All told, Tupac had $35,000 worth of gold taken from him. Stolen were a diamond-and-gold ring, a gold bracelet, and several heavy gold chains. Freddie had $5,000 worth of jewelry stolen, which consisted of a gold bracelet and several gold chains.

  Two years later, in one of the last interviews he gave to Vibe magazine, Tupac spoke to a reporter about what it felt like to get shot.

  “... The dude with the newspaper was holding the gun on [Stretch]. He was telling the light-skinned dude, ‘Shoot that motherfucker! Fuck it!’ Then I got scared, because the dude had the gun to my stomach. All I could think about was piss bags and shit bags.

  “I drew my arm around him to move the gun to my side. He shot and the gun twisted and that’s when I got hit the first time. I felt it in my leg; I didn’t know I got shot in my balls. I dropped to the floor. Everything in my mind said, ‘Pac, pretend you’re dead.’ It didn’t matter. They started kicking me, hitting me. I never said, ‘Don’t shoot!’ I was quiet as hell. They were snatchin’ my shit off me while I was laying on the floor. I had my eyes closed, but I was shaking, because the situation had me shaking. And then I felt something in the back of my head, something real strong. I thought they stomped me or pistol-whipped me, and they were stomping my head against the concrete. I saw white, just white. I didn’t hear nothing. I didn’t feel nothing, and I said, ‘I’m unconscious.’ But I was conscious.

  “And then I felt it again, and I could hear things now and I could see things and they were bringing me back to consciousness. Then they did it again, and I couldn’t hear nothin’. And I couldn’t see nothing; it was just all white. And then they hit me again, and I could hear things and I could see things and I knew I was conscious again.”

  After they finished robbing Tupac, then Freddie, the would-be assailants stepped out of the lobby, still pointing their guns at the four, and backed away so they could continue watching them. Then they simply walked out the door and disappeared into the night. When they were gone, Tupac said, “Yo, I’m hit.”

  The four, with Tupac stumbling and bleeding from his wounds, stepped outside the small lobby and yelled, “Police!” As they walked back inside, they saw an NYPD squad car pull up. Just then, the elevator door in the lobby opened. Tupac got in. Zayd and Stretch followed him. Freddie, who also was bleeding from his gunshot wound, stayed downstairs with Tupac’s half-sister and waited for an officer.

  The three took the elevator to the eighth floor. When the elevator door opened, waiting for Tupac in the floor’s reception area was Booker. Tupac yelled, “Call the police! Call the police!” even though he’d seen a squad car downstairs. Biggie and Puffy were still recording on another floor.

  Tupac got on the phone and called his then-girlfriend Keisha Morris (who later would become his wife). He said, “Call my mom. I’ve just been shot.”

  By this time, Tupac was becoming hysterical and no doubt was going into shock from his injuries. He began pacing back and forth. He looked at Booker and said, “You the only one who knew that I was coming. You musta set me up.”

  Booker was astonished and told him, “Yo, you buggin, Tupac. C’mon. Talk to me.”

  But Tupac kept repeating, “Call the police.”

  Reporters, as well as the police, showed up at the scene. Tupac was interviewed by newspaper reporters who quoted him as saying it was a setup. Tupac also accused those with him of “dropping like a sack of potatoes” and not coming to his aid.

  A lot of people were in and out of the studio that night, Tupac pointed out, many of whom were as bejeweled with gold as he was, but who were not robbed or shot.

  Included in those present that night was record producer Andre Harrell. Tupac later accused Smalls and Combs, who now calls himself P-Diddy, of setting him up.

  Jacques Agnant, a Haitian music promoter who introduced Tupac to the woman who accused him of rape, also had ties to Little Shawn, with whom Tupac was supposed to record with that night. Tupac later rapped about Agnant in his album The Don Killuminati with this: “About a snitch named Haitian Jack, Knew he was working for the feds . . . Set me up.”

  Agnant filed a libel suit against Tupac’s estate, Death Row, lnterscope, the producer and engineer of the song, and the publishing company. However, the U.S. District Court in 1998 held that it was not defamatory for Tupac to accuse Agnant of being an undercover police informant. The court also held that Agnant could not recover monies from the Shakur estate for other statements made by Tupac, because “they did not constitute libel per se.”

  Andre Harrell gave this account of the studio shooting to a Vibe reporter in April 1999: “Everybody was all excited about Pac comin’ in, but we were starting to get antsy because he was supposed to get there at a certain time, and we wanted to see how this song with Little Shawn was going to set off.”

  When Tupac got off the elevator, “We were all standing in the hall,” Harrell said. “Tupac was just bopping back and forth saying, ‘I was set up.’ At first I didn’t realize he had been shot, because he wasn’t bleeding heavily from the head. It looked like he had had a fight. He said, ‘It’s not goin’ down like that.’ I was like, ‘Yo, you shot. You need to sit down.’ He told Stretch to roll him up a spliff [marijuana cigarette]. He was in a movie mode at this point. He did the whole James Cagney thing.”

  Harrell directed people inside the studio at the time to call 911. After an ambulance arrived, he told Stretch to ride with Tupac to Bellevue hospital so he wouldn’t be alone. He didn’t want anything more to happen to him. As paramedics were lifting him into the ambulance, Tupac flipped off a newspaper photographer, who caught the gesture on film.

  Though he was shot five times and lost a testicle, the prognosis was good: He would live. He checked out of the hospital shortly after his surgery the next day, because he wanted to be in court for his sentencing on the rape conviction.

  Officers wrote in their police report that Tupac was unarmed, but carried a magazine, ammo for a 10-millimeter. Freddie, the report said, was armed with a 10-millimeter handgun.

  A security guard had been on duty at the time of the shooting, but his whereabouts weren’t mentioned in the report. It was never made clear whether the guard had been in the lobby or in another part of the building at the time of the attack. Later, another guard said a camera had been pointed at the door at the time of the shooting. Buzzers upstairs give personnel on any floor the ability to let people in to the lobby, he said. “It’s pointed at the door so they can see who’s there,” the guard told me. “Then they’re buzzed in.”

  That news was an integral piece of the investigation, because it meant that whoever had shot Tupac had been buzzed in by someone inside. An employee later said that police did not confiscate videotape from the studio’s surveillance cameras. Instead, the investigation was abruptly halted and the case closed.

  But what the New York cops at the time considered to be a break in the Quad Studios shooting came in October 1996, about a month after Tupac was killed. In a published statement, federal prosecutors in New York said that Walter Johnson, a.k.a. “King Tut,” a 17-year career criminal, was a suspect in the 1994 shooting. Johnson was jailed in October 1996 and charged with 12 federal felony counts stemming from three armed robberies in Brooklyn. The charges didn’t include Tupac’s shooting, though law-enforcement sources told the New York Daily News that they were investigating statements he allegedly made to a confidential informant. “He [Johnson] said Tupac is a sucker,” the informant told investigators. “He said Tupac is not a real gangster and that he shot him.” As of 2002, however, Johnson had not been charged in the case.

  Investigators told the newspaper the Johnson investigation could help solve Tupac’s slaying. “We hope this will lead to a solution of the murder of Tupac,” one source close to the investigation told the Daily News. LVMPD’s Sergeant Manning could not recall talking to New York City police about the case, noting, “The only King Tut I’ve heard of is the one in Egypt.” Manning did say he had spoken a few times to the NYPD detectives about the Manhattan shooting, but just briefly.

  Some say Tupac was accidentally shot with his own gun when the attacker tried to grab it from him. There was no mention of that scenario, however, in the police report, which made no mention of Tupac being armed.

  Stretch, before he was shot to death in Queens exactly a year later, told Vibe magazine that Tupac was armed that night and accidentally was shot with his own gun. “Tupac got shot trying to go for his shit,” he said. “He tried to go for his gun, and he made a mistake on his own. But I’ll let him tell the world that. I ain’t even going to get into it all like that . . . He tried to turn around and pull the joint out real quick, but niggahs caught him, grabbed his hand when it was by his waist.”

  Stretch said that Zayd had taken Tupac’s gun from him before the police arrived on the scene, so Tupac wouldn’t be in possession of a firearm.

  After the shooting, videotape shot from outside Quad Studios by a TV camera operator showed Puffy inside the downstairs lobby, in a baseball cap with a straw hanging from his mouth, staring at the camera and talking to several men. News footage also showed Biggie walking out of the lobby, closely followed by Puffy.

  Tupac underwent surgery that night at Bellevue Hospital. The next morning, Biggie visited him. At that point, Tupac hadn’t yet accused Biggie of being involved in the shooting.

  The next morning Tupac, still recovering from surgery, checked himself out so he could be in court for his sentencing in his criminal trial. Rather than convalesce in a hospital, he stayed temporarily at actress and friend Jasmine Guy’s New York apartment. A few days later, Tupac went to prison to serve out his sentence for the sexual-assault conviction.

  Before his sentencing, Tupac had told MTV News: “If God sees it fit for me to spend some time in a cell, if he’s brought me so far from hell to put me here and now he wants me to go to jail, I’ll go. When I come out, I’ll be reborn. My mind will be sharper. The venom will be more potent. They shouldn’t send me there. You don’t throw more gasoline on a fire to put it out.”

  During Tupac’s incarceration, his album Me Against The World was released. For the first time ever, a jailed man had the country’s No. 1 best-selling album.

  • • •

  While in prison, Tupac obsessed in his isolation and became convinced that Biggie and Puffy had helped set up the Quad Studios’ ambush. The case, however, would never be solved.

  Instead, just a month after the shooting, the New York Police Department closed its investigation into the shooting. No one would ever learn what had really gone down that November night. The NYPD ended its probe when, they said, Tupac opted not to cooperate with investigators.

  “Calls were made to Shakur’s lawyer, but they never responded,” NYPD Detective Nagy told me. “His lawyer never called back. No one ever called back. Therefore, the case was closed.”

  NYPD police said that because Tupac had refused to cooperate, it meant the end of their case. “They were totally uncooperative. ... They more or less handled it in their own way,” Nagy said. The officer, clearly frustrated, then went on to outline the police’s attitude in a bold admission of the way things really are: “Why would a guy go out of his way to investigate a case when the guy who was shot didn’t even care?” he asked. “Why are you going to try hard when you have a million other cases?” That was the attitude investigators on the case had at the time, he said. He noted that to close a case, “you really need a valid reason. The boss has to sign off on it. This was a high-profile case. There had to be a valid reason to close it.”

  Even after Tupac was killed in Las Vegas, Nagy said, the Quad Studios case was not reopened. He explained, “You can reopen a case if somebody walks in and says, ‘I shot Tupac.’” Without a willing eyewitness, there would be no one to testify against a suspected shooter and, therefore, no case, Nagy said.

  Gregg Howard, Suge Knight’s publicist until 2000, said the shootings were nothing more than the result of jealousy by immature rappers. Combs’ attorney, Kenny Meiselas, on the other hand, said the record companies did not engage in petty jealousies among rappers and that Puffy was not involved in any way with the shooting.

  8

  ABOUT SUGE KNIGHT

  Homicide detectives wouldn’t learn anything new about the shooting of Tupac Shakur during their questioning of Suge Knight. The interview took place a few days after the shooting. They did find out, however, what was going through Suge’s mind as he made a U-turn and drove away from Flamingo Road instead of staying at the scene of the crime to wait for police and an ambulance. Suge told detectives his intent had been to find a hospital. Had Suge not turned around, had he kept driving east on Flamingo, he would have run into Desert Springs Hospital, practically next door to Club 662 where they originally were headed.

  You have to wonder about that, at least a little. The police certainly did.

  Suge, born Marion Hugh Knight in 1965, was not unfamiliar with the area. After all, he owned a house in Las Vegas. And he had spent two years at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, also located just east of where the shooting had taken place. He played for the UNLV Rebels football team. He was there on a full athletic scholarship.

  Halfway through his college career, Suge had caught the attention of UNLV recruiter Wayne Nunnely, head coach of the Rebels in 1986, who later moved on to work for the National Football League’s New Orleans Saints.

  “You didn’t really see that street roughness about him,” he remembered about Suge. (Knight had grown up on the rough streets of Compton, California.)

  A fellow player also said that rough side wasn’t visible on the playing field.

  Suge, according to Steve Stallworth, director of sports marketing at UNLV and the starting quarterback when Suge played on the defensive line, “was all about the team.” Stallworth said that his work ethic was second to none. “He never missed a practice. He was never even late for a practice.”

  Suge played for the Rebels in 1985 and ‘86, lettering both years as a first-team defensive lineman. He earned Rookie of the Year honors and was voted All Conference. He was also one of three player-elected captains of the team, along with teammate Eddie Wide Jr., during his senior year.

  The last time Eddie Wide saw Suge was a couple of nights before Tupac was shot. They ran into each other during an evening out on the town.

  “I saw him in passing,” said Wide, who still lives in Las Vegas. “He was busy, taking care of business. I saw him and we talked, basically, ‘How you doing, what’s up.’ You know, real quick.”

  Before that, the last time Wide had seen Knight had been in Irvine, California, when the two were trying out for some Canadian football teams at a combine camp—a pro-football combination camp where “different athletes are put together to showcase their talents,” Wide explained.

  “Suge was down there and a couple of other guys [from UNLV] were there, and we sat around and talked a little bit. We talked about what to do [on the field] mostly.”

  Wide described Knight as “a real cool guy everyone got along well with. If he had gang ties at the time, it didn’t show.”

  “I wouldn’t know about the neighborhood he came from or the kind of guy he was before [UNLV],” Wide continued. “We only met each other playing ball. What happened before that time, nobody knew. I didn’t know if he was a gang member or not and I didn’t care. I’m not from L.A. I was raised in Vegas pretty much all my life.

  “Marion was one of those guys who could, if someone had a problem, he’d talk to them. He was the kind of guy you liked to be around because he was cool. He wasn’t an asshole. He wasn’t cocky. He got what he gave. Marion and I got along. We were buddies. We were the type of guys [who] might go to a club together or grab something to eat. It was mostly black guys he hung out with, but he got along with everybody.

  “He’s got some serious talent, as far as playing ball. Very talented. We all had the same goal, and that was to play pro ball. He did what had to be done on the field. It’s a lot of work and the guys on scholarships worked hard. Marion came on a full ride [scholarship]. For somebody who was that talented, he could still be in pro ball.”

  As for his talent in the music business, that came later.

  “The music thing, that kind of came out of the blue, because there was this one guy [on the team] named Eric Collins,” Wide said. “Eric actually signed with Death Row later. Marion and Eric, these guys were both from L.A. Suge would always say how good Eric could rap. Eric was good. When Marion made the transition into music, I don’t know. I was surprised at how big and how fast [Death Row] went up. With the guy’s personality, you knew he was going to be successful at something. There were a lot of other guys getting in trouble in school. Some of the guys on our team are still in prison. To see Suge then and to see him now, I never would have predicted it, that he would be this kind of guy, the fact that he would have been in all the problems with the police, an outlaw. All the criminal activity, I never would have predicted.”

  Even while in college, with his sights set on becoming a professional athlete, Suge was moving toward becoming a businessman. While in school, Suge’s favorite classes at UNLV were business-related, and his favorite instructor was a business professor. His records at UNLV have been sealed, the registrar’s office said, after trying to pull up his transcripts in the college’s computer system.

  “I can’t give out any information on that student,” a school clerk said. “He has a hold on it himself, so nothing about him can be given out. I can’t give you any information without a signed release from him.”