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Tupac “Hit Em Up”Former L.A.P.D. detective Greg Kading’s new book, Murder Rap, makes the case that P. Diddy put a hit on Tupac and Suge Knight through a Crip and PCP dealer named Duane “Keffe D” Davis, and that Knight, who survived the hit, retaliated by whacking Biggie. Psychologically, this is a far more reassuring narrative than the one it replaces: that of former L.A.P.D. detective Russell Poole, whose version of events was popularized by Nick Broomfield’s 2002 documentary Biggie and Tupac. Poole, taken off the Biggie case while investigating fellow officers, focused on deep connections between L.A.P.D. and Piru Bloods, linking the murder to patterns of departmental corruption exposed by the Rampart scandal. According to Poole, the two disgraced officers at the heart of Rampart—Rafael Perez and David Mack—were part of a conspiracy to murder Biggie that involved Suge Knight, L.A. police, and Bloods. More surprisingly, Broomfield’s film suggests that Knight first had Tupac killed because ‘Pac was going to leave Death Row, then arranged Biggie’s murder to take the heat off himself. While tying the L.A.P.D. to the murders is emotionally satisfying, Poole’s tale attributes superhuman powers of criminal genius to Suge Knight.On the contrary, Kading told LA Weekly interviewers that he hoped his book would exonerate the L.A.P.D. Compared to Poole’s story, Kading’s is country simple: Diddy did ‘Pac, so Knight knocked off Biggie. Keffe D, the man who told Kading that Diddy offered him a million dollars to whack Tupac, is the uncle of the late Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, the Crip beaten by Tupac and his crew in the lobby of Vegas’ MGM Grand hours before Tupac’s death. According to Keffe D’s confession, Anderson shot Tupac from the back seat of the killers’ white Cadillac. It would be nice to think that, someday, Kading’s story will be borne out by good old-fashioned empirical, incontrovertible evidence.
Tupac “Life Goes On”The simplicity of Kading’s tale is like that of Bullet (1996), a smack drama directed by Julien Temple in which Tupac, onscreen for maybe ten minutes, gets second billing to Mickey Rourke. Rourke, who co-wrote the movie when he still had something like the face he was born with, stars as Butch “Bullet” Stein, a small-time thug junkie who is proudly Jewish. Tupac plays eyepatched dealer Tank, a gangsta Ahab driven by a monomaniacal desire for revenge on Bullet, who shanked out Tank’s eye in stir. “Me and that muthafucka got a destiny,” Tank tells his gun. Bullet consists mainly of scenes of total junkie squalor and unrelieved urban misery, punctuated by violence and one moment of drug bliss. Everyone’s life sucks. Rourke steals, cops and geezes and obsesses over homosexuality. His brothers are played by Adrien Brody, a loser artist, and Ted “It puts the lotion on its skin” Levine, here a schizophrenic who delivers endless monologues about Vietnam and tortures Bullet’s folks with his madness. Since you’ve had 15 years to watch this piece of shit, it ends with Tank blowing Bullet away under the L train. In revenge, under cover of darkness, Bullet’s schizo brother slits Tank’s throat with a KA-BAR. In the last shot, the blood pours from Tupac’s neck, filling the street and the frame. “Payback’s a motherfucker,” Ted Levine says.Previously - Kickboy Face