The Killing of Tupac Shakur (6 page)

“Our main thing was to inform the local media that he had died and then return telephone calls. That’s how we handled it because of the volume. I don’t think we’ve ever in the history of this hospital held a press conference, nor will we probably ever do that. That’s not the way we choose to handle that kind of thing.”

Many hospitals, especially in California, hold press conferences to respond to high-volume inquiries about famous people. That way, they’re responding to everyone at the same time without having to return every call. Not in Las Vegas at that time. Since then, when another celebrity, actor and model Lauren Hutton, was seriously injured in October 2000 in a motorcycle accident, the hospital set up a hotline, with a recording giving periodic updates on her condition.

“To have celebrities here is not unusual,” Dale Pugh said. “We’ve had [lots of them]. I remember one out-of-state politician who was here. Bob Stupak [a flamboyant casino mogul who was critically injured in a 1995 motorcycle accident] was here – that’s well known. Brent Thurman, the National Finals Rodeo rider who died, was here. In none of those instances did we hold any sort of press conference. We did individual news interviews.”

As it turned out, it was a peaceful and somber crowd – mostly mourners – that stood vigil for Tupac outside the hospital that last afternoon and into the evening. No one appeared to be threatening. Cars slowly drove by the hospital as word of Tupac Shakur’s death spread across the TV, radio, and Internet airwaves. Some passengers in the cars threw gang hand signs at the people standing outside, but no one reacted. Tupac’s lyrics blared from car stereos.

• • •

Tupac’s futile six-day battle to survive marked the end of a lifetime racked with emotional and physical struggles, first on the streets and later on the entertainment scene.

His death rocked the gangsta rap world to its core. Black leaders called for peace among the rappers, and politicians, including then-Vice President Al Gore’s wife, Tipper, during a visit to Las Vegas, denounced the violence in gangsta-rap lyrics. (Tipper Gore, past head of the Parents Music Resource Council, was instrumental in creating and lobbying for Parental Advisory Stickers on CDs and tapes.)

Gang member Marcos, a friend of Tupac who declined to give his last name, made a telling statement while standing outside the University Medical Center in Las Vegas the day Tupac died. “We know who did it,” he said. “I’m just saying that whoever did this is going to get found. The people who find him, I don’t know what they’ll do, but they’ll take care of it in their own way. I mean, the pay back, it’s already started.” He didn’t name names. The week after Tupac Shakur was shot, bullets riddled the gang-infested streets of Los Angeles, particularly Compton, as drive-by shootings broke out at a record pace. Southern California police noted 12 retaliation shootings – three deadly – the following week.

Spelled out in an affidavit written by Compton Police Detective Tim Brennan is a shot-by-shot account of a five-day bloodbath in Compton prompted by Tupac’s shooting. War was declared between two notorious Compton gangs, the South Side Crips and the Mob Pirus. Both of the gangs were said to have strong ties with the Las Vegas shooting, namely Suge and Tupac with the Mob Pirus and Orlando Anderson with the South Side Crips. (Tupac always adamantly denied any gang affiliation; police have said otherwise.)

If the Compton PD’s account is to be believed, on September 9, 1996, even before Tupac died, three separate Piru sects convened at Lueders Park, a gang hangout in Compton, where the plan for retaliation for Tupac’s shooting was hatched. Compton police were told by their informant that five targets for drive-by shootings were chosen. At 2:58 that afternoon
on East Alondra, the first retaliation shooting took place; the victim was Darnell Brim, identified by police as “one of the leaders of the Southside Crips” and alleged to be one of the men in the Cadillac from which Tupac was shot. He was shot several times, suffering injuries to his back. During the Alondra Street drive-by, a 10-year-old bystander, Lakezia McNeese, was shot and critically injured. She survived.

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.

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.