The Killing of Tupac Shakur (22 page)

A noteworthy, if not a surprise, attendee was Orlando Anderson, the reputed Crips gang member all but accused of having something to do with Tupac’s murder. Also with Orlando was his uncle, Keefee D, or Dwayne Keith Davis, an alleged Crips member. LAPD homicide detective Fred Miller, a lead detective in the Biggie Smalls murder case, later told me that Orlando’s appearance had “no significance” for investigators and that they had ruled out Orlando as a player in the murder-scene scenarios. Orlando had been trying to break into the music business and had built a studio in a garage behind his uncle’s Compton house, where he lived.

At about eight o’clock the guests began arriving at the auto museum on Museum Row on the Miracle Mile in the Wilshire District near Hollywood.

At the post-awards party, the DJ played a single, “Hypnotize,” from Biggie’s new album. Biggie talked about the new release in an interview with Black Entertainment Television. “If you thought the [first] album was a fluke, hold your head, ‘cause this next one, man, it’s all. It’s all like you never
thought. The next album is called
Life After Death
, and we ain’t takin’ no prisoners.”

By 9:30 p.m. the party began to take off. It was about that time, witnesses later recalled, that Biggie was seen enjoying himself, talking and laughing. He sat at a table on the edge of the dance floor, directly in front of a classic German car, with Combs and record-producer Jermaine Dupree.

Russell Simmons, president and CEO of Def Jam Records, stopped by Biggie’s table. Actor Wesley Snipes and singer Seal, among others, were sitting nearby. Women danced for Biggie at his table. Biggie, who was using a cane, couldn’t get up and dance with them, because he had broken his leg in a car accident and was still recovering. He signed autographs. He appeared to be having a good time.

More people crowded onto the second floor of the museum. By midnight, the room was overly packed. About 30 minutes later, at 12:35 a.m., Los Angeles fire marshals, already standing by for the special event, announced they were breaking up the party. By that time, an estimated 2,000 were in attendance. Two hundred fans milled around outside hoping to catch a glimpse of a celebrity. The building needed to be evacuated, fire marshals said.

“This party is over!” barked a fire marshal’s voice over a loudspeaker. “Please leave in an orderly manner. Immediately!”

As people left, Biggie and Puffy Combs stayed upstairs waiting for the crowd to disburse. Biggie had to take it slowly because of his leg. While they waited, they posed together for a last-minute photo. It would be the last photograph taken of Biggie alive.

By 12:45 a.m., the guests spilled onto the street. Biggie and Puffy emerged from the building through the crowd and stood at valet for a few minutes. They talked with friends and made arrangements to meet at a private after-party at the home of Interscope Records executive Steven Stoute.

Biggie and his group left the parking garage and walked to the street, where their SUVs were parked. Biggie climbed
into the front passenger seat of his rented GMC Suburban (he didn’t have a driver’s license and never drove himself). Biggie’s driver, a bodyguard and friend identified only as Greg, got behind the wheel.

Just like Tupac six months before him, Biggie was sitting shotgun. He was a perfect target.

On the bumper of Biggie’s Suburban was a sticker that read, “Think B.I.G. March 25, 1997,” which was a promotion for his upcoming CD release. Damien “D-Roc” Butler and Lil’ Cease got in the back seat. Another Suburban, carrying Combs and others, pulled into the street. Biggie’s Suburban followed. Falling in behind Biggie’s vehicle was a Chevy Blazer. The Blazer carried the group’s personal bodyguards—all off-duty cops from the Inglewood Police Department, the same pool of moonlighting cops from which Suge Knight drew security guards. One of those off-duty cops was behind the wheel of the Blazer.

The convoy headed down Fairfax Avenue toward Wilshire Boulevard. All three SUVs stopped at a red light at the Wilshire intersection, about 100 yards from the entrance to the museum. Just then, a dark-colored sedan pulled up next to the second GMC’s passenger side and stopped. The sedan’s driver, a black man in his early twenties wearing a suit, dress shirt, and bowtie, stuck a 9-millimeter silver-colored handgun out the window and opened fire. More than a half-dozen rounds were pumped from the semi-automatic. Biggie, who for a moment had a look of surprise on his face, was hit seven times in his chest and abdomen. He was the only one hit.

Damien and Lil’ Cease saw enough of the shooter to help police draw a composite sketch of him. Damien told the
Los Angeles Times
that Biggie, for a fleeting moment, appeared to recognize the shooter.

Puffy Combs said he heard the crack of gunfire. “I jumped out of my car and ran over to his,” he told the
New York Daily News
. “I was saying the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Marys. I was begging God to help him out. I was touching him and talking to him in his ear.”

Biggie lost consciousness almost immediately. He was slumped over in his seat.

The shooter, in the meantime, simply drove away. The off-duty Inglewood Police Department officers moonlighting that night as security for Biggie and Puffy took off in their Blazer after the gunman. Their efforts were unsuccessful. The shooter had sped away into the night. The off-duty cops did not get a license-plate number.

Lil’ Cease, Damien, and Puffy tried to move Biggie, but he was too heavy. Instead, they propped him up in the passenger seat and closed the Suburban’s door. Lil’ Cease and Damien got in the back. Puffy followed behind in his Suburban. They left the scene of the crime and headed for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, less than two miles away.

When they arrived at the hospital, they helped emergency personnel lift Biggie’s lifeless body onto a stretcher.

Biggie Smalls was dead on arrival. Hospital officials said Biggie probably died immediately after being shot.

He’d suffered massive injuries from the seven shots he’d taken in his chest and abdomen. He’d lost a lot of blood from internal injuries. Still, for about 20 minutes, doctors and emergency-room personnel tried to resuscitate him. But he had been mortally wounded. “They tried everything in the hospital to revive him,” said Voletta Wallace, Biggie’s mother. “Everything.”

At 1:15 a.m., 24-year-old Christopher George Latore Wallace was pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai, the same hospital where Eazy-E had died of AIDS the year before.

“He died in my arms,” Biggie’s friend Damien told the
L.A. Times
.

Biggie was buried on Tuesday, March 18, in his native New York City. With thousands cheering along the route, his casket was driven through the impoverished streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant where he was raised. Some onlookers jumped onto parked cars and began dancing to his music, blaring from ghetto blasters. Ten people were arrested for disorderly conduct.

• • •

The similarities in the lives and deaths of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls are striking.

Like Tupac, Christopher Wallace was born in Brooklyn and grew up on the streets of Bed-Stuy. They both were raised by single mothers. Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace, a Jamaican national, was a preschool teacher. His father, also Jamaican, left when Christopher was two. But unlike Tupac’s troubled and impoverished childhood, Voletta said she tried to raise her son in a stable wholesome environment.

Mrs. Wallace said that her son was once an honor-roll student at Queen of All Saints middle school.

“According to what I’ve read, he’s some hooligan from a single-parent household in a run-down ghetto walk-up. There are plenty of intelligent good-hearted kids from single-parent homes, and I always had a beautiful apartment. He has never gone hungry. He never went without.”

Tupac, too, had been a good student.

Despite his mother’s best efforts, Biggie succumbed to the lure of the street. He dropped out of high school at 17 to sell drugs. So did Tupac.

“When he quit school, I wanted to kill him,” Voletta said. “Finally, when he was eighteen, I said, ‘If you can’t live by my rules, you can’t live under my roof.’ I don’t care if I was cold. If I had to do it all over again, I would.”

At that age, Biggie was cocky. “I was full-time, a hundred-percent hustler,” says one of Biggie’s rap songs. “Sellin’ drugs, waking up early in the morning, hitting the set selling any shit till the crack of dawn. My mother goin’ to work would see me out there in the morning. That’s how I was on it.”

Biggie and Tupac each lived the life of a street gangster before either had broken into the music business. Biggie had gone from the street to the studio. He made his debut on Mary J. Blige’s remixes of “Real Love” and “What’s the 411?” He appeared in Supercat’s video, “Dolly My Baby.” His first single was “Party and Bullshit.” His first album,
Ready to Die
, went
platinum for Bad Boy Entertainment, selling more than one million copies. He was honored as “Rap Artist of the Year” at the 1995 Billboard Awards.

“He was the king of rap on the East Coast, definitely, without a question,” said rap music promoter Peter Thomas, during a “Prime Time Live” interview.

Like Tupac, Biggie had trouble with the law (although not nearly as onerous).

In August 1996, Biggie was charged with gun and marijuana possession. Police had staked out Biggie’s Teaneck, New Jersey, condominium, then raided it. Undercover officers confiscated a rifle with an infrared sighting scope. Besides that, according to a police report, officers netted a cache of marijuana, a submachine gun, several semiautomatic handguns, a revolver, and a large quantity of ammunition, including hollow-point rounds.

Then, on September 15, 1996, two days after Tupac died, Biggie was caught smoking marijuana while sitting in his parked luxury car on a Brooklyn street. For the second time in a month, he was charged with drug possession.

Most bizarre, however, was that both Biggie and Tupac had predicted their own deaths in their last albums, both of which were released posthumously. In his song “You’re Nobody,” Biggie raps, “You’re nobody, Till somebody kills you.” Both Tupac’s
Makaveli
and Biggie’s
Life After Death
albums sold out the first week. Biggie’s final album surpassed the Beatles’ last album in record sales.

• • •

As in life, so too in death.

Both Tupac and Biggie were gunned down in drive-by shootings—Tupac was 25 when he was killed; Biggie was 24. Both had hired off-duty cops to guard them the night they were killed. Lieutenant Ross Moen of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Wilshire division, which first handled Biggie’s murder investigation, said the Blazer carrying Biggie’s
security guards chased after the gunman’s vehicle for a few blocks, but lost it before they could get a license-plate number. The same thing happened after the Tupac shooting; several cars chased the Cadillac, police said, but none was able to catch it or get a plate number. Or, if they did, they didn’t report it to the cops.

When Tupac was shot, record-label-owner Suge Knight had driven with him away from the crime scene, ostensibly headed for a hospital. When Biggie was shot, his record-label CEO, Sean Combs, told his bodyguard to drive away from the scene and head to the hospital.

Also similar to the Tupac shooting, Biggie’s murder was witnessed by scores of people. Biggie’s estranged wife Faith Evans, dozens of partygoers, security guards, and parking attendants witnessed the shooting. But just as in the Las Vegas investigation, police initially said they had no description of the gunman and that witnesses were afraid to talk.

“It’s frustrating,” Detective Raymond Futami, one of 20 investigators assigned to the Biggie case, told reporters. “I’m sure there’s a little bit of an intimidation factor ... because of the reputation of some of the people who are involved in the case.”

Two witnesses in the Smalls case were able to help police. Unlike the members of Tupac’s entourage, two of the men sitting with Biggie in his Suburban that night provided enough information for a police artist to sketch a detailed composite drawing.

The first composite drawing was rendered one day after the murder. It shows a black man with a heart-shaped face, a light trimmed mustache, and a receding hairline. He was wearing an Oxford shirt and a dark bowtie. LAPD Lieutenant Moen described the suspect as a “young male African-American in his early twenties.” The second drawing, done 18 days after the shooting, shows a thin, older, light-skinned black man, which was circulated to media and police departments nationwide.

However, the first composite sketch, drawn a day after
the murder, didn’t make it into the hands of the media until it was slipped to reporters at the
Los Angeles Times
36 months later. Because the murder had been committed with such precision and ease, an easy deduction was that it involved a professional, perhaps even a cop.

The reason for two composite sketches, one released to the media, the other held, was never disclosed.

Detectives began looking at one of their own. Not until the
L.A. Times
wrote a story breaking the fact that ex-police officer David Mack and Suge Knight were under investigation and suspected by police of orchestrating the hit was the composite sketch released to the public. Neither composite resembled Mack.

Attorneys for both Mack and Suge strongly rejected the notion that their clients were involved in Biggie’s murder. Robin J. Yanes, Suge’s attorney, said this: “A year ago it came up and now they’re recycling it to cover their butts.”

As in the Tupac shooting, police said they believed the gunman had an accomplice.

Early on, investigators considered the theory that Biggie Smalls’ death may have been payback for Tupac Shakur’s slaying.

“We believe it was gang-related,” Lieutenant Moen said. “We believe that it was premeditated, that he was targeted for the purpose of killing him. The way it went down, it was a targeted hit.”

One of the scenarios was that Biggie was rumored to have gone the week before his murder to South Park, a hangout for the South Side Crips, and that Crips members had tried unsuccessfully to get money from him.