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lion appellate bond in October 1995, it made Shakur
an enemy of the Crips—and, according to the LAPD
source, put him on a collision course with death.
The day of his murder, Shakur was involved in a
brawl with Crips member Orlando Anderson at the
MGM Grand casino. Earlier, Anderson had tried to
steal a medallion from one of Shakur’s entourage
and a member of Mob Piru, sparking a fistfight.
Spotting Anderson at the casino, the hot-tempered
rapper attacked. The LAPD source says that in the
years since, a former leader of the Crips has admitted
Shakur’s death was revenge for this beating. “It
was simple retaliation: You mess with one of ours,
we will mess with one of yours,” says the source. “If
Orlando had never been jumped in the hotel, they
never would have killed Tupac that night.”
Still, his death continues to spawn a complex
tangle of conflicting theories. Some have speculated
that Knight, the driver of the fatal BMW, conspired
to have Shakur killed to prevent him from
starting his own label. One recent documentary
claimed that Shakur was the accidental victim of a
plot to assassinate Knight hatched by the mogul’s
wife, Sharitha. (She strongly denied the reports to
People, saying, “If I wanted to kill Suge, believe me,
his ass would be dead.”)
The most prevalent legend is that Shakur’s
death was the result of the East Coast-
West Coast hip-hop feud with Biggie
Smalls. The pair had already traded shots
on a number of diss tracks. Smalls’s murder
six months later in a similarly unsolved
drive-by would forever link them in death,
but the LAPD source doubts the killings
stemmed from a rap rivalry. “The media
blew up the East Coast-West Coast thing,”
says the source. “Mob Piru were responsible
1
TUPAC’S DEADLY WORLD
1. One day after being shot at a New York recording
studio in 1994, Shakur attends a court hearing,
where he was convicted of sexual abuse against a
19-year-old fan 2. Hip-hop mogul Suge Knight (in
1996) is currently imprisoned on unrelated charges.
3. Knight’s black BMW 750iL after being sprayed
with bullets at the intersection of Flamingo
Road and Koval Lane in Las Vegas.
2
3
for Biggie’s death, and the Compton Crips were
responsible for Tupac’s. Biggie and Tupac ended
up being pawns in this whole thing.”
Anderson was killed in an unrelated shootout a
year after the murder, denying justice for Shakur’s
mother, who died in 2016. “She felt that nobody was
trying to find out what really happened,” says Donald
David, who worked with Afeni Shakur to manage
her son’s estate. “She never felt a sense of closure.”
With All Eyez on Me, Hutton hopes to offer that to
fans. “Tupac wanted to be a beacon of light,” says the
producer, who feels the thug-life persona belied the
star’s true character. “He didn’t want people to necessarily
be like him but to use his life as an example.
We’ll never know what he could have become.”
A LIFE CUT SHORT
“People have a lot of theories, but at the end of the day
it was a gang retaliation murder,” says an LAPD source.
Reporting by Char Adams, Christine Pelisek,
Nicole Sands and Brianne Tracy
PEOPLE June 26, 2017 71