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GR ge Fee | 8,8 8 eee ra THE SHOOTING IN ATLANTA ) Crips wouldn't think he was a Blood. His behavior was not right, he was on the edge. But they just figured he was Tupac the Rapper.” Mopreme recalled an incident that was emblematic. “There was a fight at the Comedy Store, and some gang members were after him. So he put on his [bullet- proof] vest and all his guns, and he went to their place. He said, ‘Y'all looking for me? Here | am!” After that, Mopreme added, the gang, duly impressed, didn’t bother him. Legendary as such an exploit became, the reality was rather more com- plicated. Watani Tyehimba told me thar it was the “Rolling Sixties” set of the Crips chat Tupac had gotten in trouble with and that he and Mutulu Shakur cach contacted their leadership. “I did it from the street, Mutulu did it from prison, and together we got it under control, Then be went to the Crips’ place. After that they were under orders not to harm him.” Regarding Tupac's dramatic ges- ture, Tyehimba said, “It was machismo.” all Tupac’s much publicized, vio- lent confrontations in the tempes- tuous year 1993, none better illustrated the degree to which he had become the exemplar of the gangsta-rap mandate than his arrest for shooting two off-duty police officers in Adlanta. The officers, he would later say, had been harassing a black motorist. The charges were dropped when it emerged that the policemen had been drinking and had initiated the in- cident, and when the prosecution's own, witness testified that the pun one of the officers threatened Tupac with had been seized in a drug bust and then stolen from an evidence locker. The shooting in Adanta made Tupac a hero to some, a demon to others. “They were acting 2s bullies, and they drew their guns first,” Mutulu Shakur says of the officers. Tupac’s response “scaled him as not only a rapper but a person who was true to the game. That made him, to the people who were his audi- ence, real—and if not liked, respected.” However, to the law-enforcement com- munity and the political conservatives who were rap’s most vocal critics Tupac was not only propagating insurrection- as well. Gangsta rap had been provok- ing concern among law-enforcernent authorities in this country since at least 1989, when an F.B.I. public-affairs wi47, OR. officer wrote a letter to Ruthless/Prior- ity Records, which distributed records by the group N.W.A. (Niggaz With At- titude). The F.B.1. was concemed, spe- cifically, with the song “Fuck tha Po- lice.” “Advocating violence and assault is wrong, and we in the law enforcement community take exception to such ac- tion,” the F.B.L officer wrote. In 1992, i and their allies—most vis- ibly Vice-President Quayle—denounced Time Warmer for having put out the song “Cop Killer,” by Ice-T. The fol- lowing year, Time Warner released Ice-T from his contract, citing creative differences. Officer Gregory White, of the LAPD., who works in a special gang unit, ex- plains that gangsta rap is a legitimate concem of law-enforcement agencies be- cause it often involves criminal activity. “Rap is a way to launder dirty drug money,” he says. According to White, some record companies provide fronts for the gangs. But he adds that it is rap music’s virulently antipolice rhetoric y) 7 that is considered particularly pemicious. Charles Opletee, | Jr, a black attor- ncy who is a professor at Harvard Law School and who represented Tupac on a number of cases in the last vear of his life, notes that “people in law enforcement not only disliked Tupac but despised him. This wasn't just a person talking, but someone who had generated a fol- lowing among those who had problems with the police, and who spoke to them. He was saving, ‘I understand vour pain, I know the source of it, and I can tell you what to do about it.’ Police officers knew him by name, Bob Dole mentioned him by name.” Mutulu Shakur believes that his own relationship to Tupac was a source of continuing concern to law-enforcement authorities. Mutulu, who wears long dreadlocks and is revered within the black-nationalist community, had been a target of the F.B.I. and other police agencies for years before the Brink's rob- bery. During his trial, the tederal district court judge confirmed that “the rights of aes east a . won Nay cee id a _————————Y Vat. "Please welcome Big Alcobol.” “ath