Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (28 page)

Whether or not a person can, in fact, be trained to kill – particularly if this is against their wishes – is questionable. On the other hand, some psychologists have argued that where a subject has a deep-seated desire to kill, and has a specific target in mind, he or she may be encouraged to do so by using various persuasive techniques. This is, of course, especially effective where a subject already has a distorted sense of reality, as in the case of Mark Chapman.

Conspiracy theorists argue that by using a lone drifter with a history of mental illness to commit the murder, the FBI would draw attention away from their own involvement in the crime. However, there are several problems with this theory, apart from the fact that there is so little hard evidence to support it. In particular, it seems unlikely that such a person would make a reliable hit man, to say the least. By the time of his death, John Lennon had made himself very unpopular with the powers that be, both as a result of his political pronouncements and his affiliations to left-wing groups. However, the idea that the CIA or the FBI decided to resolve the situation by programming a mentally unstable gunman to take potshots at him in the middle of New York does seem a little far-fetched.

The fact remains, though, that in 1980 John Lennon was re-emerging from a fallow period to become a public figure once again and that this coincided with a shift towards the right in American politics. Perhaps it was the case that the United States administration feared a re-run of the battles that Lennon had fought with the authorities in the past. Nevertheless, in the absence of hard evidence to link Chapman to the security agencies, it seems more likely that this was sheer coincidence and that, tragically, Lennon met his death just as his star was beginning to rise once more. Perhaps it is harder for many to accept that he was the unfortunate victim of a random killing than that there was a conspiracy to plot his murder.

During the early 1990s, rap became the biggest music in America and its leading artists not only started to appear in the pop charts but also in the news headlines. Increasingly, the new breed of rappers not only described the gangster life but they started to live it too. Two of the leading names in the world of gangster rap were Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. (a.k.a. Christopher Wallace or Biggie Smalls).

Initially friends, they soon became sworn rivals. In fact, the two men seemed to be polar opposites. Tupac was based on the West coast while Biggie was based on the East. Tupac was signed to one leading rap label, Death Row, while Biggie was signed to its leading competitor, Bad Boy. Even their physiques were very different. Tupac was wiry and lean while Biggie, as his name suggests, was big all round. Both of them, however, were shot down in their prime, and the circumstances of their murders have kept the conspiracy theorists busy ever since.

Tupac was born in the Bronx, New York City on 16 June 1971. His given name was Lesane Parish Crooks but soon after his birth his mother Afeni, a member of the Black Panthers, changed his name to Tupac Amaru Shakur. He had a poverty-stricken, transient childhood in New York, before moving to Baltimore where he attended Baltimore School for the Arts during his teens and studied dance and theatre. However, when the family moved again, this time to Marin County, California, Tupac started to go off the rails and became embroiled in drug dealing. He also started getting seriously involved in rap music, making his recording debut in 1990. In the following year his acting training paid off when he won a lead part in the gangster film Juice. In the same year, 1991, he also released his first album.

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HOT IN THE HEAD AND SURVIVED
All of a sudden Tupac was a star with a string of hit records and several more film appearances. At the same time, however, he became involved in a series of violent incidents. In one of these, in Oakland in 1991, Tupac was the victim of police brutality. In another he shot two policemen in Atlanta because he thought they were abusing a black motorist. Charges against Tupac were dropped, however, when the police officers were discovered to be intoxicated and in possession of stolen weapons. In December 1993 Tupac was charged with sexually abusing a woman in his hotel room and was subsequently sentenced to four years in prison. While still on remand, though, Tupac was shot five times by two men in a New York recording studio. He survived, despite being shot in the head and in a subsequent interview said that he believed that Biggie, who up until then he had considered a friend, and Biggie's label boss Sean "Puffy" Combs, were responsible for the attack.

In the following year, February 1995, Tupac began his prison sentence. He was released after eight months, when his own label boss Suge Knight put up $1.4 million bail. In return for this, however, Tupac had to agree to release three albums for Knight's Death Row Records.

The first of these albums, All Eyez on Me, sold more than nine million copies. Disturbingly, the video for the single "I Ain't Mad at Cha", filmed a month before his death, showed Tupac being shot and killed. Immediately before his death Tupac recorded another album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory, using the pseudonym Makaveli.

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PROPHETIC ALBUM
The album was full of death-related imagery and it soon proved prophetic. On 7 September 1996 Tupac Shakur was hit four times in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas, after watching a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon. He died from the four gunshot wounds in the Las Vegas University Medical Center hospital six days later, on February 13th.

The Las Vegas police never found the culprits but they believed that Tupac's killers were Southside Crips. The evidence for this was that a few hours earlier Tupac had been involved in a fight in a hotel lobby with a 21-year-old Crip named "Baby Lane" Anderson. Anderson was interviewed by the police but not charged with the murder. Witnesses, unsurprisingly, were reluctant to come forward.

Within the rap world, however, suspicion soon fell on Biggie Smalls and Bad Boy records. Rumours abounded that Biggie had paid the Crips to kill Tupac. Suspicion intensified when Tupac's friend, Yafeu "Kadafi" Fula, who had been present at the shooting and was believed to know the killer's identity, was himself killed in an execution-style murder in New Jersey.

While the rumours about Biggie's involvement were not enough to cause the police to act, it came as no surprise to the public when, on 9 March 1997, just two years after Tupac's murder, Biggie himself was gunned down in Los Angeles when leaving a party given by Vibe magazine. Once again, the police were unable to find a witness who was prepared to come forward to identify the gunmen and the case remains unsolved. However, this time the suspicion fell upon Tupac's label boss Suge Knight.

So were the two fallen rappers simply victims of a gang culture that had run out of control or were their murders deliberately brought about by their rap music rivals? A story in the Los Angeles Times purported to prove that Biggie had ordered Tupac's killing, paid the killers, and provided them with the gun. The writer even alleged that Biggie had been in Los Angeles at the time. He did not explain, however, that no one had noticed the presence of the 6ft 3in 300lb rapper and his entourage. And in due course, clear evidence was produced to demonstrate that Biggie had been in a New York recording studio at the time of Tupac's death.

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ORTH MORE DEAD THAN ALIVE
?
Interest in the case was re-ignited in 2002 by the documentary Biggie and Tupac, made by British film-maker Nick Broomfield. The film pointed towards a sensational conclusion – that Suge Knight might have been responsible for murdering his own artist, Tupac, and that he then killed Biggie in order to cover up the initial murder so that it would look like a revenge killing.

The motive for this, supposedly, was that Tupac was about to leave Death Row having discovered that Knight was cheating him of royalties. At that point Knight decided Tupac was worth more to him dead than alive (a theory borne out by the enormous success of Tupac's posthumous releases). This idea was backed up by an alleged prison confession by Knight to another inmate and also by Knight's long record of using violence to get his own way in business deals.

It is a neat theory but one with a lot of holes in it. For starters, Knight was sitting next to Tupac when the car they were in was sprayed with bullets. One bullet nicked Knight's head. It would have been an incredibly risky plan for Knight to execute. Secondly, if the murder of Biggie was committed in order to cover up the killing of Tupac, surely he would have carried it out sooner and not waited for two years. Also, Knight would inevitably have been a suspect in Biggie's murder.

That said, it is a lot more plausible than the other conspiracy theory that surrounds the case, which suggests that Tupac, like Elvis, is not dead at all. The evidence for this supposition is a familiar mix of song lyrics that allegedly point to Tupac having faked his own death, the fact that his last album cover had a picture of himself being crucified (Jesus was resurrected after his crucifixion) and his use of the name 'Makaveli' for this last album. This was inspired by his reading of Machiavelli, who once wrote that faking one's death is a useful tactic for fooling one's enemies.

Fans have added on an ever more tenuous list of supposed clues to Tupac's 'faked' death. However, they have a hard time gainsaying the evidence to the contrary that was provided by the 1997 publication of a leaked photograph showing Tupac's badly damaged corpse lying on an autopsy table.

On 16 August 1977 Elvis Aron Presley was still the King of Rock and Roll, but he was a king whose crown was slipping. He was forty-two years old. He had not had a major hit in years. He was addicted to a whole range of pills, both legal and illegal, and he was grossly overweight. His recent Las Vegas shows had frequently been embarrassing, with Elvis incoherent and visibly confused. So when he was found dead, lying on his bathroom floor, on that August day, there was sadness in abundance but not a great deal of surprise. For the world at large, it was a simple story of American success and excess, the cautionary tale of a young man who had the world at his feet but ended up self-indulgently throwing his life away.