On September 10, George Mack, identified as a “Leuders Park Piru,” and Johnnie Burgie were shot in front of 713 North Bradfield Street, a known hangout for Pirus. They both survived. Also on September 10, Gary Williams, brother of former Death Row Records security employee George Williams, was shot while on the corner of Pino and Bradfield streets. He, too, survived his wounds.

  On September 11, Bobby Finch was shot to death while standing outside a house on South Mayo. Compton Police told Las Vegas detectives that Finch was believed to be a passenger in the Cadillac from which Tupac was fatally injured. Finch, not a gang member himself, was a bodyguard who grew up in the same neighborhood as the Southside Crips, according to Compton Police Captain Danny Sneed.

  On September 13, Tyrone Lipscomb and David McKulin were shot at while in front of 802 South Ward. They both survived. The suspects in this case, Compton police said, were believed to be members of the Pirus. Also on September 13, Mitchell Lewis, Apryle Murph, and Frederick Boykin were shot while in front of 121 North Chester. All three survived. Three Bloods members were alleged to have done the shooting while on foot.

  All the shootings, as outlined in the Compton PD’s affidavit, were believed to be retaliatory acts following Tupac’s Las Vegas shooting.

  Two months later, the lone witness to the shooting, Yafeu Fula, was murdered in New Jersey. Six months later, East Coast superstar rapper Biggie Smalls, under contract to Bad Boy Entertainment, rival to Death Row Records, was shot to death in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles that was eerily similar to the one that claimed Tupac’s life.

  Meanwhile, Death Row Records, Tupac’s label, started to unravel. Suge Knight, CEO of Death Row, jailed two months after Tupac’s shooting for a parole violation, was sentenced to nine years in prison for his role in the fight with Orlando Anderson at the MGM Grand just hours before Tupac was shot. At the time, the FBI and IRS were looking into Death Row’s books and its associations.

  In the aftermath, the slayings of the two hottest hip-hop stars stirred criticism of the rap world and made record companies uneasy, but the murders didn’t hurt sales or deter fans; it was just the opposite. Both Tupac and Biggie’s final albums went to number one on Billboard magazine’s record charts. Tupac’s last album Makaveli and Biggie’s album Life After Death ... ‘Til Death Do Us Part, both released posthumously, broke all-time sales records, generating talk that the two rap superstars were worth more dead than alive.

  The latest retaliation shooting occurred April 3, 2002, when Alton “Kungry” McDonald, 37, a former production manager for Death Row Records, was shot to death as he filled up his car at a Shell gas station in Compton. A truck pulled up and one or more people got out and opened fire. McDonald was hit several times in his upper body and died at St. Francis Medical Center in Lynwood. The killers got away. Police found large-caliber handgun casings around the gas pumps. In the hours following the shooting, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department sent a gang-enforcement team to search for suspects and stem further violence. Authorities said a man who had been with McDonald ran from the scene. The car McDonald was driving at the time of the shooting was registered to a former Compton police officer, Reggie Wright Jr., who reportedly served as head of security at Wrightway for Suge Knight. McDonald was in the entourage the night Tupac was gunned down in Las Vegas. He was also involved in the video-taped brawl at the MGM Grand hours before Tupac was killed and could be seen in the footage dressed in white.

  All the while, Las Vegas police continued to investigate Tupac Shakur’s murder. But critics, including Tupac’s mother, her attorney, and witnesses, complained about the LVMPD’s handling of the case from the first moments following the shooting.

  3

  THE SCUFFLE

  The Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon match was supposed to begin at eight o’clock sharp that Saturday night, September 7th, but it started about 15 minutes late. Then, Tyson knocked out Seldon in the first round in less than two minutes.

  Tupac Shakur, Suge Knight, and two others who attended the fight met up with the rest of their entourage outside the MGM Grand Garden’s doors, where the match was held. The group walked out of the arena and into the casino. Tupac was spotted leaving the Grand Garden by freelance video cameraman Cornell Wade, who worked for a Las Vegas-based video services company that was filming celebrities for TV shows. That night Wade was contracted by Black Entertainment Television (BET). The BET reporter Wade was working with had trouble getting out of the crowded arena. And as the cameraman stood outside the exit waiting for her, he recognized Tupac as he walked through the turnstiles and out of the arena.

  Wade was in the midst of interviewing Louis Gossett Jr. when he spotted Tupac. Unlike Gossett, Tupac wasn’t one of the celebrities Wade was assigned to film. But he thought to himself, What the heck. I’ll [film] him anyway. He wrapped up his interview with Gossett and walked a few steps toward Tupac. He said, “I’m with Black Entertainment Television. Can I ask you about the fight?”

  “Sure. No problem, man. Go ahead,” Tupac replied as his record producer, Suge Knight, stood quietly in the background, behind him.

  Wade put a mike in front of Tupac and switched on the camera. “What’d you think of tonight’s match?” Wade asked.

  Tupac looked straight into the camera lens and said, “Did y’all see that? Fifty punches. I counted. Fifty punches. I knew he was gonna take him out. We bad like that—come outta prison and now we runnin’ shit.”

  It was the last interview of Tupac’s life.

  Later, when the reporter learned that Tupac had been at the Tyson fight and had been shot afterward, she commented to Wade, “I wish we would have gotten video of him.”

  “I did,” Wade told her. “I got it.” He handed the tape over to BET, even though he undoubtedly could have sold it to the TV tabloids for an exorbitant price. The short interview aired for several days on an untold number of national TV news programs.

  At 8:45 p.m., as Tupac, Suge, and their friends were winding their way through the casino on their way to the street, they ran into Orlando Tive Anderson, from Compton, California. A fist fight broke out.

  Exactly what precipitated the fight is still not completely known. But there were rumors that Anderson, also known as “Little Lando” and “Land,” had tried to grab a large gold medallion with the Death Row Records insignia from the neck of one of Tupac’s friend. As a result of whatever prompted the beef, Tupac and the group jumped Anderson. There were also reports that Tupac and Orlando had exchanged heated words earlier in the evening, inside the Grand Garden as they waited for the bout to begin, which caused the beef outside. Anderson and his friends were said to be sitting in the front-row seats reserved for Tupac and Suge when the entourage walked in to watch the fight. (Those rumors later proved to be false when Orlando could not produce a ticket stub for police and told them he had come to Las Vegas “to gamble.” There was no evidence that Orlando had been inside the Grand Garden Arena.)

  Hotel security guards quickly converged on the scene and broke up the altercation with Anderson.

  After the run-in, Tupac and his crew hurriedly left the scene, while an unnamed MGM Grand security guard called in Las Vegas police, already on premises to work the fight. The officers talked to the security guard and the victim (Orlando), whose identity they didn’t establish. The cops offered to take the then-unnamed victim to the MGM Grand’s basement security office to fill out a police incident report and sign a complaint. But Orlando said no. He told them he was okay and didn’t want to press charges. Because he refused, and appeared to be uninjured except for some bruises, the officers did not even write down his name before letting him go.

  In the state of Nevada, if a victim of a crime declines to file a report, police can let the victim go. That’s the law. But if they think there’s probable cause to pursue the case—based on visible injuries, for example—they may file a police report. In this case, they chose not to.

  Metro Police Lieutenant Wayne Petersen defended security’s failure to identify the victim. “No victim, no crime,” he explained. “In a misdemeanor battery like this one, if the victim chooses not to fill out a crime report, we can’t force him to. It’s not unusual at all. It happens all the time. And we certainly aren’t going to generate more work for ourselves and take a report if the victim is not willing to cooperate. In court, to prosecute, you have to have the victim’s testimony.”

  But in this case, a bigger crime might have been avoided by pursuing the case and questioning Orlando Anderson further: Anderson is widely believed to be the shooter in Tupac’s murder.

  The scuffle between Tupac and Anderson was captured on MGM Grand security videotape. The murky recording shows seven to eight men—Tupac, Suge, their paid bodyguards, and other members of the entourage—throwing the then-unidentified black man to the casino floor, then stomping on and beating him.

  “They kicked the holy shit out of him,” said a police source who viewed the entire unedited version of the surveillance videotape. “They beat him up pretty bad.”

  But because the original videotape was grainy and indistinct, it was difficult to tell exactly what was going on, according to homicide Detective Brent Becker. “It’s like a pile of people,” he said.

  On Wednesday, September 11, Metro Police issued a third news release. It said:

  “The LVMPD homicide investigators have viewed a surveillance tape provided by the MGM Grand. The tape depicts an altercation between Tupac Shakur, some of his associates, and an unknown person. The altercation was broken up by security. Shakur and his people left the area. The unknown person was then interviewed by MGM security and LVMPD patrol officers.

  “The unknown person was asked if he wished to file a report, but he declined. It does not appear that the person or the patrol officers knew that Shakur was the other person in the altercation. The unknown person was still with security and patrol officers when Shakur and his associates left the building.

  “Investigators have no reason, at this time, to believe that the altercation has any connection to the [Tupac] shooting.

  “The videotape will not be released since it appears to have no evidentiary value to the shooting incident.”

  • • •

  No “evidentiary value” just hours before a homicide shooting? In retrospect, the decision was premature and possibly, indeed, evidentiary. The tape, in fact, was later released, made public, and used against Suge Knight to put him in prison for violation of parole.

  Why didn’t the police and security officers detain Tupac Shakur and members of his entourage for questioning after the attack on Orlando Anderson? Though the official statement denies it, surely those first on the scene knew that Tupac was involved. Was it Suge and Tupac’s celebrity status that allowed them to walk away from an obvious crime? Was it Suge’s business connection to Metro? After all, off-duty Metro officers at that very moment were being paid time-and-a-half wages by Death Row to patrol Suge’s house and club. Later, just 15 minutes before the shooting, Suge would again be treated preferentially when he was stopped, but not cited, for failure to display a license plate on his car and for playing his music too loudly. Did the polite police behavior stem from the fear of offending a celebrity? Police say no.

  Contrary to the claim in the police news bulletin that the videotape would not be released, it was subsequently relinquished by LVMPD. While continuing to adamantly deny the beating was related to Tupac’s homicide, detectives released the tape to Fox’s “America’s Most Wanted” TV show. Later, it was subpoenaed by the Los Angeles Superior Court for Suge Knight’s parole-violation proceedings, where it became public record.

  Another surveillance tape shows an agitated Tupac and his friends storming through the casino at the MGM Grand. Suge can be seen running behind Tupac, trying to catch up, with members of their entourage following behind. Tupac is seen slamming his hand against an MGM glass entrance door as he angrily leaves the casino at the valet area.

  After the existence of the surveillance tapes became widely known to the media, Sergeant Manning dismissed the scuffle, saying, “It appears to be just an individual who was walking through the MGM and got into an argument with Tupac. The man probably didn’t know who he was dealing with. He probably didn’t know it was Tupac Shakur.” Later, of course, we found out differently.

  The victim “wasn’t dressed like everyone else,” an investigator said. “The subject was wearing a ball club shirt, like a team jersey, and wasn’t dressed up like Shakur and his group.” In other words, he didn’t look like he fit in with Tupac and his flashy West Coast crew, who were wearing expensive clothes and jewelry.

  At some point, and privately, the investigators changed their thinking. The videotape of the scuffle became evidence. What had been a minor fight-night encounter turned into an event of enormous significance in the grand scheme of the investigation.

  “Any of those incidents leading up to Tupac’s death obviously are of interest from an investigative standpoint,” Lieutenant Peterson later said. “[But] we don’t have a case. We’ve got no evidence linking [Orlando Anderson] to this [murder].”

  The surveillance videotape was forwarded to the evidence vault for storage several months after the murder.

  After the shooting, homicide detectives scrambled to learn the identify of the victim in the MGM Grand altercation by talking to the officers who responded that night. Only the man’s first name, “Orlando,” could be recalled. That was enough, according to police. How the first name of a young black man could have been enough information for Metro detectives to contact the Compton Police Department wasn’t revealed and is still unclear. Perhaps they had more than just his first name. Compton police gang officers were able to give Las Vegas police the name of “Orlando Anderson” and shared information that Anderson was allegedly tied to the Los Angeles Southside Crips street gang. Police in Compton quickly dispatched a photo of Orlando, a mug shot from their files. The photo was shown to the officers and security guards working at the MGM Grand on September 7th to see if they could identify him. They could. They positively identified Orlando Anderson as the victim of the beating.

  Just as the MGM Grand hotel videotape was obtained by LVMPD, investigators could have easily confiscated videotape from Excalibur, where Compton police say Orlando Anderson stayed that weekend. Detectives could have viewed surveillance videotape from the Excalibur parking garage to see whether Orlando was captured getting in or out of a white Cadillac. Or they could have looked to see who Orlando—in town, police say, with fellow gang members from Compton—was hanging out with and what cars they were getting around in. Las Vegas police didn’t do any of that.

  The vibes Compton police were getting from LVMPD homicide detectives was that they, for whatever reason, weren’t interested in solving Tupac’s murder. A raid that took place just four days after the shooting confirmed, police say, Compton officers’ suspicions that Orlando was involved in some way.

  It happened like this. On Wednesday, September 11, Los Angeles-area police raided a Compton house, responding to reports that the men inside had weapons. When officers arrived, they found Orlando Anderson and four other alleged Crips members standing in the front yard of the house. Anderson reportedly ran inside, followed closely by police. Upon questioning, he claimed he didn’t live at that address, that he lived next door, even though police said a high school diploma bearing his name hung on a bedroom wall. Inside, investigators discovered an AK-47 assault rifle, a 38-caliber revolver, two shotguns, a 9-millimeter M-11 assault pistol, and ammunition. Police confiscated the weapons. But because Orlando insisted he didn’t live in the house and police had no real evidence to prove otherwise, they let him go.

  Even so, in the days following, police began focusing on Orlando Anderson as a possible suspect in Tupac’s murder, as well as in an unrelated L.A.-area killing. Both Las Vegas and Compton police said they’d received several tips accusing Orlando of being connected to the Las Vegas crime. One tip, given to Compton police on September 13, held that a reputed member of the Bloods identified the man who shot Tupac as Orlando Anderson.

  An affidavit signed by Compton Police Detective Tim Brennan, dated September 25, 1996, and unsealed in February 1997 in Los Angeles Superior Court, read: “Informants have told police that Southside Crips were responsible for the Las Vegas shooting [of Shakur]. There is also an ongoing feud between Tupac Shakur and the Bloods-related Death Row Records with rapper Biggie Smalls and the East Coast’s Bad Boy Entertainment, which employed Southside Crips gang members as security.”

  Bad Boy Entertainment has adamantly denied it hired Crips members.

  “We have no knowledge of security being provided by Crip or other gang members,” Bad Boy spokeswoman Maureen Connelly said in a released statement. “Bad Boy Entertainment employs full-time security personnel and they [are] supplemented by off-duty members of the Los Angeles police force.”

  The accusations by Compton police were damning evidence against Orlando. Even so, he remained free. And Orlando, through his attorney, denied any involvement. Edi M.O. Faal, Rodney King’s one-time attorney, represented Orlando. Although he admitted Orlando was the man assaulted at the MGM Grand by Tupac and his entourage, Faal denied that his client had any involvement in Tupac’s murder.

  Anderson also strongly denied any connection to Tupac’s death. But Compton police remained convinced and unwavering that Shakur’s murder was the result of a Bloods-Crips feud. What was frustrating, Compton police sources say, is having evidence against Orlando and watching LVMPD detectives ignore it.

  • • •

  In mid September 1996, Los Angeles police organized a massive predawn sweep of Bloods and Crips neighborhoods—in Lakewood, Long Beach, Compton, and L.A. It was a 45-location gang sweep. The action would go down two weeks later, in October. The raid was organized after three people were killed in 12 shootings in the Compton area the week following the Tupac shooting, Compton Police Captain Steven Roller told reporters. He described the violence as possible retaliation for Tupac’s murder.