His feelings about children were, however, simple. In an Esquire article, Tupac talked about why he didn’t want to have any.

  “Procreation is so much about ego,” he said. “Everybody wants to have a junior. But I could care less about having a junior to tell, ‘I got fucked by America and you’re about to get fucked too.’ Until we get a world where I feel like a first-class citizen, I can’t have a child. ‘Cause my child has to be a first-class citizen, and I’m not having no white babies.

  “There’s no way around it unless I want to turn white, turn my back on what’s really going on in America. I either will be in jail or dead or be so fuckin’ stressed out from not going to jail or dying or being on crack that I’d just pop a vessel. I’ll just die from a heart attack. All the deaths are not going to be from the police killing you.”

  • • •

  During the last year of his life, Tupac’s acting career was skyrocketing. Vondie Curtis Hall, star of TV’s “Chicago Hope,” directed Tupac in the film Gridlock’d—which opened nationwide on January 29, 1997—a dark comedy about survival adapted from Hall’s semi-autobiographical screenplay. He told Parade magazine that Tupac had not been difficult to direct, despite his reputation to the contrary.

  “When we cast Tupac, he’d just gotten out of jail, and a lot of people were leery of working with him. But he never caused problems,” Hall insisted, “always coming to work prepared and on time. We never sensed that his luck was running out.”

  At the 1997 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, four months after Tupac was killed, actor Tim Roth talked about starring opposite the rapper in Gridlock’d.

  “It was great [working with him],” Roth told a reporter for the Park Record. “I know him only from the set, so I didn’t know his music and I hadn’t seen his films, and he preferred that. When he came to meet me for the first time, he said, ‘Please don’t see any [films] if you haven’t. Don’t listen to the music. Don’t see the videos. People are going to tell you things, and some of them are going to be true and some of them aren’t, but try to come in with a clean slate.’

  “He was very charming, very witty. He’s a good actor, I think. My experience with him [was] we spent a lot of time laughing. I mean, we would get pissed off at each other and that’s the normal way of things day to day, but we had a good time. A lot of stuff came out in the press, almost as though he deserved it when he died, but I look at him and think, ‘Wow, that’s a great actor.’ If I saw the film and wasn’t in it, just saw it, I would think, ‘I would love to work with that guy.’ So it is tragic. He was constantly writing. He would film during the day, then go off and direct videos, or produce videos, or be in the studio recording music or go off and write music. He was prolific.”

  Tupac played the straight man to Roth’s crazy-junkie character.

  “Comedy only works when you have somebody good and solid to fire your stuff off of,” Roth told the Park Record. “Although Tupac was really funny in the film, he makes a really good straight man.”

  In an interview with Mr. Showbiz magazine, Roth said Tupac had a work ethic that surpassed others he had worked with: “He worked harder than any of us. He would be off directing videos at night and then go into the studio until four or five in the morning. Then he would be very tired and he would sleep as often as he could when there was down time. But he was very professional. ...”

  “He talked about dying a lot,” Roth said, “because he knew it would happen. He knew he wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age. It just was not going to be what happened to him. . . . He really wanted to get away from what was expected from him, from how people had pigeonholed him, and move on and do different things. That’s why he was doing Gridlock’d. It was part of that change—which is a very adult emotion, so he was somebody who was really growing. He had all the talent to do that, and he had the power and the money to do that.

  But on the other hand, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. We’d talk about that, how exhausting it is to be that testosterone guy they want you to be on the street, then I would see an interview with him and he would talk about his life in a very mature way, and then I would see another interview with him and he would be getting in somebody’s face. Like everybody, he had a very childish aspect and a very mature aspect. And they were in conflict. He knew there was no clear-cut way out of where he was at that time. ...”

  Roth’s assessment was insightful. The conflict within seemed to stem from Tupac’s prison-time perspective and the temptations and demands of the outside world. When he was in jail, he told reporters he was a changed man. But after his release, he reverted to his old ways, talking tough and throwing gang hand signs. In many ways he appeared harder than ever before.

  While in prison, Tupac said he wanted to team up with his friend Mike Tyson after he got out and start a youth organization called Us First to keep kids out of trouble. The new Tupac preached anti-violence, but he often didn’t practice what he preached.

  The sequence of events on the night he was shot was a reflection of the almost schizophrenic contradictions in his life. On his way to perform at a Las Vegas charity event to keep kids out of trouble and off drugs, Tupac was seen beating Orlando Anderson and kicking him while he was down. Tupac played the role of the thug up until the end. Violence had become a way of life—and death—for him.

  • • •

  Former Vibe magazine senior writer Kevin Powell began interviewing Tupac during the early stages of his career and got to know him well. Powell described his relationship with Tupac as “very intense.”

  “I was his biographer for a while,” he said. “Pac used to say to me all the time he wanted me to be his Alex Haley. [Haley] did the biography of Malcolm X.

  “Sometimes I feel like a big brother to him, [like] I’m related to him. I miss him in a weird kind of way. You don’t want to see anyone die. I think it was internal and external questions on Tupac that ultimately led to his demise. Internally, he could never seem to turn that corner.”

  The first time Powell interviewed Tupac was in 1993.

  “Even then, he felt misunderstood,” Powell said. “I had been following his career since 1990 when he was with Digital Underground. It was a social commentary. I liked what he was saying. He stood out in my mind. I started collecting notes way before I got the go-ahead [to write a story] from Vibe. I thought, This is a kid who’s very much the nineties. He’s one person who represents the hip hop more than anybody else.

  “He was very much the period, the way James Dean was in the 1950s. He talked about dying. Always. The first piece I did with him in Vibe, he mentioned himself dying, and didn’t want people to think he was a ‘hate whitey’ [person]. This kid off the bat was talking about things like that.”

  Powell said he doesn’t know what would have become of Tupac had he lived.

  “We’ll never know,” he said. “Tupac never really had the space to grow up, find out who he was. He was always in the public eye. The son of a famous Black Panther. He was selling drugs and trying to survive when he was young. The poverty dictated what he did. Once he had money, he was a workaholic. He never had time to take a step back. Everybody put pressure on Pac. Family, friends. He would have really had to take some time. He needed to step back and look at the source of that anger. He never, never got to do that. I was watching this documentary of Jimi Hendrix and it reminded me of Tupac. Everybody said [Hendrix] was dying out of frustration.

  “I know from talking to people, Tupac didn’t even want to go to the Tyson fight that night. He wanted to chill in California. But he was a loyalist. He told them he would go, so he went. One thing Tupac said to me—I remember saying to him, ‘Why don’t you just be careful?’ and he said, ‘There’s no place like careful. If it’s time to go, it’s time to go.’ I think that’s sad. In black America some people are just waiting for death. A lot of us are like that. I’m amazed at how much people just don’t care.

  “The first week in December 1995 was the last time I talked to him. I really believed, based on my conversations with him in prison, that he was going to change. He talked differently about women and racial issues. But then when I interviewed him on the set of a video, weed smoke came out of the trailer and he was flashing money. I took it personally. Sometimes as a journalist you get caught up. I thought, ‘God, this guy, he’s not going to change.’ It depressed me. I knew it was the last time I would interview him. I didn’t know he would die; I just knew it was the last time.

  “I think, if there’s anything we can learn from Tupac it’s like, man, you cannot live your life that fast and that hard and that recklessly without thinking through every decision you make. I remember thinking the last time I interviewed him, I was wishing he had still been in jail. He would have been safe from the people who not only wanted to kill him physically, but who also wanted to kill him spiritually.”

  Sway, the San Francisco deejay, asked Tupac where he thought he might be in five years.

  “I’ll have my own production company, which I’m close to right now. I’m doing my own movies,” Tupac told him. “I have my own restaurant, which I got right now with Suge and Snoop. I just wanna expand. I’m starting to put out some calendars for charity. I’m gonna start a little youth league in California so we can start playing some East Coast teams, some Southern teams. I wanna have like a Pop Warner League, except the rappers fund it and they’re the head coaches. Have a league where you can get a big trophy with diamonds in it for a nigga to stay drug free and stay in school.

  “That’s the only way you can be on the team. We’ll have fun and eat pizza and have the finest girls there and throw concerts at the end of the year. That’s what I mean by giving back.

  “I see myself having a job with Death Row,” Tupac continued, “being the A&R person and an artist that drop an album like Paul McCartney every five years. Not that I’m like Paul McCartney, but there’s no rapper who ever did it, so that’s why I use him as an example. But I wanna do it at leisure. My music will mean something and I’ll drop deeper shit.”

  Four months after he was gunned down, Tupac Shakur was named favorite rap hip-hop artist at the American Music Awards.

  • • •

  Even after death, Tupac had more than an avid following. Fans lined up for hours at record stores across the country, including in Las Vegas, awaiting the November 5, 1996, midnight release of his last album, Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, released posthumously under his rap alias Makaveli. The day before, Mike Tyson, accompanied by several men, had tried to buy the CD a day early from the Tower Records WOW! store on West Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas, about 10 miles from Tyson’s Las Vegas mansion.

  “He didn’t believe us when we told him it wasn’t available yet,” said the store clerk who had waited on Tyson. “We told him, ‘Come back tomorrow.’”

  Tyson, he said, did return the next day and bought the CD.

  Tupac’s fourth posthumous collection, Until the End of Time, returned him to the top of the Billboard 200 albums chart four-and-a-half years after his death.

  The double album of previously unreleased material from Tupac’s vaults sold more than 426,000 copies to debut at No. 1, according to figures issued by SoundScan on April 4, 2001. The record became Tupac’s fourth No. 1 album, a feat previously achieved by Me Against the World in 1995 and All Eyez on Me in 1996 while the rapper was still alive. Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory also reached No. 1.

  Tupac’s two other posthumous collections, R U Still Down? (Remember Me) in 1997 and the Still I Rise album with the Outlawz in 1999, peaked on the Billboard chart at No. 2 and No. 7, respectively. But The Rose That Grew From Concrete, a spoken-word album based on Tupac’s poetry and featuring readings by fellow rappers, failed to break the top 50 during its release in 2000.

  A young Tupac, in the days of stogies (blunts), forty-ouncers, bandanas, non-designer underwear, and less- defined abdominal muscles. (Trilobite)

  Good times—Tupac partying after the 1995 Soul Train Awards ceremony. (Trilobite)

  Bad times—Being led to jail by N.Y.P.D. officers after being arrested for sexual abuse in Manhattan. Tupac later said, “Before I made a record, I never had a record.” (AP/Wide World Photos)

  Suge Knight arrives at the hospital after Tupac’s death to pay his respects to Afeni Shakur. (R. Marsh Starks/Las Vegas Sun)

  Mug shot of Suge taken earlier the same day when he registered in Las Vegas as an ex-felon.

  Bad Boy Entertainment’s rapper Biggie Smalls (left) and CEO Puffy Combs on the set of one of the last videos they shot together. (Trilobite)

  The scuffle at MGM Grand. From top: a frame from the video surveillance tape of the attack in the casino; minutes later, Tupac storms toward the MGM entrance; Orlando Anderson is later identified as the beating victim.

  Aerial photo of the BMW’s course. (1) The shooting occurred at the intersection of Koval Lane and E. Flamingo Rd. Suge made a U-turn and headed west on Flamingo, to (2) the corner of Flamingo and Las Vegas Blvd., where he clipped the median making a left turn onto the Strip. At point (3), the intersection of Harmon Avenue and the Strip, the BMW finally came to a stop. (Jason Cox)

  Club 662, where Suge and Tupac were headed, is located two miles farther east on Flamingo. (AP/Wide World Photos)

  Members of Tupac’s entourage wait to be questioned by homicide detectives at the corner where the BMW came to rest. (Malcolm Payne)

  Homicide Sergeant Kevin Manning presides over the only news conference about the investigation conducted by Las Vegas police. (Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun)

  The photo—Tupac Shakur on the coroner’s autopsy table.

  7

  NEW YORK SHOOTING

  On Wednesday November 30, 1994, Tupac Shakur was ambushed and shot inside the lobby of a recording studio in Manhattan’s Times Square. Tupac’s team of criminal attorneys had been in New York with Tupac awaiting a verdict on sexual-assault charges against the rapper. Tupac’s attorneys afterward said the shooting “looks like a setup and smells like a setup.” Later, Tupac publicly blamed Biggie Smalls, who was upstairs in a recording session at the time, in helping to set up the attack.

  Earlier in the evening, Tupac had been invited by Ron G., a deejay in New York, to record with him. Tupac had agreed to do the recording for free, as a favor to the young rapper, whom he wanted to help out. (He usually charged other rappers a fee to record on their albums.)

  Based on statements made to police by witnesses to the shooting, it went down like this. After finishing the taping session, Tupac was paged by a rapper named Booker, who asked him to tape a song with Little Shawn, an East Coast rapper. Tupac told him he’d do it that day, for $7,000. Booker agreed and told Tupac it was to take place at Quad Studios, at 723 Seventh Avenue between 48th and 49th streets in Times Square. While heading out to the studio, Tupac got a second call from Booker asking why he was taking so long. Then came a third call telling Tupac they didn’t have the money to pay him. Tupac told Booker he wouldn’t record unless he was paid, and hung up. Finally, Tupac got a fourth call from Booker telling him that Uptown Entertainment would take care of the fee, which would be waiting for him when he finished recording. Tupac headed for the studio. By that time, it was just after midnight.

  At 12:16 a.m., according to Detective George Nagy with the NYPD’s Midtown North 18th Precinct, Tupac, along with his manager Freddie Moore, his common-law brother-in-law Zayd Turner, fellow rapper Randy “Stretch” Walker, and his half-sister Sekyiwa arrived at Quad Studios. They left their car in a parking garage at 148 West 48th Street. Then they walked the short distance, around the corner, to the studio on Seventh Avenue.

  Nine minutes later, Tupac and his group arrived in front of the studio, a police report said. Standing on a small terrace overlooking 48th Street, for a smoke break, were a couple of teenage members of J.U.N.I.O.R. Mafia, a group Biggie Smalls was sponsoring. They hollered down to Tupac to say hello, then went back inside to tell everyone that Tupac had arrived.

  Upstairs, it was a party atmosphere. It was a large studio and a lot of people were there that night. Word had spread that Tupac would be recording there. People were excited in anticipation of the popular rapper’s arrival. Also there to record, but on a different floor from where Tupac was scheduled to record, were Biggie Smalls and Puffy Combs. They were working on Biggie’s “Warning” video. At the time, Quad had recording studios and equipment on five different floors.

  Back on the street, on Seventh Avenue, as Tupac and the others approached the entrance to Quad Studios, they could see two black men, near the elevator, wearing Army fatigues, recognized by Tupac as gang garb worn mostly in the Brooklyn area; a third man, also black, was in the lobby, pretending to read a newspaper. Tupac and his group didn’t think twice about the men.

  Tupac pressed the intercom button. The four were buzzed in. As they walked toward the elevator, Tupac, according to the police report, was ambushed by the three men, including the man who had been standing just outside the lobby. Two of the three men pulled identical handguns, NYPD Detective George Nagy said.

  They went straight for Tupac, ordering him to the floor and demanding he give up all his jewelry and money. When Tupac went for his own gun stashed in his waistband, they shot him. A round hit him in the groin area and passed through his thigh. That bullet cost him a testicle. Then the gunmen began beating him. They ripped his jewelry off him, then shot him again, hitting him in the chest. Tupac was shot five times: twice in the head, twice in the groin area, and once in his left hand. Freddie was shot once in his abdomen. None of the wounds were life-threatening. The men also snatched jewelry from Freddie Moore as they continued holding guns on the others, Nagy said.