Can you imagine the damage control that was happening in the days after the September 7th, 1996 attempted murder of Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur?
Suge Knight and Tupac Shakur were clearly the intended targets that night.
Suge was only grazed; Tupac wasn't dead and it looked like he would survive. All of that effort to put that car in that intersection at the right moment with six barricades and the hit was a complete failure. All of those behind the murder plot were burning up the telephone lines and taking meetings to deflect blame away from them.
At the time everybody feared Suge Knight and he was demanding answers. Suge had loyal soldiers that were perceived to be stone cold killers. Fear they would retaliate if it was learned what had really happened was most certainly a strong motivator. The bodyguards were also burning up the telephone lines talking about this. Several were asked to tell lies to Suge Knight by Reggie Wright Jr. Technically they worked for Reggie so reluctantly they complied.
"Everything that happened that night was out of Reggie's mouth but Suge never blamed any of it for Reggie," they would say. Why?
Reggie told Suge Knight that Sean Puffy Combs was behind the murder attempt. He knew that Suge blamed the murder of Jake Robles a year earlier on Combs. He knew that when it came to Combs Suge had an irrational hatred and Reggie and his conspirators could hide safely in that blind spot.
Later, Chuck Philips would galvanize the assertion that Sean Puffy Combs was behind the murder of Tupac Shakur and it would cost him his newspaper career. The Los Angeles Times printed the story and the Smoking Gun quickly debunked it. There was an apology and a retraction because there was absolutely no proof the murder attempt on Suge and murder of Tupac had anything to do with Sean Puffy Combs. Biggie's death had bridged the logic gap in the story to make it seem like retaliation.
Correction: Chuck Philips was fired for asserting that Combs was behind the attack on Tupac Shakur at Quad Studios as there was no credible evidence to back this claim. Philips also asserted in another article that Biggie Smalls an affiliate of Sean Combs paid a million dollars and supplied the murder weapon to have Tupac Shakur killed citing anonymous gang sources. (It is hard to keep all of the Chuck Philips propaganda straight.)
The assertion that Combs killed Tupac is fully debunked in the book Tupac:187. Our enemies have no power or access to hurt us like our friends do. Sean Combs was an outsider. He could never have infiltrated Death Row Records the way it was infiltrated by the conspirators that plotted to kill Suge and Tupac. But the story resonated with Suge Knight.
The belief that Puffy killed Tupac and deprived Suge of his number one earner as told to Suge by Reggie Wright Jr. set up the reason Biggie needed to die. One of the goals with the murder was to pin it on Suge Knight because those running Death Row Records in Suge's absence wanted to vilify Suge so that he would never see the light of day and the theft of his assets could be completed.
Biggie's murder was perpetrated while Suge Knight was in jail. It would be difficult to prove that Suge Knight had participated in that crime. What is more likely is that those who perpetrated the murder used it as a way to get back in Suge's good graces to get him to sign over the record label to them so that it could be looted while Suge Knight was in prison. According to California law Suge could not run a business from prison. He needed to put a surrogate in place to handle the day to day operations at the record label. You can imagine the conversation. We killed Biggie in your name so sign right here. A dumbfounded Suge probably signed his life away... literally... as there have been so many attempts on his life since then and Suge has never regained the quality of life he once enjoyed.
There was chaos at the record label from October 22, 1996 when Suge Knight was arrested until he signed the record label over to Reggie Wright Jr. after the Biggie Smalls murder and then almost instantly the chaos magically disappears.
While in prison, Suge Knight told Mario Hammonds all of the intimate details of the Biggie Smalls murder that he learned from Reggie Wright Jr. according to Hammonds. Reggie probably encouraged Suge to take responsibility for the hit in prison to give him "street cred."
In the immediate aftermath of the Tupac and Biggie murders those that died were witnesses. Before Suge got out of prison the murders focused on his inner circle so that if he discovered the truth about the hits he could never retaliate and would not be protected upon his release.
This was what Russell Poole came to believe before he died and what he was in the Sheriff's Department talking about at the time of his death.
You can read about this in Chaos Merchants and Tupac:187.
Chaos Merchants
http://www.amazon.com/Chaos-Merchants-Murders-Shakur-Notorious-ebook/dp/B01A2VYJTO
Tupac:187
http://www.amazon.com/Tupac-187-Richard-RJ-Bond/dp/0692317848/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8
© 2016 Michael Douglas Carlin.
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