◆ SpookStack

| ~ éi Dr. Shakur... were violated by the COINTELPRO program.” (COINTELPRO was initiated by the F.B.L. to neutralize black-activist leaders as well as certain right-wing extremists.) Recently, in a de- velopment not unlike that in the case of Geronimo Pratt, Mutulu was granted permission to file a motion for a new trial on the ground that evidence was discov- ered indicating that the government withheld information that would have been favorable to his defense. In the spring of 1994, about six months after Tupac shot the police officers in At- lanta, Mutulu was moved from the peni- tentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to the super-maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois, and from there to the country’s most maximum-security insti- tution, in Florence, Colorado. In a memo- randum written in February, 1994, the warden of Lewisburg argued that Mutulu needed “the controls of Marion,” in part because of his “outside contacts and in- fluence over the younger black element.” Mutulu is convinced that Tupac be- came a lightning rod after he shot the policemen in Atlanta. “These disenfran- chised—the young blacks who are poor and hopeless—have no leader,” Mutulu said, “Their heroes are cultural and sports heroes. No one—not Jesse Jackson, not Ben Chavis, not Louis Farrakhan—has as much influence with this segment as rappers. So when Tupac stands up to a white cop, shoots it out, wins the battle, gets cut free, and continues to say the 54 ‘ things he’s been saying—the decision to destroy his credibility is clear.” \ K THETHER by happenstance or not, about two weeks after the At- lanta shooting something occurred that could not have been better de- signed to remove Tupac from circulation—and that would ultimately lead to his undoing. fia a While in New York for the WR filming of the movie “Above oe the Rim,” Tupac had been socializing with a Haitian-born music promoter, Jacques Agnant. Tupac was playing the part of a gangster named Birdie in the movie, and he told friends that spending ume with Agnant helped him in his por- the gangs in South Central provided him with material for his lyrics. “He said that he was studying Jacques——that Jacques was Birdie,” Watani Tyehimba recalls. But and warned Tupac to keep his distance. “I told Tupac the first time I met him, Charles Fuller told Tupac, everyone told him he should stay away from Jacques.” Tupac ignored the warnings. “Jacques had all this gold and diamond jewelry,” Man Man says. “He had money. He had a nice B.M.W. He could get you in any club. Pac was just starting to be known then, and he couldn’t get in all the clubs. Jacques spent about four or five thousand dollars on Tupac in the beginning—he just overwhelmed him.” According to someone else who knew Agnant, Madonna (with whom Tupac would become close) was one of Agnant’s celebrity friends. On November 14, 1993, Jacques Agnant and Tupac went to Nell’s, the downtown New York club. A friend of Agnant's, identified only as “Tim,” introduced Tu- pac to a nineteen-year-old woman named Ayanna Jackson. She expressed her inter- est in him; they danced together, and she performed oral sex in a corner of the dance floor. They went to his hotel, where they had intercourse. The next day, she called and left many messages on his voice mail, saying, among other things, how much she'd enjoyed his prowess. Four days later, on November 18th, she returned to his hotel suite. There, she found Tupac, Man Man, Agnant, and an unidentified friend of Agnant’s. They all watched television in the living room, and then she and Tupac went into the bedroom; later, the three other men entered the room. What ensued is disputed; Jackson claims that she was forced to perform oral sex on Tupac while Agnant partly undressed her and grabbed her from be- hind, and that they then made her per- form oral sex on Agnant’s friend while Tupac held her. (Man Man, she acknowledged, did not touch her.) Tupac claimed that he left the room when the other men Meee entered and did not witness 37 whatever happened. In any case, Jackson testified that she left the suite in tears and chat Agnant told her to calm down, saying that he “would hate to see what happened to Mike [Tyson] happen to Tupac”: that is, a woman charg- ing him with sexual assault, which is what Jackson promptly did. She summoned the hotel's security officers, who called the police. Tupac, Man Man, and Agnant were arrested. (Agnant's friend left.) Indictments were handed down on sex- Pree THE NEW YORKER, JULY 7, 1997 abuse, sodomy, and also weapons charges (two guns were found in the hotel room), and Agnant's lawyer, Paul Brenner, who had represented the Patrolmen’'s Benevo- lent Association for many years, moved that his client’s case be severed from his two codefendants’, on the ground that only Tupac and Man Man had been charged with the weapons offenses, and that therefore the indictment was im- properly joined. The prosecutor did not oppose the motion—something that Tupac's lawyers say is highly unusual— and the judge granted it. Tt was apparently after Agnant's case was severed that Tupac became convinced that Agnant was a government informer and had set him up. Tupac’s suspicions were, inevitably, shaped by the experi~ ence of his extended family, “Jacques didn’t smell right to me,” says Watani Tyehimba, who considers himself par- ticularly attuned to the presence of under- cover agents because of his long history with the Panthers and what he learned from COINTELPRO files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. One night in November, 1994, during the trial of Tupac and Man Man, Tupac was at a club with the actor Mickey Rourke and a friend of Rourke’s, A. J. Benza, a reporter for the Daily News. Tupac told Benza that he believed that Agnant had set him up. A couple of days later Benza wrote an account of the conversation, re- calling that Tupac had told him that Mike Tyson had called him up from ptison to warn him that Agnant was “bad news.” On the night of November 30th, while the jury was deliberating, Tupac went toa Times Square music studio to rap for an artist, Little Shawn, who, according to Man Man, had ties to Agnant. When Tu- pac and his entourage entered the lobby of the studio, three black men followed them, drew guns, and ordered them to lie down. Tupac reached for his own gun, which he usually wore in his waistband, cocked. The men then shot Tupac five times, grabbed his gold jewelry, and fled. Convinced that the shooting had also been a setup, and that the shooters would retum to finish the job, Tupac checked himself out of the hospital a few hours after surgery, and moved secretly to the house of the actress Jasmine Guy to re- cuperate. When he returned to the court- room, bandaged and in a wheelchair, he was acquitted of the three sodomy counts and the weapons charges but, in atyap-