NEW YORK — Wardel Fenderson remained in the driver's seat Friday.

The chauffeur, the prosecution's strongest witness against Sean "Puffy" Combs, endured hours of tough cross-examination without backing off his claim that the rap mogul had a gun before a nightclub shooting and offered him a bribe afterward.

"Absolutely not," Fenderson said repeatedly as the defense suggested he made up the charges to avoid his own prosecution and to advance a $3 million civil suit against Combs.

Wardel Fenderson

The 42-year-old father of three completed two days of testimony at the music executive's gun possession and bribery trial Friday afternoon. Fenderson was driving Combs' souped-up SUV Dec. 27, 1999, when Combs and his companions fled a gunfight at a Times Square disco. When police found a gun in the getaway car, Fenderson was arrested for weapons possession along with Combs, his then-girlfriend Jennifer Lopez and bodyguard Anthony "Wolf" Jones.

He later told the prosecution that Combs and Jones were armed the night of the shooting and had offered him $50,000 to take the rap for a 9mm semiautomatic gun found in the SUV. He said that, although he initially accepted the bribe and confessed to police, he soon changed his mind. In return for Fenderson's testimony, prosecutor Matthew Bogdanos agreed to drop the gun charge.

Combs' lawyer Benjamin Brafman ridiculed Fenderson's account of being bullied into a confession, pointing out that the driver admitted ownership of the gun after less than a half hour in police custody.

"So it took 20 minutes to compromise your integrity?" scoffed Brafman.

Fenderson stuck by his account, saying he was in "double shock" after being both arrested and bribed, and that Combs and Jones "took advantage" of his state of mind.

"I was like a deer in the headlights. I didn't know where to go," he said, prompting groans of disbelief from the Combs' supporters in the rear of the courtroom.

Only the lawyer for bodyguard Jones seemed to succeed in shaking Fenderson's testimony, and he had to don a knee-length fur coat to do so. Michael Bachner slipped the flamboyant fake mink his client was wearing the night of the shooting over his conservative gray suit and had Fenderson reenact the circumstances under which he had seen a gun in the bodyguard's waistband.

The driver had testified that he first spotted what he believed was a gun midway through a frantic 11-block car chase. But as Bachner recreated the scene, he admitted that Jones' coat had been wide open when he first jumped into the getaway car. At that time, Fenderson said, he hadn't seen any gun.

The rest of the cross-examination was largely tedious. At one point, co-defendant Jamal "Shyne" Barrow, facing attempted murder charges and 25 years in prison for the club shooting, dozed off for several minutes at the defense table.

The most telling indication of how damaging the defense believed Fenderson's testimony was came outside the court. For the first time since the trial began, Combs spoke publicly about the case.

"We look forward to next week when we finally get to put our case on," he said in a statement brief enough to avoid violating the gag order, but long enough to get play on the evening news.

His famously rhyming lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, added his own sound bite, telling the cameras, "If it don't make sense, find for the defense."