The story of The Notorious B.I.G.

A big kid from Brooklyn

Christopher George Latore Wallace was born at Cumberland Hospital in Brooklyn on the twenty first of May 1972. He was the only child of two Jamaican immigrants. His mother, Voletta, was a preschool teacher, and his father, George Latore, was a welder who left the family when Christopher was about two. Voletta raised him alone, working two jobs. Home was Saint James Place in Clinton Hill, a few steps from Fulton Street and the edge of Bedford Stuyvesant. He was always the biggest child in the room. His mother remembered him as the largest five year old in the neighborhood, and by the age of ten everyone already called him Big.[1] [2] [3]

Voletta was strict, and she sent her son to Catholic schools. He graduated from the parish elementary school at Saint Peter Claver in 1982, then went to Queen of All Saints Middle School, where he won prizes in English. Years later his mother still seemed as proud of those school awards as of any music award. At Westinghouse High School his classmates included two other future stars, Jay Z and Busta Rhymes. He loved soul music at home, from Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder to Teddy Pendergrass, and on trips to Jamaica he soaked up reggae. The writer Justin Tinsley found that as a little boy he even told friends he could not fall asleep without his country music.[1] [2] [3]

The streets were right outside the door, and in the nineteen eighties the crack epidemic was tearing through Brooklyn. Christopher started selling marijuana at around twelve, and then crack. He hid the money on the roof of his building, and his mother did not find out for years. Although he was an honor student, he dropped out of school at sixteen. In 1989 he was arrested in Brooklyn on weapons charges and given five years of probation, and the next year he was arrested again for violating it. His biographer Justin Tinsley put it simply. Biggie was never going to flip burgers for minimum wage when real money was right outside his door.[1] [2] [3]

Rap started as a hobby on the same corners. As a teenager he called himself MC CWest and formed a trio called the Techniques with two friends. A New Orleans jazz saxophonist named Donald Harrison, who lived nearby, let the boys work on songs in his home studio and introduced Christopher to jazz. Around then he took a new name, Biggie Smalls, borrowed from a flashy gangster played by Calvin Lockhart in the 1975 comedy Let's Do It Again. Neighbors knew him as the best rapper around, and a street battle on the corner of Bedford and Quincy was caught on video. Then, around 1991, dealing crack in North Carolina landed him in jail for about nine months.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The demo tape and Puffy

After jail, Biggie got serious about music. With a local DJ named 50 Grand, whom he met through his close friend Damion Butler, known as D Roc, he recorded a demo in a Brooklyn basement, reportedly in about an hour. One track was called Microphone Murderer. The tape reached Mister Cee, the DJ for Big Daddy Kane, who became Biggie's mentor and passed it on to Matty C, an editor at The Source magazine. In March 1992 Biggie was featured in the magazine's Unsigned Hype column for promising new rappers. The demo became a small legend, copied and passed from hand to hand, until it reached a young executive at Uptown Records named Sean Combs, known as Puffy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

According to Tinsley's account, Puffy doubted the tape at first and assumed it had been heavily edited, until Biggie rapped for him in person. Puffy promised him a record deal by the summer. Biggie signed with Uptown in 1992, and his first appearance came on a remix of Mary J. Blige's hit Real Love. His girlfriend at the time, Jan Jackson, was pregnant, and on the eighth of August 1993 she gave birth to his daughter, T'yanna. His first solo single came out that summer on the soundtrack of the comedy Who's the Man. The producer Easy Mo Bee remembered Biggie eating burgers for most of the session, then stepping into the booth and delivering all three verses in one take.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then it nearly fell apart. In July 1993 Uptown's boss, Andre Harrell, fired Puffy, and Biggie's unfinished album was left in limbo. Biggie went back to hustling, and Tinsley tells a story about how close hip hop came to losing him. Puffy reached him in Raleigh, North Carolina, angry that he had gone back to the block, and told him the contract money was finally ready. Biggie took the bus to New York. By Tinsley's account, police raided the house he had been staying in only hours later, and the people inside went to prison. Puffy launched Bad Boy Records with Arista, and Biggie became the label's first signing.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was one more problem. The name Biggie Smalls was already taken by another artist, so he needed a new one. He settled on the Notorious B.I.G., and he said the letters stood for Business Instead of Game. Puffy used his deal with Clive Davis at Arista, reportedly a one and a half million dollar advance, to buy back the songs Biggie had recorded at Uptown. Meanwhile Biggie kept his name hot with guest verses on other people's records, including remixes for Mary J. Blige, Neneh Cherry and the reggae star Super Cat. In the summer of 1994 he joined LL Cool J and Busta Rhymes on the remix of Craig Mack's Flava in Ya Ear, which reached the top ten of the Hot 100.[1] [2]

Ready to Die

Biggie recorded his debut mainly at the Hit Factory in New York, in two stages. The first sessions, before Puffy was fired, produced the darkest songs, like Gimme the Loot and Things Done Changed, with a younger and more paranoid sounding Biggie. When he came back to finish the album on Bad Boy, his voice was smoother and more confident, and Puffy pushed him toward radio friendly songs. Biggie did not always like it. He wanted the first single to be the hard Machine Gun Funk, and the producer Nashiem Myrick said Biggie did not even like Big Poppa. He had wanted to call the album The Teflon Don, after the mob boss John Gotti. Puffy talked him into Ready to Die.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Life was moving fast. In the summer of 1994 he met the R and B singer Faith Evans at a Bad Boy photo shoot, and they married on the fourth of August 1994 after a whirlwind romance. Four days later, on the eighth of August, Juicy came out as his first single. It sampled Mtume's Juicy Fruit and told his own rags to riches story, from a poor kid with big dreams to a star in the magazines. It reached number twenty seven on the Hot 100. At the same time, his mother was being treated for breast cancer. Ready to Die followed on the thirteenth of September 1994, the same day President Clinton signed a sweeping crime bill into law.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Ready to Die was built like a movie of his life. It opens with a baby being born and ends with a song called Suicidal Thoughts, closing on a gunshot and a fading heartbeat. In between are robbery stories, sex jokes, paranoia and bragging, often with Biggie voicing two characters at once. Critics loved it. The New York Times praised it as perhaps the most honest portrait of a drug dealer's life in hip hop, and Rolling Stone later ranked it the greatest hip hop album ever made. Biggie handed out copies from his own stoop in Brooklyn, and Busta Rhymes watched fans line up outside as if Biggie were selling something far less legal.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The hits kept coming. Big Poppa, built on an Isley Brothers sample, became his first top ten hit under his own name, peaking at number six, and earned a Grammy nomination. The remix of One More Chance, with Faith singing backup, peaked at number two in 1995, held off the top only by TLC's Waterfalls. The album that had sold fifty seven thousand copies in its first week went gold within two months and would eventually be certified six times platinum. Ready to Die is widely credited with bringing the spotlight back to New York at a time when West Coast rappers like Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre ruled the charts. In 2024 it was added to the Library of Congress National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3] [4]

King of New York

By 1995 Biggie was the biggest rapper on the East Coast. He brought his childhood friends into the business as Junior M.A.F.I.A., a group he mentored like a godfather. The letters stood for Masters at Finding Intelligent Attitudes. The members included his young protege Lil' Cease and a fierce young rapper from Brooklyn named Kimberly Jones, better known as Lil' Kim. Their album Conspiracy came out on the twenty ninth of August 1995 and went gold, and the duet Get Money, a battle of the sexes between Biggie and Kim, went platinum. Biggie wrote much of the group's material, and he told an interviewer he hoped to retire from rapping in 2000 to manage their careers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That summer he was everywhere. In July 1995 he appeared on the cover of The Source under the headline The King of New York Takes Over, a nod to his alter ego Frank White, taken from the gangster in the film King of New York. At The Source Awards in August he won Best New Artist, Lyricist of the Year and Live Performer of the Year, and Ready to Die was named Album of the Year. Billboard named him Rap Artist of the Year. By the end of 1995 he was the top selling male solo artist on both the pop and R and B charts, helped by hits with 112 and Total.[1] [2] [3]

He also found himself in rooms he had never imagined. In 1995 he recorded a verse for Michael Jackson's song This Time Around, on the album HIStory. The engineer remembered Biggie almost in tears when he finally met Jackson. Lil' Cease told a very different story about that day. He said Biggie made him, then a teenager, wait outside, and told him he did not trust Michael with kids. The basketball star Shaquille O'Neal became a friend after Biggie mentioned him in a verse, and the two recorded together. But the money was not flowing the way fans assumed. In October 1995 Biggie said he still had not been paid from Ready to Die, even though it had sold two million copies.[1] [2] [3]

Brothers, then enemies

Biggie's most famous friendship began in 1993, when he visited Los Angeles and asked a local dealer to introduce him to Tupac Shakur, already a film star and a rap hero. They clicked at once. Tupac brought Biggie onstage at his shows alongside his friend Stretch, and Biggie hung out at Tupac's house in California while Tupac came to Fulton Street to smoke with Biggie, Kim and Cease. Biggie even asked Tupac to manage him, and Tupac told him to stay with Puffy, who would make him a star. Tupac's brother later said Tupac once considered signing to Bad Boy himself. It was a short friendship, perhaps sixteen months, but those who saw it called the two almost brothers.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

It broke on the thirtieth of November 1994. Tupac arrived at Quad Studios in Times Square to record a verse, and in the lobby armed men robbed him of his jewelry and shot him five times. Biggie was upstairs in the same building, recording with Junior M.A.F.I.A., and Puffy was there too. Tupac survived, but the next day he was convicted of sexual abuse in a separate case and later sent to prison. From prison he gave an interview to Vibe, published in April 1995, suggesting that Biggie, Puffy and Andre Harrell had known about the ambush in advance. All three denied it. Biggie said Tupac was simply confused, and that it was just a coincidence that he had been in the building.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Then came a song that poured fuel on the fire. In February 1995, Bad Boy reissued the Big Poppa single with a new B side called Who Shot Ya. Its menacing verses cast Biggie as a man getting the drop on an enemy, and Tupac heard it as mockery of his shooting. Biggie always said the song was written months earlier and had nothing to do with Tupac. In October 1995, Suge Knight of Death Row Records posted a bail bond of one point four million dollars and got Tupac out of prison. Tupac signed with Death Row, Bad Boy's great rival. Two months earlier, at The Source Awards in New York, Knight had openly mocked Puffy from the stage.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The feud turned personal. In October 1995 Tupac met Faith Evans, by then estranged from Biggie, and agreed to pay her to sing on one of his songs. Tupac then hinted to reporters that he had slept with her. In June 1996 he released Hit 'Em Up, one of the most vicious diss records ever made. He attacked Biggie by name, boasted about Faith, and threatened Puffy, Junior M.A.F.I.A. and all of Bad Boy. Faith admitted spending time with Tupac but always denied a sexual relationship. Biggie never answered with a direct diss. On Jay Z's debut album that year, on the duet Brooklyn's Finest, he turned the rumor into a joke instead. He said humor was how he had always coped.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The dark year

As his fame grew, so did his troubles. On the twenty third of March 1996, outside the Palladium nightclub in Manhattan, Biggie and D Roc chased two fans who had asked for autographs and smashed the windows of their taxi with a baseball bat. He pleaded guilty to harassment and was given a hundred hours of community service. That July, police called at his home in Teaneck, New Jersey, about an illegally parked car, smelled marijuana, and searched the house. Biggie was charged with drug and weapons possession, and Lil' Kim was arrested there too. In January 1997 he was ordered to pay forty one thousand dollars to a man who said Biggie's entourage had beaten him after a 1995 concert dispute.[1] [2] [3]

His private life was tangled and, at times, violent. He was married to Faith but carried on an affair with Lil' Kim, and in 1996 Kim became pregnant with his child. She chose to have an abortion, and only spoke about it publicly in 1999. Years later Kim described the relationship as very violent. In a 2010 radio interview she said he had choked her until she passed out, and the producer Jermaine Dupri said he once saw Biggie pull a gun on her. Biggie was also seeing the rapper Charli Baltimore, who appeared in the Get Money video. On the twenty ninth of October 1996, Faith gave birth to his son, Christopher Jordan Wallace, known as C J.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In September 1996, Tupac was shot in a drive by in Las Vegas and died six days later, on the thirteenth of September. Because of the feud, rumors immediately pointed east. Biggie called Faith that night in tears, and she said he was in shock and probably afraid. He expressed regret, but when a friend asked if he would go to the funeral, he said no. He said Tupac had made his life miserable, lied, and damaged his marriage. The writer Justin Tinsley says Biggie was deeply hurt and lonely, having lost the one person who truly understood his kind of fame. A September Vibe cover with the words East versus West had only raised the temperature.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That same autumn, a car crash changed his body. After an arrest for smoking marijuana in public cost them their own car, Biggie and Lil' Cease drove a rental that Cease said had faulty brakes. It hit a rail. Biggie's left leg was shattered and Cease's jaw was broken. Biggie spent months in hospital and rehab, first in a wheelchair and then walking with a cane, which he used for the rest of his life. He kept working anyway on his second album, recording in New York, Trinidad and Los Angeles, and rapping about the accident on the new material. His mother noticed he lost about thirty pounds, and he began to talk about wanting peace of mind.[1] [2] [3]

The last weeks in Los Angeles

Life After Death was finished in January 1997, with a release set for the twenty fifth of March. In February, Biggie flew to Los Angeles to promote it and to shoot the video for Hypnotize, a three day shoot with a budget of seven hundred thousand dollars. His producer D Dot remembered that Biggie could really dance for a big man, but because of his leg he had to stay in one spot, smiling the whole time. He told a San Francisco radio station on the fifth of March that he had hired security because he feared for his safety. On the seventh of March he presented an award to Toni Braxton at the Soul Train Music Awards, and parts of the crowd booed him.[1] [2] [3]

He was reportedly due to fly to London the next morning. Instead, on the evening of the eighth of March 1997, he went to an after party hosted by Vibe and Qwest Records at the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard. Faith, Aaliyah, Missy Elliott, Queen Latifah and hundreds of others were there, along with members of the Bloods and the Crips. A Vibe staffer remembered Biggie smiling and laughing, leaning on his cane beside the dance floor all night. The party was so overcrowded that fire marshals shut it down shortly after midnight. Shortly after half past twelve in the morning, Biggie climbed into the front passenger seat of a rented green Chevrolet Suburban.[1] [2] [3]

In the car with him were D Roc, Lil' Cease and a driver, Gregory Young. Puffy rode in another Suburban just ahead. At a red light at Wilshire and Fairfax, about fifty yards from the museum, a dark Chevrolet Impala pulled up alongside. The driver, a Black man in a blue suit and a bow tie, lowered his window and fired a nine millimeter pistol into the side of the truck. Four bullets hit him. His friends raced him to Cedars Sinai Medical Center, where doctors opened his chest in an emergency operation, but he was pronounced dead at a quarter past one in the morning on the ninth of March 1997. He was twenty four years old.[1] [2] [3]

An autopsy released fifteen years later showed that three of the four bullets would not have killed him. The fatal one entered his right hip and tore through his colon, liver, heart and lung. He had no drugs or alcohol in his system. His funeral was held on the eighteenth of March at the Frank E. Campbell chapel in Manhattan. He lay in an open casket in a white suit, Faith sang, and Puffy gave the eulogy. Then the hearse drove through Clinton Hill and Bedford Stuyvesant, past his old home on Saint James Place, where neighbors had built a shrine of candles and teddy bears. Thousands lined the streets, and some fans danced on parked cars, turning the procession into the kind of party Biggie had wished for.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Life After Death

Sixteen days after the murder, on the twenty fifth of March 1997, Life After Death was released. It was a double album conceived as a sequel, picking up exactly where Suicidal Thoughts had ended his debut. Guests included Jay Z, Lil' Kim, R. Kelly, Too Short, Mase, Run DMC's Darryl McDaniels and Bone Thugs n Harmony, whose rapid fire style Biggie matched on Notorious Thugs. The album sold six hundred ninety thousand copies in its first week. Because some stores broke the release date, it had briefly charted at number one hundred seventy six the week before, so its leap to number one was the biggest in Billboard 200 history.[1] [2]

Hypnotize had been released on the fourth of March, five days before he died. It entered the Hot 100 at number two, right behind Puffy's own Can't Nobody Hold Me Down, and then climbed to number one. It was the first posthumous number one by a credited artist since John Lennon in 1980. That summer Mo Money Mo Problems, with Puffy and Mase over a Diana Ross sample, also reached number one. That made Biggie the only artist in history with two posthumous Hot 100 number ones. In the video, he could only appear through old concert footage, timed to match his verse. Life After Death was later certified diamond, a rare achievement for a rap album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Puffy turned grief into another huge hit. I'll Be Missing You, recorded with Faith Evans and the group 112, was built on the Police song Every Breath You Take. It became the first rap song to debut at number one on the Hot 100 and stayed there for eleven weeks. Sting had not been asked first, and he ended up with the song's royalties. At the Grammys in 1998, Life After Death, Hypnotize and Mo Money Mo Problems were all nominated but none won, while I'll Be Missing You took home a Grammy. The final single, Sky's the Limit, got a video by Spike Jonze in which children played Biggie, Puffy, Faith, Kim and Busta Rhymes.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The vaults kept opening. In December 1999, Bad Boy released Born Again, old verses set to new beats with guests Biggie had never worked with, including Eminem and Missy Elliott. It debuted at number one, though many critics disliked it. In 2005 came Duets: The Final Chapter, which paired him with stars from Nelly to Korn. Its single Nasty Girl gave him his first number one in the United Kingdom, although Method Man complained that many of the guests were people Biggie would never have chosen. A Greatest Hits album topped the charts in 2007, and in 2017 Faith Evans released The King and I, a duet album with her late husband.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The case that was never closed

Nobody has ever been charged with the murder of the Notorious B.I.G. From the start, detectives said they had few cooperative witnesses, even though more than a thousand people had been at the party. Within days the Los Angeles Times reported that police were focusing on a Southside Crip with a personal money dispute. That was the same Compton gang set that Bad Boy had used as security in Los Angeles. Others blamed the rap feud and suspected revenge for Tupac. A Los Angeles police detective named Russell Poole developed a darker theory, involving corrupt police officers and Suge Knight. When his superiors ordered him off that line of inquiry, Poole quit the force in protest in 1999.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Poole's theory became the basis of the book LAbyrinth, the documentary Biggie and Tupac, and later the film City of Lies, with Johnny Depp as Poole. It also drove a wrongful death lawsuit that Voletta Wallace and Faith Evans brought against the city of Los Angeles. In July 2005, days into the trial, the judge declared a mistrial after an anonymous tip led to hundreds of pages of hidden police documents, found in the lead detective's desk. The judge found the evidence had been deliberately withheld, and ordered the city to pay the family's legal fees. The family sued again in 2007, asking for five hundred million dollars, but the case was dropped in 2010.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A new task force took up the case in 2006, led by detective Greg Kading. He came to believe that Suge Knight had paid a Mob Piru gang member named Wardell Fouse, known as Poochie, to kill Biggie in revenge for Tupac. Fouse himself was shot dead in Compton in 2003, and Knight, who was already in jail when Biggie died, has never been charged. In 2008 the same task force questioned a Compton gang leader named Duane Davis, known as Keffe D, about Biggie's murder. He denied any part in it. But then, according to a detective's testimony, he volunteered a startling line. He told them, we did the other one. He meant Tupac.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That confession sat unused for years. Davis repeated much of it in a 2019 memoir, and Nevada prosecutors charged him in 2023. On the thirty first of August 2026, a Las Vegas jury convicted him of first degree murder for orchestrating Tupac's killing, after less than three hours of deliberation. He said he would appeal, and as of 2026 he was awaiting sentencing. So an investigation into Biggie's death helped close Tupac's case, but Biggie's own case remains open. A former head of the Los Angeles police task force once told the Los Angeles Times that the shooter was most likely dead, and that you cannot ask a dead man who paid him.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The greatest of all time

In a career that lasted barely four years, Biggie made two studio albums, and he is still often named the greatest rapper who ever lived. The Source said so in 2002, Billboard said so in 2015, and Rolling Stone has called him exactly that. His style looked effortless. He had a deep, rolling baritone, packed rhymes on top of rhymes, and could switch voices to play two characters in one verse. He called himself the Black Alfred Hitchcock because he loved telling stories. Rappers from Jay Z and Eminem to Drake and Kendrick Lamar have borrowed his lines, and at his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2020, Jay Z joked that Biggie was so good he worried for his own career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Brooklyn claimed him for good. A mural of his face looks down over Fulton Street near his childhood home, and in 2019, after years of resistance from some city officials over his violent lyrics, the corner of Fulton Street and Saint James Place was renamed Christopher Wallace Way. Lil' Kim spoke at the ceremony. His managers revived his plus size clothing line, Brooklyn Mint, with help from Jay Z, and his mother's foundation hosts an annual gala called B.I.G. Night Out, where the letters stand for Books Instead of Guns. In 2009 the film Notorious told his life story, with his son C J playing Biggie as a boy, and in 2021 Netflix released the documentary Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

His family carried the legacy. Voletta Wallace, who had once dismissed her son's music as noise, later said she finally sat and listened after his death and cried like a baby at how talented he was. She co produced the film and the documentary and fought the city of Los Angeles in court for years. She died of natural causes at her home in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, on the twenty first of February 2025. His daughter T'yanna and his son C J accepted his Hall of Fame honor, and C J released a house remix of Big Poppa in 2020. Faith Evans has kept his music alive, and she often tells their son that he is just like his father.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The man who made him also fell hard. Sean Combs, who built Bad Boy on Biggie's voice and has called him the best ever, was jailed on federal charges in 2024. In July 2025 a jury in Manhattan acquitted him of racketeering and sex trafficking but convicted him on two counts of transporting people across state lines for prostitution, and in October 2025 he was sentenced to fifty months in prison. None of that case involved Biggie. But it cast a long shadow over the label that had carried his name, nearly three decades after a young man from Saint James Place turned his own hard life into some of the most vivid stories in music.[1] [2] [3]

The people around The Notorious B.I.G.

The Notorious B.I.G. and Sean Combs. Puffy heard the demo, signed Biggie to Uptown, and after being fired built Bad Boy Records around him. He shaped Biggie into a radio star, pushed for smoother singles, and shouted ad libs on nearly every track. Biggie sometimes resented the pop direction, but the partnership made them both famous. Combs gave the eulogy at the funeral, turned grief into I'll Be Missing You, and still calls Biggie the greatest ever. In 2025 Combs was convicted on federal prostitution related charges and sentenced to fifty months.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. They met in 1993 and became close friends, performing together and trading visits between Brooklyn and California. Biggie asked Tupac to manage him. After Tupac was shot at Quad Studios in November 1994 he accused Biggie of knowing about it, and the friendship turned into the most famous feud in rap. Tupac's Hit 'Em Up attacked Biggie viciously. Both were shot dead within six months of each other, and both murders were linked by rumor for decades.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Faith Evans. The Bad Boy singer met Biggie at a photo shoot in 1994 and married him on the fourth of August that year after a whirlwind romance. She sang on the One More Chance remix. The marriage was stormy, strained by his affairs and by Tupac's claims about her, and they were separated by early 1997. Their son C J was born in October 1996. She sang at his funeral, won a Grammy for I'll Be Missing You, and in 2017 released a duet album with him.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Lil' Kim. Biggie discovered Kimberly Jones as a teenager, put her in Junior M.A.F.I.A. and helped launch her solo career. She called herself his biggest fan and his pride and joy. They were also lovers during his marriage, and she ended a pregnancy by him in 1996. She later described the relationship as very violent, saying he once choked her until she lost consciousness. He called her three days before he died to say he loved her.[1] [2] [3]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Voletta Wallace. A Jamaican born preschool teacher, she raised him alone on two jobs and sent him to Catholic schools, not knowing about his dealing for years. After his death she became the fierce keeper of his legacy, suing Los Angeles, producing the film Notorious and the Netflix documentary, and founding the charity behind B.I.G. Night Out. She died in February 2025.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Lil' Cease. James Lloyd was a teenager from the neighborhood whom Biggie treated like a little brother, often described as a cousin. He was one of the few people in the music business Biggie fully trusted. Cease rapped in Junior M.A.F.I.A., was hurt in the 1996 crash that shattered Biggie's leg, and was in the car the night Biggie was shot.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Damion Butler. D Roc was Biggie's best friend from the streets and the man who introduced him to DJ 50 Grand. He was arrested with Biggie outside the Palladium in 1996, sat in the Suburban the night of the murder, and shot the home videos used in the 2021 documentary. He later managed Lil' Kim.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Mister Cee. Big Daddy Kane's DJ heard the demo, mentored Biggie, helped get it to The Source and to Puffy, and was credited as associate executive producer on Ready to Die. He is often credited with discovering Biggie. Mister Cee died in April 2024.[1] [2]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Jay Z. Both went to Westinghouse High School in Brooklyn. Jay Z said hearing Who Shot Ya on a mixtape was the last time he was truly inspired by another rapper. They traded verses on Brooklyn's Finest in 1996, and Jay Z later helped relaunch Biggie's clothing line and honored him at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Suge Knight. The Death Row Records boss was Bad Boy's great rival. He mocked Puffy at the 1995 Source Awards and signed Tupac out of prison. After Biggie's murder, investigators including Russell Poole and Greg Kading suspected Knight had ordered it. He has always denied it and has never been charged. As of 2026 he is serving a long prison sentence for an unrelated fatal hit and run.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Notorious B.I.G. and Easy Mo Bee. The Brooklyn producer made Biggie's first single, much of Ready to Die, and the Flava in Ya Ear remix. He also produced for Tupac and made Runnin' From tha Police, a rare song featuring both men. His last work for Bad Boy was on Life After Death.[1] [2]

Rare facts about The Notorious B.I.G.

• His first rap name was MC CWest, and his first group was a trio called the Techniques. As a teenager Christopher Wallace called himself MC CWest and formed the Techniques with two friends. The group faded when one member turned to high school football and the other lost interest in music.[1]
• A New Orleans jazz saxophonist, Donald Harrison, gave teenage Biggie studio time and taught him about jazz. Harrison, a veteran of Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers, let Biggie and his friends record early songs in his home studio. Harrison lists Biggie among the young musicians he mentored.[1] [2] [3]
• The name Biggie Smalls came from a gangster character in the 1975 Bill Cosby and Sidney Poitier comedy Let's Do It Again. Calvin Lockhart played a flamboyant hustler called Biggie Smalls in the film. Biggie later had to drop the name because another artist already had it.[1] [2]
• He said the letters in B.I.G. stood for Business Instead of Game. When he rebranded as the Notorious B.I.G., he explained the letters that way. His mother's foundation later turned them into Books Instead of Guns for its annual charity gala.[1]
• He won prizes in English at Queen of All Saints Middle School. Biggie excelled in English as a boy. His mother, Voletta, still spoke proudly of those school prizes years after his death, alongside his music awards.[1] [2]
• He went to the same Brooklyn high school as Jay Z and Busta Rhymes. Westinghouse High School produced several future stars. Biggie weighed about two hundred pounds there, which cemented the nickname Big.[1]
• Ready to Die was almost called The Teflon Don. Biggie wanted to name his debut after the nickname of the mob boss John Gotti, famous for dodging convictions. Puffy argued for something that spoke to the masses, and they settled on Ready to Die.[1]
• Ready to Die came out the same day President Clinton signed his 1994 crime bill. Both happened on the thirteenth of September 1994. The writer Justin Tinsley sees the album as a street level answer to how Washington viewed young men like Biggie.[1]
• His song Things Done Changed was included in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. It is one of only a handful of hip hop songs chosen for the anthology. The song looks at how his Brooklyn neighborhood had changed since his childhood.[1] [2]
• He handed out copies of Ready to Die from his home in Brooklyn. Busta Rhymes remembered Biggie dubbing the album on a double cassette deck, with a line of people outside his house on Saint James Place. Busta saw it as Biggie marketing himself.[1] [2]
• The Big Poppa beat was first given away to another group and had to be traded back. Producers Chucky Thompson and Nashiem Myrick made the Isley Brothers based beat, and it went to the Lost Boyz. Puffy wanted it back and swapped another beat, which became the Lost Boyz hit Jeeps, Lex Coups, Bimaz and Benz.[1]
• The angry voices on the answering machine at the start of One More Chance were Lil' Cease's relatives. The child's voice on the album version belongs to Cease's niece, and his sister and her friends played the women leaving messages for Biggie.[1]
• Who Shot Ya began as an intro for Mary J. Blige's album My Life. Puffy judged it too hard for her record. By one producer's account, Biggie's original verse on her interlude was replaced by Keith Murray so the album would not need an explicit lyrics sticker.[1]
• The Hypnotize chorus is often credited to Lil' Kim, but it was sung by Pamela Long of the group Total. The hook borrows its melody from Slick Rick's La Di Da Di, which also gave the song its title. Long's vocal was uncredited.[1]
• Herb Alpert's nephew turned down Ice Cube, Eazy E and Vanilla Ice before letting Biggie sample Rise. Randy Alpert, who co wrote Rise, said he refused several rappers over the years. When Puffy sent him a rough cassette of Hypnotize, he loved it and predicted a number one.[1]
• Lil' Cease said Biggie did not know how to drive. For all his lyrics about fancy cars, Cease said in 2013 that Biggie would never dare get in the driver's seat. Friends and hired drivers took him everywhere.[1] [2]
• Life After Death made the biggest jump to number one in Billboard 200 history. Stores that broke the street date pushed it onto the chart at number one hundred seventy six. The following week, its first full week, it went straight to number one.[1]
• Biggie is the only artist with two posthumous number ones on the Hot 100. Hypnotize topped the chart in May 1997 and Mo Money Mo Problems in August. He nearly had a third, when Puffy's Been Around the World, featuring Biggie, reached number two in 1998.[1] [2]
• A beat falling out cost Biggie two songs that became LL Cool J hits. Producer Rashad Smith made two tracks for Life After Death, but Bad Boy's budget was not approved. Def Jam offered double, and the beats became LL Cool J's Loungin and Doin' It, which ended Smith's work with Biggie.[1]
• Ten Crack Commandments was inspired by a sidebar in The Source magazine. A July 1994 article on ten years of crack included a list of rules for dealers. Chuck D later sued over the sample of his voice on the track, and the case was settled in 1998.[1]
• Bone Thugs n Harmony at first ignored Biggie's request to work together, because of his feud with Tupac. Fat Joe persuaded them. Biggie studied their rapid flow at home, and the Guardian notes Bone Thugs were the only group to record with both Biggie and Tupac.[1] [2]
• Biggie would not let teenage Lil' Cease into his session with Michael Jackson. Cease said Biggie stopped him at the door and explained that he did not trust Michael with kids. The recording engineer remembered Biggie himself nearly in tears on meeting Jackson.[1] [2]
• He called himself the Black Alfred Hitchcock. Biggie loved storytelling so much that he compared himself to the master of suspense. His biographer also found he loved country music as a child, another genre built on stories.[1]
• His autopsy showed no drugs or alcohol in his system the night he was killed. The report, released in December 2012, also noted a tattoo on his right forearm quoting a Psalm, beginning The Lord is my light and my salvation.[1]
• Only one of the four bullets that hit him was fatal. The others struck his forearm, his back and his thigh. The fatal shot entered his right hip and passed through several vital organs.[1] [2]
• Life After Death was originally scheduled for Halloween 1996. The car crash that shattered his leg and months of recovery pushed it back to March 1997. In March 1997 the Los Angeles Times gave its full title as Life After Death Till Death Do Us Part.[1] [2] [3]
• Biggie planned to retire from rapping in 2000 to manage Junior M.A.F.I.A. He said so in a 1995 interview that XXL published in 2003. The group broke up soon after his death.[1]
• He launched a clothing line for big men called Brooklyn Mint. The plus size brand went dormant after his death. His managers revived it in 2004 with help from Jay Z, with proceeds going to charities.[1]
• The Mo Money Mo Problems video could only show Biggie through old concert footage. He had died months before the shoot, so Hype Williams played archival footage on a screen, timed so he seemed to rap his own verse.[1]
• Duets gave Biggie his first number one single in the United Kingdom, eight years after his death. Nasty Girl, with Puffy, Nelly, Jagged Edge and Avery Storm, topped the UK chart in 2005 for two weeks, though it only reached the forties in America.[1]
• His son played him in the biopic Notorious. C J Wallace was just twelve when he played young Christopher in the 2009 film. Jamal Woolard, who played adult Biggie, said he gained seventy pounds for the role.[1] [2] [3]
• A Brooklyn street corner was named after him only after years of resistance. Some officials objected because of his violent lyrics. In June 2019 the corner of Fulton Street and Saint James Place became Christopher Wallace Way.[1]
• The 2008 interview that cracked Tupac's murder case was part of the hunt for Biggie's killer. Duane Davis was being questioned about Biggie when he offered that his crew had done the other one. The statement helped convict him of Tupac's murder in 2026.[1] [2] [3]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.