The Killing of Tupac Shakur (12 page)

The images tattooed on his body represented the things Tupac held sacred.

Tupac also adorned himself with jewelry. He had a particular penchant for gold. Besides the solid-gold chains around his neck and diamond and gold rings on the fingers of both hands, he wore diamond studs in his nose and ears and an 18-karat-gold Rolex watch on his right wrist.

Tupac wore jewelry like medals, badges of honor. Even the lyrics of Tupac’s favorite passage, a borrowed poem, became a reality for him. To his director in his first movie,
Juice
, he recited Robert Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” It read:

“Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaves a flower; but only so an hour. Leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, so dawn goes down today. Nothing gold can stay.” (Tupac, who was an avid reader, often quoted passages from a book or lines from a poem or lyrics from a song. His friends were used to it. He’d done it since he was a boy.)

Just before his death, Tupac had formed a new group made up of kids, which he named Nothing Gold. He planned to personally produce their songs, which would, he felt, send a positive message to teenagers.

Tupac was a talented singer-songwriter with five solo albums to his name. Additionally, he had contributed songs to soundtracks for several movies, including
Above the Rim, Poetic Justice, Supercop
, and
Sunset Park
. He was also a rising film star, having starred in the movies
Juice
(1992),
Poetic Justice
(1993),
Above the Rim
(1994),
Bullet
(1997),
Gridlock’d
(1997), and
Gang Related
(1997). The latter film wrapped up a week before the fatal shooting and was released on the first anniversary of his death.

Boston Globe
movie critic Jay Carr described Shakur’s acting abilities in a January 31, 1997, review. “Whatever else the late gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur was, he was a good movie actor,” Carr wrote. “He was good in
Juice
, and he was the best thing in
Poetic Justice
. He’s even more appealing as the soulful half of the strung-out buddy team alongside Tim Roth in
Gridlock’d.
”

Rap journalist Kevin Powell said Tupac acted with a moody intensity comparable to that of James Dean, whose acting career was also cut short, but by a fatal car accident.

Tupac had reason to be moody. His childhood had been far from easy.

• • •

Tupac’s mother, Alice Faye Crooks, a.k.a. Afeni Shakur, and his father, Billy Garland, in the late 1960s were founding
members of the national Black Panther Party, based in New York. Alice (not yet known as Afeni Shakur), while out on bail pending felony charges for conspiring to blow up department stores and police stations, dated Garland. She’d earlier been married to Lumumba Abdul Shakur, but short time after she got pregnant (by Garland), Lumumba, a fellow Panther, divorced her.

In April 1969, she and 20 other Panther members were arrested. They were dubbed the notorious “Panther 21.” Also part of the group was Tupac’s future aunt, Assata Shakur (who began living in exile in Cuba in 1984). Alice found herself pregnant and incarcerated at the Women’s House of Detention in Greenwich Village. Alice represented herself in court,
pro per
, delivering, according to Connie Bruck in a July 1997 article in the
New Yorker
, “a withering cross-examination of a key prosecution witness, who turned out to be an undercover government agent.” Fourteen of the original 21 co-defendants, including Alice, were acquitted in May 1971, only a month away from Alice’s delivery date of her baby boy.

On Wednesday, June 16, 1971, a son was born to Alice Faye. She named him Lesane. She and Garland parted ways soon after Tupac’s birth. Garland, who had two other children from previous relationships, saw his son off and on until he was five, then lost contact. Garland wouldn’t see him again until 1992, after he saw Tupac’s picture on a poster advertising the movie
Juice
.

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide unit lists Tupac’s given name as “Lesane Crooks.” Lieutenant Larry Spinosa said the family gave officers that name. The Clark County Coroner shows the rapper’s name as Tupac A. Shakur with an alias of Lesane Parish Crooks. It is believed that his legal surname, Crooks, was his mother’s maiden name.

Alice Faye married Jeral Wayne Williams, her second husband, when Tupac was a toddler. Later, when Williams changed his name to Mutulu Shakur, Alice Faye Williams became Afeni Shakur, and she gave her son the name Tupac
Amaru, after a warrior and the last Inca chief to be tortured and murdered by Spanish conquistadors. Tupac means “Shining Serpent,” which was an lncan symbol of wisdom and courage. Shakur, which became his new surname, is Arabic for “Thankful to God”; it is a common surname chosen by members of the Nation of Islam when they join the Muslim religion. Afeni never legally changed her son’s name to Tupac Shakur, but that’s what he went by the rest of his life.

Tupac was born a fighter.

“It’s funny, because I never believed he would live,” Afeni told writer Veronica Chambers about her son in an
Esquire
interview. “Every five years, I’d be just amazed that he made it to five, that he made it to 10, that he made it to 15. I had a million miscarriages, you know.

“This child stayed in my womb through the worst possible conditions. I had to get a court order to get an egg to eat every day. I had to get a court order to get a glass of milk every day—you know what I’m saying? I lost weight, but he gained weight. He was born one month and three days after we [Panther 21 members] were acquitted. I had not been able to carry a child. This child comes and hangs on and really fights for his life.”

After she was found not guilty, Afeni went on the speakers circuit to talk about her experiences. But her celebrity was short-lived; Afeni found herself back on the welfare rolls, living in the ghetto.

She settled with her baby boy in the Bronx. Two years later she gave birth to Tupac’s half-sister Sekyiwa Shakur. Sekyiwa’s father, Mutulu, was also a Black Panther and a nationalist with the Nation of Islam. Mutulu called himself a doctor, claiming he had received a degree in acupuncture in Canada.

In 1986, Mutulu was arrested and charged with masterminding a 1981 Brinks robbery in which two Nyack, New York, cops and a Brinks security guard were killed. Mutulu denied being involved in the hold-up. He was convicted anyway and is serving a 60-year sentence in a federal maximum-security
penitentiary in Florence, Colorado. Mutulu was also convicted of conspiracy for his role in helping to break Assata Shakur, a family friend whom Tupac called “aunt,” out of prison. Assata, also a Black Panther, then a Black Liberation Army leader, was convicted in 1977 of murdering a New Jersey state trooper and sentenced to life in prison. She escaped a few years later. She has been living in Cuba since 1986 and remains at large.

Mutulu went underground after the Brinks holdup in 1981 and wasn’t captured until 1986. He was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List until his capture. Tupac was taught early by Mutulu not to trust law-enforcement officers. FBI agents would periodically go to Tupac’s school to ask him if he’d seen his stepdad. Mutulu, who was close to Tupac, kept in touch while on the run.

Tupac’s godfather, Elmer “Geronimo” Pratt, a deputy minister in the Black Panther Party, also wasn’t around when Tupac was growing up. Pratt was sentenced to life in a California prison after his conviction for the murder of a white Los Angeles grammar school teacher when Tupac was an infant. Pratt’s attorney at the time was a young Johnnie Cochran Jr., who went on to successfully defend former football star O.J. Simpson in the murder trial of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Pratt’s case became, and remains, a famous civil-rights cause célèbre for L.A.'s African-American community, because Cochran claimed racism. Cochran argued, and Pratt maintained throughout his incarceration, that Pratt was framed by law enforcement. After his conviction, Pratt was denied parole 16 times because he refused to renounce his politics or confess to a crime he said he didn’t commit.

Geronimo Pratt walked out of prison in June 1997 after his conviction was overturned by an Orange County Superior Court judge, who declared that the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s prosecution was unlawful and corrupt. His conviction was reversed on the grounds that the government suppressed evidence favorable to him at his trial, notably that the principal witness against him was a paid police informant.
The decision was handed down midway through Pratt’s 26th year in prison.

Tupac later said that he continued where Geronimo Pratt, Afeni and the Black Panthers, Mutulu Shakur, and Lumumba Shakur all left off. In his lyrics, Tupac referred to them as political prisoners.

Afeni and her two children eventually moved to Harlem to live with Afeni’s new lover, Legs, and in homeless shelters and with friends and relatives. Legs, once linked to New York drug lord Nicky Barnes, was jailed for credit-card fraud and died in prison at 41 from a crack-induced heart attack.

Legs, Tupac later said, was the man who taught him about being a thug, an aspect of Legs’ personality Tupac said he admired. He was also the only father Tupac ever knew, and now he was gone. “I couldn’t even cry, man,” Tupac told writer Kevin Powell. “I felt I needed a daddy to show me the ropes, and I didn’t have one.”

When Tupac was 10 years old, a minister asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. “A revolutionary,” was his answer, because that was all he had ever known.

“Here we was, kickin’ all this shit about the revolution and we starving,” Tupac told Powell.

When Tupac was 12, something happened that would change his life. Afeni sent him to a Harlem theater group. He was a natural on stage. At 13, he played the role of Travis in
A Raisin in the Sun
at the famous Apollo Theater for a Jesse Jackson fundraiser. Tupac loved the limelight and enjoyed performing; through acting, he felt he could become someone worthy of respect. It changed the direction of his life and eventually got him out of the ghetto.

In 1986 when Tupac was 15, Afeni moved her family to Baltimore, Maryland. There, Tupac entered the prestigious Baltimore High School for the Arts, after his mother talked the school into taking him. It marked another major turning point; this time it meant going to a school far removed from the ghetto. While there, Tupac thrived, starring in several productions. He also started dabbling in rap.

Besides music, Tupac studied ballet, poetry, and acting. It was at the Baltimore school that he began calling himself an “artist.” His classmates and teachers considered him talented. The thug in his personality hadn’t emerged yet—at least he wasn’t showing it.

Life at home, however, was still a hand-to-mouth existence. Afeni often didn’t have the money to pay her utility bills and the electricity in their apartment was shut off most of the time. When that happened, Tupac, always the avid reader, studied outside by the light of the street lamps. He stayed at Baltimore High School for the Arts for two years. He told Kevin Powell, “That school was the freest I ever felt.”

When a neighborhood boy was killed in a gang shooting during Tupac’s junior year, 1988, Afeni put her kids on a Greyhound bus to spend the summer with a family friend who lived in Marin City, California. It turned out to be an area cops called the “Jungle,” a small ghetto just below pricey hillside homes across the bay from San Francisco in affluent Marin County. Afeni didn’t realize she was sending her kids to another gang-infested ghetto—the same as, or worse than, what they’d lived in for most of their lives. A few months later, after her friend called and said she was going into an alcohol rehabilitation center, Afeni joined her children in California, moving with them into a low-income federal housing project, the worst in the area. The family lived in the heart of the Jungle, in Building 89, Unit 1. Surrounded by neighborhood drug dealers, Afeni soon took on a cocaine habit.

Tupac, a skinny teenager, was taunted by the street drug dealers from whom his mother bought crack cocaine to feed her worsening habit.

“It’d be the shitty dumb niggas who had women, rides, houses,” Tupac told Powell. “And I didn’t have shit ... They used to dis me ...”

And to writer Veronica Chambers, Tupac said, “Everybody else’s mother was just a regular mother, but my mother was Afeni—you know what I’m saying? My mother had a strong reputation. It was just like having a daddy, because she
had a rep. Motherfuckers get roasted if you fuck with Afeni or her children. Couldn’t nobody touch us.”

Still, Tupac felt he could no longer handle his mother’s crack habit. He moved out of her apartment and into an abandoned housing unit with a group of boys. They later formed the singing group One Nation Emcees. Even though he was a good student with a high grade-point average, Tupac eventually dropped out of high school at age seventeen and, to survive, worked odd jobs, one at a pizza parlor. He also sold crack on the street to get by.

Tupac remembered crying a lot while he was growing up. Because his family had moved around so much, often to homeless shelters, he never felt like he fit in anywhere. He led a lonely existence. He didn’t have any long-term friends and felt pressured to reinvent himself each time his family moved into a new neighborhood. He felt vulnerable living in the ghetto. Kids made fun of him, calling him “Tuberculosis” and “Tube Sock” because of his name, and “Pretty” because of his good looks. He told writer William Shaw he didn’t have decent clothes and went to school “in the same things every day, holes in my jeans, the fucked-up sneakers. You don’t want to be Tupac. You want to be ‘Jack.’”

It was in the Bay Area that Tupac got into hip-hop music. He started writing poetry, then turned his poems into songs. He called himself MC New York. When he wasn’t writing lyrics, Tupac spent his spare time reading. He couldn’t get enough of books, movies, and music. He was hungry for knowledge.

It was there that he came into his own with his rap style, where he rhymed straight and to the point, where his lyrics became direct, where he learned not to pretend to be someone or something he wasn’t. His family was still poor, still living in the ghetto; he admitted it and wasn’t ashamed of it—keepin’ it real, as he would often say.