Murder Rap: The Untold Story of the Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur Murder Investigations (17 page)

Looming in the corridor, outside the conference room where our sit-down would take place, was Keffe D himself, dressed casually in a t-shirt and jeans. I stood next to him, nodding a slight greeting as we waited to be escorted in.

After a moment he leaned over to me and, in a low voice, spoke close to my ear. “I don’t know nothin’ about what you want to talk to me for,” he said. “But what I do know is gonna blow your fuckin’ mind.”

PART

FOUR

CHAPTER
13

Who Shot Ya?

T
UPAC SHAKUR WOULD NEVER
be riding higher than on the evening of September 7, 1996, cruising through a blazing galaxy of lights along the Las Vegas Strip in a brand new black BMW 750 sedan driven by Suge Knight.

The sunroof of the Beemer was open to the sky and hip-hop pounded from the car’s state-of-the-art speakers, echoing across the vast desert. A phalanx of support and security vehicles formed a convoy down Las Vegas Boulevard in heavy Saturday-night traffic and the wide street quickly became an impromptu parade route as passing pedestrians immediately recognized the superstar rapper. Photoflashes flared and gang signs were thrown up in triumphant salute to the man whose music had become the soundtrack to an era.

All Eyez on Me
, Tupac’s Grammy-nominated third album, had been released seven months earlier and by April of that year had already sold five million albums, on its way to an astonishing total of nearly ten million. By a wide margin one of the most successful rap recordings in history,
All Eyez On Me
was also among a handful of the best-selling albums of the decade, in line with iconic releases by Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, Pearl Jam, and, tellingly, the Notorious B.I.G. The singles “How Do U Want It” and “All About U” had been everywhere that summer, proclaiming not just the ascendancy of a major new star, but also the mainstreaming of a sound straight from the street that had lost none of its potent authenticity in the transition. Tupac Shakur was the real deal, a natural-born performer whose enormous charisma and innate intelligence put him in line to become a spokesman for a whole generation of young blacks looking for a leader.

Catapulting off the success of
All Eyez on Me
, Tupac had recently completed his follow-up Death Row release, written, recorded, and mixed in less than two weeks during August 1996.
The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory
contained a cut titled “Bomb First,” which featured the sounds of seven shots being fired. As the last report faded in the mix, Tupac emerged as his swaggering new alter ego, Makaveli. As creative strategy, Tupac’s lightning-fast recording pace and shape-shifting identity suggested a supremely confident artist at the top of his game. But
Don Killuminati
was a darker and far less accessible work than its predecessor. On track after track he called out his rivals in rap, disrespecting by name everyone from Biggie Smalls and Puff Daddy to his former producer, Dr. Dre. It was as if Tupac could not tolerate another star burning brighter than his own.

And that night on Las Vegas Boulevard, none did. Conclusive proof of his exalted status was breaking out in spontaneous displays by an adoring public as Suge drove on a roundabout route toward their destination: a purple-hued nightspot at 1700 East Flamingo Road. Owned by Suge, it was dubbed Club 662, for the numbers on a phone pad that spell out MOB. It was here that Tupac was scheduled to perform, at a charity event benefiting a local gym founded by a former Las Vegas police officer to steer kids away from violence. But there was more to Tupac’s appearance on stage than simple altruism: it was part of a community-service deal Suge’s lawyers had negotiated to mitigate some of Tupac’s myriad legal entanglements.

The event promised a standing room only crowd, with word getting around that night that the newly crowned heavyweight champion, Mike Tyson, barely winded by his 109-second bout with Bruce Seldon, would be dropping by. There was a special relationship between the fighter and the rapper, in evidence earlier that evening at the main event in the MGM Grand arena, when the PA pumped out the driving hip-hop track “Write the Glory,” which Tupac had penned especially for Tyson. Tupac beamed from his thousand dollar ringside seat as his amplified rap blasted through the darkened hall. It didn’t get any better than that.

And it had been worse, a lot worse. A little less than two years earlier, on November 30, 1994, Shakur had been shot multiple times, severely beaten, robbed, and left for dead in the lobby of a New York City recording studio. It was an incident many would claim had lit the spark on the murderous bicoastal rap wars that were still raging the night Tupac and Suge made their exultant way toward Club 662.

At the time of the assault, Tupac had already riveted the rap world with his 1991 debut album,
2Pacalypse Now
. A rising star in every sense of the term, Tupac was much in demand as a guest vocalist on recordings by other artists. That night he was scheduled to perform on a track by the young hip-hop hopeful Little Shawn for the hefty sum of $7,000.

The deal had been initiated by Little Shawn’s manager, James “Jimmy Henchman” Rosemond, a formidable New York gang member who had transformed himself into a respectable businessman, starting Czar Entertainment and, in the process, earning a reputation as what Vibe called “one of the most feared players in hip-hop.” Over the course of several months Rosemond had worked hard to ingratiate himself with Tupac in hopes of eventually adding the rapper to his client roster. Part of his strategy was to encourage Tupac to leave his label, Interscope Records, and sign instead with Puffy Combs’s Bad Boy imprint. But Tupac had repeatedly rebuffed his overtures with a kind of offhanded disdain that rubbed Rosemond the wrong way.

Rosemond had earlier introduced Shakur to another shadowy East Coast underworld figure, Jacques “Haitian Jack” Agnant, and the pair had hit it off, running a wild streak through New York City in late 1993. A little too wild, according to the testimony of a nineteen year-old fan who accused Tupac and Haitian Jack, along with two other men, of gang-raping her in a luxury suite at the Parker Meridien Hotel. Arrested for the assault, Tupac had returned to New York to stand trial on the charges a year later.

By then, Jimmy Henchman and Puffy Combs had supposedly laid plans to cut Tupac down to size. His refusal to sign with Combs’s company was seen by many as a direct insult to the music mogul and Tupac’s frequent and very public affronts to Puffy and his organization had only fueled the fire. A trap had been laid with the $7,000 recording fee as bait. Or so the story went.

Shakur arrived for the gig at Quad Recording Studios on Seventh Avenue, where Rosemond had booked time for the Little Shawn sessions. Whether by accident or design a large group of Bad Boy executives, including Puffy Combs, had gathered in the adjacent studio for a playback of tracks on the debut album by Biggie Smalls’ pet project, Junior M.A.F.I.A..

Entering the lobby in the company of his manager, Fred Moore, and a friend, Randy “Stretch” Walker, Tupac and his associates were approached by three men dressed in army fatigues, who demanded that Tupac and the others hand over their expensive jewelry. When Tupac refused, a pistol whipping ensued, at which point the rapper pulled out his own gun, accidently shooting himself in the groin in the process. A flurry of gunfire erupted and Tupac was hit four more times, taking bullets in his head, hand, and leg. Bleeding profusely, he dropped to the floor, where he was kicked, punched, and relieved of a medallion valued at $40,000. The assailants vanished into the night, pursued by a wounded Fred Moore until he, too, collapsed. Meanwhile, Tupac rode the elevator to the tenth floor studio, where the door opened on Puffy and his Bad Boy cadre. Their shocked expressions at the sight of Tupac, bloody but still standing, were ultimately accorded a variety of interpretations.

Paramedics rushed Tupac to Bellevue Hospital, where he was operated on for three hours. His condition somewhat stabilized, he was admitted to intensive care. There, in the early morning hours of November 30, he checked himself out, apparently still in fear for his life. A few days later, bandaged and in a wheelchair with a frightened look in his eyes, Tupac arrived at court to hear the verdict on the Parker Meridien rape case. The jury swiftly convicted him of first-degree sexual abuse. He was sentenced to a four-and-a-half-year prison term.

Considering the ultimate outcome of the Quad attack, it’s hardly surprising that it has been seen as the flash point in ensuing gang wars. It was a conflict that at first had been carried out only in mocking taunts, nasty but hardly lethal. In the late spring of 1995, the Notorious B.I.G. released “Who Shot Ya?” and although both the artist and Puffy Combs, the track’s producer, would insist that the song had been recorded months before the slaughter on Seventh Avenue, there are more than enough provocative lyrics in the track to suggest otherwise. Aside from such vivid descriptive verses as
“It’s on, nigga / fuck all that bickering beef / I can hear sweat trickling down your cheek,”
the song’s fade seemed, to many, as a de facto admission of responsibility.
“You rewind this,”
Biggie rumbled,
“Bad Boy’s behind this.”
Tupac would eventually respond in kind on “Hit ’Em Up,” rife with such incendiary rhymes as
“Who shot me / But your punks didn’t finish / Now you ’bout to feel the wrath of a menace.”
But by that time, the war had escalated far beyond words.

The escalation had begun in the summer of 1995 when Death Row Records founder Suge Knight began regular visits to Tupac at the Dannemora maximum security prison in upstate New York. He would eventually post $1.4 million in bail, freeing the rapper and funding his appeal on the rape conviction. Tupac reciprocated by signing an exclusive recording contract with Death Row, demonstrating in no uncertain terms to which coast, and to what gang, he now pledged allegiance. Tupac had undergone a startling transformation behind bars. The inspirational aspect of his artistry had been replaced by dark and violent imagery, tinged with paranoia and bent on revenge. It was a side of the twenty-four-year-old rapper that many felt had been brought out by his association with Suge Knight.

For his part, the rapper, like his new mentor, made no secret of whom he held responsible for his near-death experience in the Quad Studios lobby. The track “Against All Odds,” on
Don Killuminati
, would implicate Puffy by name and promise payback to, among others, Jimmy Henchman. At that time, however, Rosemond was safe from retribution, behind bars on a laundry list of drug and weapons charges.