ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SHELDON PEARCE is a writer and editor at The New Yorker. Previously he was a contributing writer at Pitchfork. He has worked for NPR Music, and his writing has appeared in The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Fader, Spin, Dazed, Complex, Deadspin, and others.
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I
I. On November 24, 1993, Tupac, Haitian Jack, and Fuller were indicted on sexual abuse and sodomy charges. Tupac and Fuller were also indicted on weapons charges for two handguns found at the hotel suite. Haitian Jack’s lawyer sucessfully argued that his case should be tried separately, since he wasn’t included in the weapons charges. Following the conviction and sentencing of Tupac and Fuller, Haitian Jack’s indictment was dismissed and he plead guilty to two misdemeanors. According to writer Connie Bruck, in her 1997 profile of Tupac for The New Yorker: “When I asked Melissa Mourges, the assistant district attorney who had tried the case against Tupac, why Haitian Jack had been dealt with in such a favorable way, she said that Ayanna Jackson was ‘reluctant to go through the case again.’ Jackson had, however, brought a civil suit against Tupac following the trial. (The suit was subsequently settled.)”
II. In 1970, Afeni Shakur was tried as a member of the Panther 21 for 186 counts of attempted murder, attempted arson, and conspiracy to blow up schools, police precincts, department stores, and the New York Botanical Garden. Tupac was conceived while she was out on bail. While pregnant, she defended herself and others at trial, and a month after her acquittal, on June 16, 1971, Tupac was born.
III. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a student action committee that challenged segregation in the 1960s.
IV. Civil rights leader and president of the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP who obtained a charter from the NRA to establish a Black rifle club and fight off the KKK.
V. On April 1, 1967, twenty-two-year-old Denzil Dowell of North Richmond, California, was shot and killed by police responding to a burglary report. A jury ruled it a “justifiable homicide.”
VI. Wolfe’s June 1970 article “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s” for New York magazine explored the co-opting of radical causes by white socialites.
VII. Alumni include Angela Bassett, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson, Phylicia Rashad, Denzel Washington, and Billy Dee Williams.
II
I. A progressive Manhattan private school in operation from 1914 until 1988 whose students included Mike Nichols, Matthew Broderick, and Michael Diamond of the Beastie Boys.
III
I. In 1979, the Baltimore School for the Arts was created by a school board resolution as part of the Baltimore City school system with the purpose of preparing art students for professional careers.
II. One of Tupac’s earliest recorded songs, released in 2007 on the posthumous album Beginnings: The Lost Tapes 1988–1991.
III. The Roland TR-808 is a drum machine first popularized in the 1980s. The E-mu SP-1200 was a sampler used in most early hip-hop production.
IV. Tupac’s mentor Leila Steinberg, who set him on his professional path.
V. Tupac’s group with Ray Luv.
VI. Digital Underground’s executive producer and Tupac’s first manager.
VII. 51.50 Illegally Insane was a Marin City rap group featuring the producer Klark Gable and the rappers Ryan D, Levy Love, and TAC.
VIII. Shock G, also known as “Humpty Hump,” was the frontman for Digital Underground, the Oakland rap group that also included Money B.
IX. Queens, New York, rapper who joined Tupac’s Thug Life group. In 1994, they released their only album. In 1995, Stretch was shot and killed at age twenty-seven.
X. The producer duo Poke and Tone, who have worked with Jay-Z, 50 Cent, Will Smith, and Destiny’s Child, among many others.
XI. St. Charles was the executive of Solar Music Group, a hip-hop company and record label that was a gateway for Bay Area rap. (Unrelated to SOLAR Records, referenced later.)
XII. The Afros were a New York rap group developed by Jam Master Jay and DJ Hurricane whose lone album was 1990’s Kickin’ Afrolistics.
XIII. A 1990 song from Digital Underground’s This Is an EP Release (also included on the Nothing but Trouble movie soundtrack), featuring a verse by Tupac.
XIV. Starlight Sound, the Richmond, California, recording studio used by many notable Bay Area artists, including Digital Underground, Tony! Toni! Toné!, and En Vogue.
XV. The second posthumously released single from Tupac, which sampled Bobby Caldwell’s 1978 song.
XVI. In 1991, Tupac was attacked by Oakland police after being stopped for jaywalking. He filed a lawsuit against the department that was eventually settled for $43,000.
V
I. A former member of the Black Liberation Army, Assata Shakur (no relation) was a friend of Afeni and her husband, Mutulu Shakur. Often referred to as Tupac’s godmother.
II. Ecuadorian-American rapper sometimes referred to as the “Latin Elvis” whose 1990 single “Rico Suave” reached number 7 on the Billboard Hot 100.
III. In August 1989, Milt Ahlerich, then assistant director of the FBI Office of Public Affairs, sent a letter to Priority Records stating, “[R]ecordings such as the one from N.W.A are both discouraging and degrading to these brave, dedicated officers.… I wanted you to be aware of the FBI’s position relative to this song and its message.”
IV. A designer who started at Capitol Records in 1964 and later became creative director of A&M Records. He was responsible for hundreds of album covers—for artists such as Cat Stevens, Carole King, and the Carpenters—and the famous Sunset Strip billboard promoting the Beatles’ Abbey Road.
V. The Parents Music Resource Center was a Washington, DC, group formed in 1985 by politicians’ wives, including Tipper Gore, that successfully lobbied the recording industry to place warning stickers (“Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics”) on albums containing potentially objectionable content.
VI. Solid State Logic and AMS Neve are British manufacturers of recording studio equipment.
VII. A technique used in multitrack recordings to overwrite sounds.
VIII. The 1994 film in which Tupac starred as Birdie, a vicious Harlem gangster who will stop at nothing to win a playground basketball tournament.
IX. In November 1993, Tupac was charged with shooting two off-duty police officers in Atlanta while there for a performance at Clark Atlanta University. Prosecutors later dropped the charges, believing Tupac had acted in self-defense.
X. In 1992, Dan Quayle called for 2Pacalypse Now to be removed from stores when it was connected to the shooting of a state trooper in Texas.
VI
I. A civil rights activist and a conservative Republican, respectively, who joined forces against gangsta rap. In a coauthored 1995 op-ed for the New York Times, they wrote, “We are not calling for censorship. We are both virtual absolutists on the First Amendment. Our appeal is to a sense of corporate responsibility and simple decency. There are things no one should sell… Corporations that peddle filth for profit are doing enormous damage to children. For the sake of children, they should stop now.”
II. Tunnel Sundays was hosted at the eponymous Chelsea neighborhood nightclub from 1992 until the club closed in 2001.
III. In addition to the Tunnel, Gatien’s portfolio of Manhattan clubs included the Limelight and the Palladium.
IV. Danish producer Soulshock cofounded Sou
lpower Productions in 1990, and both Ezi Cut and Jay-B released projects on the label.
V. Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff was the founder of the Queens gang “the Supreme Team,” which at its height in 1987 sold $200,000 worth of drugs per day. McGriff was arrested that year and received a twelve-year sentence. In 2007, he was convicted of ordering the murders of two rivals and imprisoned for life without parole.
VI. Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols was a Queens drug trafficker who in 1992 pled guilty to ordering the 1985 killing of his parole officer, receiving a maximum state sentence of twenty-five years to life. He also received a forty-year federal sentence for drug distribution and ordering two other killings. He is currently imprisoned at the Clinton Correctional Facility in Dannemora, New York, where Tupac served his 1995 sentence for first-degree sexual abuse.
VII. While promoting the film, Tupac claimed he was asked to take an AIDS test before filming a kissing scene with costar Janet Jackson. In a 2017 interview on the podcast Drink Champs, director John Singleton denied the story, claiming, “It was just us talking shit on the set.”
VIII. Conducted by journalist Kevin Powell at Rikers Island while Tupac awaited sentencing for his sexual abuse conviction. Powell interviewed Tupac several times during his life.
IX. On November 18, 1993, four days after the incident at Nell’s, Ayanna Jackson returned to Tupac’s hotel suite. The two were there with Tupac’s road manager Charles “Man Man” Fuller, Haitian Jack, and a friend of Jack’s who remained unidentified. Jackson claimed that she was forced to perform oral sex on Tupac while Jack undressed her and then was forced to perform oral sex on Jack’s friend while Tupac held her down. Tupac claimed that he left the room when the other men came in and didn’t see what happened after. Jackson sought out hotel security, and Tupac, Haitian Jack, and Fuller were arrested. The unidentified man was never located.
X. In February 1992, Tyson was convicted of rape and sentenced to ten years in prison. He was paroled after three years.
XI. Prior to the trial, Tupac gave an extensive interview to journalist Ed Gordon for BET.
XII. In 1992, Tupac was involved in an altercation in which gunshots were fired, killing a six-year-old boy named Qa’id Walker-Teal who was riding his bike at a nearby playground. Tupac was arrested but released. He would later settle a wrongful death suit brought by Walker-Teal’s mother.
XIII. Founder of the Guardian Angels volunteer crime-patrol group and New York City talk radio host. In 1992, he was kidnapped by two men in a taxi and shot twice in the abdomen but escaped by leaping through a window of the moving car. John A. Gotti was charged with ordering the attack, in retaliation for Sliwa’s disparaging his father, Mafia don John J. Gotti, on his radio show, but never convicted.
XIV. The Nation of Islam’s security force.
XV. On December 1, 1994, Tupac and Fuller were convicted of first-degree sexual abuse, a Class D felony defined as, per the Washington Post’s reporting on the conviction, “nonconsensual groping or touching.” The sentencing options ranged from probation to seven years imprisonment. On February 7, 1995, Justice Daniel P. Fitzgerald—remarking, “This was an act of brutal violence against a helpless woman”—sentenced Tupac to one and a half to four and a half years in prison. Fuller, who had no previous criminal record, received four months in prison and five years’ probation.
XVI. After the 1987 trial of Bernard Goetz for shooting and injuring four Black teenagers on a New York City subway car, two jurors—twenty-seven-year-old James Mosley and thirty-three-year-old Diana Serpe—became romantically involved. “All I can say is go to jury duty, you never know what might happen,” Mosley told the Associated Press following the verdict, which acquitted Goetz of attempted murder charges.
XVII. During the sentencing hearing, Tupac told Justice Daniel P. Fitzgerald: “I mean this with no disrespect, Judge—you never paid attention to me. You never looked into my eyes. You never used the wisdom of Solomon. I always felt you had something against me.” In her turn to address the court, Jackson—according to reporter George James’s account of the sentencing for the New York Times—described how “she has received threatening phone calls, lives in constant fear, has suffered nightmares and, while Mr. Shakur ‘has been glorified by his peers and fans,’ she has been viewed as a villain. Calling for a stiff sentence, she concluded, ‘He should not be allowed to use his so-called celebrity status to avoid the consequences of his actions.’ ”
XVIII. Tupac’s Interscope imprint.
VII
I. A nonprofit youth organization that delivers learning programs.
II. An acronym that stood for “The Hate U Give Little Infants Fuck Everybody.”
III. Bay Area rapper and producer, respectively.
IV. Entertainer and star of the TV series A Different World, on which Tupac guest-starred in 1993.
V. Multiplatinum songwriter and Death Row producer who died in 2008.
VIII
I. Los Angeles–based R & B and soul record label founded in 1977 whose artists included the Whispers, Calloway, and Babyface.
II. Over the years, it was rumored Suge got Chocolate credit by dangling Vanilla Ice over the side of a Los Angeles hotel balcony. In a 2013 interview on SiriusXM’s Sway in the Morning, Vanilla Ice denied the claim: “He never hung me over no balcony. The truth is, he was nice. But the story seemed a little bit better, a little more interesting, and it got better ratings when you’ve got Vanilla Ice hanging upside down.”
III. Eazy-E alleged in a 1992 lawsuit he was forced by men brandishing baseball bats—Suge Knight among them—into signing over the rights to Dr. Dre and several other Ruthless artists. The suit, seeking $54 million in damages, was dismissed in 1993.
IV. Accepting the Best Motion Picture Soundtrack statue for Above the Rim at the 1995 Source Awards in New York City, Knight said, “I’d like to tell Tupac to keep his guard up. We ridin’ wit’ him. And one other thing I’d like to say: any artist out there want to be an artist and want to stay a star, and don’t want to have to worry about the executive producer tryin’ to be all in the videos, all on the records, dancin’, come to Death Row.”
V. Knight’s friend and bodyguard. In September 1995, Robles was shot and killed outside Atlanta’s Platinum City Club, where members of both Bad Boy and Death Row were celebrating producer Jermaine Dupri’s birthday.
VI. A spring break festival in Atlanta that draws students from historically Black colleges and universities.
VII. Pasadena, California, high school student Tushana Howard wrote a letter to Tupac’s fan club jokingly asking him to prom if he ever read the letter because her boyfriend broke up with her, and he showed up on her doorstep.
VIII. The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory was the final album Tupac recorded while he was alive. Released under his alias Makaveli in November 1996, two months following his death, it was his third consecutive number one on the Billboard 200 and was certified quadruple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America in 1999.
IX. A friend and coworker of Afeni Shakur who became Tupac’s surrogate aunt and business manager.
X. Actor and model Kidada Jones, who was dating Tupac.
XI. In the late 1990s, the anti-gang unit of the LAPD’s Rampart division became embroiled in scandal when seventy police officers were implicated in some level of police corruption. Investigators on a task force discovered that Suge Knight hired several off-duty officers to work security.
XII. Aftermath Entertainment is a record label founded in 1996 whose artists have included Eminem, 50 Cent, Kendrick Lamar, and Dr. Dre himself.
XIII. Tupac’s final live performance.
XIV. Rapper and member of the Outlawz who died in 2015 in a car accident.
IX
I. To attend the WBA heavyweight championship fight between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon, held at the MGM Grand Garden Arena on September 7, 1996.
II. Death Row lawyer who, in a seeming conflict of interest, also represented Tupac
. In August 1995, Tupac fired him—though as an unnamed friend told New Yorker writer Connie Bruck, “He didn’t realize, or he refused to accept, what anyone from the street would have known—you can’t fire Kenner, you don’t leave Death Row.”
III. Brennan and Robert Ladd were veteran members of the Compton Police Department and comprised the city’s gang unit.
IV. Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro was a mobster for the Chicago Outfit based in Las Vegas. In 1986, he and his brother Michael were beaten to death and buried in an Indiana cornfield. He inspired the character of Nicky Santoro, played by Joe Pesci, in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film Casino.
V. Billy Garland, a man Afeni Shakur referred to in a 1997 People magazine interview as a “gold digger” and the “designated sperm donor.” Tupac had assumed he was dead until Garland visited him at Bellevue Hospital following the 1994 Quad Studios shooting. “After I got shot, I looked up, there was this nigga that looked just like me,” he told Kevin Powell in a 1996 Vibe interview. “And he was my father. That’s when I found out.”
VI. Former Tupac bodyguard and FBI informant.
VII. Allegedly, at a 1995 Death Row Christmas party, Bell, a record promoter, was beaten and made to drink urine in order to force him to divulge Puffy’s home address. Bell did not press charges and received a $600,000 settlement from Death Row.
VIII. Allegedly the driver of the Cadillac from which Tupac was shot, Brown was shot and killed in a 2015 Los Angeles double murder.
IX. In the days before Tupac died, gang warfare erupted in Compton between the factions on either side of the shooting. Drive-bys left three dead and twelve injured. Darnell Brim, a leader of the South Side Crips who was alleged at one point to be one of the men in the Cadillac, was killed in one of the subsequent shoot-outs.
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