Tupac’s mother had been born Alice Faye Williams. She was a farm girl from North Carolina who took her new name after moving to Brooklyn and starting an affair with one of Malcolm X’s bodyguards. Chants of “Black Power” were “like a lullaby when I was a kid,” Tupac himself once said. Her acquittal in the Panther 21 trial gave Afeni Shakur a short-lived celebrity in the early ’70s. While living in a subsidized apartment in Manhattan near Columbia University, she lectured at Harvard and Yale. Her only son was called the “Black Prince” and forecast as the future leader of “the revolution.” By the late ’70s, though, as the epoch of radical chic passed, Afeni and her son were reduced to living on welfare in the South Bronx, while many adult members of Tupac’s Black Panther “family” were either behind bars or on the run. Tupac’s godfather, Elmer (Geronimo) Pratt, was convicted in 1968 of murdering a schoolteacher during a robbery in Santa Monica and sentenced to life in prison. The boy’s “aunt,” Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) was found guilty in 1977 of murdering a New Jersey state trooper, though she did manage to break out of prison two years later and flee to Cuba. Tupac’s step-father, Mutulu Shakur, was found guilty of conspiring in that prison escape, as well as in the attempted robbery of a Brinks armored car in which two police officers and a guard were killed.
Tupac was never certain about his father’s identity. Afeni had been married to Black Panther activist Lumumba Shakur when she became pregnant, but told him that her son’s father was either a Harlem drug dealer who answered to “Legs” or another Panther party member, Billy Garland. Garland claimed paternity, but Tupac reaped little benefit from this; he rarely saw the man, who never amounted to much anyway. Garland was a far better choice than Legs, however, who reentered Tupac’s life when the boy was about twelve and stayed around just long enough to turn Afeni into a crack addict. Afeni and her two children (Tupac had a younger sister named Sekiwa) moved to Baltimore in 1984 when Legs was arrested for credit card fraud. The man died of a drug-induced heart attack a short time later. Legs’s death “fucked Tupac up,” Afeni once told an interviewer. “It was three months before he cried. After he did, he told me, ‘I miss my daddy.’”
“I remember crying all the time,” Tupac told an interviewer about his early childhood. “My major thing growing up was that I just couldn’t fit in.” Baltimore would be good to the boy, though. His mother enrolled him in the city’s School for the Arts, where he studied ballet, poetry, jazz, and acting. He performed in Shakespearean plays and played the mouse king in The Nutcracker. The teenager who had been teased about his slight build and effeminate features in New York would say that he finally felt “in touch” with himself during his time at the School for the Arts. “I was starting to feel like I really wanted to be an artist,” Tupac explained. “I was fucking white girls.”
The idyll ended when Tupac moved to California in 1988 to escape the squalor and poverty of a home where his mother smoked a crack pipe all during her third pregnancy. His new residence was in Marin City, an isolated ghetto in a geographic depression surrounded by rolling hills where white people with money had created a quasi-rustic suburbia. He didn’t fit in with the black kids he met in California, Tupac said: “I dressed like a hippie. I couldn’t play basketball … I was the target for [street gangs]. They used to jump me … I thought I was weird because I was writing poetry and I hated myself. I used to keep it a secret … I was really a nerd.”
Tupac’s self-esteem was considerably enhanced in 1990, however, when he got a job as a dancer with the rap group Digital Underground. Only one year later, executives at Interscope heard a demo tape Tupac had made and signed him to a recording contract of his own. The young rapper’s 1991 album 2pacalypse Now sold 500,000 copies, thanks in part to Vice President Dan Quayle, who declared that Tupac’s tales of young black men in pitched battle with the pigs who invaded their neighborhoods had “no place in our society.”
Tupac had started a film career that same year, landing a part in Juice, even before his first album was recorded. When he moved to Los Angeles in 1992, however, Shakur immediately became absorbed in the gang culture of Crips and Bloods. In part he was doing what artists and writers always do—sponging up stories, characters, and attitudes he could use in his songs. The young men who controlled the streets of Compton and South Central L.A., however, placed an unusually high premium on authenticity. The only options they gave anyone, even visiting rap stars, were hard or soft, gangsta or punk. Either have the heart of a killer or expect to be treated like any other sucker, fair game for anyone who was bad enough to take the watch off your wrist or the money from your pocket. At 5’8” and 150 pounds, with fine, soft features and eyes that just wouldn’t go dead, Tupac scared absolutely nobody, at least not until he bought his first pistol and began practicing with it at local firing ranges. He started lifting weights, too, and began to cover his torso with tattoos—the most famous being the huge letters that spelled out “Thug Life” across his solar plexus, with the image of an assault rifle etched into his flesh above it.
Tupac’s first major brush with the law made headlines that summer, when he went home to attend the celebration of Marin City’s fiftieth anniversary and got into a shouting match with some young men from the neighborhood that did not end until shots were fired and a six-year-old boy was killed by a bullet to the head. Tupac’s half brother was arrested for murder, only to be released because of insufficient evidence, but all that most people remembered were headlines with the name Shakur in them.
Back in L.A., Tupac kept even the gangbangers guessing. When he wore red on the cover of his second album, 1993’s Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z., word spread that he had joined the Bloods, but soon after he posed for pictures with a blue bandanna on his head. During a drive to the Fox lot in Hollywood, where he was to tape a segment for In Living Color, Tupac pulled a gun on a limo driver who had asked him not to smoke pot in the vehicle, then looked on as the members of his entourage beat the man senseless. He played opposite Janet Jackson in his second movie, Poetic Justice, that summer, then on Halloween got into a shoot-out with two off-duty white police officers in Atlanta, wounding one man in his abdomen and the other in his buttocks. Charges of aggravated assault were dropped only when it came out that the cops Tupac had shot were a pair of drunken yahoos who had started things by brandishing a pistol stolen from a precinct evidence room, and that on the day of Tupac’s first court hearing one of them had been charged with aggravated assault, while both were accused of using the word “niggers” in a police report.
The attendant publicity made Tupac simultaneously a media villain and a ghetto champion. By November of 1993, when he moved to New York for the filming of Above the Rim, Tupac’s legal expenses had mounted to the point that he began telling people he had to change his life and clean up his act or declare bankruptcy. Smelling blood in the water, Suge Knight made his first overture to Tupac, paying $200,000 for a single song, “Pour Out a Little Liquor.” When Knight offered a long-term recording contract, however, Tupac turned Suge down, choosing to align himself instead with the Haitian-born music promoter Jacques Agnant.
The rapper’s bad press, meanwhile, continued to mount. He was the target of civil suits that blamed his lyrics for the shooting of a Texas state trooper and the paralysis of a young woman who was hit by a stray bullet during a near-riot at one of his concerts in Arkansas. The headlines were louder still when, shortly before Thanksgiving, Tupac was arrested for the sexual assault that would send him to Dannemora.
What had happened would never be clear, largely because the victim was a young woman whose own behavior inspired neither trust nor sympathy. Tupac claimed he first encountered Ayanna Jackson when she approached him on the dance floor of the downtown Manhattan nightclub Nell’s, unzipped his pants, and led him by the penis to a dark corner of the club where she performed oral sex on him. Jackson insisted that Tupac had chased her all over the club before a brief and furtive encounter in which he “pushed my head down on his penis in a b
rief three-second encounter.” Whatever, the young woman not only slept with Shakur that night but showed up four days later at Tupac’s suite in the Parker-Meridian wearing a tight dress and within minutes was giving him a massage in the bedroom. The two soon were joined by Jacques Agnant and a friend of the promoter’s. Tupac and the other two men claimed Jackson was a willing participant in group sex; the young woman said she was the victim of a gang rape. One year later, a New York jury would essentially split the difference, but in the meantime Tupac was attending to other troubles.
On February 1, 1994, Tupac was in Los Angeles municipal court to answer assault charges filed against him by film director Allen Hughes, who, along with his partner-brother, Albert, had tried to cast Tupac in the film Menace II Society. When he read the script, however, Tupac decided the Hughes brothers had cast him as a sucker, and showed up on the set of a video they were filming with an entourage of gangbangers. Allen Hughes was beaten, while his brother fled the scene. After pleading guilty in court, Tupac was to face sentencing on March 10. Less than twelve hours before his scheduled court appearance, however, Tupac was confronted by five Crips at a convenience store on Sunset Boulevard. When one of the five smashed him in the face, Tupac grabbed a pair of scissors from a display case and chased the group into the street while dozens of witnesses looked on. The news was in the morning papers, and national TV crews were on hand at the courthouse the next day as the prosecution argued that Mr. Shakur was a young man who could not control his temper. Tupac, sentenced to fifteen days in jail, flew back to New York as soon as he finished his time.
On the evening of November 28, 1994, shortly after a Manhattan jury began to deliberate charges of sodomy, sexual abuse, and weapons possession against him, Tupac was smoking pot as he made his way to the Quad Recording Studios off Times Square. He had been promised seven thousand badly needed dollars for a guest appearance on a song by an obscure Uptown Records rapper named Little Shawn, a deal set up through Tupac’s new friend Biggie Smalls. Biggie’s friend L’il Caesar shouted greetings to them through an open window as Tupac and two companions entered the building. At the elevator, however, Tupac and his friends were confronted by a pair of black men who wore army fatigues and held identical 9mm handguns. Neither of Shakur’s friends was hit, but Tupac was shot five times; one bullet creased his head, while another shattered a testicle. The men in fatigues stripped him of a $30,000 diamond ring and $10,000 in gold chains, yet left the diamond-studded Rolex watch Jacques Agnant had given Tupac as a present. Though wounded as well in the thigh and abdomen, Tupac managed to make it into an elevator and ride eight floors up to the studio where he was scheduled to perform. Andre Harrell, Puffy Combs, and Biggie Smalls were among those in the room. All were dripping with jewelry, and none would look him in the eye, said Tupac, who would become convinced the three men viewed him as a rival they wished to eliminate.
A team of twelve doctors at Bellevue Hospital operated on Tupac during the early morning hours of November 29, then were shocked when he checked himself out that evening. His life was in danger if he stayed, explained Tupac, who chose to spend the night of the twenty-ninth at the home of his friend actress Jasmine Guy. A team of bow tied Fruit of Islam security guards surrounded Tupac’s wheel-chair as he arrived in court to hear the jury’s verdict. Relief at his acquittal on the more serious sodomy and weapons charges was almost instantly overwhelmed by the knowledge that being found guilty of sexual abuse would mean prison time. He was given two and a half months to convalesce, first at Metropolitan Hospital then at Jasmine Guy’s apartment, but on Valentine’s Day 1995 he received a sentence of four and a half years in state prison.
He began doing his time at Riker’s Island, where he read Machiavelli’s The Prince until he had memorized it, then announced in an interview with VIBE that he was done with gangsta rap. “That shit is dead,” he told the magazine’s reporter. “If Thug Life is real, then let somebody else represent it, because I’m tired of it. I represented it too much.” As his single “Dear Mama” rose on the charts, a rumor spread on the streets that he had been raped in Riker’s by members of a Latin gang. Tupac then was transferred to Clinton Correctional in Dannemora, where he was initiated into prison life by a strip search and rectal examination.
From the beginning of his career, Tupac had come across as a young man torn between his demons and his angels. The hit single on 2pacalypse Now was “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” a song Tupac said was inspired by the newspaper account of a twelve-year-old girl who got pregnant by a cousin, then threw her baby down an incinerator shaft. “No male rappers at all anywhere were talking about problems females were having,” he explained when asked why he had written the song. Yet on the same album Tupac boasted in another song, “This is the life, new bitch every night, never tripped off a wife.” He showed up for his first film audition wearing the tattooed words OUTLAW on one arm and HEARTLESS on the other, then recited the lyrics of the Robert Frost poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”
At Dannemorra, Tupac became engaged to a recent graduate of John Jay College who planned to go to law school, didn’t smoke marijuana, and refused to sleep with him on their first date. “She’s my first and only girlfriend ever,” he told an interviewer, shortly before marrying the young woman. VIBE printed a prison interview in which Tupac seemed to take full responsibility for what had happened to Ayanna Jackson at the Parker-Meridian Hotel: “Even though I’m innocent of the charge, I’m not innocent in terms of the way I was acting … I’m just as guilty for doing nothing as I am for doing things.” He was “ashamed,” Tupac said, about not intervening to defend the young woman from the two men who actually did rape her.
At the same time he made these pronouncements, however, Tupac was plotting revenge against those he believed were responsible for the shooting at Quad Studios: Puffy Combs, Andre Harrell, and Biggie Smalls (whose single “One More Chance” had just hit No. 1 on Billboard’s chart). Biggie’s involvement was what cut him deepest, said Tupac, who had been convinced by letters he received at Dannemora that the Brooklyn rapper helped set him up. When Tupac made his accusations public in an interview with VIBE, Biggie, Puffy, and Andre Harrell replied with a brief letter to the editor in which the three denied they had anything to do with the shooting, then expressed the hope that the feud between the East and West coasts could be brought to an end. Puffy Combs claimed that he had written personally to Tupac asking for a meeting to clear the air, and assured the imprisoned rap star that he and Biggie “got nothing but love for you.”
Next to his prison sentence, Tupac’s biggest problems were financial. The attorneys he hired to defend him against lawsuits and criminal charges all across the country had exhausted his bank accounts. During the past several years, he had become the sole supporter of his mother, his sister, her baby, his aunt, her children, as well as assorted cousins and hangers-on. Even as he renounced gangsta rap and made plans to move to Arizona with his new bride and raise children in the sunshine, Suge Knight was beckoning from the shadows, promising not only to solve all his money problems but to secure his release from prison as well. Tupac’s childhood friend Watani Tyehimba visited him in prison during the late summer of 1995 and begged the rapper not to sign a contract with Death Row Records. Sobbing, Tyehimba recalled, Tupac hugged him tight and said, “I know I’m selling my soul to the devil.”
Tupac signed the three-page handwritten agreement drafted by David Kenner during the early autumn, and on October 12, the day he was released from Dannemora, he flew back to Los Angeles with Knight and Kenner aboard a private jet. He was in a Death Row recording studio that same night. Overwhelmed with gratitude for his release from prison, Tupac parroted Suge Knight in an interview with Source magazine: “Whether the odds are in your favor or appear to be stacked against you, the Death Row family sticks with you.”
Tupac Shakur’s mother, sister, aunt, and assorted other relatives who depended upon him for support now were part of the Death Row family, also. Shortly after he si
gned Tupac to a recording contract, Suge Knight bought Afeni Shakur a new home, and when she and her relations visited Los Angeles, Suge lodged them in a luxury hotel, the Westwood Marquis, where they ran up huge room service bills. Tupac was spending his days, and most of his nights as well, at Death Row’s studios in Tarzana, where producers were amazed by the facility with which he wrote and recorded rap lyrics, despite being high on marijuana and drinking heavily most of the time.
What Suge received in exchange for his largesse was the reflected glow of his new rapper’s starlight. Tupac was by far the biggest celebrity in the history of the genre, aided considerably by his film appearances. During late 1995 and early 1996, dozens of stories appeared in the hip-hop press suggesting that only the fearsome Suge Knight, with his gangbanger thugs and audacious street tactics, could protect Shakur from those who wanted him dead. Tupac bristled at stories that described him as a frightened and demoralized figure who had lost a testicle in a shoot-out, then been raped in prison, yet continued to sing the praises of Suge Knight and Death Row Records. “There’s nobody in the business strong enough to scare me,” he boasted in one interview. “I’m with Death Row ‘cause they not scared either. When I was in jail, Suge was the only one who used to see me. Nigga used to fly a private plane all the way to New York to spend time with me.”
Suge, meanwhile, was going ever more public with his thuggery, and Death Row’s partners at Interscope seemed not to mind much. Jimmy Iovine would tell federal investigators he was unaware that Michael Harris had bankrolled Death Row’s inception until December of 1995, when Harry-O threatened Interscope and Time Warner with a lawsuit that demanded his share of the company’s profits. Most people in the record business had been hearing rumors for years that the “Ghetto Godfather” had financed Death Row’s startup, however. And Harry-O himself had sent Iovine a threatening letter in the summer of 1995 that prompted the head of Time Warner’s music division, Michael Fuchs, to attempt a prison meeting with Harris. Few employees of Death Row doubted that Iovine was informed when Jake Robles and a group of other Bloods showed up at the offices the record label shared with Interscope and literally seized the office of Fade Duvernay, the head of Interscope’s rap promotion department. And Iovine, they said, had to know that when Duvernay objected Suge and his henchmen responded by dragging the Interscope executive out of a meeting and choking him nearly unconscious in an adjacent office.
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