zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric

Friday, September 06, 2002

BIGGIE KILLED TUPAC?

The Los Angeles Times ran a piece today saying Biggie Smalls ordered the killing of Tupac and supplied his personal Glock for the murder. Apparently, after Randall Sullivan's hatchet-job book, LAbyrinth and Nick Broomfield's documentary "Biggie and Tupac"--which both argued but failed to prove Suge killed Tupac--LA Times investigative reporter Chuck Philips of the LA Times. (Check the article here.) He argues that Biggie authorized the Southside Crips (Orlando Anderson's set) to kill Tupac, and that they may have done so with Biggie's own Glock. Pretty inflammatory stuff, indeed.

On my initial read, Philips' timeline is viable, but extremely difficult to imagine. At 8:30 pm, Tupac and Suge were at the MGM Grand Hotel to check out Tyson fight. Between 8:45 and 9pm the fight was over and the entourage headed into the casino shortly thereafter where they spotted Crip Orlando Anderson and beat him down. The Death Row crew headed to the Luxor while Anderson staggered back to Treasure Island Hotel.

In Philips' timeline, the Crips immediately held a meeting to decide to off Tupac, then sent a contact to see Biggie. Philips reports that Biggie was staying at the MGM Grand incognito, in the penthouse. A Crip emissary was dispatched to see Biggie to see if Biggie would pay for the hit. According to Philips, Biggie not only agreed to pay $1 million for the hit, he offered his own Glock to do so. Separately, Anderson and his crew of Crips planned the assassination. They allegedly decided to hit Tupac and Suge on the way back from the afterparty at Suge's Club 662. Anderson and crew left the Treasure Island hotel sometime before 11pm (hitting mad traffic on the Strip). Sometime after 11pm, they were surprised to spotted the Death Row entourage, pulled up alongside Suge's car and killed Tupac.

In under 2 hours, then, Philips has the Southside Crips deciding on the hit, planning the hit, soliciting Biggie in person for a million-dollar bounty, receiving the murder weapon, then actually doing it. In and of itself, this timeline is hard to believe.

But today, Biggie's family and friends said Biggie was at home in Teaneck, NJ, thousands of miles away and called the report irresponsible. Russell Simmons will be responding with his own press statement shortly. Libel lawsuits will surely follow.

The report leaves a lot of questions open: what was Biggie's motive? Where was he really? But they raise lots of questions about Philips' own sourcing. The article cites police and Crips, but quotes none, not even anonymously. Were the sources paid? What are the sources' motives?

Philips defends himself and his article on MTV.com,
here. He says he never bought into the Biggie stories until he began to investigate, and hints that Biggie may not have meant it when he told the Crips to kill Tupac, just was playing a game with them. To believe this, one would have to accept that Biggie was incredibly naive of the Crips he was allegedly working with. That's pretty hard to do.

Another explanation is that Philips was desperate to rescue his reputation after Randall Sullivan personally ripped him in LAbyrinth, that this story is less about truth than about ego. Sullivan's argument, of course, is that Suge and corrupt black cops conspired to kill both Tupac and Biggie. (Sullivan spends a lot of time bemoaning affirmative action and black police chiefs in LAPD, a fact which might give you an idea of how his reactionary politics distort the story he is trying to report.) In a Biggie-as-don scenario, then, Philips gets a made-to-use narrative to shut Sullivan up and put himself back atop the investigative reporting heap. Is it any mistake that both stories--which interchange Suge and Biggie as Black Caesars--both rely on ridiculously overblown stereotypes and belief-defying B-movie plotting?

Part 2 of Philips' article runs tomorrow morning, and will reportedly be about why the police investigation faltered. Stay tuned.

posted by Zentronix @ 2:19 PM 0 comments

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