*Black Ink Crew‘s tattoo mogul Ceaser Emanuel tells IHeart Radio Personality and host of EURweb.com Spotlight, Jazmyn ‘Jaz’ Summers, that despite his painful break up from girlfriend, Suzette Samuels, he talks to her every day and that a reunion could be in the future.
“I mean, there’s always hope.,” he dishes to Jaz. “She was like my best friend before anything. So, wow. We always hope for that. We still talk every day and whatnot.”
Earlier this year, he learned that Suzette would need serious corrective surgery to remove illegal butt implants she received in 2014. He was torn about spending 45 days out of the country caring for his girlfriend as he was still reeling from the restraining order that bars him from contacting his daughter, Cheyenne who had accused him of abuse (an investigation cleared him of the allegations). Ultimately he decided not to go and they ended the relationship.
“We couldn’t see eye to eye through everything that was going on. We just decided, like, we weren’t best for each other. We decided that, you know, as adults let’s just go our separate ways because I couldn’t see what she was going through. And she couldn’t see what I was going through because we were both going through stuff.”
Now that he’s single he says he’s chilling and isn’t going to be like the notorious single Caesar of the past when he was juggling 10 women at one time. His boys joke and call him legendary.
“The single Ceaser is free, and you know, he just does what he wants,” he tells Jaz. “I remember at one of my pool parties, I was dating like 10 girls at the same time and I invited every single one of them to my pool party. They all sat in my section. And it was so funny cause when I look at the picture now it’s like, wow.” And there was no drama. No throwing hands, he tells EURweb Spotlight. “Everybody had a good old time.it’s like, wow Ceaser you really did that. Like, yeah. I pulled that one off.”
Did they all know he was dating them?
“You know? I don’t know. I think some of them knew and they were playing little catty games, but you know, single Ceaser knows how to maneuver through everything,” he laughs.
But he’s a different man now he shares with EURweb Spotlight: “That’s the old me. I don’t think I’m really that. Cause you know, that was me coming out of a five-year relationship. I’m gonna be selective now. I’m getting up there in age, you know, and I got a lot more risk now and whatnot. I just want to settle down and just chill. That’s it. I just wanna chill.”
OK ladies. Anybody interested?
Breaking up with his best friend Suzette is painful but he says his wifey now is building his empire.
“I can’t lie, man. Like, it’s doing very good. People would think being on television and being here for so long, people would get really tired of us. I just had a shop opening in Jacksonville. It was like so much love and so much of everything. It was like, wow people really, really love us. I always had a groove with it, but you know, when you first start, it’s different than when you’re like eight shops in. It made me get like a rejolt and know that I need to keep going. Keep it moving and keep pushing I’m gonna do ten by the end of this year.”
He also gets a piece of all the Black Ink TV franchises. He might have the money equal to the GDP of a small country he jokes.
He says all of the tribulations caused him to lose focus but now he’s getting it back.
“I think all my family problems, my relationship, coming back from COVID, business problems, I think everything, just entwined and it was just like a freaking point for me. A lot of people don’t understand coming back from COVID I didn’t lose no shops but I lost a lot of money. I didn’t downsize. I didn’t fire anybody or lay anybody off. Everybody, when they came back, had their jobs but with all of that, and then I had family problems and I had relationship problems. It was all like, you know, it was hard for me even to get the peace that I need.”
Last year, Ceaser’s only child, teenage daughter Cheyenne, accused him of pulling her out of the shower while naked and beating her “like a dog in the street” in a January 2021 Instagram Live.
She claimed her father drunkenly broke several doors and threw a speaker at her head, resulting in police intervention. Ceaser publicly responded to her allegations during “Black Ink Crew” Season 9 Episode 5 (aired May 18, 2021) with his side of the story, claiming his daughter lived with him and Suzette during the global lockdown. An investigation cleared him. He says he’s working on mending the relationship.
“Right now, she about to go off to college and whatnot,” he says. ” I’m letting her just focus on that. The lines of communication are finally open and all legal battles that I was going through are over. You know what I mean? It’s finally almost done. The only thing I got left is child support. I was acquitted of everything. I was never charged or anything. It’s just that investigation was opened up against me. And they found the same thing that Atlanta found out. It was nothing, but now I can actually say I got a daughter in college. Like that made me just feel really old. But God, that’s just like, I got a daughter in college, like, wow.”
He says despite all the drama, he’s proud of his daughter.
Ceaser rose to the top of the tattoo and reality TV game starting tatting when he was 20 years old.
“We started from the dirt? How we had nothing and now we’re like eight shops strong. Honestly, when you in the race, you don’t really notice where you at in the race until the end. And it wasn’t until the other day that I really looked back and like, wow, I put in so much hard work that I’m really running the tattoo game. At first, it wasn’t like one of those. Uh, can you say one of those things that I’m like, nah, I gotta take over the tattoo game? It was more like, I gotta take over my, my neck of the woods. And then it was like, nah, I gotta take over this, this side of the world. And then I gotta take over this and it end up like, nah, I gotta take over the industry. And then when it was that, it was like, wow, I’m really at that point where I can really say I’m about to be king of the tattoo.”
“I used to tattoo a lot of rappers and some of my friends were rappers. I’d be backstage and you can network. I was a little smart,” he reveals. “What happened was we were on a reality show called “Son of a Gun” which was also on VH1. So what happened was they seen us and they saw our energy and some productions came like, we wanna shoot you, we wanna shoot you. Finally, we said, let’s do it. And we did it.”
What’s the latest drama? One of his artists Tatti (Tatiana Ritter) was most recently facing serious cocaine trafficking charges but wanted to run her own shop. He said he had to turn her down.
“I love Tatti as a person. I love her ambition, her attitude. It’s just that TA is in a jam that as a businessman, I can’t necessarily rely on her cuz God forbid she gotta go to jail and I’m stuck with a shock that yeah. Yeah. I gotta run on my own and I’m legally bonded with partners. Like I, I’m not gonna put myself in that predicament. Those are serious charges. I’m from the hood. Most of the time when you face charges like that, I’m gonna see you in a couple of years. You know what I mean?
But she ended up getting no jail time. And for a quick wrap-up of the latest episode: Ceaser receives some bad news from Atlanta. It turns out his Atlanta employees went to a tattoo convention he was boycotting, behind his back. Feeling betrayed, he makes the decision to fire all of them. Tatti’s lawyers gave her some good news revealing that he negotiated a deal that she would avoid jail time, which caused her to break down in tears. Ceaser called in his NY artists to keep the Atlanta shop running, The Compton and Chicago crews join the fray in Atlanta and Ceaser proposes a battle of the tattoo titans. Stay tuned for more mad drama.
Next week’s episode airs May 9 on VHI.
Finally his advice on getting a tattoo if you’re not in a city with Black Ink?
“I would advise them to find the nearest Black Ink and fly there,” he laughs but he’s dead-ass serious.
Check out the full convo in the video at the top. And please don’t forget to subscribe to Jaz’s YouTube channel.
Jazmyn Summers
Interview/article by Jazmyn Summers. Follow her @jaztalk1 on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. Video editing by www.patrickhousefilms.com
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