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tit Ry dw ete Bens WR wt ashe mn! Sb on ate Ald tant Cental ae Belushi. The night it wrapped, Tupac celebrated by taking one of his law- yers, Shawn Chapman, to dinner at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills. He had been seeing a lot of Kidada Jones, Quincy Jones's daughter, but that didn't deter him from flirting with Chapman. She remembers him driving away from the Peninsula in his midnight-blue Rolls-Royce with the top down, playing Sinatra's “Fly Me to the Moon.” It was a romantic and lighthearted interlude— and a stark contrast to the grave business Tupac was transacting. Just a few days earlier, on August 27th, Tupac had severed a critical tie to Death Row. “He had been on the set all day, and in the studio all night,” Fula recalls. “He sent us to the studio to get cassettes of what he'd done the night before—he wanted to listen to it. They said no, that Kenner wouldn’t allow it. Pac went crazy! He fired Kenner .. . I typed the letter... and he gave me permission to hire another lawyer.” “Tupac waited far longer than I wanted him to,” Ogletree says. But, to Tupac’s more streetwise friends, firing Kenner seems impossibly rash. Syke didn’t know that had happened until I told him, and when I did he looked at me for a long moment, as if he was hav- ing difficulty processing what I had said. Then he murmured—repeatedly—“He Jirred Kenner?” “Tupac was brilliant, but he wasn’t smart,” another friend says. “He didn’t realize, or he refused to accept, what any- one from the street would have known-— that you can’t fire Kenner, you don't leave Death Row.” Suge Knight is said now to maintain that Tupac’s differences were with Kenner, not with him. NIGHT had planned a big party at his Las Vegas club, 662 (on a phone pad the numbers spell “M.O.B.”), on September 7th, following the heavyweight- boxing-title fight between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon. Tupac was supposed to attend with the Death Row contingent. He had just got back to L_A. from New York that morning, and he decided he was not going to Las Vegas; he told Fula he was going to Adanta to setde problems with some relatives there, instead. But just a few hours later she learned that he had changed his plans; Knight had per- suaded him to go to Las Vegas after all. After the almost nonexistent fight— Tyson knocked Seldon out in less than two minutes—Knight, Tupac, and their entourage were on the way out of the M.G.M. Grand when they came upon Orlando Anderson, a reputed member of the Southside Crips, the Bloods’ long- standing enemies. According to an aff- davit that would later be filed by a detec- tive with the Compton Police Department, some Crips had robbed a member of Death Row of his company medallion a month or so earlier; now, in the hotel, the victim is said to have whispered to Tupac that Anderson was the thief. Tu- pac, predictably, took off after Anderson, followed by Knight and the rest of the Death Row entourage; they set upon him, beating and kicking him, unal ho- tel security guards arrived and broke up the melee. , Tupac went to his hotel briefly, then rejoined the others; about two hours af- ter the fight, they were on their way to Knight's club, in a long convoy of cars. Afeni Shakur says that Kidada Jones, who was in Las Vegas that night, told her that Tupac had wanted to drive his Hummer, which is aktn to a combat ve- hicle; but Knight, insisting that they had things to discuss, had prevailed upon Tupac to ride with him. Knight drove his black B.M.W., and Tupac rode in the front passenger seat, with his win- dow down, A former Death Row body- guard told me that the situation was ab- ertant; ordinarily, an armed bodyguard would have been riding with them, and additional armed bodyguards would fol- low in the car behind. This night, how- ever, Knight and Tupac rode alone. The Outlawz were in the car behind them, with a bodyguard who was unarmed, | A white Cadillac pulled up alongside Knight’s B.M.W. and a black man who was riding in it fired about thirteen shots from a .40-calibre Glock pistol into the passenger side, hitting Tupac, who strug- ged to get into the back seat. Knight (by his own account in a subsequent police interview) pulled him down. Tupac was hit four times; Knight's forehead was 63 grazed. (He would later maintain he had a bullet lodged in his head.) At the hos- pital, Tupac went into emergency sur- gery, where doctors removed one shat- tered lung, and he was listed in critical condition. According to his mother and others who saw him over the next sev- eral days, he was first unconscious and then, because he was so agitated, he was heavily sedated. Knight, interviewed sev- eral weeks later by Time magazine, claimed that when he was sitting on Tu- pac’s bed, Tupac “called out to me and said he loved me.” Tupac died on the afternoon of Sep- tember 13th. Afeni says that doctors trted to resuscitate him several times, and that she then told them not to try again. She later told me that when he was thrashing about she surmised that he was trying to tell one of his cousins that he wanted him to “pull the plug.” She also said repeatedly that “Tupac would not have wanted to live as an invalid.” (y March Sth, six months after Tu- pac was murdered in Las Vegas, Biggie Smalls, who had been singled out by Tupac as a traitor and mortal enemy, was shot in his car as he left a music- industry party in Los Angeles. No arrests have been made in either Tupac’s or Biggie’s murder. While the Las Vegas police would appear to have been almost lackadaisical in their approach to Tupac's murder (they made only a perfunctory at- tempt to question Tupac's cousins, wha were riding in the car behind Knight's, for example), it is also true that in that group of witnesses--and among their peers—giving information to the police is taboo. When Knight was interviewed. on “Primetime Live,” he said that even if he knew who had shot Tupac, he would not say. “I don’t get paid to solve homicides,” he declared. There have been many theories about who killed Tupac; one of the most preva- lent rumors, which began to circulate shortly after Tupac was shot and has per- sisted to this day, is that Knight himself had something to do with Tupac's mur- der. In mid-March he gave an interview from jail to “America’s Most Wanted” and said that he had not been involved. But many of those who were close:to Tupac continue to suspect—based only on circumstantial evidence and their un= derstanding of the street—that it was his 4 Ae cy