Mega-mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs has now spent more than a month inside a Brooklyn jail awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking and racketeering charges that may tank the former billionaire hitmaker’s career.

The three-time Grammy winner, who once partied with the global glitterati, has traded his Gucci leisure wear for a brown Bureau of Prisons jumpsuit. He denies the salacious charges – even as new allegations of violent misconduct pile up.

Combs, 54, has a history of slipping out of legal jams, including a 2001 acquittal on gun and bribery charges, and a 2015 arrest for attacking his son’s college football coach.

But Combs’ first brush with infamy came decades ago, 13 miles north of the Metropolitan Detention Center, on a college campus in Harlem. There, a judge later ruled, Combs shared responsibility for the deaths of nine young people during a fatal crush on the stairs at a celebrity basketball game he organized.

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Some were his own friends.

Now, as Combs works to salvage his freedom and fortune, families affected by the stampede are reliving the worst day of their lives – and the embattled star’s evasions about his role in the disaster at City College of New York.

Combs “overbooked it, he promoted it, and he left those people on the staircase and he wouldn’t open the door,” said filmmaker Jason Swain, whose big brother was killed that winter night in 1991. “And he didn’t own up to it.”

“From the days of City College…there’s always been this cloud that trailed him,” said Zach Greenburg, author of “3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, and Hip-Hop’s Multibillion-Dollar Rise.”

Prelude to disaster

The flyers promised a party.

Two young rappers, Puff Daddy and Heavy D, were promoting a charity basketball game thick with stars. RUN-DMC, Boys II Men, and EPMD were on the bill along with Big Daddy Kane, Jodeci and Brand Nubian. DJ Funkmaster Flex was set to attend.

The venue was City College in Harlem, a working class bastion of higher education that’s been minting Nobel laureates and business tycoons for more than a century.

Combs, a promising 22-year-old executive at Uptown Records, had approached the college’s student government in early December about hosting an AIDS education benefit following basketball legend Magic Johnson’s recent disclosure that he was HIV-positive. (Johnson’s news was a cultural earthquake at a time when HIV and AIDS carried enormous stigma.)

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The young promoter, who performed as Puff Daddy, booked the school gym, downstairs in the science building. It was nearly Christmas; administrators paid little attention while approving the Dec. 28 benefit.

Combs said he would handle security, and he went into overdrive promoting the game with appearances on the popular KISS-FM and 10,000 flyers that blanketed upper Manhattan.

Some 1,440 advance tickets were sold at $12 each, while Combs and Heavy D handed out 100 more to friends and other guests.

School administrators were unaware the event would feature the biggest names in hip hop.

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The crowd swells

By 4 p.m. on the 28th, between 1,500 and 2,000 people were already lined up outside the Nat Holman Gymnasium for the 6 p.m. show. The crowd was orderly.

Among them were Dirk Swain, a junior at Hampton University in Virginia Beach, and Sonya Williams, a pediatric nursing student at Lehman College in the Bronx. Williams was close friends with Combs’ partner at the time, and had been coaxed out that evening with a free ticket.

 

At least 500 tickets were sold at the door for $20 as the gym began to fill. Combs’ private security firm allowed both pre-sale ticket holders and those buying tickets the day of the event to enter at the same time from two lines, leading patrons who’d bought their tickets in advance to worry they wouldn’t make it inside. Others were sneaking in without paying.

Order was lost, at first slowly and then in flash.

A box of cash, a flood of people

The tension and anticipation descended into pushing and jostling when patrons saw celebrities including Mike Tyson and LL Cool J arrive at a VIP entrance. Police on the scene called for reinforcements. Barricades were toppled, glass was broken, and kids were trampled in the line.

Combs’ security, who were not in uniforms, hadn’t been paying attention to crowd control, witnesses said: They at first focused on ticket sales and ensuring only ticket holders made it into the lobby and down a stairwell to the gym, testimony showed.

As the unruliness grew, ticket sales abruptly stopped and one of Combs’ associates grabbed the cash box and fled with the head of his security team into the small lobby and down to the gym, pulling the vestibule doors closed behind them as patrons tried to follow.

 

At 6:23 p.m., as fans overwhelmed the cops, Combs’ security, and the college’s rented guards, someone on a police radio said: “They're not people, they're animals."

Inside the gym, the heavyset security chief pulled a gun and began shouting racial abuse at the people in the stairwell. He moved a table against the doors as those on the other side pushed and pounded.

The four doors opened outward, into the stairwell. Scores of kids pressed against them, with more arriving every moment, though one door on the far left remained slightly ajar thanks to the prying hands of those at the bottom of the stairs.

The table was a barricade to deter anyone who might squeeze through that last door. The gun-wielding security man climbed on top to give it ballast.

The surge

An estimated 50 people, aspiring architect Dirk Swain and nursing student Sonya Williams among them, were trapped on the other side when chaos erupted in the lobby and hundreds of kids began pushing their way in – not realizing those downstairs were caught between the mob and the doors.

“You couldn't go nowhere because people were continuing to come down thinking the gym was open,” Frederick Holloway, who’d arrived as a guest of the hip-hop duo Nice & Smooth, later testified. “Just the door and the people – just together – just smacking together.”

The doors were like a dam “that was holding back the flood of people,” Holloway recalled.

The surge was so strong that Nicole Levy, who’d come as Combs’ guest, told attorneys that her feet “left the floor and never touched the ground again.”

The air became thick and some started passing out. Others closer to the slightly cracked door – nearer to its meager supply of air – continued to pound, shouting that they couldn’t breathe.

The cop and the cash

Near the top of the deadly scrum, a few fought their way out. Like everyone else above ground, police didn’t know of the desperate crush taking place less than 20 yards away.

Officer Sean Harris, a 10-year NYPD veteran, had earlier tried and failed to clear the mob from the upstairs lobby before moving back onto the sidewalk. Now he turned to see frantic kids banging on the glass from inside, shouting for oxygen and ambulances.

He muscled his way to the stairwell and saw “it was literally wall to wall.”

“You could not get through,” he testified.

Harris mounted the bannister and started a precarious descent until he lost balance and fell onto the packed crowd. The trapped patrons lifted the police officer over their heads and young arms passed him, one to the other, to the bottom of the stairs, where he heaved open the cracked door and fell gasping onto the table that had been shoved there as a barricade.

The first thing Harris saw, Court of Claims Judge Louis Benza later wrote, was “Combs standing there with two women, and all three had money in their hands.”

The horror

Combs was stunned by the carnage on the other side of the doors, he later said. He joined in pulling victims from the stairwell and tried to perform CPR on Williams, his girlfriend’s best friend. She didn’t make it.

Neither did Dirk Swain, also 20, who never regained consciousness, or seven others aged 15 to 28. “He died with his ticket in his pocket,” Jason Swain said.

The cause of death for each victim was “asphyxia due to compression of the chest,” the city medical examiner found. There wasn’t a single broken bone.

Confusion slowed the emergency response. It was 19 minutes before ambulances were dispatched. The police duty captain at first refused to send officers to the gym, believing they were barred from the premises, even as individual cops went down to help the victims.

A reckoning

Judge Benza ruled the college was 50% responsible for the death and injury and that Combs and Heavy D shared the other 50%. School officials ignored every opportunity to stop the unfolding disaster, he said, while, through aggressive ticket sales and promotion, Combs and Heavy D guaranteed a crowd too big to control.

Combs would testify he too barely escaped the crush, but Judge Benza waved off his account, noting that none of the other witnesses placed him on the stairs when the havoc broke out.

“By closing the only open door giving access to the gym, Combs’ forces, who were fully aware of the crowd uncontrollably pouring down the stairwell, created something akin to a dike, forcing the people together like ‘sardines,’ squashing out life’s breath from young bodies,” Benza wrote.

Combs’ attorney in the City College litigation declined comment. Heavy D, whose real name was Dwight Myers, died in 2011. No criminal charges were filed.

While Deputy Mayor Milton Mollen had chastised the mob for “a lack of care which has become a reality of modern day life and which must be stopped before any more lives are lost” in a 1992 report, Benza, ruling six years later, held them mostly blameless.

"It does not take an Einstein to know that young people attending a rap concert camouflaged as a ‘celebrity basketball game,’ who have paid as much as $20 a ticket, would not be very happy and easy to control if they were unable to gain admission to the event because it was oversold,” he wrote.

Giving back

Combs’ career took a dip, but he roared back as one of the biggest producers and performers of the '90s with Bad Boy Records and a stable that included his close friend Notorious B.I.G. and Faith Evans.

As his career soared, Combs appeared to turn his back on the families of the City College victims, said Sonny Williams Jr., Sonya’s brother.

“He literally refused to help me do anything to keep their memories alive,” Williams said.

In 1997, on the Grammy award-winning “No Way Out” album, Combs shouted out the City College victims – while evading responsibility for their deaths – in a song called “Pain.”

To the City College deceased, may you rest in peace

To the families, I never meant to cause no pain 

I know the truth, but if you want, then I shoulder the blame

Meanwhile, Sonya Williams’ family started a small foundation called Sonya’s Seeds that provided scholarships to nursing students. Combs didn’t contribute, her brother said.

But after multi-platinum artist Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down in November 1997, Sonny Williams Jr. was given the opportunity to join a different charity effort. He received an invitation from a Combs associate to a fundraiser for the Christopher Wallace Memorial Foundation, created to honor the slain rapper.

The price tag: $1,000 a plate.

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