The Killing of Tupac Shakur (23 page)

Lieutenant Moen added during a news conference: “We’re investigating possible connections to other murders in New York, Atlanta, and L.A. We can’t ignore the fact that there have been a number of murders involving rap singers recently.”

In another development, about two weeks after the shooting,
L.A. police seized a videotape in Houston they felt could help them find Biggie’s assailant.

“We expect the tape to give us some key information. We’re hoping the tape is going to assist in having people come forward to identify the shooter for us,” Moen told the
Houston Chronicle
. A Houston woman, who spoke to the newspaper on condition of anonymity, told the
Chronicle
the tape was filmed by a group of Houston residents who were in Los Angeles for the Soul Train Music awards. In a telephone interview, Moen said he couldn’t reveal what detectives had learned from viewing the videotape, because it was evidence in the ongoing investigation.

L.A. Homicide Detective Harper (who wouldn’t give his first name), said, “The tape is just one in a million things we’re doing in the investigation.” In the end, the tape didn’t provide any evidence.

There were rumors that Biggie was under federal surveillance just before the shooting, but they were unsubstantiated and probably “not true,” said Lieutenant Pat Conman.

“I have no idea what the feds are doing, but to my knowledge, that’s not true,” Conman said in a telephone interview. “I have no knowledge that Biggie Smalls was under surveillance by the feds.”

But the
Los Angeles Times
reported that undercover officers from New York were in the vicinity at the time of the shooting as part of a federal investigation of criminals thought to have connections to Bad Boy Entertainment. And it was rumored that at least one member of a federal task force investigating the rap industry was at the Petersen Automotive Museum the night of the party.

Conman also said that members of LVMPD’s homicide team investigating Tupac’s murder had been in touch with LAPD detectives about Biggie’s murder, “but just in the normal course of business. I believe detectives have had some conversations with them. They’re following the case.”

Unlike investigators in Tupac’s murder case, Los Angeles police early on were optimistic about cracking Biggie’s slaying
and publicly stated that they expected to make an arrest.

“I can tell you we are going to make an arrest,” Lieutenant Moen said at a news conference two weeks after Biggie’s slaying. “I cannot tell you when we are going to make that arrest. There’s a lot left to be done yet in this investigation.”

But six weeks after Biggie’s death, Homicide Lieutenant Conman admitted that there was nothing new in the case. “We have just a few leads we’re following up,” Conman told me. “There’s nothing startling to report.”

Detective Harper pointed out that “people are afraid and don’t want to talk to us. People [rappers] have careers to look after.”

In stark contrast to the Tupac investigation and LVMPD’s three-man homicide team, LAPD assigned a team of 20 investigators, who identified and interviewed nearly 200 witnesses. “We didn’t need any more,” LVMPD’s Manning said. “They [L.A. police] gathered as much information in their case, with all their people, as we did in ours. The more people involved, the more things get lost. You have a communications problem.”

Six months later, 20 officers were still involved in Biggie’s investigation. Nearly six years later, though, two detectives, a sergeant, and a lieutenant were assigned to the case, one of many in their total workload.

• • •

Biggie and Tupac once counted each other as friends. Biggie’s childhood friend, Abraham Widdi, told me that he, Biggie, and Tupac sometimes drank beer and threw dice together at Hodgie’s corner saloon on Fulton Street in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy. But the two had a falling out after Tupac accused Biggie of copying his style and, later, of setting him up in the 1994 shooting at Quad Studios in Manhattan.

San Francisco deejay Sway, in a telephone interview from his San Francisco radio studio, had this to say: “The Biggie thing, Tupac told me, is what he heard. He knew Biggie didn’t
pull the trigger [at the Manhattan studio]. There were allegations in the air that Biggie had something to do with it, but I don’t think Tupac knew who did it.”

When Tupac was in prison, people sent him letters saying Biggie’s homeboys had something to do with the shooting. In Tupac’s mind, that scenario grew stronger as more and more people told him that. From that moment on, the two were at odds with each other. Their record labels were rivals during the same time. As early as 1994, Biggie told the
Chicago Tribune
, “I’m scared to death. Scared of getting my brains blown out.”

By then bitter enemies, Tupac and Biggie taunted each other, and they used their music to do it.

After accusing Biggie of stealing his lyrics, Tupac stole Biggie’s wife, Faith Evans, or at least he claimed to have slept with her.

Tupac rapped, “I fucked your bitch, you fat mothafucka. You claim to be a playah, but I fucked your wife.” (Biggie and Faith were separated at the time; Biggie was seeing other women, including rapper Lil’ Kim, or Kimberly Jones, when he was killed.).

Biggie rapped right back in his solo album, “Dumb rappers need teachin’, Lesson A, don’t fuck with B-I-G, that’s that.” But Biggie claimed the lyrics had nothing to do with Tupac.

In a Miramax documentary titled
Rhyme or Reason
, Biggie talked about his dispute with Tupac and said it was just a coincidence. “We two individual people, you know what I’m saying?” he explained. “One man against one man made a whole West Coast hate a whole East Coast, and vice versa.”

The situation with Tupac was “blown up to much more than it was,” he told
The Source
magazine. “They’d gone and made a personal beef between me and [Tupac and Death Row] into a coastal beef, East against West. And that’s crazy. That’s bananas right there.” He said he still planned to go to California, because “they got the women, the weed, and the weather.”

Biggie blamed the media for the hype.

“I never did nothin’ wrong to nobody,” he said. “I ain’t never did nothin’ wrong to Tupac, I ain’t never did nothin’ wrong to Faith. ... And I kept quiet. I kept my mouth shut. I figure if I had been the one sittin’ here riffin’ it’d seem like I’d had a point to prove. I know I ain’t done nothin’ so it don’t make no sense for me to say nothin’. I just let everybody do they thing.”

After Tupac was killed, Biggie told
Spin
magazine’s Sia Michel, “I had nothing to do with any of that Tupac shit. That’s a complete and total misconception. I definitely wouldn’t wish death on anyone. I’m sorry he’s gone. That dude was nice on the mike.”

Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace, said, too, that her son had nothing to do with Tupac’s death. She was also adamant that her son’s murder had nothing to do with Tupac’s death. “I don’t think my son’s death was connected to Tupac. And I don’t think Christopher had anything to do with Tupac’s death,” said Mrs. Wallace, who told me during an interview from her New Jersey home that Biggie’s friends had told her that.

“The other thing I heard was that the shot was not meant for my son. The shot was meant for Puffy. My son was supposed to leave for London the same day he was killed. Puffy [Combs] asked him to stay. He didn’t want to stay [in L.A.]. He had to go to a party he didn’t want to go to. The only reason he was in L.A. was to help Puffy finish an album.”

For his part, Tupac, in a
Vibe
interview, once described Biggie as his brother.

“Regardless of all this stuff—no matter what he say, what I say—Biggie’s still my brother. He’s black. He’s my brother. We just have a conflict of interest. We have a difference of opinion,” he said.

“I don’t want it to be about violence. I want it to be about money. I told Suge my idea: Bad Boy make a record with all the East Coast niggas. Death Row make a record with all the
West Coast niggas. We drop the records on the same day. Whoever sell the most records, that’s who the bombest. And then we stop battling. We could do pay-per-views for charity, for the community.

“That’s as together as we can get. For money. What about getting together as black men? We are together as black men—they over there, we over here. If we really gonna live in peace, we all can’t be in the same room.”

Writer Kevin Powell said he thought Biggie was an unfortunate innocent bystander in the Death Row-Bad Boy feud.

“Suge definitely encouraged that,” Powell said. “It sells records, definitely. What record label—think about it—when in the history of music has a song like ‘Hit ’Em Up’ been put out? People heard the record. It was ridiculous. Tupac says he slept with Biggie’s wife, Faith. There’s a song on Biggie’s new album. It’s called ‘Notorious Thug.’ He says, ‘I have a so-called beef with you-know-who.’ He doesn’t even say Tupac’s name.

“I really feel deep down in my heart that Biggie just happened to be an innocent bystander and he caught the brunt of it,” Powell said in an interview from his Brooklyn home. “Black kids, the young black people on the East Coast, are very different from the West. I can go to Harlem, I can go to Staten Island or Queens. It’s not like a big deal. We’ve never claimed East Coast like they claim West Coast in California. New York is not the East Coast. You have Connecticut, Florida, other states. I know for a fact that a lot of kids in the East love West Coast music. I do. Biggie was the first East Coast artist in a long time who was able to transcend those boundaries. People here are petrified of going to California at this point. No one knows where it’s coming from. The running joke is, whoever is mentioned in Tupac’s last album, they are scared to death. You don’t know who’s doing the killings. You don’t know where it’s coming from. It’s scary, man.”

KMEL’s Sway said, “The media has done a very poor job of reporting the truth and kind of printed what they wanted to print in order to sell papers. There’s no such thing as an
East-West war. There are individuals who had conflicts. It’s not the coast of a country against a coast of a country. It’s easier to print that. The coasts are divided by the media.”

“It’s a sad world,” commented Peter Thomas, a rap music promoter, “where you can’t even go out and enjoy a party like everyone else because you think somebody’s going to kill you. You’re not just talking to an individual. You’re talking to a complete community, and in that community there’s a lot of people who have absolutely no sense, but they do have a .45.”

“For a rap superstar,” wrote Sia Michel in
Spin
magazine, “Biggie’s dreams were almost embarrassingly small: His ideal future, he said, was ‘to quit the game and just chill and watch my kids grow up ... live the life of a normal rich person.’ That become an impossibility the day Tupac Shakur declared war on [Biggie] ...”

Just before he was killed, Biggie told
The Source
magazine he’d thought about quitting the game of rap, commenting that he was laying low because, “I could fuck around and get murdered out in these streets.

“It’s a headache. ... sometimes as of late,” he said, “I’ve really been talkin’ about quittin’. I really want to stop. If I was financially stable, I would. I figure if I was to make like a cool $10 or $15 million, I could; probably just chill and put my artists out on my label and help them out more, but just not make any more music. I would quit.”

He talked about relocating from the East Coast to the South, “where I can just move at my [own] pace and not really have anybody movin’ at the same pace as me. Or where I can just do what I want to do and it wouldn’t seem strange to other people. I just wanna be in a calm area. I just wanna be able to relax.”

The beef with Tupac was wearing on him.

Sway conducted one of Biggie’s last interviews on the air. Sway said, “Biggie talked about Puffy being instrumental in him finding God in his life. He talked about his child. He had a baby. He talked about music and trying to be one of
the best rappers. It was real important that he get respect as an emcee. I don’t think he had no idea what was going to hit him. He wouldn’t have been parading around like that in L.A. if he did.”

No arrests have been made and the murder of Biggie Smalls remains unsolved.

Fourteen months after the Biggie Smalls murder and 19 months after Tupac Shakur was gunned down, another black-on-black killing took place, leaving the man widely suspected of being connected to Tupac’s murder dead on a Compton, California, street.

It was just after three p.m. on a spring afternoon on Friday, May 29, 1998, when a car drove up to a crowded car wash on a street corner in the heart of Compton, on Alondra Boulevard and Oleander Avenue. An argument broke out between two groups of men. Moments later, the sound of gunfire erupted. When the smoke cleared, four men were sprawled on the ground, bleeding from gunshot wounds. Two were dead. A third died early the next morning. The fourth man was charged with three murders.

Although a shooting in a white rural school is cause for a national outcry (as witnessed by a rash of killings in schools in the late 1990s and early 2000s), a black-on-black gun battle in an African-American ghetto barely raises an eyebrow. The bloodshed at the car wash would have been quickly forgotten with little mention, but for the notoriety of one of the dead: 23-year-old Orlando Napoleon “Little Lando” Anderson, a second-generation member of the Los Angeles street gang known as the Southside Crips.

The shooting of Orlando Anderson was another in the string of ongoing murders that blighted the reputation of rap culture and the image of young black men. Perhaps most intriguing, Orlando was the man widely suspected of pulling the trigger a year and a half earlier and killing Tupac Shakur.

After police in Las Vegas and Compton had all but named Anderson, a Lakewood resident, as Tupac’s killer, Orlando’s family released a statement denying his connection. The statement read: “Tupac Shakur, the talented musical genius, fell at the hands of a violent cruel drive-by shooter or shooters in Las Vegas. That’s a fact. That person, however, is not Orlando.”