Tupac Amaru Shakur was born Lesane Parish Crooks in East Harlem on June 16, 1971. He died on September 13, 1996 in a Las Vegas hospital after undergoing surgery for multiple gunshot wounds. Tupac would have been 40 today.
Yesterday, a convicted murderer serving life in prison claimed he shot Tupac in an earlier robbery in New York in 1994.
According to AllHipHop.com, Dexter Isaacs claims he was hired by industry veteran Jimmy “Henchman” Rosemond to rob and kill Tupac.
Supposedly Henchman gave Isaac $2,500 to do the job. By coincidence, Isaacs was convicted of killing a Brooklyn taxi driver in a murder-for-hire plot that was arranged by the taxi driver’s wife.
Rosemond, who once managed rappers The Game, Shyne and Too $hort, is on the lam from the law in NY where he’s wanted on federal narcotics charges.
Isaac is hinting that he may implicate Sean “Puffy” Combs in Tupac’s shooting and robbery as well. Although Isaac claims to have evidence in the form of a gold chain that he snatched from Tupac during the robbery, he has yet to produce that chain.
Within hours of Isaac’s statement, an NYPD spokesman said, “NYPD detectives plan to interview the prisoner.”
“It’s a flat out lie,” Rosemond’s lawyer Jeffrey Lichtman told the Daily News.
“Dexter Isaac is not claiming this 17 years later to clear his conscience. He’s doing it because he’s told anybody who will listen he doesn’t want to die in prison. He has kids and wants to work off his sentence. He can’t be trusted.”
According to police, Tupac was ambushed on Nov. 30, 1994 by three men outside the Quad Studios in Nw York. Tupac himself fingered his best friend, Randy “Stretch” Walker, for setting him up for the robbery. Stretch was gunned down a year later by three men in Queens Village. His murder was never solved.
By coincidence, rapper Christopher “Notorious BIG” Wallace and Bad Boy Records founder Sean “Puffy” Combs were both on an upper floor of the same recording studio at the time of Tupac’s shooting and robbery. After the shooting, a bleeding Tupac rode an elevator to the eighth floor where Biggie and Puffy were recording. Once there, Tupac demanded to know if they set him up.
Puffy noted that Tupac was bleeding profusely from his wounds and he ordered someone to call 911. Tupac was suffering from five bullet wounds to his head, buttock, scrotum, arm and thigh.
Increasingly paranoid and thinking he was a sitting duck, Tupac checked himself out of Bellevue hospital three days later against doctor’s advice.
Tupac would be shot dead two years later by an unknown assailant in Las Vegas.
