The Killing of Tupac Shakur (21 page)

In January 2002, Suge was acquitted of all federal racketeering charges leveled against him while he was in prison.

Today, he’s a free man. His record company has been renamed Tha Row. From all appearances, Tha Row and Suge Knight are thriving. In April 2001, Tha Row, while Suge was still incarcerated, released
Until the End of
Time, an album with some of Tupac’s previously unreleased songs. It debuted at No. 1 on Billboard’s Top 200 list.

Yafeu “Kadafi” Fula (also called Yak) was gunned down in the hallway of a federal housing project in Irvington, New Jersey, two months to the day after Tupac Shakur died.

Yaasmyn Fula, one of Afeni Shakur’s best friends and Kadafi’s mother, lost her only son in the shooting. Las Vegas police lost their only willing witness to Tupac’s murder.

Yafeu Fula was born on Sunday, October 9, 1977, and raised in Irvington, New Jersey. Like most of his fellow rappers in the back-up group the Outlawz, Kadafi had led a troubled youth growing up in the ghetto.

Kadafi looked up to Tupac like he was his big brother. Tupac, after all, had mentored him. Many of Fula’s friends believed that he and Tupac were half-brothers. They weren’t. While their mother’s were close friends, they were not related.

At the time of his death, Yafeu was living in Montclair, New Jersey.

Kadafi had toured with the Outlawz, first called Thug Life, then Outlawz Immortal, a quartet that regularly backed Tupac in concert and appeared with him on the first album he cut for Death Row,
All Eyez On Me
. All of the back-up singers, including Kadafi, had had the words “THUG LIFE” tattooed, like Tupac, across their mid-abdomens. Tupac planned to produce
records for the group under his newly formed company, Euphanasia. Tupac hired Fula’s mother Yaasmyn to manage his Beverly Hills-based company.

Yafeu, just 19 years old, was an unwitting player in the events surrounding Tupac’s murder. He was a passenger and eyewitness in the Lexus that was directly behind Suge’s BMW when Tupac’s shooting occurred. Bodyguard and former peace officer Frank Alexander was driving the Lexus; neither he nor the other passenger, rapper Malcolm Greenridge, who performed in the Outlawz as E.D.I., would immediately admit to seeing Tupac’s assailant. Only Yafeu told police at the time that he thought he could pick out Tupac’s shooter from a photo lineup. He was the only witness that night who exhibited a willingness to help investigators.

“Yafeu Fula was the only one who gave us an indication in the [initial] interview he could identify the gunman,” then-homicide Lieutenant Wayne Petersen said. “His statement was, ‘Yeah, I might be able to recognize him.’”

But in the aftermath of the shooting, detectives were frustrated by not being able to schedule an interview with Kadafi. Once Fula left Las Vegas, detectives were referred to Death Row attorney David Kenner, one of the lawyers they’d dealt with in their attempt to interview Suge Knight.

Before a meeting could be arranged, Fula was murdered.

On Sunday, November 13, 1996, at 3:48 a.m., Fula was fatally shot in the face at point-blank range with a handgun while in a hallway of a federal housing project on Mechanic Street in Orange, New Jersey, where his girlfriend lived. Found slumped against a hallway wall on the third floor, he was taken by ambulance to University Hospital in Newark. Efforts to save his life were futile and he was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. Yafeu Fula was born on a Sunday, and he died on a Sunday.

There were reports that Fula had been wearing a flak jacket when he was shot. Bruce “Fatal” Washington, a fellow rapper in the Outlawz, told reporters that Fula and the other members of the group frequently wore bullet-resistant vests
for protection, especially in the wake of Tupac’s murder.

Like Tupac, Fula was shot following a Tyson heavyweight prize fight, slain just hours after a Mike Tyson-Evander Holyfield fight in Las Vegas.

Within two days of the murder, Orange police arrested and charged an Irvington, New Jersey, teenager in connection with the murder. A few hours later, on the afternoon of November 14, 1996, a second suspect surrendered to investigators working for the Essex County prosecutor’s office. Nine months later the teenagers’ identies were revealed as Kaseem Nadier Way and Rashad Clark. Their names weren’t released earlier because they were minors.

Orange Police immediately claimed the Fula case was not related to Tupac’s murder. Publicly, Las Vegas investigators, too, insisted there was no link. LVMPD’s Sergeant Manning attributed Fula’s death, in part, to the general nature of being a young black male in this country today, with the odds against him.

Another officer close to the case agreed, comparing it to Tupac’s murder. “Just because Tupac was famous,” he said, “does not mean we’re going to assign more detectives than usual [to the case]. Tupac was a young black man in America, and young black men get murdered.”

Statistics show that black-on-black gun violence has been the leading cause of death for black youths 15 to 19 years old since 1969. From 1987 to 1989, the gun homicide rate for black males 15 to 19 increased 71 percent. Of the roughly 20,000 murders committed each year in the U.S. between 1991 and 1995, 50 percent were cases involving black victims.

Privately, Las Vegas police say that while their sense is that the Fula case probably is related to Tupac’s, they have to go on the evidence, not a gut feeling. The criminal-justice system demands that when police submit a case to the district attorney’s office, the evidence must be strong enough for it to be approved for criminal prosecution. Manning said he couldn’t go on instinct and he couldn’t go on a gut feeling. Still, it’s hard to imagine that a possible star witness to a murder
who gets gunned down just two months later isn’t in some way connected to the crime he witnessed.

• • •

Having been intimately involved with this story, I recognized the connection the minute I heard about it and broke the story.

I was working on Monday, November 14, making my beat rounds on the phone as I did every morning. Since I was working at the time for an afternoon daily, I was on deadline each morning for that day’s edition. I made a routine phone call to homicide to see whether there was anything new in the Shakur investigation. I was told that detectives had sketchy information that a witness in the case had been murdered back East; homicide had gotten a message overnight on its answering machine. The investigator didn’t know how to spell Yafeu Fula’s name. He didn’t know the name of the city where the witness was murdered. He did know that it had happened somewhere in New Jersey.

I hung up and immediately relayed what little I knew to the city desk and was told to see what I could get in 30 minutes. In the meantime, the news desk freed up space on the front page just in case the story panned out.

I picked cities at random, phoned directory assistance for the numbers, and then, one by one, called about 10 police departments; the last one had heard there’d been a murder in Orange, New Jersey. I called the police department there and asked for the homicide division. An officer confirmed that there had been a murder the day before. The captain who could tell me about it, however, was in a meeting, unavailable to speak with me. No one else there was authorized to talk to the press. The officer invited me to attend an afternoon news conference. I told him that I was in Las Vegas and needed information for that day’s paper. He said he’d heard the homicide got a brief routine mention in one of the area’s newspapers, but he didn’t know which one. He also said
that no mention was made that Fula was an eyewitness in Tupac’s murder or that Las Vegas police had been trying to schedule an interview with him. I called the papers. Within a few minutes, I reached a reporter at the
Star-Ledger
in Orange who faxed me a copy of a short article.

The newspaper reported that Yafeu Fula had been shot to death. Wire services had not moved the story overnight.

The connection had not been made—nor reported—that Fula was a key witness in Tupac’s murder and that now he, too, was dead.

Orange Police Captain Richard Conte called me a few minutes later with the details. The captain told me he had not been made aware that Fula was a witness to a murder.

My paper, the
Las Vegas Sun
, bannered the story on the front page, above the fold. The article began, “A key witness Metro Police have been trying to interview since the fatal shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur has been murdered in New Jersey.” The Associated Press picked up the piece and it was the lead story on local and national TV news programs that evening.

Officially, Las Vegas and Orange police claimed that Fula’s murder was not connected to Tupac’s slaying. “It doesn’t appear at this time to be involved with the Tupac Shakur killing,” Captain Conte told reporters who followed up on the story.

When I pressed him about a Las Vegas connection, Conte said Fula knew the two people who shot him and that it may have been drug-related.

“From what we understand right now,” the captain said, “one has nothing to do with the other. I think it’s more or less a lifestyle-related homicide, as opposed to Death Row versus Biggie and all that. The availability that people have of drugs and guns—I think he died because of that, not because he saw Tupac Shakur killed. It was a lifestyle thing. [Fula] was going out with a girl there. He was at her apartment.”

Conte noted, “In talking to California and Las Vegas detectives, I do not believe [Fula’s death] was related to either
Tupac Shakur or gang affiliation. With the evidence at hand, I can say it’s not gang-related.”

LVMPD’s Sergeant Kevin Manning, as well, maintained there was no evidence to link Fula’s killing with his being a witness in Shakur’s murder. “Based on the information we received from Orange Police, we don’t think there’s a connection,” Manning told me. Las Vegas homicide never went to New Jersey to interview the murder suspects. They based their opinions on Conte’s.

Manning did, however, express defeat. “It just kind of adds to our frustration about this whole investigation,” he said. “It’s another dead end for us. He spoke to us the night of the shooting, and based on what we got from him that night, we wanted to speak to him again. We wanted to show him some photographs.”

• • •

Both suspects in Yafeu Fula’s murder pleaded not guilty. One of them was a blood cousin of Outlawz member Mutah Wasin Shabazz Beale, who uses the moniker “Napoleon.”

Kaseem Nadier Way and Rashad Clark remained in custody at the Essex County Youth House until their cases were processed by the judicial system.

After the arrests of Way and Clark, Captain Conte said, “Basically, the case is over.” Prosecutor Clifford Minor, however, said the investigation into Fula’s death was continuing and that it was too early to speculate on a motive.

On Wednesday, October 14, 1998, according to Essex County court records, the indictment against Kaseem Nadier Way was dismissed by the court after a motion was filed by the prosecution. A court administrator said the dismissal was for lack of evidence. Kaseem was released from custody.

Rashad Clark was offered a plea bargain to a lesser charge of manslaughter in the Fula case. He accepted it. On October 9, 1998, Rashad was sentenced by Judge Richard Camp to seven years in prison, with a three-year parole eligibility.

A motive in the murder has never been made public.

After four years of silence about the shooting, in 2001 members of the Outlawz talked about Yafeu’s death, in magazine interviews. They said that Napoleon’s cousin was playing with a gun when he exchanged words with Yafeu. The gun, they said, accidentally went off in Yafeu’s face. The police investigation never mentioned an accident and the rap group’s take on the shooting has never been corroborated.

Since Tupac and Kadafi’s deaths, the Outlawz have remained together. They originally signed with Death Row Records in March 1997. But after a contract dispute, they left to record under an indie label.

On Sunday, March 9, 1997, East Coast rap superstar Biggie Smalls, also known as Notorious B.I.G., was attending a star-studded party in Los Angeles to celebrate the 11th Annual Soul Train Music Awards. He’d been in Los Angeles for about two weeks doing West Coast interviews and had canceled a flight to Europe so he could attend the post-awards get-together. The party, held at the Petersen Automotive Museum in the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles and sponsored by
Vibe
magazine, Qwest Records, and Tangueray Gin, was supposed to have been private, but by the time Biggie and his associates and friends arrived, about 2,000 people had filed into the museum.

Biggie, six-foot-three and weighing 350 pounds, wore a long-sleeved black-velour shirt and faded blue jeans. It was too warm for a jacket. Around his neck on a heavy gold chain hung a large gold Jesus Christ pendant, not the prized Bad Boy Entertainment gold medallion and logo with a baby wearing a baseball cap and work boots. Biggie also wore one of his trademark hats, a bolo riding cap.

Biggie was a presenter at the awards ceremony at the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium. He was booed as he walked on. It didn’t daunt his enthusiasm, though. He bent over the mike and said, “Whad up, Cali?” He felt honored to be a presenter.
He was in good company. Also appearing throughout the evening were co-hosts Gladys Knight, LL Cool J, and Brandy, along with fellow presenters Snoop Dogg, Aaliyah, Immature, Tisha Campbell, and Heavy D.

The night’s biggest award, for Best R&B/Soul or Rap Album, went posthumously to Biggie’s onetime rival, Tupac Shakur, for his multi-platinum double-disc
All Eyez On Me
.

The night also marked the end of a lengthy recording session in L.A., as well as a big promotion opportunity for Biggie’s
Life After Death
album, to be released in just two weeks. All Biggie wanted to do that night was relax with his friends.

The guest list for the party included Heavy D, Busta Rhymes, Chris Tucker, Da Brat, Yo-Yo, Jermaine Dupree, and, of course, Biggie Smalls and his friend, record producer, and owner of Bad Boy Records Sean “Puffy” Combs. Also attending was Kidada Jones, Tupac’s girlfriend at the time of his death.