The size of the roster and staff wasn’t the only issue. Despite doing $100 million in billings, Loud didn’t turn a profit in 2000 because of its massive overhead. Toward the end of the Clinton administration, both the music business and the economy at large were booming. The grit and grind of the early days had turned into overblown excess. Guys like Gabriel “Gaby” Acevedo, who was Loud’s New York radio rep, says he spent $20,000 to $30,000 a month on his corporate card schmoozing with the powers that be at Hot 97 and WBLS.

“I’d go to the club and be like, ‘Lemme get four bottles of Moet!’” says Acevedo, who currently manages French Montana. “What we were doing before, you could never do that again. That whole corporate card thing ain’t what it used to be. You can’t even buy someone a hot dog on the corner these days.”

“As you grow you have to start making numbers to justify everybody’s salaries, the offices, and the overhead,” explains Isaacson. “All of a sudden you look down and go, ‘Holy shit! Look how big our overhead is! In order for us to keep this overhead this high you have to have this much revenue.’ Then they expect you to do it every year. Then something doesn’t happen and you get pressure. Sony goes, ‘You guys are spending too much money. You can’t go for a fourth single when the second single wasn’t successful.’ We didn’t want to hear that. Nobody does that now; it’s a different industry. No one would go four singles deep on Sadat X.”



Artists took notice. “When he sold the company to Sony, Steve didn’t make the decisions anymore,” says Prodigy, who released Mobb Deep’s last album on Loud, Infamy, in 2001. “It was some people at Sony who probably didn’t give a fuck about Mobb Deep because we didn’t sell enough records. Mobb Deep made hardcore hip-hop, and we was going to do our numbers, but it’s not so much about first-week sales and ‘Did you go platinum?’ We felt like goldfish in an ocean with sharks and whales. So we knew right away it was time to go because Steve had nothing to do with it anymore. The writing was on the wall.”

All of the changes and stress only exacerbated Rifkind’s famous temper. (He once threw a chair at RCA’s chief lawyer, Carol Fenelon, because the company wouldn’t put up the money for Loud to sign Raekwon as a solo artist and release Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.... Security escorted him out.) “One time I came to the office and Steve had a bandage on his hand,” remembers Prodigy. “I was like, ‘What the fuck happened to your hand?’ Steve was like, ‘I went to this car lot to buy a car, I asked the dude, ‘How much is the car?’ and he tried to brush me off like I couldn't afford it. We got in each other’s face, I ended up swinging on him.’ He beat some dude up in the car lot and the dude bit his hand or some shit. I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you doing? You got a million-dollar company and you fighting in the car lot? You bugging, yo.’”

When Rifkind traveled to Hawaii in February 2000, all these troubles weighed heavy on his mind. While staying at the Four Seasons, he decided that all the money in the world wasn’t worth the aggravation and sat down and wrote a letter of resignation to Sony Music’s chairman, Tommy Mottola.

Later that day, two Samoans came running up to him while he was in the middle of a heated tennis match to tell him that he had an emergency on the mainland. Rifkind was used to late calls and emergency situations. They were typical in his 24/7 work world. He once got a call at 1:30 a.m. because someone in Big Pun’s entourage had accidentally broken his new head of promotions’ eye socket. Rifkind rushed to his phone, concerned something might have happened to one of his parents. Isaacson was on the line and told him that Pun was in a coma. Pun died shortly thereafter, of a heart attack and respiratory failure.

Before hopping on a plane to the mainland, Rifkind wrote a check to Pun’s family and tore up his letter to Mottola. But it didn’t matter by then: Loud was suffering from myriad problems. He ultimately left the company in 2002.