Khloé and I moved back to Los Angeles after our year in Dallas. I was back with the Clippers, where it all started. Head Coach Doc Rivers welcomed me with open arms. He had always been friendly and kind to me. I would play a full eighty-two games despite my rapidly accelerating drug use and weakened body, but I knew my career was over. I didn’t know if Doc knew, but I did my best to hide my lethargy. We were finishing the second season of Khloé & Lamar on E! and I was at my wits’ end.
I could not handle the potentially lethal cocktail of the spotlight, drug addiction, a diminishing basketball career, and infidelity. Oh, did I mention the paranoia, anxiety, depression, hangovers, withdrawal, and rejection? But back to the infidelity . . . I struggled to remain faithful. I couldn’t keep my dick in my pants or the coke out of my nose.
My man cave had huge custom-made leather chairs, thick brown carpeting, and a cigar bar. Man, I loved that room. But it was also where so many of my demons lived.
Drug addicts are incredibly skilled at hiding their habit. It starts with the lies and deception. I’d get defensive all the time and Khloé would just drop it. It’s easy to hide the activity, but far more difficult to hide the hangover, weight loss, and manic behavior.
I’d be down in my cave snorting insane amounts of coke, waiting for my dick to get hard like that first time at the Shore Club in Miami seven years ago. Then I’d run upstairs to the bedroom, where Khloé was waiting. She didn’t ask any questions. I’d always hit the lights and take care of business.
One day she got tired of waiting and came downstairs looking for me. I had done a couple hits but hadn’t left the cave. She banged on the door. I didn’t respond.
“What are you doing in there?” said Khloé. “Come out. Now.”
After an hour or so she became concerned but didn’t want to call the police. So she called Greg. She only ever called Greg in an emergency. He arrived an hour later with Alex Harris.
“He’s acting crazy,” Khloé said. “He’s hallucinating. He’s saying people are trying to kill him.”
At that point I couldn’t tell reality from fantasy. I was on ecstasy and coke. I was sure that people were coming for me. They wanted to get me. They were listening to everything I was saying. They could read my thoughts. They were in my phone. They were in my head. They were in the walls.
“Who put these fucking mikes in my wall!” I screamed. “Why are you following me?”
I took a golf club and swung away. I began smashing the walls to find them. I was convinced they were in there. I just kept swinging and ripping out the drywall. “I’m gonna fucking find you!” I screamed. “This is my fucking house. I’ll get you lying motherfuckers!”
I had knives. I would kill them before they killed me. Before I was done there were dozens of gaping holes in the walls. The golf club was bent in half. My hands were bloody from ripping out the walls. Khloé was hysterical and had dashed up to the bedroom and shut the door. I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours.
I stumbled over to the door and slumped to the ground with my back up against the door. I did some more coke. At this point I was just putting it in my hand and shoveling it in my nose. The coke was everywhere. I would have eaten it if I thought it would get me higher.
Then . . . a knock on the door.
“Yo, Money, what are you doing in there?” Greg said. He kept banging on the door. I thought if I sat perfectly still he would think I was gone and just leave. I waited for fifteen minutes.
“Lamar, what’s good? Open the door,” he said. I texted him despite being only inches away.
“Yo what up? Just chillin at my house,” I wrote. Every time he asked a question, I texted him back. I could hear Greg and Alex talking, confused by my behavior.
After a half hour of this back-and-forth, Greg and Alex went to the kitchen and Khloé came down and knocked on the door. I opened it suddenly and grabbed her forcefully by the shoulders, which frightened her.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed, out of my mind. “You trying to embarrass me in front of my friends? I’ll fucking kill you! You don’t know what I’m capable of!” She ran back upstairs and I slammed the door.
After two hours, Greg and Alex left. As I came down from my high, the paranoia wore off, and I asked Khloé to forgive me. I was embarrassed and ashamed. It was a new low for our relationship and for my life . . . the most regrettable moment in a series of regrettable moments.
Khloé knows now I have a drug problem, I thought.
Things were quiet for the rest of the day, with Khloé and I in separate rooms. The silence was deafening. For the first time I realized that this thing could kill me and that I was capable of hurting the people I loved. I went to sleep, praying for a cure.
Infidelity had become a regular part of my life. I had broken my vows with Khloé so many times it’s just impossible for me to remember them all. Each time I was doing wrong and I knew it. I don’t know why Khloé stayed with me. She couldn’t trust me at all. I couldn’t trust myself either. I’d always find some self-important way to justify my actions. Khloé would get wise and become ever more vigilant in uncovering my cheating ways. She started checking my Black Card statements. She tracked my movements when she saw a charge pop up, usually a hotel or some kind of bottle service. That’s how she found me at the legendary Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood that night in 2012.
I had arranged for two strippers to meet me there for an indefinite stay. I reached out to my drug contact and had a nice little stash of weed that would last me a few days. When the girls showed up, they had their own supply, so we laid everything out on a coffee table in neat little piles. Meanwhile, Khloé was frantically calling and texting me. She saw the charge and had a pretty good hunch what I was doing. I wasn’t yet hip to her new sleuthing method, so the idea of her finding me was the last thing on my mind.
The girls called other girls to come over to do blow and fuck, and I didn’t mind at all. Around midnight I heard a pounding on the door. I got up and looked through the peephole, shocked to see Khloé, Kris Jenner, and their security team in the hallway. They had asked the front desk what room I was in because that information didn’t show up on the credit card statement. The front desk gave them a key card to my room. There were naked girls everywhere. Khloé opened the door and pounced on the first girl she saw. That’s when her security bulldozed the door and rushed into my den of iniquity. Try to imagine the scene: Khloé’s beating the shit out of one of the girls who tried to protest. She’s dropping vicious blows all over the top of this girl’s head. Kris is screaming and her security guard jumps in and pulls Khloé off the beaten stripper. Khloé tells me to gather up my things, and the guards quickly remove all traces of the drugs. We sneak out of a back door of the Roosevelt and disappear into the night.
I first met Jamie Sangouthai at Christ the King. We were in the same grade, and he even had a stint on the end of the bench on the basketball team. He was quick with a joke and had that trademark Queens edge to him, and even though we weren’t that close in high school, I always liked him. I had rarely seen him since we graduated high school in 1997, but when the Heat advanced to the playoffs in 2004, my first time in the postseason, I wanted to celebrate by flying in my old friends from Queens. He had gone to school to study information technology and ended up working on Wall Street for a while.
Jamie was an Italian kid from Queens who may not have been long on talent, but he had a good heart and I trusted him. He had dreams of making it in Hollywood as a record producer, and it felt good to reconnect with him.
In 2008, during my time with the Lakers, Jamie moved out to Los Angeles to follow his show business dreams. I put him up in a two-thousand-square-foot loft next door to mine at the Roosevelt Lofts, four blocks from Staples Center. And I got him a nice car, which didn’t go over well with a lot of my friends who had been out here with me since the early Clippers days. It was understandable that guys might be a little territorial, but I just wanted everyone to get along and enjoy the ride we were on.
Jamie ended up starring on Khloé & Lamar as my best friend. My boys were pissed about that because he had just showed up. They knew he wasn’t my best friend, but the producers needed someone who was white. My longtime black friends hated that, while I just went along with it.
Another reason his presence didn’t go over well was because it quickly became apparent that Jamie had a penchant for hard drugs, which was a no-no with my immediate crew. I already had extensive experience with cocaine, but none of my friends knew about it at that point. And Jamie was hard-core. He used needles and was constantly on the lookout for heroin.
Even though he didn’t have much Hollywood know-how, he was ambitious, and I wanted to help. He had an idea for an upscale menswear clothing line called Take Out. I connected him with a few folks in fashion, and he networked as best he could. Several people told me not to go into business with him, but if I didn’t help him, who would?
I was also hell-bent on starting a record label, and thought Jamie, with his charm, street sense, and bravado, was the perfect fit to run it.
In November 2008, I had gone to the GQ Men of the Year party at the famed Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. It was a black-tie who’s who of famous faces all sipping drinks and nibbling on finger snacks on the garden terrace beneath the stars. I stood in a tight circle with Justin Timberlake, the rapper T.I., and Jay-Z as we made small talk and discussed what upcoming projects we had in the works.
“I got an idea for a record label I’m about to start up,” I told Jay-Z excitedly. He shook his head.
“Don’t do it,” he warned. “Put your money in real estate. All the money is taken here.”
T.I. started to laugh. “He ain’t lying, LO.”
I thought Jay was trying to play me because he didn’t want me creeping into his lane. New Yorkers were supposed to be supportive of one another, but Jay was dismissive. He wasn’t rude about it, but he was far from encouraging and didn’t offer any advice or connects.
I decided to go ahead with the project under my fledgling brand, Rich Soil, which I first started as a T-shirt line that represented growth and prosperity. I put Jamie in charge of the label, and he got to work right away. He hired a small staff, began meeting with A&R people, created marketing campaigns, and searched for unsigned acts online and in studios around town.
From the outside, things looked like a well-oiled burgeoning enterprise. But looks can be deceiving. I spent $500,000 on a Rich Soil promotional event in Miami on Memorial Day weekend before we had signed a single artist. We were booking first-class tickets and five-room suites in whatever city we visited.
If the record label wasn’t hemorrhaging money, it was burning it. And whatever was left was flushed down the toilet. All told, I lost nearly $8 million without putting out so much as a single album. Soon after, Take Out went under because we couldn’t secure outside funding. Ultimately, Jamie was in over his head. It was my mistake to put someone in charge of a record label and fashion line who had no experience running either.
We made a hell of a splash, threw great parties, and looked every bit the part. We just never made any music. I should have listened to Jay-Z. Here I thought he was trying to play me, and he was really trying to help me.
I regularly did hard drugs with Jamie back in Miami. That’s how Scott Storch and I crossed paths. I didn’t want to admit it, but I kept Jamie around because he was my go-to enabler. He had easy access to crack and heroin and was always finding harder drugs to try. Having him tucked away downtown where none of my friends lived or interacted with him helped me cover my tracks.
While I was on one bender or another, Jamie was doing the same. By 2015, no longer a reality TV star, he was strung out, desperate, and broke. And on June 14, he died before he wanted to.
A bacterial skin infection crept into his body and killed him. It was from his heroin addiction. Another light that went out.