◆ SpookStack

i ms i A a ot - ig 7 Yate Oe Ayes, y ~ y N ! = *s5 eal ‘Sam is very focussed.” gave me, I’m not innocent in terms of the way I was acting. .. . I'm just as guilty for not doing nothing as I am for doing things.” He accepted blame for not hav- ing intervened on behalf of Ayanna Jack- son. “I know I feel ashamed—because I wanted to be accepted and because [ didn't want no harm done to me, I didn’t say nothing.” In April of 1995, while he was still in prison, he married Keisha Mortis, whom he'd been dating for about six months before he was put in jail. Eminently re- sponsible and levelheaded, she was go- ing to school and holding down a job; she didn’t smoke marijuana; and she didn't immediately have sex with him. Morris told me that on their first date they saw a movie, and then Tupac pre- vailed on her to stay in his hotel room. When she insisted on going to bed fully dressed, he protested only that “you could take off your sneakers.” In the deposition he gave in the civil case brought against him by the family of the young man who had murdered the Texas state trooper, ‘Tupac described his new wife: “She's twenty-two, she’s a Scorpio, she. .’. just graduated from John Jay College with a degree in criminal science, and she’s taken a year off, she's going to go to law school . . . she’s nice, she’s quiet, she’s a square, she’s a good girl She’s my first and only girlfriend I ever had in my en- tire life and now she's my wife.” Tupac and Morris talked about mov- ing co Arizona, and what they would name their kids. He started to organize his finances, and attempted to settle the ‘ numerous lawsuits pending against him across the country. But in the forbidding, almost feudal backdrop of the Clinton Correctional Facility, his efforts seemed increasingly irrelevant. His lawyers were filing appeals in his case, and under those circumstances he could have been al~- lowed to post bail, but the district attor- ney’s office was fighting his right to do so, and the proceedings dragged on, month after month. What he had spoken of ini- tially when he was at Rikers Island as prison’s “gift”—of respite and introspec- tion—now had been overshadowed by the nightmare of incarceration. “Dannemora was a hellhole—he had a one-to-four-year sentence, and they put him in a maximum-security prison!” one of his lawyers, Stewart Levy, ‘ays. Levy recalls that while he was visiting Tupac one ‘day, “Tupac hada’ rectal search when he came in”—to the visit- ing area. “Then we spent six hours there oe Lei ah ade 1 tts THE NEW YORKER, JULY 7, 1997 in full view of the guards. Then the guards started saying “Tu- pac! Tupac!” in this falsetto voice, putting up their fingers with these plastic gloves, waving them—'Tt's time! It’s time!’ Why a second rectal search, when he'd been sitting there in plain view with his lawyer, why, except to humiliate hum?” Yaas- myn Fula, who had known him since he was a baby, and who visited him often in prison, re- calls, “It was a terrible experi- ence for him—to be captive, in a horrific situation, with guards threatening to kill him, inmates threatening to kill him... . He said, ‘f have never had people demean me and disgrace me as they have in this jail.’” Other factors weighing on Tupac contributed to his anxi- etv about being in prison. He was the breadwinner for a large extended family—his mother, his sister, her baby, his aunt and her family, and more. Ins Crews, one of his attorneys in the sex-abuse case—who had been leery of representing Tupac but became be- guiled and devored (“Had he been this foulmouthed, woman-hating kid, 1 wouldn't have done it”)——recalled that one day as he sat in court with a bunch of young children climbing all over him during a recess he had remarked to her, “If 1 don’t work, these kids don’t eat.” “He'd been deprived of his child- hood, and then, at twenty, he had twenty people to support,” she said. Beyond that, he had enormous legal fees for cases all over the country. After nearly six months in prison, despite the money be- ing advanced by Interscope, Tupac’s funds were depleted. EATH ROW RECORDS offered to . solve all Tupac’s financial prob- lems. Death Row had been started by Suge Knight and the rap producer Dr. Dre in 1992. Knight was a former University of Nevada football star who had grown up in Compton in South Central L.A. In the late eighties, he had worked as a bodyguard in the burgeon- ing L.A. rap scene, eventually develop- ing a friendship with Dre, who was then a member of the group N.W.A. Knight persuaded Dre that he was getting