudas -- seven or eight of 'em. When a bitch recruits for you, she goes out into the club or the environment and brings back other bitches and makes 'em my ho's. That's pimpin'."

He says that Max Julien, who played Goldie in The Mack, the zenith of movies about pimping, is like a father to him and helped teach him some of the rules of pimping, but Snoop says he was a natural. In the tenth grade, he and a friend won the school's Halloween contest by dressing like pimps. The following year, again they dressed as pimps, only to have a girl volunteer to be their ho. "We was, like, fuck it," he says. "So we put the bitch on a leash and walks the whole stage. We pimpin', she's the ho, and we won back to back." When he got to the pros, Snoop knew exactly how to run his operation: "I made sure my bitch would never talk shit to me. She always got all the money upfront, she never looked in another pimp's eyes, she kept her head down. But I wasn't a gorilla pimp where I was beatin' the girls up. I was more finesse with it, just givin' you a comfort zone and providing you with opportunity 'cause I know so many motherfuckers who like buyin' it, so if you come fuck with me, it's not as much of a risk as bein' with a gorilla pimp. He gon' be hard on you and rush you, as opposed to a nigga like me who's gonna relax and let you go get it. And if you don't go get it you just gon' be replaced."

Snoop met the Bishop Don Magic Juan -- a pimp for more than three decades until he retired in 1985 -- in Chicago, and years later when they became friends, the Bishop led Snoop into the world of pimping and away from Cripping. "Niggas would try to bang on me," Snoop says, "and I wasn't havin' it. I'm not gonna say I was putting in work, but I was into a lot of gangbang stupid shit. I would go do shit. And a lot of times, Bishop would say, 'Let's go to the Players Ball [a pimp convention].' 'Let's go get your hair did.' 'Let's go to Chicago to do this pimp thing.' Shit that I had never seen before but was always an infatuation of mine. So it actually got me out of the G [gangsta] and into the P [playa]. Which may have saved my life."

Bishop says, "I encouraged him to be more of a man. More conscious about who he was and that he was a playa so he could step up his playa game. And the change is apparent. Then you seen him dressing with mink coats to the floor and the pimp music he was makin'."

Snoop says his wife, Shante Broadus, at first tolerated his pimping. "She went along with it 'cause she know and understand that was an infatuation of mine, a childhood dream, to be a pimp. Look at her daddy," he says, pointing to the oversize picture of his father-in-law in a red suit beside Snoop and Puff, saying without saying it that her dad's pimping enabled Snoop's. "She wasn't accepting; she was just lookin' the other way 'cause I never did it in her face. I was never bringin' bitches to the house. It was just in an entertainment light, where it looked like entertainment. It's easier to accept when it looks like part of your job, as opposed to me bringin' it home with me." But, of course, pimping soon contributed to the dissolution of his marriage. "She'd act like it didn't happen," he says, "but she knew it was happenin' 'cause the pimps would come over, get dressed, and then go to the Players Balls."

In May 2004, Snoop filed for divorce and got further into the life that had been his childhood dream. "When I stepped away, that's when the pimpin' was really heavy," he says. "I was goin' to all the Players Balls." Eventually, he says, he took twelve women with him to one Players Ball and, at a ball in Detroit, won the Bishop Don Magic Juan Lifetime Achievement Award. But in late 2004, he said, some of the pimps told him to go back home to his wife. They reconciled and ended divorce proceedings, though it meant Snoop had to accept a different relationship. "Before, I would never listen to her," he says. "Everything I say is law. But on the comeback, I'm more of an ear instead of a mouth, instead of a hand. Sometimes it irritates me to hear her talk shit to me, but when it's right, that's the way it supposed to feel."

He admits he's far from a perfect husband, but he's left pimping behind because he cares about his family and because, well, been there, done that. "If you dream of riding the Colossus at Magic Mountain and you get a chance to ride it, you gonna get on it," he says. "But I had enough. That pimping shit was cool 'cause I needed to do it -- it's in me; but I'm into the family, I'm into this now."

He's retired from pimping, but don't expect Snoop to pull a Jay-Z. He doesn't believe in retiring from music. "Look at the forefathers who did it before me," he says. "Stevie, Marvin, Curtis, Teddy. In groups in the Sixties, solo in the Seventies, hits in the Eighties. C'mon, cuz! Talk to me! Only way they retire is through death. That's how I'm-a retire. Through death, nigga. I ain't fittin' to quit." And why should he retire? He survived Cripping in the wild streets of L.A. and survived Death Row. He outlived the gangsta-rap era and morphed into the most lovable gangsta in the country, an MC so popular people love him and his style and his cool more than his music. So he can be with Crips and Tookie and the Bishop and still make a lighthearted Hollywood comedy with Owen Wilson and go on tour whenever he chooses, whether or not he's got a hit on the radio. "I can go get $1 million in fifteen days anytime I want," he says.

Snoop also has more to say on the mike. He's working on a new group that will satisfy some of his pimpish urges. "A group called the Nine Inch Dicks," he says. "We basically a male-chauvinist group, and all we do is R&B songs with a twist. I had a song called 'Bitch, I'm Gone, I'm Through With You.' I got another: 'Can You Control Your Ho?' The name of the record is Coming Soon, and you can believe me, we coming soon."

[From Issue 1015 — December 14, 2006]