Changes

by Sheldon Pearce

  CHARISSE JONES I remember the day that he got shot, and I came into the newsroom. They asked me to do the story. It was interesting, because I had a colleague, who was another Black woman, and she was saying, “Well, I just don’t want you getting pigeonholed into doing just stories about hip-hop.” And I didn’t see it that way, because first of all, I did have a wide variety of stories. So that was not happening. But on the other hand, I felt that covering someone like Tupac getting shot and talking about hip-hop, that wasn’t being pigeonholed to me, that was the moment. That was a real strong strand in the culture. Being the person to chronicle that, I felt, was a great story.

  GOBI RAHIMI While I was back working real estate in Orange County, I met an aspiring music video producer by the name of Tracy Robinson. She had a small production company. Within six weeks, I’d moved to LA and moved in with her, and I started helping her with all the music videos that she was producing. I sort of worked up from the PA to production manager to a producer, and we ended up doing a hundred to a hundred and fifty music videos together. Tracy had been doing some work with Pac and introduced me.

  I sort of heard the firsthand stories from Tracy about her experience with him and didn’t really know much more than that about him. I think the first time that it really sunk in was when we got the call in the middle of the night when he had been shot at Quad Studios.

  She just fell apart, she started crying. And then she kind of went into the story of who he was. Tracy was very protective of her relationship with Tupac. Even though I was her boyfriend, she would only give me bits and pieces. After the shooting, I started doing some homework on him. This is ’95, so it wasn’t exactly like we had Google. It was minimal intel. But from what I did get on him, I realized that he was cut from a different cloth than most of the artists that we’d worked with.

  KHALIL KAIN There was a level of fearlessness. To trust, you have to toss away fear. I thought that was beautiful about Pac. He had the ability to trust people because his fear was something that he had just discarded. He had become comfortable with the idea of his demise. It was inevitable. So why have that be an obstacle to [his] forward motion?

  I mean, at the studio in the lobby, they told him to get on his knees. He told them, “Fuck you.” Anybody who knows anything about Pac knows that that’s real and understands that there’s power in that. I watched the videotape of Ahmaud Arbery and felt a large sense of pride in the fact that he fought. He was like, Nah, if it’s today, then it’s today, but we ’bout to throw these hands. That’s what Pac gave us.

  ETHAN BROWN My feeling is that he gets attacked by these guys in the lobby, he fumbles to defend himself, grabs the gun, and gets shot in the hand, and in fumbling with his weapon he shoots himself in the testicle. Jimmy’s in the building. Biggie’s in the building. Puffy’s in the building. I think he’s legitimately like, What the fuck is going on here?

  CATHY SCOTT The Quad Studios shooting didn’t happen at all the way they tried to say it happened. It was just a robbery. That’s all it was—a robbery. It wasn’t attempted murder. If they were out to kill him, they would’ve killed him. They just took $35,000 worth of jewelry. And then Tupac shot himself in the groin. He went to grab his weapon and fired it accidentally. I went to the Manhattan police department while I was there at Quad and they told me that.

  KARL KANI When Tupac got shot in New York at Quad Studios, his first interview that he did when he got out of the hospital was with Vibe magazine. I think the third question, it actually says, “Tupac, how did you feel when you got shot?” And this is exactly what he says: “I didn’t know I was shot. All I knew was I could feel the heat of the bullet pierced through my Karl Kani drawers.” He correlated what he was wearing in that moment. The connection was that strong.

  DR. LEON PACHTER He was shot multiple times. And if I recall correctly, one of them was about around his testicle. So the joke there, at that time, was that instead of Tupac they would call him “one pack.”

  We took him up to the operating room. It was in the middle of the night. I left to start another operation by ten thirty. And then I got emergency calls for the intensive care unit saying that he pulled out all his intravenous lines, and he checked out of the hospital. He checked himself out after only a few hours. The next day, the New York Post had a cartoon: it shows a patient on the operating table—Tupac—and I was the doctor looking up at an X-ray. There’s a bullet right in the center of the brain. The caption was: “Mr. Shakur, I want to assure you that no vital organ has been injured.” And that was because he just, you know, tore [the IV] out and checked himself out.

  People don’t usually leave within six or seven hours after they’ve been shot. Even Curtis SliwaXIII didn’t leave the hospital after he was shot. But otherwise it was business as usual. In the scheme of things, this is basically what we see—we see gunshot wounds through the liver, through the abdomen, through the heart, through the chest, and through the head. His was relatively minor for what we see, although for the individual, it was obviously a major injury.

  I think the people around him were concerned that whoever was out there trying to kill him was going to come to the hospital and, you know, finish the job. And it was kind of like that scene in The Godfather, where he’s in Bellevue Hospital, and they move him out because the other people are coming to kill him. I’m sure that was going through his mind.

  JUSTIN TINSLEY Keep in mind, Biggie is telling Pac, “Watch who you hang with, bro. I’m from Brooklyn. I know these dudes.” He knew about those worlds. When he gets shot, Tupac’s mind is all over the place already. He implicates Biggie and Puffy in it.

  GREG KADING Pac thought that initially in the immediate aftermath of having his head bashed in—Puffy and Biggie set me up. But then you realize in time that that wasn’t it.

  JUSTIN TINSLEY Paranoia defines so much of Tupac’s life because paranoia ran in his family. They were battling the government. A lot of that generational trauma passed on to Tupac, and then of course he experienced his own. I wish he wouldn’t have checked himself out of the hospital so early, because Biggie wanted to go see Pac and I think he tried to go see him the next day. He looked up to Tupac. He wouldn’t have set him up. I think Tupac knew that in his heart. He was looking for someplace to vent his anger.

  TERRENCE “KLEPT” HARDING I came in when Big was just starting Junior MAFIA. He had the team name but he didn’t have the players. He didn’t have the squad. I stepped in with divine timing. I’m new to running with Big, so it had been maybe a month or two when I first met Pac. Big is like, “Pac is at the Parker Meridien, let’s go check him.”

  So we go to the Parker Meridien, and soon as we get in his room, I’m bugging out. I look all over the floor and it’s just maaaaaaad composition notebook papers with lyrics on them. I’m like, The fuck is up with this nigga? The shit was like snow. Just papers all over the floor. You know how perfectly you have to rip a page out of a composition notebook? This motherfucker had composition notebook pages all over the floor like garbage. I wonder if he did that purposefully because he knew that Big was coming by.

  Pac and Big looked up to each other. Big had a lot of respect for Pac. Big was like, “Don’t take your camera. Don’t take no pics with him, man.” Because he didn’t want to look like he was on some fan shit. Like me; I was excited to be there.

  I just happen to glance up at the corner of the room and I see a shrine with candles, and when I look close it’s a shrine with candles and a picture of Madonna. I’m like, This motherfucker got a picture of…, and then come to find out he was fucking her. Yo, this is an ill motherfucker.

  After that we went and jumped in my car and I drove him and Big across the bridge to buy weed and we blew down weed in my car. Not a lot of rappers can say they rolled around with Pac and Big in their car blowing weed.

  PUDGEE THA PHAT BASTARD In the beginning of his career, he definitely gave swag to Biggie—as much as Puffy did. Puffy was responsible for changing and shaping the whole i
mage, but Pac gave him a lot of games. And there are even songs where Biggie starts to rap like Pac. He affects the whole California, almost Southern swag on several songs because he was trying to do what he thought Pac was doing.

  When you’re close to someone that’s from a different area—at the time, you know, LA, New York—and then they draw a line in the sand, at some point, you get confused, if not shocked, if not angry as fuck, if not vengeful. You start to feel like you woke up one day and you don’t know the motherfucker that you’ve been telling all your secret plans. It kind of becomes an Achilles’ heel. I think Pac’s biggest issue was not getting the respect, or even just the recognition, when he did all he did to support Biggie, especially in LA. Without quoting the dead, I would just say he was definitely feeling slighted. He felt almost like he had been taken advantage of, used as a stepping stool.

  On “Temptations,” he says, “Give him the finger,” which is the name of my album. So people didn’t understand that he was shouting me out everywhere until Angie Martinez asked me about the Biggie beef—when he says my name in the “Hit ’Em Up” video. And I had songs with Biggie. I can joke about it now, but I was driving around looking behind me pulling off the roads. I thought people were following me. It was at a time where people were shooting everybody. So even though I felt so good that my friend said my name, I was like, “You couldn’t have said it in ‘Dear Mama’?”

  ETHAN BROWN In terms of the actual shooting, Jimmy Henchman claims basically total ignorance. But then, you know, this is what was so interesting talking to him. The phrase that he used, you know, I’ll never forget it. It was like: “Pac, you were disciplined.” I was just like, What? Your entire life has been clouded by the allegation that you had Tupac shot, and you’re saying, with a tape recorder in front of you, that Tupac got disciplined.

  CATHY SCOTT Tupac would not cooperate on the shooting investigation. So they closed the case after a week. I said to them: “Well, when someone dies in a homicide, they can’t cooperate with you because they’re dead. Do you close those cases because the victim won’t cooperate?” It’s a hell of a reason, and it’s not a valid reason. There’s no logic to it. When it came to Tupac, Manhattan police couldn’t have cared less.

  RICHARD DEVITT Even the older woman who really wanted to crucify Tupac, regardless of whatever he may or may not have done, she even dismissed the gun charges immediately. When we first went into the jury room, the gun charges were dismissed in minutes. The gun that they entered as evidence was a different-colored gun. [Jackson] testified about the gun—she described a gun that was completely different than the gun that they entered into evidence. The gun they entered into evidence was silver colored; she described a black-colored gun. That and various other details about the gun, which I no longer recall, made us immediately discount those gun charges. We all felt, even the most conservative, that the guns had been planted there by the cops. Everybody believed that.

  The cops who testified, frankly, I didn’t believe a word of what they said. And I don’t think any of the jury did either. They just didn’t come across as believable and it was felt that they had an ax to grind. I do recall that they admitted to the fact that they were basically stalking Tupac. There were a number of them around the hotel. They were out to get Tupac, and it was obvious. He was in town to make a music video, and they hounded him all over town. Because eventually when he was shot in the middle of the whole thing, they were at his side thirty seconds after he was shot. It was just phenomenal. The feeling was at the time that he was shot by one of the cops. That wasn’t discussed in the jury room, but I remember people speculating afterward. We didn’t feel that the cops were being fair to him at all.

  JUSTIN TINSLEY Of course Tupac is gonna be the one to catch the brunt of everything. He’s Tupac Shakur. He’d just shot at two off-duty police officers. The federal government knows who he is and hates him. At some point they’re gonna be waiting on you to slip up.

  KHALIL KAIN He was being dragged in too many ugly directions by the system. They immediately spotted how he was influencing our culture and made a point of keeping him occupied with lawyer fees, in court, and behind bars. He did not rape that girl. Fuck outta here. That’s not in his character. And to talk to him about it was just sickening, to understand the level of persecution.

  RICHARD DEVITT We were sequestered in a hotel, a really kind of shabby place. The city of New York didn’t have a lot of money. It was a sort of a roach-infested place, like a Holiday Inn, outside Kennedy airport. We were bused there in a police van with our armed guards the entire time back and forth. We actually ate at the place with the guards standing around the table. We all had to be at one big table. They made sure that, like, when we walked in, there were guards standing in front of the newsstand. We didn’t look at any newspaper. The TVs were taken out of our room. So we were incommunicado. We had no idea whatsoever what happened. So the next day after it happened, and they came into the courtroom, as always, when we would come into the courtroom, the jury was the last to arrive. We came in and right away we noticed that Tupac was not there.

  So the judge turns to us and he says, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury”—and I’m paraphrasing—“I would like to instruct you that the defendant will be arriving shortly and you are to make no inferences whatsoever about his appearance. You are not to discuss his appearance afterward when you deliberate. His appearance today has nothing to do with the events that occurred during what he’s accused of.” Then, they wheeled Tupac in in a wheelchair. I was like, Whoa, what happened here? So we kind of glanced at one another. I remember being incredibly curious as to what went on. But it didn’t have any effect on our deliberations. Nobody speculated on it in the jury room. Nobody called attention to it.

  WENDY DAY As the founder of Rap Coalition, I kind of took it upon myself, wherever there was a need in rap that I could fill, I kind of stepped up and filled it. That kind of became my self-imposed job description. I knew Pac was in trouble. I knew he was going to court. I knew that something had transpired at Quad Studios, and I knew he was scared, because he ran. I kind of knew about the issues. I didn’t know any of the inner workings of those issues. I just knew he was in trouble and he needed help. His concerns were legitimate. It wasn’t just his perception. It wasn’t as bad as he thought, but it also was very real.

  Of course, I didn’t know that at the time; I just assumed that it was real. I didn’t really know any details. And I had had a relationship with the Nation of Islam since the very early days of Rap Coalition. The Fruit of IslamXIV always stood out because they were always super respectful. They wore suits and red bow ties. They were very security minded. We hired them for a lot of events, so I had a relationship with a gentleman named Brother Arthur, and when Tupac first had the situation occur at Quad Studios, I called Arthur and asked if there was anything he could do to help him, and he did.

  RICHARD DEVITT Another of the jury members was a skinny white guy. In the jury room, he would go into the bathroom repeatedly. Finally, the younger Jewish lady who was sitting next to me, she said, a couple of days into it: “Have you ever noticed how he does that?”

  It was toward the end of things now, and after not really playing much of a role, he suddenly wanted things to get going. “Let’s just wrap this up. Let’s wrap this up. Let’s take another vote. Let’s take another vote.” She said, “Well, you know why he’s doing that?” She said, “He’s a crackhead.” We weren’t sequestered from the beginning. We were sequestered partway along. But she said, “He’s running out of drugs. That’s the reason why he’s in a hurry to end this.”

  We—with the exception of the Catholic lady and her old-lady friend who would sometimes join her—repeatedly voted to acquit on all the charges because it was felt that Tupac wasn’t even in the room when the abuse occurred. Whether somebody else or the rest of them gang-raped or not is irrelevant to this case.

  So we thought Tupac was definitely not guilty of anything at all. We were very
close to saying hung jury. Hour after hour after hour; you have no idea how tedious it was. We actually sent a note out at one point that said, We’re having difficulty coming to a decision, Your Honor. We wanted to know about how a hung jury would work. He sent a note back that said keep going. After that, we went a whole other day with this woman.

  I said, “This is ridiculous. This is not going anywhere. We cannot make a decision here. Let’s just say a hung jury.”

  A lot of people threw up their hands and said, “All right.”

  The old lady said, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, does this mean he’s going to go free?! Is that what you people want? He’s got ‘Thug Life’ written on his stomach. Is that what you want? Somebody like that roaming the streets?”

  She gave this nearly hysterical speech about how there’ll be other women who are victimized and the message we were sending to young people. She was virtually arguing that whether this guy is guilty or not guilty, the details of this case are virtually irrelevant. Because it’s the message that you’re going to be sending that’s the key. She said, “I will not allow you to say this is a hung jury.”

  We were like, “Listen, we’re just not going to go any further, okay?”

  She said, “There’s the fourth-degree thing, you have to admit that something did happen to this girl, right?”

  Our knowledge of fourth-degree sexual assault was that if you put your hands on somebody in a bar or something like that, that’s fourth-degree sexual assault. People went around the table and said things like, “Well, how much time will he get for a conviction like that?” I think we may have even sent a note out to the judge asking about that. The answer came back that he can’t talk to you about the sentencing or the sentencing potential. That’s irrelevant. You’re to judge the facts of the case and the facts only.