Who is kato and mental

The more trouble Tupac got into with the law, the more credibility he gained on the street—and the more viable a rap star he became. The huge commercial success of gangsta rap created a peculiarly volatile nexus between the worlds of inner-city gangs and the multibillion-dollar record industry. Tupac sometimes said that he thought of his songs as parables, and now it is his own life—his journey into those two worlds, and his immolation at the point at which they converged—that seems almost allegorical.

The world of Suge Knight and South Central Los Angeles is at a far remove from the one in which Tupac Shakur grew up, though each, in its own way, romanticized violence. Early in , while she was pregnant with Tupac, she was on trial for conspiring to blow up several New York department stores. She and her co-defendants—the Panther 21—were acquitted just a month before Tupac was born.

His surname, Shakur, is a kind of clan name taken by a loose group of black nationalists in New York. I used to sit outside by the street lights and read the autobiography of Malcolm X.

And it changed me, it moved me. And then of course my mother had books by people like. And she would tell these stories of things that she did or she saw or she was involved with and it made me feel a part of something.

She always raised me to think that I was the Black Prince of the revolution. Tupac had indeed become a Black Prince by the time he was killed, but not along the lines laid out by the political activists of the sixties. Afeni and her friends were involved in what they perceived as revolutionary activity for the good of their community.

Tupac and his fellow gangsta rappers sported diamond-encrusted gold jewelry, drove Rolls-Royce Corniches, and vied with one another in displays of gargantuan excess. Nevertheless, Tupac did not forget who his forebears were. The leaders of the black nationalist movement to which the other Shakurs belonged had been virtually eliminated, largely through the efforts of the F. Mutulu Shakur, who had received a degree in acupuncture in Canada and used his skills to develop drug-abuse-treatment programs, was sentenced to sixty years in prison for conspiring to commit armed robbery and murder.

She had been convicted in of murdering a New Jersey state trooper, but escaped two years later and fled to Cuba. He was imprisoned for twenty-seven years. His conviction was reversed a few weeks ago on the ground that the government suppressed evidence favorable to him at his trial most significantly that the principal witness against him was a paid police informant.

I tried to add spark to it, I tried to be the new breed, the new generation. I tried to make them proud of me. Their revolution, and in most cases their lives, too, were ashes. Tupac and his sister Sekyiwa, who was born in , became small Panther celebrities on the radical-chic circuit. In his deposition, Tupac says that by the time he was twelve or thirteen years old Afeni had developed serious drug and alcohol problems.

Afeni disagrees. She says he was seventeen. Tupac did not know who his father was, but he was close to Mutulu, who was the father of Sekyiwa and lived with them for a number of years. Mutulu was on the F. The family moved to Baltimore, and when Tupac was fourteen he was admitted to a performing-arts school there. I was the mouse king in the Nutcracker.

There was no gangs. I was an artist. He wrote his lyrics with great speed and ease, and was soon performing at benefits for Geronimo Pratt and other prisoners. Tupac spent two years at the Baltimore School for the Arts. His work was always original, never imitative, never off the rack. Even in this talented group of kids, he stood out. As he described it in his deposition, he had no money for food or clothes; for a time he stayed at the home of a wealthy classmate and wore his clothes.

But my mother was pregnant, on dope, dope crack. She had a boyfriend that was violent toward her. We never could pay the rent. She always had to sweet-talk this old white man that was the landlord into letting us [stay] for another month. And he was making passes at my mom. So I sacrificed my future at the School for the Arts to get on a bus to go cross-country to California with no money. Tupac stayed for a time with Linda Pratt, the wife of the incarcerated Geronimo Pratt, in Marin City, a poor community north of San Francisco, and then with his mother, who also moved to California.

But school in California did not provide a haven for him. I was the outsider. I dressed like a hippie, they teased me all the time. I was the target for. They used to jump me, things like that. I thought I was weird because I was writing the poetry and I hated myself, I used to keep it a secret.

I was really a nerd. Indeed, when he was living in Marin City—destitute, with no place to stay his mother and he had fought bitterly, and he accused her of lying to him about her drug use —it was mainly street people who tried to help him.

Man Man Charles Fuller , a friend who would later become his road manager, provided him with a bed, and kept him from becoming a full-fledged drug dealer. His fortunes began to brighten slightly in when he got a job with the rap group Digital Underground, as a road manager and dancer. But his real break came the following year, when he was picked up by Interscope—a small company that had just been founded by the record producer Jimmy Iovine and the entertainment magnate Ted Field an heir to the Marshall Field fortune as a joint venture with Time Warner.

Tom Whalley, who signed Tupac at Interscope, had brought in a demo tape Tupac had made, and Ted Field gave it to his teen-age daughter. She told her father how much she liked it. Rap was originally an East Coast phenomenon, an element of the hip-hop culture of the nineteen-seventies, which also included graffiti and break dancing.

Compassion, to show compassion. When this song came out, no male rappers at all anywhere were talking about problems that females were having, number one. It talked about how the innocent are the ones that get hurt. It talked about drugs, the abuse of drugs, broken families. He can get anybody he wanted. So I felt like. I have to tell the multifaceted nature of a human being. A man can be sexist and compassionate to women at the same time.

I was. Tupac moved to Los Angeles early in , and the stories he told in his music began to reflect more specifically his fascination with gang life. He was at bottom an observer and chronicler, profoundly utilitarian in his approach to experience and, some thought, people as well. And South Central L. He would suck it up out of them and then use that, in his music and his acting. For all the swaggering machismo that would come to dominate his public image as a gangsta rapper, he was considered within that world to be a novitiate.

When he moved to L. Even so, his countenance, when caught in repose—delicate, fey, androgynous, a face with long-lashed, limpid eyes—tended to betray him. But he was adamantly tough. I made it through the ghetto. I made it through school with no lights. We the same person! By , Tupac seemed to have become obsessed with gang life. He was spinning from one altercation and arrest to the next. He got involved in a fight with a limo driver in Hollywood, tried to hit a local rapper with a baseball bat during a concert in Michigan, and collected criminal charges and civil suits.

Walk blind into a lie or fight. Fight and die if we must. Die like niggas. He was straddling two worlds And he saw that we never make it as black people unless we sell out.

He was saying he never would. The idea was that the album would enable gang members to escape street life by becoming musicians.

Some of the songs that Tupac and his fellow-artists wanted to include were rejected by Interscope. Only their families know. It had Dayton rims—they cost twenty-five hundred dollars.

They killed him for it. 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. So he put on his [bulletproof] vest and all his guns, and he went to their place.

Here I am! Legendary as such an exploit became, the reality was rather more complicated. After that they were under orders not to harm him. The officers, he would later say, had been harassing a black motorist.

The shooting in Atlanta made Tupac a hero to some, a demon to others. That made him, to the people who were his audience, real—and if not liked, respected. Gangsta rap had been provoking concern among law-enforcement authorities in this country since at least , when an F.

Niggaz With Attitude. The F. The following year, Time Warner released Ice-T from his contract, citing creative differences. Officer Gregory White, of the L. According to White, some record companies provide fronts for the gangs.

Charles Ogletree, Jr. 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. Recently, in a development 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 discovered indicating that the government withheld information that would have been favorable to his defense. Mutulu is convinced that Tupac became a lightning rod after he shot the policemen in Atlanta.

Whether by happenstance or not, about two weeks after the Atlanta shooting something occurred that could not have been better designed to remove Tupac from circulation—and that would ultimately lead to his undoing. Tupac was playing the part of a gangster named Birdie in the movie, and he told friends that spending time with Agnant helped him in his portrayal of Birdie—much as hanging out with the gangs in South Central provided him with material for his lyrics.

But Tyehimba was alarmed by the relationship, and warned Tupac to keep his distance. Tupac ignored the warnings. He had a nice B. He could get you in any club. Jacques spent about four or five thousand dollars on Tupac in the beginning—he just overwhelmed him.

She expressed her interest 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. Four days later, on November 18th, she returned to his hotel suite. 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.

Man Man, she acknowledged, did not touch her. Tupac claimed that he left the room when the other men entered and did not witness whatever happened. Tupac, Man Man, and Agnant were arrested. Benza, a reporter for the Daily News. Tupac told Benza that he believed that Agnant had set him up. When Tupac 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 return 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 recuperate.

Bail was set at three million dollars, and Tupac turned himself in and was incarcerated. On February 7, , he was sentenced to a term of not less than one and a half to not more than four and a half years in prison. The suit was subsequently settled. Brenner suspects that the police planted the gun they found in the hotel room. Ayanna Jackson has always maintained that she was not involved in any setup. What role Agnant, the police, or any other governmental entity may have played in the sexual-assault case against Tupac is conjectural.

But this much is plain: once the gears of the criminal-justice system were set in motion, Tupac was penalized more for who he was—a charismatic gangsta rapper with a political background—than for what he had done.

In the very beginning, prison granted Tupac a sort of grace, extricating him from the manic, overcharged existence he had created for himself. Outside, he drank heavily and smoked marijuana constantly. Now his mind was clear. And in Dannemora he was liberated from the demands of his music. His gangsta-rapping had been a pose, he said. He had been required to maintain the pose and he did not regret doing so, but it was a pose nonetheless, and one he was abdicating.

When you do rap albums, you got to train yourself. You got to constantly be in character. You used to see rappers talking all that hard shit, and then you see them in suits and shit at the American Music Awards.

I represented it too much. I was thug life. Morris told me that on their first date they saw a movie, and then Tupac prevailed on her to stay in his hotel room. Tupac and Morris talked about moving to Arizona, and what they would name their kids. He started to organize his finances, and attempted to settle the numerous lawsuits pending against him across the country.

But in the forbidding, almost feudal backdrop of the Clinton Correctional Facility, his efforts seemed increasingly irrelevant. Other factors weighing on Tupac contributed to his anxiety about being in prison. He was the breadwinner for a large extended family—his mother, his sister, her baby, his aunt and her family, and more. Beyond that, he had enormous legal fees for cases all over the country.

Death Row had been started by Suge Knight and the rap producer Dr. Dre in In the late eighties, he had worked as a bodyguard in the burgeoning L. Knight persuaded Dre that he was getting cheated by his record company and that he should leave. By the summer of , it was one of the top record companies in the rap-music world.

They were trusted on the streets. He had an instinct with people about what he thought their marketability could be. He could motivate Dre to finish what he started.

Dre had essentially all the ideas, and Suge the management muscle to get it done. Death Row owed its start to Interscope. Jimmy Iovine and Ted Field had decided to fund Death Row and distribute its products in , when other companies had shied away. So he gambled, and reaped the payoff: gangsta rap turned out to be a gold mine. But the disadvantage of being involved with Death Row was continuing reproaches from social critics and incensed shareholders.

Time Warner had succumbed to pressure of that nature when it disengaged itself from Ice-T in By early , however, the profitability of gangsta rap seemed to be tipping the scales of greed and fear. When Time Warner was discussing raising its stake in Interscope from twenty-five per cent to fifty per cent, they sought assurances that the relationship with Death Row would continue.

Then, in the late spring of , Time Warner again came under attack for its involvement in gangsta rap, this time by the joined forces of William Bennett and C. Tupac was too promising an artist for Interscope to consider jettisoning; but there was a compromise solution that might make it appear that Interscope was insulated from him, and the solution apparently made sense to everyone involved—except Tupac.

Suge Knight had wanted Tupac at Death Row for some time, although he had not been a Tupac supporter at first. It had Dayton rims—they cost twenty-five hundred dollars. They killed him for it. P And Big Kato , R. One of the Realest Niggaz i ever met! Still missing him! DMX said : First, he Kato was a friend to me. He was a friend to my family. His wife, my wife friends.

Record label out of Chicago, got a couple artists just got signed. Just got a deal. That was my dawg. Dawgs for life. Kato rest in peace.

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