The Killing of Tupac Shakur (17 page)

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

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.

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.”